Howard Helmer
By Ben Mims
Photos by Cara Howe
Howard Helmer insisted that we split the crepes. An infectiously affable salesman with a megawatt smile, he was not easily declined, even though — I tried in vain to explain — I honestly had no appetite. Stuffed with oyster mushrooms, Gruyère, and showered with chives and brown butter, the crepes were his favorite thing on the menu, he proclaimed in defense. At last I obliged. Then I leaned back into the plush, red leather banquette, ready to hear where Howard’s story would begin.
I’d met Howard for the first time just a month prior. Alongside the food editors of every other food magazine in New York City, we’d convened to talk about eggs, a topic for which Helmer is an indisputable authority. He’d been the spokesman for the American Egg Board for over four decades, entertaining food editors like me, as well as chefs, writers, and journalists with all the good news about eggs. Helmer’s job was to drive the narrative around eggs, to “get ink” — recipes, nutrition facts, and other information — in publications for the Egg Board. During the cholesterol scare of the late seventies, for example, when eggs were the public’s foremost food enemy, Helmer’s media relationships helped keep the controversial news out of food and women’s magazines. Helmer retired three years ago, but the Egg Board occasionally brings him back for events like the one I attended.
At seventy-seven-years-old, Helmer has the enthusiasm and personality of a Taylor Swift superfan: bubbly, always grinning from ear to ear, and full of uncontainable joy. His tan skin enhances the brilliance of his snow-white hair and teeth, and his exaggerated Great Lakes accent makes it seem as though he’s voicing a cartoon character. Howard regaled us with egg trivia and lore. Presentations like this are rarely very enlightening for food editors, but Howard turned the spiel into a show: Everyone laughed at his corny jokes because he meant them. And his enthusiasm for eggs was infectious. When plates of scrambled eggs mixed with pecorino and black pepper arrived, Helmer, in his good-natured, pitch-man speak, said “Oh boy, have you guys tried these eggs?! They’re sensational!”
Helmer’s omelet shtick — which he’s performed on morning news shows, at food conferences, and, most famously, on The Oprah Winfrey Show — transforms a seemingly ordinary task into a compelling performance, one that even the most cynical person will find amusing. He always starts by explaining that his omelet is composed of two eggs whisked with two tablespoons of water, and if you want to make more than one omelet, simply multiply the eggs by the amount of omelets you want and use a standard kitchen soup ladle, which he breathlessly tells us is universally four ounces in volume, to portion out the exact amount of eggs for each omelet. Once a pat of butter goes into a scorching-hot nonstick skillet, a ladleful of eggs follows, and bubbles crater the surface. Then Helmer begins his “dig a hole and fill it” method, scraping in the north, south, east, and west points of the omelet with a flat spatula while tilting the skillet so runny egg fills the gaps. Once there’s no more runny egg, Helmer quickly showers the omelet with an array of continental toppings: cheddar cheese, scallions, mushrooms, ham, onions, and tomatoes. He folds the omelet in half, then flips the skillet over a plate to reveal a perfectly cooked half moon of eggs. He implores the viewer to try making an omelet for dinner at home, because it’s quick and so much cheaper than eating out. The same omelet at his diner down the street costs $12.95, and — with a flick of his wrist — $14.50 with a sprig of parsley as garnish. “As simple as it looks is as simple as it is!” he proclaims in earnest.
One of his biggest fans is my former colleague and mentor Tina Ujlaki, who was there at the breakfast as well. As we walked together to our respective offices, Tina entertained me with stories of Howard as if they were lifelong pals, which, as it turns out, they were. They met early on in Tina’s over thirty-year tenure at Food & Wine and continue to see each other at Howard’s breakfasts.
When I first met him, I’d been oblivious to the fact that Howard was gay. But perhaps because I’m gay, too, Tina elected to disclose this detail about Howard’s life, as well as another one: After four decades as spokesman for the Egg Board, he had only recently, explicitly, come out to his colleagues in the industry. He’d waited until he married Tom, his husband of four years but partner of nearly forty, who’d died just a month prior.
I wondered why — and how — he stayed in the closet for so long. Not only was he partnered for almost forty years, but he witnessed so much of modern gay history firsthand: the sexual revolution of the late sixties; the beginning, middle, and aftermath of the AIDS epidemic; and then the recent, sweeping advances in marriage equality. And as a public figure, one might expect that he’d be out, whether on his own terms or by accident or force, long ago.
I asked him about this, and Howard told me that he never kept his being gay a secret. He told me that he was never, not once, called a derogatory name or made to feel bad about being, or seeming, gay. I suppose that his personality and magnetism made him the fun guy at the party, and that he was regarded as an “eccentric”: so disarmingly outlandish that the gay thing got folded into the bigger package of quirks and charms.
Well, he does admit that he might have formally come out much sooner, but there was one small thing holding him back: his wife.
When Howard first met Sonya, they were children growing up in the Hyde Park neighborhood of 1940s Chicago. Their parents, both Russian-Jewish immigrants from Belarus, were great friends in the neighborhood, and so Howard and Sonya, both the first-generation Americans of their families, came to be seen as a very natural pair. According to Howard, it was virtually ordained that they’d eventually get married. He joined the Air Force after high school and while he was stationed in Bremen, Germany, Sonya flew to meet him, and they were married there on the base in 1959. Howard was seventeen.
“New York percolated with energy. I wanted to be at the epicenter of art, culture, everything.”
They moved back to Chicago after finishing his service and started a family, giving birth to two sons, Gordon in 1961 and Michael in 1964. Howard supported them by working as a copywriter. But after having spent so much time traveling while in service, and desperate for a more cosmopolitan, international scene, Howard wanted to move to New York City. “It percolated with energy. I wanted to be at the epicenter of art, culture, everything,” he said. Knowing he couldn’t uproot his wife and two children to a new city without a job already in place, he began asking around.
A fellow copywriter referred Howard to The Poultry and Egg Board, an organization that at the time had enlisted home economics teachers to promote chicken, turkey, geese, duck, and eggs to the public via nutrition-based advertising. Like many other big food companies, the Poultry and Egg Board would hold semi-annual “galas” at flashy restaurants to attract press, which were hosted by the home-economics professionals. But they were looking to try out something different, and wanted to bring on a spokesperson. Howard presented them with a new, more personal approach than what they’d been doing with home-ec teachers: He’d cultivate relationships with editors at newspapers and food magazines, hold intimate meetings with them at upscale restaurants, and spread the egg gospel that way. (This is standard-fare “wine-and-dine-‘em” practice at food public relations companies today, but at the time it was a much less common approach.) With his big ideas and personality to match, he was hired, and in 1970 he and his family moved to West Keansburg, New Jersey, on the Jersey Shore. It wasn’t quite the metropolis he was hoping for, but it was close enough. To get a foot in the city, Howard and Sonya also kept a one-bedroom apartment on East 55th Street in Manhattan, where they’d bring their kids to stay over the weekends.
Though being a spokesperson for the Poultry and Egg Board may seem like one of those jobs that anyone who’s personable, likes chicken and eggs, and can memorize a pamphlet is qualified for, Howard was particularly well suited for it. Growing up poor in Chicago, Helmer’s grandmother, a practical Russian cook he called Bubah, fixed nearly every meal for her extended family, dishes like braised beef brisket with potatoes and salmon croquettes with onions. And in the days following such meals, she would stretch the leftovers with eggs so they’d feed the same amount of people as the night before. She’d stuff leftovers inside French omelets, or mix them with potatoes and make hash topped with fried eggs, or combine them with cooked noodles and beaten eggs for a kugel. And virtually every Sunday night, that morning’s leftover lox was chopped with onions and folded into creamy scrambled eggs. Cheap protein then as it is now, eggs were comfort food for Howard from early on in his life.
A few years into the job, the Poultry and Egg Board split up into its respective factions, creating a National Broiler Council to promote chickens, the National Turkey Federation, the Long Island Duck Association, the National Goose Council, and the American Egg Board. In the first five years of his job, Howard promoted them all, but always with an emphasis, or rather an affinity, for eggs. So when the Poultry board split up, he went with the Egg Board. Once the new board was formed, they announced plans to take sponsorship of a restaurant in the Disneyland theme park in Anaheim, California, renaming it the American Egg House, and Helmer was tasked with attracting press. At the time, The Guinness Book of World Records was a pop culture draw, so Howard charged himself with becoming the record holder for making the most omelets in thirty minutes. This would validate his job and, by staging the omelet-making competition at the new restaurant, it would all but guarantee press.
By his own admission, he was already good at making omelets. But in the two years before the restaurant opened, he honed his skills, perfecting his technique of pouring beaten eggs with one hand while maneuvering the hot skillet in the other. At the Guinness event, he juggled six skillets at once, producing a fully-cooked-and-formed omelet at an average of one every six seconds. Of the over 350 omelets Helmer made that day, only 217 ended up being judged acceptable by the Guinness panel (not overcooked, no cracks or holes, fully formed), but regardless: he set a new record for the thirty-minute time limit.
Around the time of Helmer’s omelet victory in 1978, he met Helen McCully, then the food editor for House Beautiful magazine. She became a mentor to Howard, refining his palate and showing him, along with a young rising star chef by the name of Jacques Pépin, around the New York editors and writers. McCully began enlisting Howard and Jacques to present together at press events, and with their shared notoriety for producing omelets, they became fast friends. A new world was opening up to Howard in New York.
Meanwhile, Helmer traveled extensively all over the country for the Egg Board. During these travels, and before he gained notoriety for his record and could remain anonymous, he first started having sex with men. Howard told me he always knew he was attracted to men, but he loved Sonya, and growing up, he simply didn’t know a different world beyond the one in which he lived. In New York in the late seventies, changes were underway — more men and women were insisting on living out lives, pushing for political and social change. Howard witnessed these changes but never felt comfortable acting on them until he started traveling and meeting other men like himself. “It was a whole new world to me,” he said. “The thrill of hooking up with men on the road helped me figure out who I really was.”
On these work trips, most often to Boston, Helmer would find the nearest gay bar and spend his night there. If there was no gay bar, he’d get a drink in the lobby of the hotel where he was staying and hang out, getting hit on by other married, traveling businessmen who were looking for a “change of experience,” as one of his suitors put it. Like many gay men of the era, work travel gave him the opportunity to test out his sexual fantasies — at home he had to be discreet. Though he had many opportunities for one-night stands or risqué trysts, Howard says he remained relatively conservative. “It was like two or three guys total. Nothing serious,” he said. “I was still in the beginnings of being okay with my sexuality, and I knew those guys were just flings.”
“It was a whole new world to me. The thrill of hooking up with men on the road helped me figure out who I really was.”
In 1977, Howard was in Boston again and ventured out for drinks at the Napoleon Club, a now shuttered gay bar in Boston’s Theatre District. While there, Howard locked eyes with a young dancer by the name of Tom Arsenault, fifteen years his junior. Tom was a regular at the bar and would act as a “gopher” for drag queens, getting them drinks throughout the night or picking out guys from the audience to the be the butt of the queen’s next joke. There’s some disagreement about where they actually met — “Tom insists we met in the piano bar downstairs, but I know we met in the leather bar upstairs,” Howard says with a sly grin. After talking for a short time, they ditched the club to get a cup of coffee at the Howard Johnson restaurant in the hotel where Howard was staying, and eventually, retired to Howard’s room together.
Almost immediately, they fell into a devoted affair. “I didn’t know what love was until I met Tom,” he told me. Tom lived in Boston, so the couple had to work out an arrangement to see each other. When Howard first moved to New York, he had joined the New England Supermarket Advertising Club, an organization that held monthly meetings in Boston, so he’d arrange to see Tom on those visits, tacking on two or three extra days off to spend time with him. Tom also came frequently to New York and stayed with Howard in his and Sonya’s pied-à-terre on East 55th Street. To keep their affair a secret, Howard would tell Sonya that he was staying in town because his dinners were running late, and because of what he did for a living, Sonya never questioned him. Howard’s affair with Tom lasted this way for three years. But knowing that his marriage couldn’t last, Howard planned to divorce her after their children went away to college.
But one night in 1980, Tom was involved in an accident, where his car hydroplaned off the road and crashed into a tree. He called Howard to report that he was okay, but Howard was completely distraught. It startled him in his core, and he took this strong reaction to be proof that he could no longer carry on with Tom as a secret. He immediately told Sonya about Tom. When I asked Howard what that was like, to come out to her, he maintained that he didn’t agonize about it at all; he wasn’t concerned with what she or their children would think of him. For him, being with Tom was a necessity if he was going to be happy. His love for Tom so overwhelmed him that he couldn’t continue the charade.
To his surprise, Sonya refused him the divorce. She asked him to go to couples counseling and work to save their marriage, a common practice at the time. Helmer obliged but during their sessions, the psychologist gave Sonya the plain truth: Howard was gay, and the faster she accepted it, the sooner she could move on with her life. Still, Sonya wanted the family together, and if Howard couldn’t legally marry Tom, then she didn’t think divorce was necessary. According to Howard, Sonya had had no suspicions about his being gay, preferring, in his mind, to stay in denial of anything that might threaten their happy home life. Howard continually assured Sonya that he would take care of her — and kept his word, supporting her to this day with monthly alimony checks — but staying married to her kept him stuck between the new love that he wanted to start a life with, and his former love who couldn’t and wouldn’t let him move on.
Despite this arrangement, according to Howard, he and Sonya remained cordial, even spending holidays together with their kids and Tom in tow. After a couple years, Sonya and Tom even became friends. Howard attributes this to her seeing firsthand how happy Tom made him and how his being gay, and ultimately leaving her, was not her fault but his. So Howard stayed married to Sonya but later that year moved out of his and Sonya’s house and, with Tom, into their 55th Street apartment.
That apartment, Howard told me, was just a couple blocks from the restaurant where we sat sharing the crepe. The next moment, a plate of steak tartare was placed before him, with a glistening quail egg yolk perched at its center. “How apropos!” Howard exclaimed, without missing a beat. “Would’ve been better if it was a chicken yolk, though.”
Throughout our conversation, Helmer never looks depressed or sad, but maintains an earnest smile at all times. This is a man who, seemingly, no matter what happens to him, keeps up a positive attitude. He knows what makes him happy and enjoys his life. “New York City is just so wonderful, ya know, what, that we could be here talking about all this together?” he said. “That’s why I wanted to move here when I did, gosh, almost forty-six years ago. Growing up, I remember those old David Niven movies that took place in the big apartments in this city, with the maid and everything. That was my fantasy, and that’s what I wanted here.”
As soon as Tom and Howard moved in together, they began to cultivate such a life. Tom pursued dancing more seriously, taking classes at the famed Luigi’s Jazz Centre on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “I would walk with him to his classes and stay behind to watch him and the other dancers jump and tumble and twirl around in all that tight spandex,” he said, grinning. “It was so exciting!” Thanks to Tom, Howard immersed himself in the dance world and in turn, he introduced Tom to the opera. (Howard’s bubah had been an opera aficionado.)
Tom was cast as a principal dancer for a show called BING!, but it never made it to Broadway. Then more dancing opportunities petered out, and Tom decided to make a career change. Through one of Howard’s friends working for Aronow, the PR firm that handled press and publicity for the Egg Board, he helped Tom into a position as assistant to the firm’s president. With a personality as big and naturally social as Howard’s, Tom excelled at the job, entertaining clients with his boss at lavish dinners held at the hottest restaurants, just as Howard had done for the Egg Board. “Here you have this beautiful young boy taking you out to dinner at the chicest restaurants of New York City at the time,” Howard said. “What person wouldn’t be delighted to be sitting next to him?”
It was during this time in the early eighties, when both their careers were taking off, that they took a trip to Mont Saint-Michel, a rocky, imposing island half a mile off the Normandy coast of France. Only accessible via a land bridge during low tide, the island first housed a monastery, and then a prison, but is now a UNESCO World Heritage site that sees most of its income from tourism. One of the main draws of the island is the restaurant La Mère Poulard. Situated within a hotel, it was, and still is, world-famous for its fluffy, custard-like omelets. This, of course, is what drew Howard to the remote island in the first place.
“The La Mère Poulard omelets were so light and fluffy and tender, my god! It was all just so beautiful and romantic.”
“They had these giant wood-burning ovens, like those you’d make pizza in,” Helmer told me. “The cooks would stand in the kitchen with these small copper skillets with eight-foot-long handles. They’d beat whole eggs in large copper bowls until they were as foamy as whipped meringue, then pour them into the skillet, set it over the fire, and tap the end of the handle with canes! The vibrations shook from the handle and to the pan and made the eggs dance, shifting them around so they didn’t stick, and then they slid out with a cracker-thin shell on the bottom. Their omelets were so light and fluffy and tender, my god! It was all just so beautiful and romantic.”
The cooks at La Mère Poulard let Howard try making the omelets himself. He donned an apron and took his position behind the kitchen stove. Then he whisked, poured, and cracked at the handles until he’d mastered the technique and his omelets looked just like the ones they served.
A few years after that trip, Howard learned through the industry grapevine that his omelet-making record had been broken. In the decade since he first won the title, the food scene in America had changed considerably. The celebrity-chef cult had taken hold and an increasing number of chefs were looking for ways to draw attention to their restaurants. Without the advent of televised food competitions, the Guinness events were still a sought-after caché. (Howard hadn’t been the first person to use a Guinness record for publicity, but he certainly paved the way for people in the food industry.) A man named John Elkhay, then the executive chef of City Lights restaurant in Providence, Rhode Island, had usurped him.
With renewed vigor, Helmer honed his omelet-making skills once again, drawing on what he’d learned at La Mère Poulard. He tapped the handles of his skillets to keep the whisked eggs in constant motion, so they floated in the skillet and cooked up tender and fluffy. While practicing, he’d listen to rap music on headphones, to maintain focus and keep the steady rhythm he needed.
In that time, Helmer also learned of another chef who had broken Elkhay’s record. This further motivated Helmer to get his title back, and so, in 1990, Helmer beat his original record with 427 omelets in 30 minutes, virtually double his previous effort. And though one would think that another challenger must’ve come along, no one has been able to top Howard’s record. As of this writing, he still holds it.
While Howard continued to enjoy the spoils of his life’s work, remaining healthy and strong going into his sixties, Tom was diagnosed as a “brittle” diabetic. Tom was in his mid-forties at the time, and this was a more serious diagnosis than most other types of diabetes, leaving him unable to predict when his blood sugar might drop. As his condition worsened, they brought into the family a giant British Labrador named Drake, a trained diabetic alert dog that could monitor Tom’s blood sugar levels. To accommodate Drake, they moved to a condominium on City Island, a one-and-a-half-mile-long island community in the Bronx that juts into the Long Island Sound. This severely limited their trips into Manhattan. Aside from Howard traveling for work, the pair only seemed to venture into Manhattan for doctors’ visits. “The last time we went into town, to see a Broadway show, Tom had to wear an oxygen mask, and it was awful for both of us,” Howard said.
After nine years on City Island, with his health decreasing steadily, Tom succumbed to his illness in 2015, at sixty-three years old. This was the one time in my conversations with Howard that a maudlin tone overtook his upbeat personality. “This was our favorite place to come for lunch,” he said, with a heavy sigh. “It’s been very hard to come back here without him. Oh, we had so many wonderful plans, and I had things I wanted to do with Tom. It’s really sad now that he’s gone.”
As we finish our lunch, Howard refers to Tom for the first time as his husband. It catches me off guard — Howard had been calling Tom by his name only. When gay marriage was finally legalized in New York State in 2011, Sonya understood its significance for Howard and Tom. So, after fifty-three years of marriage, she finally granted Howard a divorce. He and Tom were married immediately thereafter. They enjoyed four legal years together — one tenth of the time they were a couple.
Now that he’s alone on City Island and retired from his post at the American Egg Board, Howard has more free time than ever to reflect on his life’s trajectory, from a poor first-generation son in Chicago to egg maestro of New York and beyond. Though no longer employed full-time by the Egg Board, Howard continues to travel across the world to places like Malaysia, Dubai, and North Africa as a star in the industry, preaching the benefits of eggs and showing off his hard-won omelet craftsmanship at conferences. “How extraordinary it is that my life has taken me so far away from my roots,” Helmer says, with humility. “If you had told me as a kid that this is where my life would be, I wouldn’t have believed you.”
This brings up the void that Tom has left in Howard’s life, presenting him, in a way, with the opportunity to embark on something of a third chapter. I ask Howard how he’s holding up. “You know, it’s been a hell of a month since Tom’s been gone, and I’ve realized I’m not very good at being alone. I tried to go on those senior dating websites but none of the guys on there are attractive. They’re all so old and sad-looking,” he says, earnestly. I laugh at Howard’s candid statement, but then recall his age gap with Tom when they first met: Howard just likes younger guys. Marking myself as an apparent ageist, I tell Howard I’m impressed that he’s even trying to date. “Oh, no, I want to be back out there, meeting guys and taking part in the action and excitement. That’s what made this city and my relationship with Tom in it so exciting,” he replied. “It’s more an issue of finding someone to fall in love with and blow off consequences with. I never would’ve had the opportunity to do that had I not met Tom. I’ve been going back to bars by myself, because that’s how I met Tom, and I’ve been on a few dates, but the guys, ya know, I just couldn’t see myself going somewhere on a plane with any of them sitting next to me.”
Howard then tells me about a gay friend he’s known since his days in Chicago. This friend continues to live in the closet — still married to his wife and secretly sleeps with other married men in his neighborhood. “Ya know, I could only do that for so long because it’s soul-crushing. I don’t understand it,” he says. “He gets so defensive with me whenever I try to talk to him about it, but all I’m trying to do is show him how happy he could be if he was true to himself. I could never have been like him and lived that life for so long. Does he not know what he’s missing?”
This comment reminds me how fickle and fleeting the notion of “being out” really is, and how rapidly circumstances have changed for subsequent generations of gay men. Given a few particulars of Howard’s life — that he came out to his colleagues only a few years ago, was married to Sonya for fifty-three years, that he claims to have never experienced homophobia — one might regard these remarks as lacking self-awareness. But the degree to which Howard blazed his own path and lived so truthfully is astonishing. The fact is, “being out” is subjective, saddled to the circumstances of a time and place. Howard worked with the cards he was dealt, maintaining his commitments both to Sonya, as he had promised to in their vows, and to himself and to Tom, by insisting that they live their lives out in the open.
Several weeks later, Howard was in Los Angeles to see his sons. It was just a quick stop on the way to Honolulu, where he’d spend his first holiday since Tom’s passing. As they finished dinner and were getting ready to go to the airport, Howard, ever the optimist, shared how he hoped to meet his next love in Honolulu, someone who’d make him smile just as Tom had. At the front door, his eldest son pulled him aside and gave him a giant bear hug. “No matter what happens,” he told Howard, “just remember one thing: You’re a really great catch.”
Howard Helmer’s Perfect Omelet
Makes 1 omelet
In a small bowl, whisk 2 large eggs with 2 tablespoons water and season with salt and pepper. Warm a 10-inch (25 cm) nonstick skillet over high heat, then add 1 tablespoon butter and swirl to coat the skillet. Add the eggs and, using a rubber spatula, scrape the north, south, east, and west points of the omelet toward the center, tilting the skillet each time so any uncooked egg runs into the gap in the skillet. Once all the egg looks set but still moist on top, sprinkle 1/3 cup (35 g) grated sharp cheddar cheese over the left side of the omelet, followed by 1/4 cup (50 g) chopped tomatoes, 1/4 cup (55 g) thinly sliced baby spinach, and three 1-inch-wide (2 1/2 cm) strips of deli ham. Flip the right half of the omelet over the fillings, then invert the skillet and omelet onto a serving plate.
[“Howard Helmer: Egg Maestro” appears in Jarry Issue 2: Makers. To purchase, or find a retailer near you, visit our website.]
