He approached food, politics, life with gusto
One night at the Back Bay Summer Shack, Johnny Apple was holding forth about the no-holds-barred Sunday suppers he and his wife, Betsey, used to have with Al Gore at a roadside dive near Washington. He told stories about his Boston friends and colleagues, including
While tucking into a Jasper White lobster he talked of a recent fusion meal at Tetsuya's in Sydney, one of his favorite restaurants in one of his favorite countries, and of the incomparable charred beef of the Argentine pampas, which he and Betsey had visited unaccountably late in their incessant globe - trotting. The party he was planning for his 70th birthday, to be held at the Paris bistro L'Ami Louis, came up, and the difficulty of narrowing the guest list from their hundreds of friends around the world to the couple of dozen diners the restaurant could seat.
Then our waitress, who had brought several rounds of freshly shucked oysters and had fondly tied a bib below Apple's broad, beaming, boyish face, got to talking about her wedding, which was to be in a few months in Lynn. Apple, impressed by her cheerful aplomb as he grilled her about the night's varieties of oysters, had asked her something about herself. By the end of the evening he knew where she'd grown up, everywhere she had worked, how she and her fiance had met, the date of the wedding, and the restaurant and reception menu, and had all but snagged an invitation.
It was typical Apple. And those who knew him well or had met him even once had similar stories to tell when they heard of his death last week from cancer at age 71. A New York Times associate editor who spent his career covering wars and campaigns and politics, Apple wrote about food for the last decade of his life, taking readers to Singapore and Bangkok street markets, Texas ice-cream factories, and Alsatian riesling cellars.
Everyone and everything in Apple's purview excited his keen curiosity, anything was fodder for a story, and he always brought friends old and new into the conversation. At dinner he remembered incidents from years before (Lydon's departure from the Times, a column Lewis had written about a Supreme Court freedom-of-the-press decision that bore on Patrick Fitzgerald's investigations of the Valerie Plame leak). There was almost nothing he wouldn't taste, and he took the same childlike delight in consuming Pemaquid oysters as in the story of a new acquaintance's happiness. Though he had not yet been to this Summer Shack location, he simply took possession of it for the evening, as if the cooks and servers had come in just for him and Betsey.
Apple threw a bearish arm around almost every newcomer's shoulder, and in any conversation praised friends and colleagues. The last time I saw him, a few weeks before he died, he spent a good part of our long visit telling me how terrific his new editors at the Times were.
Many took Apple's magnanimousness for grandiosity, and pointed out his self-aggrandizement: He had been everywhere, he knew everyone, he recognized young political and cooking talent before anyone else did and single - handedly created careers, he was always right. (All true, to varying degrees.) But those people failed to add how quick he was to aggrandize others. Dare to disagree with or correct him and he would quiz you for the next 10 or 20 minutes. If he knew he had been bested, he would pronounce you an expert and a friend for life.
Although he wrote for many magazines -- work was his pleasure, and he was never not working -- his home base was always the Times, because of the legendary expense account he enjoyed to the last oyster and also because, as he said the last time I saw him, ``working at the Times gives you a sense of social responsibility; that's pretty unique." (Even when he was more or less housebound, he used the power of the paper to help a chef who needed it -- Andrew Evans, a transplant from Australia, who had settled in Easton, Md. After his late-August paean to Evans's cooking appeared in the Times, the chef called Apple to tell him that the restaurant was booked for months.) His spiritual home base was Betsey, from whom he would part on the telephone with ``Love you to pieces," and whom he mentioned in every travel and food article he wrote.
On that last visit he told me how rewarding he had found his second career as a food writer. He never lost his fascination with politics, and his status as the paper's best all-around political reporter remained intact (characteristically, he wanted to share credit with proteges, notably Todd Purdum, now at Vanity Fair, who at Apple's request wrote his Times obituary).
But from the start he loved food people for their generosity, which showed while he was ill -- in the organic California fruit Alice Waters regularly sent from her Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, the stream of concerned calls from chefs, the visits from food friends bearing okra soup and skillet cornbread and the best andouille or pulled-pork sandwiches their cities could provide. He saw the same steadfast friendship in most of his journalism colleagues, he told me, including the ones he had warred with for years at a time. But he didn't see that hell-or-high-water loyalty in the political world.
He said he had recently advised the Times food section to ``make room for enthusiasts. Make people want to call up and order what you're writing about, to go out and eat it." Apple made you love learning and eating almost as much as he did, even if you could never learn or eat anywhere near as much as he did. He was always engaged, never indifferent. If we can't follow his and Betsey's every footstep -- and no one ever will -- we can aim for that.
Corby Kummer is a senior editor at The Atlantic , for which he writes a regular food column. 
