Celebrities never have to pay to enter a nightclub. They’re VIPs and they expect to be welcomed for free. But when I opened Nell’s in New York, the entrance fee was $5 . . . no exceptions.
Even back then in 1986, five bucks wasn’t exactly a fortune. Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Sting and Andy Warhol took my eccentric policy in good humour and paid up. But Madonna was incensed. She demanded I let her in for free and, when I refused, she called me a ‘f***ing b*****d’ and left in a huff.
Nell’s was on 14th Street in New York, on two levels. The ground floor had a live jazz band, red leather booths for dining and a 30ft mahogany bar we bought in Harlem. The floor below had a small, funky dance floor.
On some nights the atmosphere was so charged Nell’s felt like the epicentre of the universe, like when Prince gave a two-hour concert for free. It was electrifying.
One morning, I took a phone call from Bill Cosby’s assistant, announcing that the comedian was coming into the club alone. The assistant was adamant Cosby wanted to be treated like everybody else – no special treatment.
The following Sunday Cosby arrived alone, stood at the bar, ordered a drink or two, listened to the band and left without incident. My staff treated him no differently from anybody else.
Three days later, I received a nasty letter from the funnyman complaining about the rude service he’d been subjected to at Nell’s. I’d never found Cosby funny before, but after this I found him repugnant.
At the start of the pandemic in 2020, I discovered Instagram. This had nothing to do with Covid but everything to do with my health. Four years earlier, I’d had a debilitating stroke, followed by another so serious it almost killed me. I was left with partial paralysis and a voice so slurred and garbled that it barely existed.
James Corden made a complaint about the way his wife’s eggs had been prepared, he insulted one of my servers to the point where she broke down and cried, writes Keith McNally
Instagram became my voice. No one goes through life unscathed, I thought. Everybody hits the skids at one point. If I could be honest about my own ‘skids’ perhaps it could help someone else deal with their own. Who was I fooling? I joined Instagram to p*** people off. To yank them off their high horses.
Owning restaurants gave me a rich source of material: the more disastrous the night, the more likely I was to post about it. In some ways, it was only after I lost my voice that I learned to speak my mind.
I pretended to be indifferent to the number of followers my posts attracted, but was secretly obsessed with it. For vanity’s sake, my goal was 100,000 followers, but once I reached 58,000, the numbers unaccountably ground to a halt.
I couldn’t get a single new follower for two months. Then, out of nowhere, in August 2022 came a gift from heaven: James Corden. Ever the obnoxious customer, the English actor crossed the line at Balthazar, my traditional French restaurant in Manhattan’s Soho.
Making a complaint about the way his wife’s eggs had been prepared, he insulted one of my servers to the point where she broke down and cried. I posted an account of his bullying behaviour on Instagram and announced I’d 86’d him – restaurant jargon for banning a customer. ‘James Corden is a hugely gifted comedian,’ I wrote, ‘but a tiny cretin of a man. And the most abusive customer to my Balthazar servers since the restaurant opened 25 years ago. I don’t often 86 a customer, [but] today I 86’d Corden.’
My post went viral. I felt like I’d hit the jackpot – that night I ended up with over 90,000 followers.
Corden called me four times during the day, asking me to delete it. On the last call he sounded desperate. Relishing my hold over someone so famous, I told him I wouldn’t. Like a little dictator, I was intoxicated with power and self-righteousness.
For someone who’s hyper-conscious of humiliation since suffering a stroke, it now seems monstrous that I didn’t consider his humiliation. I’m not suggesting Corden didn’t deserve the backlash from my post. The b*****d probably did.
In my teens and early 20s, I had no notion of becoming a restaurateur. After leaving grammar school in east London aged 16 with just one O-level, I decided to be an actor, and, while I was working out how to achieve this, took a job as a bellhop at London’s Hilton Hotel on Park Lane.
On my second day I was asked to escort Marlon Brando to his room. Like most movie stars, Brando was shorter in person than on screen. He had a boxer’s broad shoulders and a surprisingly high, nasal voice.
In the elevator, he asked me what I intended to do with my life. I had no idea and said as much. (I still have no idea.) In the hotel’s ballroom one night in 1967, I watched the Beatles listen to a lecture given by the guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Ringo was missing but John, Paul and George sat in the third row, looking spellbound as the Maharishi talked about ‘raising the consciousness of man’.
When they visited the Maharishi at his retreat in India, they discovered that instead of raising the consciousness of man, he was having sex with many of the women in their entourage.
I was 16, and looked all of 12. In my third month at the hotel, an American guest who was a producer asked me to try out for a role in his film, Mr Dickens Of London, to be filmed at Pinewood, with Sir Michael Redgrave as Dickens. I hadn’t a clue what ‘trying out’ meant, but I somehow landed the part.
Stage work followed, but my first television appearance was in a play called Twenty-Six Efforts at Pornography, based on the relationship between an ageing teacher and a free-spirited pupil. I played the boy.
The night the play aired on the BBC I was home with my parents. As the title rolled, my mother stiffened and gave a pronounced huff. Seconds before I appeared on screen, she got up from her high-backed chair and changed the channel. Not one reference was made to the play ever again.
I’ve had two homosexual relationships in my life. The first was with an actor when I was 16. The second and more serious one was with Alan Bennett.
Although the playwright and I became friends when sharing a West End stage in his production of Forty Years On, it wasn’t until after the play ended that our relationship developed into something else.
Several weeks after it closed, Alan invited me to go to the theatre with him. Later, he invited me back to his house in Camden Town for supper, before driving me home. This became a weekly routine. During the meal, we’d talk about that night’s play, and Alan would preface his thoughts by gossiping about the actors. He was quite funny about short actors, with Edward Fox often his main target.
While I loved Alan, the attraction was never physical, and our nights together were more intimate than passionate. Soon after our relationship began, Alan told me that before meeting me he’d never slept with someone he was in love with.
McNally says when he opened his nightclub, the entrance fee was $5 and Madonna demanded he let her in for free, when he refused she called him a ‘f***ing b*****d’
Former Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour used to have Sunday brunch at the restaurant McNally managed in New York when he was 24
Alan’s friend and fellow performer in Beyond The Fringe, Jonathan Miller, lived across the road from him. The first time we met, Miller – an intellectual of vast learning – walked in and casually announced, ‘I’d really love to f**k Judi Dench.’ Though pure bravado, it was, and still is, the best introduction I’ve ever heard.
Not all my closest friendships have been sexual. By the time I was 24, I was working in New York as the manager of One Fifth, a restaurant on Sixth Avenue, and I noticed something interesting about a young English woman who came for brunch every Sunday.
She was often accompanied by several writers and always ordered eggs Benedict. One Sunday she came in alone, a few minutes after the kitchen had closed. I asked the brunch chef, Chang, to make her eggs Benedict anyway. When he refused, I told him she was a regular and besides, she was quite pretty. Once he heard that, Chang went bananas and threw his sauté pan at me. His aim was as bad as his cooking and he missed by a mile. I picked the pan up off the floor and for the first and last time went behind the kitchen line and cooked a customer’s order.
Although I made a hash of the eggs Benedict, the incident had rich consequences: the young woman was future Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, and despite coming from opposite ends of the English class system, we became friends. Nothing romantic happened, yet we’d often watch movies together in the afternoon, which, outside of the bedroom, is the most intimate thing two people can do at that time of day.
I discovered I had a natural flair for managing a restaurant but my failures could be spectacular. One night, a middle-aged couple graciously asked me for a table. The dining room was full, so I asked them to wait at the bar.
The man took me aside: ‘You do know that the woman I’m with is Ingrid Bergman, don’t you?’ Having no idea who Ingrid Bergman was, I looked at the tall, sophisticated woman and repeated my spiel about waiting at the bar. The man looked me in the eye, turned around and left. A week later, I watched Casablanca for the first time and saw the most beautifully dreamy actress imaginable. I felt like disappearing down the closest manhole.
On another busy night, I was almost dumped down one with my feet in concrete. A pushy New Yorker who looked a lot like Mafia boss John Gotti wanted a table. I told him there wasn’t one available. ‘Do you know who I am?’ he snarled. ‘No,’ I said, ‘but I can find out for you.’ After he threatened to break my legs, I found him a table tout de suite.
New York teaches you to deal with difficult customers. Singer Patti Smith and her boyfriend, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, were regulars at One Fifth. Smith, unfortunately, was incredibly rude to the servers. It’s impossible for me to listen to her songs today without remembering her reduce a waitress to tears because she forgot to put bread on the table.
If only Instagram had existed back then.
- I Regret Almost Everything by Keith McNally is published by Simon and Schuster
This article was originally published by a www.dailymail.co.uk . Read the Original article here. .