The French Chef in America Page 10

  The documentaries were a risky escapade. They were shot guerrilla-style, with a tight deadline, minimal budget, skeleton crew, on 16-millimeter color film, to record traditional French foodways before they disappeared forever. The Childs referred to their adventure as “The French Chef in France,” or “FCiF.” As in White House Red Carpet, Julia was taking her audience somewhere they had never been before: this time to the France that most tourists never see, the arrière-pays (“backcountry”) of rustic charcuteries, olive oileries, cheese shops, screaming fishwives, skilled butchers, medieval bakeries, Parisian chocolatiers, and subterranean wine caves—the people and places that had originally inspired Julia in the 1950s.

  There had never been anything like the “FCiF” films on American television before. In many ways these episodic inserts anticipated today’s globe-traveling cooking shows, with a focus on local specialties, unfamiliar ingredients, classical techniques, and surprising locations brought to you by a compelling host.

  As the camera panned around the La Couronne dining room, Julia stepped into the frame to interview the maître d’hôtel about his famous dish Canard à la Rouennaise (duck from Rouen). Julia wore a dashing silver-white dress with an orange scarf around her neck—a chic ensemble that was a far cry from the sensible blue work shirt, green apron, and purple dish towel she usually favored. Her sartorial choices telegraphed a message about Season Two: Julia was taking her mission, and herself, seriously.

  Monsieur Dorin, the master of the duck press, was a lean, bearded man dressed in a dark suit and tie, with thick plastic-framed glasses. He looked more like an accountant or a cousin of Sigmund Freud than the manager of a famed restaurant. In accented English, he explained how he roasted a duck on a spit, then carved off the legs and wings, peeled the skin from the pink breast, and sprinkled it with minced shallots, coarse salt, and exactly forty grinds of pepper.

  He worked with the practiced, economical movements of a surgeon, and Julia said, “It looks as though you’ve done this before, several times.”

  Dorin knit his brow and nodded solemnly.

  As the bird’s wings and legs, coated in mustard and bread crumbs, were whisked off to the kitchen for roasting, Dorin placed the bird’s carcass into the duck press and added a gurgle of deep red Burgundy. He spun the handle down and gave it a good tug. With the sound of cracking bones, the silver machine crushed the carcass and issued a stream of red wine and duck essence from the spout. Dorin collected the juices in a small copper saucepan and mixed in a splash of cognac. Then he set the blood-brandy pool alight and gently warmed sliced duck breast in the mixture.

  “Very careful,” he intoned.

  Julia stood with her hands behind her back, watching raptly. “Why do you have to be so careful?”

  “The blood will become hard, scrambled,” if you allow it to overcook, he replied.

  “Yours is the most pure recipe I’ve seen for canard.” Julia nodded.

  Rouen is known for its duck, and those roasted at La Couronne were a beautiful half-wild, half-domestic hybrid. Though Dorin enacted the ritual with priestly seriousness, much of it, Julia noted, was theatrics. “If you do happen to have a duck press of your own, you can do it like Monsieur Dorin,” she trilled. “But you don’t have to rush out and rent a duck press because you can do almost the same at home.”

  At that point, the screen switched, and the viewer was transported back to the French Chef set in Boston, where Julia demonstrated how to cook a perfectly delicious duck in your own kitchen.

  The “FCiF” team shot similar documentary segments in three culinary regions of France: Provence, in the south (where Julia and Simca shared a property); Paris, in the central north (where Julia had learned to cook, and Simca lived); and Normandy, in the northwest (where Simca was raised and Julia had vacationed).

  The choice to highlight La Couronne was no accident. The restaurant was the site of Julia’s very first meal in France, a revelatory lunch of sole meunière that took place on November 3, 1948. Much had changed in the intervening years. At the time, Paul was the “senior” member of the marriage, a worldly forty-six-year-old diplomat to Julia’s “rather loud and unserious” thirty-six-year-old ingenue. By June 1970, however, Julia had grown into a best-selling author and zesty television celebrity. Like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice—or Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady—Julia had virtually reversed roles with Paul. While she became a superstar, Paul stepped out of the limelight to support her career, which he was glad to do. “I feel Nature is restoring an upset balance,” he wrote to Charlie.

  The filming at La Couronne marked the rounding of a circle. It was a homecoming to the site of Julia’s culinary awakening, and, though no one knew it at the time, it would prove to be the beginning of the end of Phase One of her career.

  II. A COOK’S TOUR

  The final push to complete Volume II had been such a strain that Julia swore off books and, like a horse from the barn, bolted the confines of her study: “Never again am I going to get into anything like this book—never able to go anywhere, do anything, learn something new. NON,” she vented to Simca in April 1970. “All of this takes hours and hours of work…but at last—it shall be done. H*O*O*R*A*Y.” Eagerly returning to the WGBH studio, Julia began to prepare for Season Two of The French Chef, which would air in October. “It is such fun to be back there again, and so jolly, and to finally be out of this house and away from this typewriter.” It was then that she proposed “The French Chef in France” documentaries.

  “I have felt that we needed something new…when we came on again in color, and this is it!” Julia said of taking a small crew across the Atlantic to record traditional foodways. “I keep talking so much about France…and I am itching to show the actual country, life, people and food. And I envisage our doing it in a very intimate and personal manner.”

  WGBH welcomed her documentary plan, and outlined it in a handsome brochure for potential underwriters. Julia proposed a luxe “Cook’s tour” that would take her from a private home in Champagne to a three-star restaurant in Paris, a picnic on the Eiffel Tower, a truffle hunt in Périgord, and a winepress in Beaune. It was an ambitious idea, but not an easy sell. While The French Chef boasted more than a million viewers a week, Season Two would feature more episodes than ever, and would be shot in color for the first time, which made it expensive. Production costs for the Cook’s tour alone were estimated at more than $500,000. This was a large sum for public television, and the station’s executives struggled to find a corporate underwriter. It was a sobering moment.

  Julia had no choice but to scale back and propose a more modest slate of documentaries: they would be shot on a tight schedule in places where the Childs knew people, which would help cut time and costs, and would focus on simpler foods. This scheme was more appealing, and at the eleventh hour two familiar patrons—Polaroid (which funded The French Chef) and Hills Bros. Coffee (which had sponsored White House Red Carpet)—agreed to fund Julia’s documentary experiment.

  Despite this apparent setback an innovative and subversive spirit lingered deep inside the project. Julia had sold the “FCiF” documentaries as a useful teaching tool, and as a way to show her television audience the kinds of food and people that had originally inspired her to cook. But this pitch was something of a Trojan horse. As she revealed years later in My Life in France, Julia’s true agenda with the “FCiF” documentaries was to “save” classical cuisine from being crushed by American-style supermarkets and fast-food joints that were popping up around France like poisonous mushrooms. The French, it turned out, liked convenience as much as everyone else did. Julia feared this was a grave threat to the traditional handmade foods that defined the nation’s heritage. In essence, she believed that her documentaries would help preserve the soul of France:

  Although I never mentioned this blatantly, I was convinced that our footage would prove to be an important historical document. Mechanization was taking over the food business, even in France, and it seemed clear
to me that many of the artisanal skills we were going to record—the making of glacéed fruits, the hand-cutting of meat, the decorative skills of traditional pâtissiers—would disappear within a generation or two. Of course, film itself can fade or break. But if our little documentaries survived, they might be one of the few records showing how food was once made almost entirely by human hands rather than by machines.

  She had not voiced this motivation at the time for fear of scaring away her audience, her bosses, and her sponsors.

  Yet there was a mild irony at work in Julia’s attitude. In France she was a stalwart defender of tradition, while in America she was an enthusiastic agent of change. But Julia did not like to analyze her own complex and sometimes contradictory impulses. Though she was measured and pragmatic as a cook, she lived her life instinctually and moved ever forward.

  With a green light to proceed on “The French Chef in France,” Paul and Julia created detailed schedules, lists of equipment, and questions to be answered on the ground to ensure that everything went smoothly. Naturally, it didn’t.

  III. THE EXPERIENCE OF AGE AND THE ENTHUSIASM OF YOUTH

  Olive trees twisted against a blue sky. Red roses nodded in the warm breeze. There was bright sun, wispy clouds, and the smell of honey in the air at La Pitchoune. Down the road, the Mediterranean glittered and the Cannes Film Festival was in full carnivalesque swing under the palm trees. Paul and Julia sipped tea on the veranda and plotted out the next few weeks. It was mid-May 1970: a moment of calm before the storm.

  At 9:00 that night the phone rang. It was Shana Alexander, the editor of McCall’s, calling from New York. She made pleasant conversation, then got to the point. For $40,000, McCall’s had procured the exclusive right from Knopf to use a host of recipes—from broiled eggplant slices to a mold of parslied aspic and apricot sherbet—excerpted from Volume II. The recipes would accompany the three-part series of articles that Patricia Simon had written about the making of Volume II after her visit to La Pitchoune the year before. But there was a catch: reneging on its promise to use the hundreds of photos Paul had taken of Julia and Simca at work, McCall’s had decided to use the celebrity photographer Arnold Newman instead. The real purpose of Alexander’s call was to convince Julia and Simca to participate in a photo shoot with Newman, and to allow him to produce a series of mouthwatering images of the duo’s completed recipes. To sweeten the deal, the magazine would cover the costs of food and laundry, and would throw in a $200 per diem. All Julia and Simca had to do, Alexander purred, was to pose for Arnold Newman.

  McCall’s was pulling out all the stops for their series on Volume II, and the publicity value of such attention in a major magazine, timed to the publication of the book, was incalculable.

  La Pitchoune

  Julia wasn’t interested. For one thing, Paul was deeply insulted that the magazine had unceremoniously dropped him. For another, every minute of Julia’s time for the next few months had already been scheduled. “Cooking with us is NOT a hot-dog-stand operation,” Paul harrumphed to his brother. “Our standards are perfection, visually as well as gastronomically. For us, the cooking and serving of food (and instructing others to do it as we do) is not something we can toss together at the last minute.” Once the “FCiF” shoot wrapped at the end of June, the Childs would return to Cambridge to tape Season Two in the studio at WGBH. “We have no staff of writers, idea-men, gag-men, or anyone but ourselves,” Paul thundered. “A group of 24 people is involved in the final shooting. They depend on us.”

  Well, then, Alexander countered, what if Simca Beck were to pose for the great lensman, alone? “Oui!” Simca replied; she would be delighted to pose for Mr. Arnold Newman.

  The Pan Am jet carrying the WGBH film crew touched down in Nice on May 20. An hour later, Julia, Paul, and five groggy Americans huddled beneath a blue awning at a restaurant in Cannes, eating lunch. Ruth Lockwood was Julia’s trusted producer and all-around fix-it woman. She was solidly built, with short brown-gray hair, an oval face, big glasses, and a foghorn voice. It was Ruthie who often came up with the silly props Julia used on air, like the blowtorch and fireman’s hat she used for a show on crème brûlée. But Ruth could also be a relentless perfectionist, insisting that reams of research about the White House or French provincial cooking be prepared before a shoot. As trying as she could be, Paul noted, Ruthie was very useful.

  Morning on the Côte d’Azur

  The director was David Atwood, a tall Mainer with straight brown hair. He had directed WGBH’s coverage of the race riots in Boston in 1969, and the night that James Brown had persuaded an angry crowd not to rampage in the streets. But the “FCiF” was Atwood’s first overseas assignment, and the responsibility weighed on him. The cameraman was Peter Hoving, a wry Dutch Canadian with a red beard and a sure sense of himself. He had shot film in Moscow and Western Europe, and spoke a smattering of French. Sound recording was the province of Willie Morton, who hid beneath tables and around corners to pick up sound on his long microphone while out of sight. The crew’s production assistant was Nancy Troland, a bespectacled Massachusetts native who had traveled through France with her aunt and spoke a bit of French.

  Five of the seven—Paul and Julia, Lockwood, Hoving, and Morton—had worked together on Julia’s pilot episodes for WGBH in 1962. Hoving and Morton had worked on White House Red Carpet in 1967. As they ate salade niçoise, they reminisced about their naïve efforts to produce those shows in rudimentary conditions, and agreed the experience had forged a strong working relationship.

  After lunch, David Atwood strolled through an outdoor market and used a Polaroid camera to take instant portraits of the vegetable sellers. The wizened market women were astonished to see the camera spit out a fully developed color picture moments after it was taken. It was as if the young American had “made an apple grow from its seed in 60 seconds,” Paul wrote in his diary.

  As a former schoolteacher and diplomat, Paul seemed intent on educating the young WGBHers about the importance of building trust and adapting themselves to local customs; he worried that the Yanks’ obsession with speed and technology would not mesh well with the slower-paced, tradition-bound French.

  Julia at a marketplace in France

  “Remember, France is halfway to the Orient,” he advised the crew. The message was: You are no longer in America, kids. For our documentary project to succeed, you must adjust to the French way of doing things. Don’t rush through a marketplace too quickly, push people too hard, or take their goodwill for granted. Unlike most people, the Childs had lived for extended periods in three cultures—American, Chinese, and French—each of which had distinct shopping traditions and relationships to time. Raised in the States, Julia and Paul understood the efficient, but essentially nonsocial, way of buying goods in an American supermarket. They had also lived in the ancient city of Kunming, China, at the end of the Second World War, where even simple transactions required lengthy negotiations. And after the war they lived in Paris and Marseille, where shoppers were expected to interact with vendors as part of doing business. So, while purchasing frozen chicken breasts in Boston took minutes, deliberating the price of a live chicken in a Chinese market could stretch for a day, and buying premium chicken thighs in France would take at least an hour.

  Sensitive to cultural differences, Julia believed in the importance of what she called “les human relations.” Paul emphasized building “linguistic bridges” with butchers, cheese ladies, or fruit purveyors. If the young WGBHers followed suit, he explained, they would be rewarded with the finest pork loin, ripest triangle of Camembert, and freshest strawberries in the market—and perhaps a few well-guarded family recipes. If not, they would be shut out and the “FCiF” project would fail.

  The final member of the team was Daniel Berger, an affable, twenty-eight-year-old French “fixer.” He had a mop of curly brown hair, bright eyes, a creamy complexion, a tentative mustache, and an affinity for colorful shirts. Appropriately enough, “berger” means “she
pherd” in English: his job was to make things happen when, how, and where they were supposed to. In a 2009 blog post, Berger looked back at his three weeks with the Childs as an adventure that altered the course of his life: “Nixon and Pompidou were presidents, Ungaretti had died, the Renault 12 was popular, Miles [Davis] was playing at the festival of the Isle of Wight, and Michel Le Bris was sentenced to eight months in prison for subversion. Julia Child, the U.S. star unknown in France, was inhabited by a sense of delight, genuinely interested in others, and was to me a female equivalent of the ‘perfect gentleman.’ ”

  Summing up the “FCiF” team, Paul quoted Fernand Point, the famed chef at La Pyramide: “Lorsqu’on dirige un personnel, il est nécessaire d’amalgamer l’expérience des anciens à l’enthousiasme des jeunes” (“When one heads up a group of people one must combine the experience of age with the enthusiasm of youth”).

  IV. THE OLD-FASHIONED AND THE NEW

  Grasse is a romantic vision of a French town, known for its flowers, fountains, arcaded streets, dank alleyways, long staircases, and sublime courtyards. It was an ideal setting for the opening shots of Julia’s documentary. Early on the morning of Thursday, May 21, Julia wandered through the Place aux Aires marketplace, admiring the tulips and fresh vegetables for sale, and bought just-made crème fraîche from a stern woman at a crémerie. The film crew trailed behind, capturing the sights and sounds of the moment.

  David Atwood silently gestured his directions while Peter Hoving focused his camera on the vendors’ rugged hands. Willie Morton crouched to pick up sound with his mike. Nancy Troland clacked the “slate,” which identified each shot. Then she scribbled notes about what happened in each scene and where, kept track of film footage, and planned the shooting schedule. Paul Child still snapped photos with his Rolleiflex.