Le Cirque's VIP List, From A to Zappa
By Richard Leiby
Sunday, June 6, 2004; Page D03
In a new memoir, Sirio Maccioni, owner of New York's snooty Le Cirque restaurant, gleefully dishes the names of luminaries he has fed over the decades: Frank Sinatra, Nancy Reagan, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, Donald Trump, Woody Allen, Barbara Walters, Bill Blass and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, to list a few. But none of them, he says, became "my best friend." That honor belonged to a long-haired, "rough-looking" musician initially barred from the restaurant as woefully underdressed: Frank Zappa.
"It was a very difficult beginning of the relationship," Maccioni, 72, told us during a stop in Washington last week. He still tears up when talking about Zappa, the Baltimore native who died of prostate cancer in 1993 at age 52: "He was a great man and a very intelligent man. . . . I wish he was alive today."
The book, "Sirio," recounts how Zappa, in the early '80s, had to don a suit and tie before he could claim a table among the swells at Le Cirque. "This better be the best [expletive] meal of my life -- I've toured the Kremlin, met the pope, and I've never needed a suit," the restaurateur quotes him as saying. "If I don't like this meal, you're paying for the suit!"
But somehow the two Italians bonded like long-lost paesanos. "He came to eat at my house. He became friends with my wife. I spoke with him two days before he died," Maccioni told us. To comfort Zappa, "I sent my pastry chef to make creme brulee for him in Los Angeles."
And, as a true friend, Maccioni was always honest: "I had the courage to tell him I did not understand his music."
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