The Skinny on Fats

Most Kansas Citians remember Larry “Fats” Goldberg as being skinny. After all, he was famous for being thin, despite the nickname that his Southwest High School pal, noted author Calvin Trillin, gave the once-obese Goldberg after he first lost 150 pounds. That was before he went on to write diet books and open pizzerias in New York, before he wrote a newspaper column or became a stand-up comedian.

“Fats” Goldberg — who died on January 27 after a battle with Alzheimer’s disease — first became a celebrity by creating the controversial “controlled cheating” diet. But Fifi White knew Goldberg when he weighed 320 pounds. He was so big that when he worked for her father’s distributing company in the City Market area, few chairs in the warehouse could hold him comfortably.

White was still in high school when her dad hired Goldberg in the 1950s. “[He told me he] fantasized about me and the barbecue joint around the corner, but not necessarily in that order,” White remembers, laughing.

White’s friendship with Goldberg lasted nearly fifty years, and she watched him evolve from a chubby Kansas City warehouse clerk to a rail-thin New York-based writer and pizza-shop maven to the lovable character he became after he moved back to his hometown in the mid-1980s.

That’s when I met him. Both of us were on the original “Food Critics Panel” on Walt Bodine‘s show on KCUR 89.3, and Goldberg was the program’s resident comic soul for years. He was more interested in talking about chili joints and french fries than about the haute cuisine at upscale bistros.

“He had a great sense of humor,” Bodine recalls. “And his concept of dieting all week and then having one day to eat whatever you wanted was brilliant. I follow it myself to this day.”

Goldberg also covered the junk-food beat for KMBZ 980. All of his favorite foods — on his once-a-week “cheat” day — were fattening, greasy, sugary and cheap. One of his most famous get-rich-quick schemes (he had dozens, including a “pizza cone” that he invented with Paris-based restaurant critic and author Patricia Wells) was the “Sugar and Lard Tour.”

“He drove tourists around in a van to places like Stroud’s, Gates Barbecue and LaMar’s Donuts, and everyone ate at every place. But I don’t know if Larry ever really made any money doing it,” recalls KKFI 90.1 personality Mark Manning, who waited tables at Café Lulu when Goldberg was the restaurant’s resident “host, floor manager and maître’ d.”

Café Lulu’s owner, Lou Jane Temple, knew of Goldberg’s New York pizza fame when she hired him to oversee the front door, and they became instant friends. “He reflected the joie de vivre of the restaurant simply by being himself,” she says. “He dressed in striped bell-bottoms and polka-dot T-shirts, because he had a policy that he could only buy clothes that cost less than $20. What he put together was all wrong, but he still made a fashion statement.”

Not everyone got Larry. He dressed like a clown and let his wiry hair go wild, frizzing up around his head like silvery cotton candy. His smile was as childlike as Shirley Temple‘s, and he was so jovial and good-natured that people would be caught off guard by the often outrageous things he would say.

“He would come right out and tell some of our patrons that they were getting fat,” Manning says. “He didn’t mean to be nasty. He kept himself in good shape by watching what he ate and by walking, and he thought everyone should.”

At Café Lulu in 1990, Goldberg launched his brief campaign to be Kansas City’s mayor and joined bartenders Martin Zander and Jimmy McAllister in starting the musical group that’s still known as the Bidets. When Café Lulu closed in 1992, Goldberg opened a short-lived pizzeria in Prairie Village. (Many of his friends think the first symptoms of Alzheimer’s started around that time and were responsible for the restaurant’s failure.) He also worked as a host for Houston’s on the Plaza and for Ruth’s Chris Steak House. The restaurants were much more conservative than Café Lulu, but Goldberg never changed his style.

Bonnie Winston, formerly of Pasta Presto and now with Ball Foods, was a longtime Goldberg pal. “He was an inveterate charmer, smart, funny and a terrific friend to hang out with,” she says.

During his life, Larry Goldberg encouraged his friends to savor living. Even dieting needn’t be humorless with one day set aside for going absolutely wild.

“The irony of Larry’s death is that his entire life centered around food,” White says. Loving it, making it, talking about it. And ultimately, when he became so ill, he forgot how to swallow.”