I met Lee Gregory on an assignment for Stanford magazine, a glossy bimonthly that helps alumni and faculty measure their lives against the incredible accomplishments of friends and competitors. I was to write a profile of Gregory, the only woman partner in San Francisco's premier events/catering company, Dan McCall Associates. When presidents and prime ministers visited former Secretary and State George Shultz and renowned party-giver Charlotte Shultz, McCall got the call. As director of sales and marketing, Gregory handles accounts including the San Francisco Symphony gala, Oracle OpenWorld and the opening of Bloomingdale's. When the Food Network's Behind the Bash came to San Francisco to film McCall's catering the opera gala, Gregory's job expanded. The gala meant $15,000 gowns in 2005, and Giada De Laurentiis didn't have one. Gregory took her shopping.
Gregory also raised funds for Stanford scholarships and was a tireless volunteer. Even better for my magazine profile, she had an ironic back-story.
Lee Gregory always loved being in charge of events. In high school, she planned the party for her mother's second marriage. Later, when she and her parents had the "What do you want to do with your life?" talk, she said: "Party planning."
"Uh, other than that," said her stepfather, a chemical engineer who'd become an executive at DuPont.
"He thought engineering would prepare me for everything. He wasn't wrong," says Gregory, who graduated from Stanford in 1983 with a degree in mechanical engineering and went to work for IBM. When her class's ten-year reunion came along, she managed it so successfully that the catering company running the event, McCall, offered her a top job.
Gregory was the first person to work at McCall who didn't start as a busboy. "It was trial by fire," she says. "I stepped into the sales position over some people, almost all men trained in Europe. I'm hired right into a position a lot of them had been striving to get."
Temperaments clashed. "Engineers have methodical ways to work with people and solve problems. In catering, it's expected for chefs to lose their cool and go mad. Screaming and yelling and swearing, it's just a way of life. Many of them had been beaten up by the European system."
One blustery summer night, I watched Gregory orchestrate dinner, with circus acts and fireworks, for 1,552 Japanese health-products saleswomen. She did it four times that week, on Treasure Island, in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Which meant there was no going back for forgotten ingredients or cookware. At her command, the guests were served chilled Maine lobsters almost simultaneously. And then the entrée: Roasted Filet of Fresh Salmon, Leeks and Fennel, Baby Branch Carrots, Petite Snap Peas, Peruvian Purple Potato, Cherry Tomato, Black Trumpet Mushrooms, Caper Beurre blanc. In a black pin-stripe pantsuit and white stretch top, Gregory blended with the staff. She does not wear a headset. People find her or she finds them. As I followed her around the 32,000-square-foot tent, she ate nothing. Neither did I, but had it been offered, I would have. She wouldn't.
Back in the lounge/bar area of McCall's capacious offices, I asked how a person who eats out three meals a day stays in fighting trim. "I'm hungry all the time," she says. "I eat a lot of hors d'ouevres." (Not that I saw. Maybe she ate while I was inspecting the top-shelf portable restrooms or the flower tent.)
And then she told me about her food issues. At Stanford, Gregory was anorexic. She stopped menstruating for four years, from senior year in high school through most of college.
No doctor noticed. In Gregory's freshman year at Stanford, another girl had to be hospitalized for anorexia. When Gregory went to visit her, she had no idea what to say. She had never seen anorexia. She didn't know she had it.
"I put on weight at Stanford, but every summer I'd go on the Scarsdale Diet and lose a pound a day. That's what you're supposed to do," she said, proudly. Gregory is good at everything she does. She worked at a Delaware restaurant the first three summers, and then apprenticed with a New York chef after her senior year.
Growing up, Gregory got used to fine food. Her family lived in Wilmington, Del., and would go to luxurious Philadelphia restaurants for lunch. "One time, my mother noticed the waiter had been standing there a long time. He kept putting down pats of butter, and I'd eat them," Gregory said. "I also loved liver pate and escargot."
Soon, it showed. And more than anything, she wanted to look like her mother. "My mother is miniscule. She wears AAAA shoes. Me, I have size C feet. I didn't put it together, that we just had different body types."
Women with eating disorders have deep memories of comments that may have been said as superficial wisecracks. For Gregory, the significant one came at party for her group of high school students who had spent a month in Portugal. In that month she had lost 30 pounds, but when they got together with their families to watch slides of the trip, "There was a picture of me riding a donkey, with my thighs squished up. There I was, projected on the screen. My mom said I looked fat."
Gregory played varsity lacrosse, was the goalie for the field hockey team and captain of the cheerleading squad in high school. Senior year she started restricting herself to 1,000 calories a day. "I never had a high school boyfriend, but during my senior year some of the guys who'd just gone to college came back to visit," recalled Gregory, who by then had lost a good deal of weight. "These were guys who never paid a lick of attention to me the year before. Now they were saying, ‘You look great!' "
When my daughter, Lisa, became anorexic, the family learned not to make comments like, "You look great!" and we told others to say instead, "It's great to see you!" Gregory knows all the ways the most innocuous, non-specific comments about appearance can be interpreted. "When I hear, ‘Oh, you look great!' it means, skinny." But when they say, ‘My God you look so skinny!' it might not be meant as a compliment."
Somebody should have said, "My God you look so skinny!" to another high school friend of Gregory's. Everybody knew this girl was unhealthy. "Nobody said a peep. I certainly didn't. I wanted to look like her!"
Gregory lived on melon, bowl after bowl, and Desserta, the zero-calorie gelatin. She remembers when supermarkets had aisles labeled Diet Foods. As in, "Here's your diet section, here's your Asian section." Now, there are so many diets, these foods are planted throughout the store.
"When I was feeling fat in college, or worried about gaining weight and feeling my waist, my mom would send Ayds caramel candies," Gregory said. She even remembers the commercials: "Why take diet pills when you can enjoy Ayds?"
Gregory now works fourteen-hour days, and eats out every meal. She isn't skinny, but stays in fighting trim with a bit of Weight Watchers and a lot of exercise, at least an hour a day. She keeps a log of what she eats. Unlike many anorexics, she did not start on the road to restriction by becoming a vegetarian. She dated a vegetarian, though, and the pickiness turned her off. "I got tired of the questions in restaurants, like, ‘Is that a chicken broth?' What a nightmare!"
The passion driving Gregory is about pleasing people with a fabulous experience that includes food, not so much the food itself. Her events are like going on a little vacation. "I love to exceed people's expectations, with the service, the food, the flowers. At IBM the best I could do was give them what they paid for. They weren't calling and saying, ‘Thank you so much. I love what you've done with my computer.' " She does get that kind of appreciation now. Her work, she says, is one way "to focus on food without consuming it. Or, you consume it in a safe way."
