TAXES: Better Than 15%

During his 50-year regency over the cuisine of New York’s famed Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Oscar Tschirky—Oscar of the Waldorf to thousands of epic epicures —rose to such gastronomic eminence that his memory endures in menus, viands and appetites the world over. A greeter, Oscar in his white chef’s cap stood figuratively astride the gourmet banquet table like some culinary colossus, a familiar and beloved figure to trenchermen of his day. No such adulation has fallen on the narrow Gallic shoulders of Oscar’s successor, Claudius Charles Philippe, 47. Son of a French chef, London-born Philippe migrated to the U.S. in 1929, stirred soup in a variety of kitchen pots, even sold Fuller brushes for a spell before going to the Waldorf as Oscar’s assistant in 1931.

But what Philippe of the Waldorf lacked as a greeter and as a symbol of the leisurely, intimate dinner, he more than compensated for in his mastery of the art of big-time wining and dining—and of educating thousands of barbarian palates to the delights of Rock Cornish game hen, crab meat Louis and cream of pumpkin soup. Any conclave of hungry and thirsty humans was his meat. “I won Goodyear Tire & Rubber over to pink champagne,” he once boasted to a companion. Unexcelled at spreading a gourmet’s table, even for the American Trucking Associations, he delighted in explaining to slightly befuddled clients that turtle soup was a better first course than melon prosciutto for the simple reason that melon prosciutto was undignified. Such was his deftness in pushing wines that Waldorf guests annually drain 11,700 gallons of supreme French vintages.

With an executive’s shrewd touch, Waldorf Vice President Philippe handled banquets for the world’s great, found ways to bring hungry hordes, good food and hot plates together, cannily governed his hotel empire of seven restaurants, 30 banquet rooms, a liveried army of some 600, and the boudoir snacks of 2,000 guests. With the accountant’s sure hand, he also dispensed to suppliers annual orders for $200,000 in silver, china and glass, $350,000 in furniture, $2,500,000 in food and $1,000,000 in drink. In these commissions, Philippe had the decisive say.

But last week the business practices of the Waldorf’s Philippe landed him squarely in the saucepan. Handed down by a federal grand jury in New York City: a five-count indictment, four counts charging Philippe with evading a whopping $88,706 in income taxes in the years 1952-55, one charging that he knowingly concealed the receipt of “cash, currency or kickbacks” from Waldorf suppliers. Sunk in a continental sulk, Philippe issued a printed declaration of probity (“At the trial I confidently expect to establish my innocence “), then left for his $500,000 country estate near Peekskill—there to ponder, perhaps, the outrageous ways of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, which, in his case at least, wants something better than 15% of the tab.