The French Chef in America Page 3

  II. HOW FORTUNATE WE ARE

  La Pitchoune overlooked a green valley and the town of Plascassier, just north of Cannes, and a few miles from the Mediterranean. It was a simple one-story building, with tan stucco walls and a red tile roof. It had a large living-dining room, a narrow kitchen, modest bedrooms, and a terrace overhung by a trellis coiled with green vines.

  The house was built in 1965, in a former potato field on a gently sloping hill. Julia referred to it as “the house the book built,” because she had paid for it with proceeds from Mastering. She also called it “the house built on friendship,” because it was situated on a corner of Bramafam (“the cry of hunger”), the property owned by Simca Beck and her husband, Jean Fischbacher. They had invited the Childs to lease the property and build on it, on the condition that once they were finished using the house it would revert to the Fischbacher family. This was a very un-French and un-American arrangement; but it suited the four friends just fine, and it was sealed with a handshake.

  Enveloped by soft warm breezes from the Mediterranean, and perfumed by the scents of wood smoke, manure, mimosa, jasmine, and lavender, La Peetch seemed to exist out of time. The arid gray-brown earth was festooned with low scrub bushes, red and yellow wildflowers, dark green olive trees, and tall, swaying cypresses. The quiet was punctuated by birds chirping, bleating goats, and a chugging tractor. In the distance behind Plascassier, the Alpes-Maritimes rose in a succession of green foothills and blue mountains that appeared to recede into infinity. Southern France is famously laid-back, and the people who lived nearby didn’t know, or care, who Julia Child–the-American-TV-star was.

  Julia and Paul had flown there right after taping the diplomatic dinner at the Johnson White House, and quickly fell into a contemplative rhythm. Over the course of December and January, Paul painted landscapes, photographed Julia’s cookery, and tested bread recipes. Julia corrected proofs for The Cooking of Provincial France, a Time Life book on which she was a consultant, and tested recipes with Simca for Volume II of Mastering. On a visit to Paris in December, the Childs dove into the chaos of Les Halles one last time, to buy three foie gras and truffles for their holiday celebrations. “God, it was great!” Julia enthused of the market. “Ten thousand smells, sounds, and faces! I kept thinking what a movie we could have made if that plan of ours hadn’t fallen through.”

  Back in Provence, they were invited to watch the slaughter of a three-hundred-pound pig in a traditional ceremony. This was the kind of local, ritualized moment that fascinated Julia. She was inquisitive and not squeamish, and felt it was important to know “all of the hows and whys” of where food comes from.

  As Julia kneaded, chopped, and stirred in the kitchen at Christmas, Paul—who affectionately referred to her as “the Mad Woman of La Pitchoune”—found himself “smelling all these breads, chickens, pâtés, dorados, cooking, and hearing my tender little wifelet crashing around in the kitchen, scolding the pussy for meowing, whacking something metallic with something else metallic, like a Peking street vendor. A very jolly house.” He wrote his twin, Charlie Child: “How fortunate we are at this moment in our lives! Each doing what he most wants, in a marvelously adapted place, close to each other, superbly fed and housed, with excellent health, and few interruptions.”

  In early February 1968, Paul and Julia flew home to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a quick visit. Having rented out their rambling Victorian house, they stayed with Avis DeVoto, the literary scout who had sent Mastering to Knopf in 1959, and was the wife of essayist Bernard DeVoto. They planned to catch up with friends and review some paperwork; Julia would record the voice-over for the White House TV special, have a small lump in her left breast examined—“It is a very simple matter,” she said—and they would return to France, where work on Volume II of Mastering would resume.

  Julia was riding high. White House Red Carpet had gone extremely well, planning was under way for Season Two of The French Chef, and Knopf was about to publish a compilation of recipes called The French Chef Cookbook. And so it came as a rude shock when a doctor at New England Sinai Hospital in Boston said that the small lump in her breast was a cancerous tumor, “the size of a lima bean.” Julia had been a casual smoker, but was otherwise robust and healthy.

  Faced with the unexpected diagnosis, she characteristically instructed the surgeon, “If the tumor is malignant, lop the breast off. I want to get it over with.”

  Following the standard procedure of the day, the oncologists performed a radical mastectomy, removing the entire breast and the lymph nodes on her left side, to forestall further spread of the disease. (Such invasive surgery would not be used on a small tumor today.)

  “Left breast off,” Julia wrote in her diary on February 18. She was not given chemotherapy, and at the time breast reconstruction was not widely available. “They just sewed me up and I went home,” she recalled. In fact, it wasn’t quite that simple. Julia spent ten days recuperating at the hospital. Returning to Avis’s house, she sank into a warm bath and allowed herself to cry over her “lost bubby.”

  With such highs followed by such lows, Julia could have been forgiven for dropping into a funk. But she remained stoic, hardly complained, and dismissed the operation as “a nuisance.” In letters to friends, Julia emphasized how fortunate she’d been that the surgery had been on her left side, and not on her dominant right. Friends sympathized, saying, “That’s too bad,” but didn’t dwell on her condition. “No one took it as a terrible crisis,” Julia recalled, not because they were insensitive, but because at the time mastectomy was considered a difficult, extremely personal subject to talk about. Julia did not mention her breast cancer in public for years, and when she finally did, she kept a stiff upper lip: “No radium, no chemotherapy, no caterwauling. I didn’t want to be whiny.”

  Paul suffered on her behalf. Though he was a black belt in judo, he was a worrier bedeviled by existential dread, and was subject to a string of coughs, stomach flus, and eye inflammations in a way that his twin, Charlie, never was. Though Paul put on a brave face, Julia’s mastectomy gripped him with fear. “Death and degeneration sat on my chest like twin ghouls, and I had a white night in spite of a double dose of sleeping pills,” he wrote. Berating himself for such “damn-fool emotions,” Paul imagined the worst: “Planning the funeral, the disposition of La Pitchoune and of our house in Cambridge…the problems of whether [Julia’s] ashes would better be buried in the Plascassier cemetery, in Pasadena, in Cambridge, or simply scattered somewhere.”

  Despite his fears, Julia recovered, and willed herself upward and outward into “the world of the living.” She began to take short walks around Cambridge, did physical therapy, and, though she wasn’t sleeping well, slowly regained her strength. The loss of her breast “didn’t really bother me, for I wasn’t flapping my breasts around anyway,” Julia said. Besides, Paul “made me feel like he loved me.”

  Years later, in 1975, she appeared on a PBS show called “What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You,” part of a Dick Cavett series to promote breast cancer awareness. “The leading expert on a woman’s body is the woman herself,” Julia said. “And the best instruments for the detection of possible breast cancer are a woman’s own two hands.” When the show aired in New York, the station received more than two thousand calls from viewers wanting to know more. “It’s dreadful to lose a breast,” Julia told Cavett. “I was in my fifties and married. How would I have felt had I been thirty and hopeful?”

  —

  BY MID-MAY 1968, Julia was in the midst of recuperating from her mastectomy when she and Paul plastered smiles on their faces to attend a special screening of White House Red Carpet for the WGBH crew in Boston. Driving to the station Julia lit a cigarette, inhaled, and felt nauseated. She flicked the butt out the window and never smoked again.

  Everyone has his or her own remedy for trouble. Julia had always turned to work as a salve, and so it was now. The enormous challenge of envisioning Mastering, Volume II, testing and retesting recipes, w
riting them up, and consulting with their editor at Alfred A. Knopf, Judith Jones, gave Julia a goal, structured her time, and nourished her in every way. And, for better and for worse, the process brought her closer to her “French sister” and longtime collaborator, Simca Beck.

  When Julia, Simca, and Louisette Bertholle wrote Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the fifties, they had to leave aside many recipes that wouldn’t fit into the already-crowded 684-page tome. Upon the book’s publication in 1961, they vowed that if it sold well they would include the forsaken dishes in a second volume. Judith Jones encouraged this idea.

  Jones was an accidental cookbook editor. “The idea had never even occurred to me” before Mastering landed on her desk in 1959, she recalled. She had been hired by Knopf as a fiction editor, and to work on translations of Camus and Sartre. But, Jones explained in a series of conversations over many months, she understood the cookbook intuitively. She had lived in Paris at the same time the Childs did, had developed her palate by eating in cafés and brasseries, and had learned to cook with friends and by asking for recipes as she shopped in the outdoor markets. Given the manuscript for Mastering in New York, Jones was charmed by the book, and convinced of its potential when she cooked from it at home. “I thought, ‘Well, if I like it then others will, too!,’ ” she said.

  Mastering was the first cookbook Jones edited, and she would go on to introduce other chefs with distinct voices and culinary expertise to America—including Marion Cunningham (sophisticated home cooking), Lidia Bastianich (Italian food), Claudia Roden (Middle Eastern), Edna Lewis (the American South), Madhur Jaffrey (Indian), and Irene Kuo (Chinese).

  When Mastering successfully fulfilled its promise and Julia became a TV star in the early sixties, it was logical for the publisher to follow up with a sequel. In 1965, Julia and Simca began to work on Mastering, Volume II. (By that point, Louisette Bertholle had dropped out of the collaboration.) Jones set a deadline of December 31, 1967, for the first draft. But that date came and went, with no sign of Volume II.

  “It will be ready when it’s ready,” Julia said. Writing to Simca, she added: “Too bad, but it is a thing we can’t hurry, if it is to be the super book we expect.”

  A year later, she and Simca had produced only three of fourteen planned chapters. Jones was growing concerned—in part because the authors gave the appearance that “they could keep going well into the next century,” and in part because she noticed that the Child-Beck collaboration was starting to buckle and crack under pressure.

  III. MADE FOR EACH OTHER

  The air was chilly and the sky was overcast and portending rain until the late afternoon, when the sun sent shafts of light through the gloom and warmed up their little corner of Provence. It was December 27, 1968. The Childs were at La Pitchoune for Christmas, the Fischbachers were next door at Bramafam, and Julia and Simca were knuckling down to “cookery bookery.” They had spent the afternoon in front of a tiny black-and-white TV, watching NASA’s Apollo 8 capsule—the first manned spaceflight to orbit the moon—reenter the atmosphere from space and splash down into the Pacific. They were “dazed and thrilled” by the sight, Paul wrote. “Its courage, its perfection, and its imagination are almost beyond belief. What a triumph for human beings.”

  That afternoon, the American journalist Mary Roblee Henry drove up the rutted driveway to chronicle the making of Volume II for Vogue. “Tonight you are our guinea pigs!” Julia greeted Henry and the French photographer Marc Riboud enthusiastically. “We’re going to cook up a storm, testing two tremendously secret recipes from the new book.”

  Julia heaved a weighty black stone mortar onto the worktable in her La Pitchoune kitchen, and used the pestle to mash crawfish shells together with butter. “It takes strong hands to be a good cook,” she said, with a zealous gleam in her eye. “You have to be rough and tough.” With hard strokes she squeezed the pink butter through a sieve into a bowl. “This flexes the muscles, and the butter gets far better mixing than in a blender…The crawfish go into the sauce, the shells into the butter, and the rest into the soup!”

  Simca Beck watched impatiently. She was a tall, pale-skinned, sharp-featured, headstrong blond Frenchwoman who was just as obsessed with la cuisine bourgeoise as Julia was. They called each other ma belle soeur, which can mean either “my dear sister” or “sister-in-law.” Like blood sisters, they loved each other most of the time and clashed spectacularly some of the time.

  Simca dipped a finger into the crawfish mousse and scowled. “I find that very buttery.”

  “Zut alors, more shells!” said Julia, who seemed to relish the work. “This is only the sixth time we’ve done this dish. We tried it out on Sam Chamberlain [the American artist and writer], but so far it hasn’t even a name.”

  As Madame Henry took notes on a yellow legal pad, Riboud snapped pictures. Paul acted as sous-chef and dishwasher, and quietly observed the proceedings.

  As far as Henry and Riboud could tell, Julia and Simca were working in perfect harmony. It was an impression the authors encouraged. “Some people don’t want others around because they don’t know what they’re doing,” Julia said. “I know what I’m doing so I don’t mind company. One of the great pleasures is working with Simca.”

  “We were made for each other.” Simca nodded.

  As the cooks finished and the sun set, drinks were served in front of the fireplace in the open living-dining room. The floor at La Peetch was lined with red tile, the white stucco walls were decorated with Paul’s paintings, and a vase of fresh mimosas graced the round dining table.

  Dinner began with a sole mousse accompanied by the hard-won crawfish butter sauce. Paul poured a cool Alsatian Sporen 1964, which they sipped from distinctive amber-colored, handblown wineglasses bought in neighboring Biot. Conversation was light and convivial. As they ate, Riboud focused his cameras on Julia, creating a series of images of her tasting food at the stove and laughing as she poked the fish mousse with a fork. He didn’t take many pictures of Simca.

  The entrée was a duck that had been poached, boned, molded with foie gras, and chilled in a port wine aspic. It was served on glazed pottery plates that were a house gift from the eminent American chef James Beard. Paul uncorked bottles of Château Lynch-Bages 1959 and cut “thighs” of a peasant loaf that Julia had baked. Simca’s husband, Jean Fischbacher, turned the salad leaves in their dressing eighty times. Julia served ripe cheeses bought in Cannes, and Simca brought out her signature dessert, an apple tarte normande.

  The meal was sublime, “one of the most unforgettable dinners ever cooked by Julia Child,” Henry declared in her Vogue article, which appeared six months later. Julia had thoroughly enjoyed herself, and understood that a story about the making of their book in a high-profile magazine would provide fantastic publicity. Now she was eager to finish work on Volume II.

  Paul wasn’t convinced the evening had gone so well. “The concentration of both Mary Henry and Marc was on Julia,” he observed, “which may have hurt Simca’s feelings.”

  Out of respect for her colleague, Julia did not discuss her success in the States, or the media apparatus that had helped make it possible. Simca rarely watched television and knew little about The French Chef; she did not appreciate why Julia’s portrait on the cover of Time in 1966 was groundbreaking, or how a feature in Vogue would publicize their book. As far as Simca was concerned, nothing had changed since they worked on the original Mastering in the fifties: she and Julia were equal partners in teaching and writing, and Simca considered herself the better cook.

  But when it dawned on her, as Paul wrote, that “Julia has so sedulously protected her (against my urgings) from knowing how popular, how beloved and well known, what a household word Julia has become,” Simca grew quietly resentful. How was it that her old friend had become such a major celebrity in America?

  2

  The French Chef

  I. 103 IRVING STREET

  In January 1959, the Childs were living in a small house
on Olive Avenue, in Washington, D.C. Paul had been temporarily named the chief of exhibits for the USIA (U.S. Information Agency, formerly USIS, the U.S. Information Service), and Julia was fine-tuning the manuscript for what would become Mastering the Art of French Cooking. To all outward appearances, they were happily committed to a career in diplomacy. But behind closed doors, they had made a momentous decision: after one more posting—to Oslo, Norway—Paul would retire from the USIA, and the Childs would return to civilian life in America.

  He had just turned fifty-seven and she would soon turn forty-seven. They had enjoyed their time abroad—most of all in France—but it was tiring, and they were ready to settle down. They had a quiet life already planned out. Julia would cook, write, and teach classes. Paul would paint, write, and take photographs. They would find a nice house, surround themselves with good friends and sophisticated culture, and enjoy delicious wine and food.

  After much consideration, they chose Cambridge, Massachusetts, over other cities, such as Washington, D.C. (which they liked, but didn’t love), Los Angeles (Julia’s hometown, though “too far from family and friends”), and New York (too much hustle and bustle). Paul had spent much of his youth in Boston, and had lived in Cambridge with his first great love, Edith Kennedy, in 1930, when he taught at the Shady Hill School. (He and Kennedy, who was a sophisticated divorcée twenty years older than Paul, did not marry; she died of heart troubles and edema in 1942.) Paul had friends in Cambridge and felt comfortable in its leafy, left-leaning, academic milieu. As did Julia: though raised in Pasadena, California, her family was rooted in Massachusetts, and she often mentioned her “New England Yankee” lineage. She graduated from Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts, and had grown fond of Cambridge during visits to Avis DeVoto and other friends.