Appetite For Life_ The Biography Of Julia Child Part 6

FLAVORS OF M MARRIAGE.

(1946 1948) "No matter what happens in the kitchen, never apologize."

JULIA CHILD.

THE APPROACHING truck lost its brakes; Julia saw it heading straight for them. Paul could not swerve the car out of the way in time. He and Julia had left Lumberville on this three-lane road that almost became the end rather than the beginning of their life together. "It was nip and tuck," reports Jack Moore (Paul's colleague at State). "If the truck had been just six inches closer, they would have both been dead. I remember being heartbroken." truck lost its brakes; Julia saw it heading straight for them. Paul could not swerve the car out of the way in time. He and Julia had left Lumberville on this three-lane road that almost became the end rather than the beginning of their life together. "It was nip and tuck," reports Jack Moore (Paul's colleague at State). "If the truck had been just six inches closer, they would have both been dead. I remember being heartbroken."

Paul bruised his ribs on the steering wheel, hit the winds.h.i.+eld, and was thrown out the car door. Julia remembers that she "hit the winds.h.i.+eld and was thrown out the door and my shoes came off. I was knocked out and covered with blood from a head wound." The car was totaled. "A woman and her husband who were pa.s.sing by took us to the nearest hospital emergency room somewhere in New Jersey. After they patched us up, we called my father." Before the accident Julia and Paul left Charlie and Freddie's Pennsylvania home to meet her family, who had gathered for a McWilliams engagement party at the River Club in New York City the day before the wedding.

A BANDAGED BRIDE BANDAGED BRIDE.

Julia insisted on going ahead with the ceremony. "We were married in st.i.tches," Paul said, "me on a cane and Julia full of gla.s.s." The civil ceremony was held at noon on September 1, 1946, at the home of prominent lawyer Whitney North Seymour (a friend of Charlie's) in Stockton, New Jersey, where the legal waiting time was brief. Charlie stood up with his brother, Dorothy with her sister.

Across the Delaware River in beautiful Bucks County, Pennsylvania, their families and closest friends gathered to celebrate the union of Julia Carolyn McWilliams (thirty-four) and Paul Cus.h.i.+ng Child (forty-four) with a garden party in the backyard of the Childs' home. It was a country wedding lunch, very casual, with big dishes of food lining groaning tables. The men shed their jackets and rolled up their white s.h.i.+rtsleeves under the late summer heat. Food, like mashed sweet potatoes stuffed into oranges, and wine were plentiful.

The bride "had the most beautiful, bean-thin figure I've ever seen ... slender but curves in all the right places," declared f.a.n.n.y Brennan, a longtime friend of the Childs'. Julia's nieces reported, "Julia was exuberant and warm and gorgeous and had beautiful legs." She wore a slender, short-sleeved, belted dress that looked like a summer suit with high heels that made no attempt to disguise the fact that she was taller than Paul.

Coppernose, Charlie and Freddie's house in Lumberville (seven miles from the popular New Hope village), was as polished and decorated as possible on such short notice. Only a month before, Paul and Julia had arrived in Maine with no definite plans to marry. Now the wedding, appropriately and symbolically, was on the Child family property; Freddie Child, who came from a wealthy family, had inherited a nearby house in 1927 and bought Coppernose when the owner died. Paul, who had his own room here, had helped Charlie lay the large brick terrace with Charlie's diamond pattern. There was a brook and a small waterfall, and a swimming pool. The wedding guests ate their lunch on the terrace and lawn. This grand home, with its gardens and brook, was Paul's only home since the death of Edith in Cambridge early in the war.

When Julia and Paul cut their wedding cake, they shared a bit of it together-a tradition dating from the Middle Ages that bonds a couple at the moment of their first shared food. Julia's family gathered around. Stepmother Phila came with Julia's father from Pasadena; Dort from New York City where she was working in the theater; brother John and his wife, Jo, drove down from Pittsfield, Ma.s.sachusetts. Present also was Aunt Bessie's daughter, Patsy Morgan, from New Canaan.

John McWilliams, as a traditional father, wanted to give the wedding. But it was a Child event, which "got Julia and Paul off on the wrong foot with Pop," admits Dorothy, who is even today reluctant to acknowledge that Julia was "rejecting" her family. Indeed, the break for Julia was a necessary and significant one. Paul's nieces believe that he was not "disapproving of the McWilliamses, he was bored by them." His att.i.tude had its basis in his unstable childhood and his prejudice against business, particularly money made in land speculation. "It was a kind of fear of money," they add, pointing out that both twins married women with money who took over their finances. The political antagonism between the two men in Julia's life was unambivalent and mutual.

The wedding guest list was as meaningful as was the reception site for Julia's future, for included with the two immediate families were the people who comprised Paul's larger family: the Myerses, the Kublers, and the Bissells-all part of Paul's Paris and Connecticut life before the war, a group that continued a gourmet "orgy" of food and drink at the Mayflower Inn each New Year's Day. These people would become Julia's new family.

Tall and stately Richard Myers in his crocheted St.-Tropez beanie came from New York City with his daughter and son-in-law, f.a.n.n.y and Hank Brennan (his wife, Alice Lee, could not attend). Daddy Myers was Paul's connection to the world of food, wine, and music in Paris, where the Myerses lived for nearly thirty years. He was part of the F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gerald Murphy group of wealthy expatriates who lived in Paris and on the Riviera. Myers then worked for American Express and served as head of The Ladies' Home Journal The Ladies' Home Journal in Europe (where Charlie painted his portrait), before serving with the OSS in London during the war. f.a.n.n.y, who was younger than Julia, thought Paul was "very, very masculine." Everyone, she adds, "was very happy for Paul because Julia was so ebullient." in Europe (where Charlie painted his portrait), before serving with the OSS in London during the war. f.a.n.n.y, who was younger than Julia, thought Paul was "very, very masculine." Everyone, she adds, "was very happy for Paul because Julia was so ebullient."

George Kubler met Paul when the latter taught at the Avon Old Farms School and George taught art history at Yale. The two men traveled together in Mexico in 1938, where Kubler met his wife, Elizabeth (Betty) Scofield Bushnell, a Smith '33 cla.s.smate of Julia. Because of this double connection they would henceforth be among the closest friends of the newlyweds.

Completing the Avon-Yale circle of Paul's friends, his extended family, were the Bissells, its social center and probably the family that unofficially adopted him. Paul's artistic blossoming occurred at the salon of Marie Bissell, a wealthy patron of the arts in Farmington, Connecticut (near the Avon Old Farms School). In fact, Paul helped design some of her charity b.a.l.l.s. Marie and Richard Bissell had three children. Son d.i.c.k (Richard Jr.), who was of Paul's generation, had been in the OSS and was now headed to MIT as an economics professor. Later he would become the top planner in the CIA and meet his Waterloo with the Cuban Bay of Pigs debacle. He was married to Ann Bushnell, Betty Kubler's sister.

Thus the reception included the extended family to which Julia would become sister and daughter for the remainder of her life. As they enthusiastically touched winegla.s.ses, Paul called out le carillon de l'amitie le carillon de l'amitie-the bell of friends.h.i.+p! Though Julia and Paul were an integral part of this expansive clan, they remained a tight unit of two, "emotionally dependent upon each other" (as one family member says). "They each needed someone who would never leave.... They were devoted to each other." He never had parents upon whom he could depend; she left her family for him.

Because they had had their honeymoon on the cross-country journey and Paul needed to return to work, they moved immediately to Was.h.i.+ngton.

WAs.h.i.+NGTON HOUSEWIFE.

The nation's capital, once a port on the Potomac River, was a sleepy Southern town in the late 1940s, colored by postwar drama-a dozen n.a.z.i war criminals were hanged at Nuremberg that October-and visions of European peace and recovery, bolstered by the United Nations and the Marshall Plan. Columnist Drew Pearson set the tone of political gossip in this one-industry city. Black servants worked in the homes of government officials. And every weekday morning, Dean Acheson walked to the State Department with Felix Frankfurter, having agreed never to talk of Palestine or Zionism. Georgetown's cobblestone streets and neighborhood grocery stores were the ideal setting for a new bride.

Julia set about becoming the consummate housewife so typical of this period later defined by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique The Feminine Mystique. Paul left for his office at the Department of State, and Julia planned the evening meal and social appointments. Because the city was full of their friends, there were frequent c.o.c.ktail and dinner parties with d.i.c.k Bissell, Guy Martin, d.i.c.k Heppner and Betty MacDonald, Joe Coolidge, and others from their OSS years, as well as Charlie and Freddie, who lived nearby.

They settled in a small house at 1677 Wisconsin Avenue, where they plastered, papered, rewired, and painted to make it home. Julia had twenty-five cookbooks on a shelf above her stove, and Paul hung six of his favorite OSS photographs on the wall of the stairs. As soon as the curtains were hung, they began inviting friends over for c.o.c.ktails.

Though Paul's Was.h.i.+ngton ties went back as far as 1943, both had a wide network of a.s.sociations there. Paul's 1943 diary, written the year after the death of his beloved Edith, contains the names of many people he worked with who later went on to politics (Paul Nitze, Bob Vance, d.i.c.k Bissell, Sherman Kent) and to the arts (Budd Schulberg, Garson Kanin, Ruth Gordon, John Ford, Sol Kaplan, Eero Saarinen) as well as OSS friends Cora DuBois and Jeanne Taylor. He records two funerals this year, for d.i.c.kie Myers, who was shot down while flying for the RAF, and Steve Benet, who had read drafts of his "John Brown's Body" to Paul in Paris (his friends staged a rereading after the funeral). The introspective, lonely, illness-plagued Paul who wrote the 1943 letter-diary seems in sharp contrast to the contented married man of 1947 and 1948.

One Christmas Eve, Julia met Paul's Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts, "family" after a drive to Boston: Robert, Fitzroy, and Edmond Kennedy, sons of Edith. Bob and Gerta Kennedy-he was a professor of architecture at MIT-welcomed Paul and his bride to their home and family, which included two children. Paul had been closest to Bob, who was fourteen when Paul became surrogate father to Edith's sons in Paris and Cambridge. Also there were Joan and George Brewster, he an architect and she a poet and longtime friend of Paul who attended Edith Kennedy's salon and short story course in 1936 or 1937. "Paul's wife is a big tall girl with an open, friendly face; not good-looking but immensely attractive. I liked her at once and was delighted he had married 'a golden girl' and not some rarefied creature," Joan Brewster wrote in her diary that evening. Today she adds: "Julia was loved by all the Kennedy family, and why not?! She was ebullient ... [and] uncomplicated Paul's life a bit."

It was just a month after a wonderful holiday season, including the New Year's Day reunion at the Mayflower Inn, when Paul and Julia were awakened by the smell of smoke at four o'clock one February morning. When they opened their upstairs bedroom door, a wave of vinegar-smelling smoke poured into the room and they could hear the crackling flames downstairs. The lights and phone were dead. "We spent an explosive three minutes pitching into the street below whatever clothes we could lay our hands on in darkness," Paul later told the Kublers. Julia pitched out her shoes, always the most difficult apparel to acquire in her size. They managed to crawl through the hot smoke, unlock the window in the next room, and jump out on a lower roof and to the ground. They had nothing on under thin robes and the weather was twelve degrees in a stiff wind. While Paul went to warn the woman next door, "Julia stood in the middle of Wisconsin Avenue and, fingers-in-mouth, whistled a night cab to a stop."

The fire, which started in an unoccupied house next door, blackened everything; the firemen knocked holes in all the walls and scattered their belongings everywhere. Julia and Paul retreated to the home of Charlie and Freddie, where they remained until their house was renovated. During the nearly two months it took to restore lights, heat, water, gas, and walls, their little house was burglarized twice. At the same time Charlie and Paul learned that they would be "let go" from the Department of State on March 15. Many people were dropped from State because of budgetary and political troubles (the Republicans had seized power from the Democrats).

For one year, Paul would remain self-employed. The loss of his government job left him in a "pool of confusion," as he described it, and convinced that Life is not regulated by an Omnipotent Intelligence. The two Child families were not dest.i.tute, however, because Paul had his OSS savings account and both Julia and Freddie had annual incomes from their inheritance. John McWilliams bought his daughter and son-in-law a 1947 Buick, "a steel-blue wonder-chariot presented to us as a consolation prize by my father-in-law. The possession of this thunderbolt has ironic overtones, however, in a context of joblessness," he told the Kublers. He and Charlie spent a lot of time painting and applying for jobs at organizations such as UNESCO, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the United Nations. By spring Julia and Paul were back in their little house, and Charlie was making plans to move his family permanently back to Lumberville, where he would continue his portrait painting.

Paul was able to cope with this double blow of firings because he had always lived with some degree of insecurity during a dozen careers. His mother imbued in her boys the sense that artists were special and gifted, and that att.i.tude, together with her monetary irresponsibility, resulted in both insecurity and the habit of adjusting to that insecurity in her children. She had survived on her talents; they would too. Not surprisingly, Freddie and Julia always kept the family checkbooks and accounts.

Julia was always aware that Paul painted, but until she visited Lumberville for the first time she did not see much of his work. She knew he was happiest when he was working on a new painting, and many of his letters to Charlie through the decades, especially from Paris, talk of his work and his theories of painting. Paul's work is "very accomplished," according to Professor Colin Eisler of the Inst.i.tute of Fine Arts at New York University. Had he wanted to be a professional artist, he had the talent to do so. Eisler places Paul's painting in the Precisionism of the 1920s and 1930s, which is hard-edged and studied.

Paul himself a.n.a.lyzed the difference between his and his brother's painting: he was stirred by "formal relations.h.i.+ps" (shapes) in nature, while Charlie was stirred by "energy expressions" (movement). Indeed, Paul's paintings are so completely detailed that they do not seem to have any air in them. Unlike James Thurber, his acquaintance in 1920s Paris who drew in minimalist pencil strokes like a blind man, Paul completed every detail of a scene like a photographer. Both Paul and Thurber were marked for life when a brother accidentally blinded them in one eye during play, and yet both became skilled draftsmen (Thurber for The New Yorker) The New Yorker).

THE JOY OF COOKING.

Commerce and psychology were reinforcing the image of a "wholly compliant femininity," says writer Laura Shapiro of the 1950s woman. The Ladies' Home Journal The Ladies' Home Journal, which had shown women defending the home front in uniform, now reproduced smiling wives and mothers hanging up the wash or transporting children. As these roles of femininity grew more powerful, Shapiro points out, "cooking went into retreat." Campbell's Soup and women's magazines portrayed cooking as a nuisance, in a trend for convenience that would culminate in the first frozen TV dinner in 1953.

Going against this trend, Julia focused on learning to cook the food that Paul valued and enjoyed. Contrary to the feminine image of the day, she had an appet.i.te and labored over recipes calling for fresh ingredients, taste, and texture. Reinforcing her labors was Paul's view of the centrality of good food and drink and the artistry of the toiler in these vineyards. In France cuisine des meres cuisine des meres was venerated, and all professional chefs were men. While Julia labored for hours, was venerated, and all professional chefs were men. While Julia labored for hours, The Ladies' Home Journal The Ladies' Home Journal advertised: "Learn to Cook in five meals!"-meaning learn to open tins, pudding boxes, and frozen vegetables ("cut two boxes of frozen cod fillets in halves"). Julia was learning to cook with the 1943 edition of Mrs. Irma Rombauer's advertised: "Learn to Cook in five meals!"-meaning learn to open tins, pudding boxes, and frozen vegetables ("cut two boxes of frozen cod fillets in halves"). Julia was learning to cook with the 1943 edition of Mrs. Irma Rombauer's The Joy of Cooking: The Joy of Cooking: published seven years earlier, it became the best-selling edition. published seven years earlier, it became the best-selling edition.

The Joy of Cooking was the first real attempt to move away from the antiseptic, diet-reform boredom of the domestic-science home economists. The daughter of German immigrants, Rombauer wanted to find a balance between French bearnaise sauce and American pancakes. Historian Robert Clark claims her book represents a movement away from the domestic science of Fannie Farmer "toward flavor." Her directions were accessible and her style ebullient, even blithe. There was a vivid sense of personality in the writing that appealed to Julia. Indeed, Rombauer's biographer describes the style as "charming, civilized, irreverent, original, [and] irrepressible"-adjectives that could describe Julia's own speech. was the first real attempt to move away from the antiseptic, diet-reform boredom of the domestic-science home economists. The daughter of German immigrants, Rombauer wanted to find a balance between French bearnaise sauce and American pancakes. Historian Robert Clark claims her book represents a movement away from the domestic science of Fannie Farmer "toward flavor." Her directions were accessible and her style ebullient, even blithe. There was a vivid sense of personality in the writing that appealed to Julia. Indeed, Rombauer's biographer describes the style as "charming, civilized, irreverent, original, [and] irrepressible"-adjectives that could describe Julia's own speech. Joy Joy was American, not because it focused on indigenous produce, but because it was egalitarian and middlebrow, avoiding both the gourmet and the cooking school marm. It was American because it focused on meat and potatoes, or, specifically, hamburgers, ca.s.seroles, and cakes. was American, not because it focused on indigenous produce, but because it was egalitarian and middlebrow, avoiding both the gourmet and the cooking school marm. It was American because it focused on meat and potatoes, or, specifically, hamburgers, ca.s.seroles, and cakes.

Though the book was a huge compendium of recipes and sold nearly 1.1 million copies by the end of the decade, it changed little about the average American diet. Contrary to James Beard's later a.s.sertion that the GIs returned from World War II with a taste for "the real thing," Americans, whether GIs or civilians, preferred instant coffee, Jell-O products, and gloppy ca.s.seroles.

Julia, apparently not a natural or instinctive cook, struggled with recipes. Her first broiled chicken: "I put it in the oven for twenty minutes, went out, came back, and it was burned; I needed better directions." Sometimes Paul had to wait until late in the evening for the dishes to be ready for eating, but they enjoyed entertaining their friends for meals: I was not much of a cook when we first married. I was using magazines and The Joy of Cooking The Joy of Cooking. We would not eat dinner until around ten because it took me so long to cook. I was doing fancy things. Paul would help. He would do anything. He was a wonderful companion; he was never, ever boring.

Julia and Paul set a pattern as ideal hosts. Her spontaneous merriment matched his tight order and structure. While she busily banged away with pots and pans, he set a perfect table, coordinating the colors and placing the silver precisely. With their guests, she showed instant rapport and cozy friends.h.i.+p, while he poured the wine and directed the dinner conversation to weighty and stimulating topics. "Paul was somewhat more of a recluse," says later friend Mary Dorra, "but Julia was a vacuum cleaner: She picked up everybody." Paul agreed that Julia was his "magic catalytic agent for friends.h.i.+ps."

Julia continued her education, reading, in addition to Time, Harper's Time, Harper's (Paul was fond of Bernard DeVoto's "Easy Chair" column), (Paul was fond of Bernard DeVoto's "Easy Chair" column), The New Yorker The New Yorker, and the Paris Herald Tribune Herald Tribune. She also subscribed to a magazine founded in December 1941 called Gourmet Gourmet. Within the next few years she became aware of several people who were writing about food-Lucius Beebe, Clementine Paddleford, M. F. K. Fisher, and, by the summer of 1948, James Beard, who contributed a two-part series on outdoor cooking. Because the Childs had no television, she did not see Dione Lucas's or Beard's cooking programs from New York City.

After living in close proximity to Charlie again, Paul occasionally suffered what he called "anxiety neuroses or phenomena of generalized fear," for which he would seek professional help early in 1948. He carefully a.n.a.lyzed the intense love-hate relations.h.i.+p with his twin brother and his long tendency to define himself in opposition to Charlie. He now determined to live as a separate ent.i.ty, to control his own att.i.tudes and shape events and his own future. He also reprimanded himself for his pessimism. Though he did not say as much, he certainly married Julia in part for her optimism. He later claimed to have been "trained as I am in the Pollyanna att.i.tude" by her.

THE CHILD-BICKNELL COMMUNE.

After a year on Wisconsin Avenue, Julia and Paul moved into the very large house that Chafred still owned at 1311 Thirty-fifth Street in Georgetown. It was Paul's home after his return from China, and he used the studio in back of the garden for his painting. Beginning in October 1947, they shared the house with Sally and Nigel Bicknell, neighbor friends who were looking for larger quarters. The Bicknells vacationed in August in Maine with all of the Childs before moving into the Thirty-fifth Street house. Nigel was a "golden boy" of the Royal Air Force and stationed in Was.h.i.+ngton. Julia thought he was "difficult," and he did not get along well with Paul. (Their opinions of him were reinforced later when he left Sally for his mistress of eight years.) But they both adored Sally ("Paul loved intelligent women," Julia explained), who was pregnant. Their first son, Julian Bicknell, was four years old and had a Scottish nanny, who also lived with them.

Sally remembered that the day she went into the hospital to give birth to Marcus, Julia babysat Julian, Paul drove her to the hospital, then Julia prepared a beef heart for company that night: "She had begun to be adventurous and go to the meat and the fish markets. She had a healthy appet.i.te always. When I returned, Julia told me that she had thrown away the beef heart because 'it did not work out.'" Sally added, "Julia at that time was not a great cook, but she wanted to know how food worked. She wanted to know about everything." Mary Case Warner, Julia's Smith College roommate, remembers visiting the "commune in DC" and being served kidney pie, "which I couldn't eat. And we had c.o.c.ktails with avocados in them. Avocado c.o.c.ktails! We sat on orange crates, but Julia was always herself."

The Childs and Bicknells ate every meal together, and the women loved cooking together. Because of Julia's adventurous cooking and because Nigel's diplomatic work as a civil air attache demanded entertaining, they had many c.o.c.ktail parties and dinners, their guests including Rosamond and Thibaut de Saint Phalle, d.i.c.k Heppner and Betty MacDonald, Cora DuBois and Jeanne Taylor, as well as General Wedemeyer and columnist Joe Alsop. When Julia sat down at the piano to play something silly, Paul was not pleased, Sally Bicknell observed. She and her husband noted Paul's serious and restrained demeanor, but Nigel responded to it with humor, if not a mean spirit. He deliberately placed Paul's tools on the wrong hook in the garage. In his careful manner, Paul would always outline the tool or the pot or pan on the wall of his workroom and in Julia's kitchen.

Julia and Paul bought a house at 2706 Olive Street in Georgetown. The t.i.tle cleared on May 17, just a couple of days before the farewell party for the Bicknells, who were transferred back to their Foreign Office in London. Julia was thrilled with their first home. Despite their car accident, the destruction of some of their possessions in the fire, and Paul's job loss, she was optimistic. She lacked only a child or a career. Though Paul always admired bright and accomplished women, Julia refused to work again for the government as a file clerk.

Three days after the t.i.tle to the house cleared, they drove to Boston with Chafred for the wedding of Paul's nephew, Paul Sheeline, to Harriet Moffat. Sheeline was the first son of Charlie and Paul's sister, Meeda, of whom they disapproved and about whom they rarely spoke. She had several marriages (Sheeline counts a total of nine marriages between his parents) and wrote for Town & Country Town & Country in Paris before her death in 1941. Sheeline grew up in Paris, attended boarding school with Jack Hemingway near Versailles, and served with the OSS in France during the war (the schoolboys Paul and Jack met again at OSS headquarters in Avignon). He was attending Harvard when he met his wife-to-be, and he would go on to become a corporate lawyer on Wall Street. Sheeline had not seen his uncles in many years, nor had he met his Aunt Julia, whom he liked immediately. in Paris before her death in 1941. Sheeline grew up in Paris, attended boarding school with Jack Hemingway near Versailles, and served with the OSS in France during the war (the schoolboys Paul and Jack met again at OSS headquarters in Avignon). He was attending Harvard when he met his wife-to-be, and he would go on to become a corporate lawyer on Wall Street. Sheeline had not seen his uncles in many years, nor had he met his Aunt Julia, whom he liked immediately.

Following a month on Lopaus Point in Maine, where they ate lobsters cooked in every manner and celebrated the birthday of young Rachel Child, Paul returned to Was.h.i.+ngton to rejoin the State Department with the promise of work overseas. As if to say farewell to family, they also paused on the way up to see John and Jo McWilliams in Pittsfield and on the way back stopped at Avon and Lumberville. Paul wrote to the Kublers in late September that "the FBI has finally declared us Kosher, so we're back-sucking at the govt. t.i.t-and we'll be leaving for Paris around the end of October...." They rented their new house, got all their medical shots, bought spare parts for the Buick, which they called the Blue Flash, and three cases of whiskey, gave away their cat, and made plans to spend Christmas with the Bicknells in London.

They boarded the SS America America in New York City on October 27, 1948, with fourteen pieces of luggage and six or seven trunks along with their car. The following day the s.h.i.+p's photographer caught the Charlie Child family waving from Pier 61 at Twenty-first Street as Paul and Julia sailed toward France. In yet another reversal of her McWilliams family migratory history, Julia was crossing the path of her grandfather's Scottish grandfather, who was born on board a s.h.i.+p to America. in New York City on October 27, 1948, with fourteen pieces of luggage and six or seven trunks along with their car. The following day the s.h.i.+p's photographer caught the Charlie Child family waving from Pier 61 at Twenty-first Street as Paul and Julia sailed toward France. In yet another reversal of her McWilliams family migratory history, Julia was crossing the path of her grandfather's Scottish grandfather, who was born on board a s.h.i.+p to America.

After five days of a bone-bruising, stomach-heaving gale and then wet fog-cheered only by the showing of Unfaithfully Yours Unfaithfully Yours, a movie by Paul's pal Preston Sturges-Julia and Paul docked at Le Havre, claimed the big blue Buick, and headed toward his new appointment as "Exhibits Officer" for the United States Information Service in Paris. More important, they were heading toward a career for Julia.

Chapter 10.

a P PARIS.

(1948 1949) "There are so many kinds of hunger ... memory is hunger."

ERNEST HEMINGWAY.

HER EPIPHANY occurred in Rouen, in a restaurant called La Couronne. Julia and Paul stopped for lunch on November 3 on their journey to Paris, the back seat and trunk filled with suitcases. They had been up since 5:45 occurred in Rouen, in a restaurant called La Couronne. Julia and Paul stopped for lunch on November 3 on their journey to Paris, the back seat and trunk filled with suitcases. They had been up since 5:45 A.M. A.M., before the s.h.i.+p landed, then sat around yawning and smoking for two hours before the car was off-loaded to the dock. Their stomachs were shriveled after five days of the tasteless food on board s.h.i.+p.

TASTING FRANCE.

Briny oysters portugaises portugaises on the half sh.e.l.l and a bottle of chilled Pouilly-Fuisse awakened their palates and hearts. The ritual of an expectant welcome, white tablecloth, formal wine presentation, and incredible tastes brought time to a wors.h.i.+pful standstill. on the half sh.e.l.l and a bottle of chilled Pouilly-Fuisse awakened their palates and hearts. The ritual of an expectant welcome, white tablecloth, formal wine presentation, and incredible tastes brought time to a wors.h.i.+pful standstill. Sole meuniere Sole meuniere, sputtering hot and browned by "golden Normandy b.u.t.ter," followed. Then a green salad, creme fraiche, and finally cafe filtre cafe filtre. All at a reverential pace. Julia savored each dish as if it were the first food she had ever tasted. In a way, it was.

When they left the medieval, quarter-timbered house of La Couronne to walk through the streets of Rouen past the mighty cathedral, still damaged from the war, past the merry-go-round of the festival of St.-Romain, Julia was full of a warm, winy awareness that the world of pleasure lay before her. She later described the meal, and by implication herself, as "quietly joyful." Thus began the second romance of her lifetime. "The whole experience was an opening up of the soul and spirit for me.... I was hooked, and for life, as it has turned out."

At Amba.s.sador Caffery's crowded c.o.c.ktail party for General Marshall the next night, "Julie with green-feathered hat" looked "divinely tall and svelte," according to Paul. It was "like a Was.h.i.+ngton clambake," he wrote Charlie, "and there were Avis and Chip Bohlen." (Bohlen would become U.S. amba.s.sador to Russia in 1953.) According to Theodore White, their journalist friend from the China years, America's "finest group of American civilians in government since Roosevelt gathered his war cabinet in 194042" was working on the Marshall Plan: W. Averell Harriman, Paul Gray Hoffman, David Bruce, Richard Bissell, to name just a few of those who were in Paris during the coming months. All had a common purpose: the Cold War.

Julia and Paul took their morning cafe complet cafe complet at the Cafe aux Deux Magots, a sentimental place for Paul, who, during a bone-chilling day in China, recalled for Charlie the days the two brothers had huddled with Edith and Freddie by the charcoal braziers of this literary cafe in St.-Germain-des-Pres. That first week when Julia and Paul were sitting outside facing the church and watching a mob of actors with reflectors and cameras making a movie with Franchot Tone, Paul talked to Buzz Meredith, an actor friend from Hollywood, dressed in bohemian clothes and smeared with greasepaint. Julia and Paul immediately began a month of whirlwind diplomatic social life and paperwork, apartment hunting, and dining out with friends. They preferred, according to Julia's datebook, the Michaud restaurant, just around the corner from their hotel. at the Cafe aux Deux Magots, a sentimental place for Paul, who, during a bone-chilling day in China, recalled for Charlie the days the two brothers had huddled with Edith and Freddie by the charcoal braziers of this literary cafe in St.-Germain-des-Pres. That first week when Julia and Paul were sitting outside facing the church and watching a mob of actors with reflectors and cameras making a movie with Franchot Tone, Paul talked to Buzz Meredith, an actor friend from Hollywood, dressed in bohemian clothes and smeared with greasepaint. Julia and Paul immediately began a month of whirlwind diplomatic social life and paperwork, apartment hunting, and dining out with friends. They preferred, according to Julia's datebook, the Michaud restaurant, just around the corner from their hotel.

Michaud, an Old World place at the corner of the rue des Saints-Peres and the rue Jacob, was where the James Joyce family ate regularly when they lived in the neighborhood in 1922 and where Hemingway and Fitzgerald had a famous lunch. Julia and Paul's first Paris lunch cost a total of $3.00 (there were 310 francs to the dollar in 1948). Julia had to have sole again, this time with spinach, and Paul had rognons sautes au beurre rognons sautes au beurre (kidneys) with fried potatoes; and finally Brie for them both. "Julia wants to spend the rest of her life right here, eating sole, rognons, drinking wine and looking at Paris," Paul wrote in his diary to Charlie. (kidneys) with fried potatoes; and finally Brie for them both. "Julia wants to spend the rest of her life right here, eating sole, rognons, drinking wine and looking at Paris," Paul wrote in his diary to Charlie.

The Childs lived a month at the Hotel du Pont Royal on the corner of the rue Montalembert and the rue du Bac, halfway between the Seine and the Boulevard St.-Germain on the Left Bank. They could see the Seine and the old pewter buildings and green mansard roofs of Paris. The emba.s.sy lay on the Right Bank, with its elegant shops, commerce, and banks; the Childs always chose to live on the Left Bank, with the artists, publishers, and university people. Their hotel was steps from Gallimard, France's most prestigious publis.h.i.+ng house, and its editors and writers hung out in the hotel bar beneath the lobby.

While Paul made his first visit to the emba.s.sy office that Friday, Julia took the car and, map in hand, found the amba.s.sador's residence, where she left their card. Employees were expected to leave a total of two hundred cards at the residences of all persons of their own rank and higher. An anachronistic practice, Paul thought. He showed Julia the Paris he had not visited for eighteen years: they walked along the Seine, past medieval churches, the Louvre, and theaters (the first week alone they saw a French farce, a film of Hamlet Hamlet, and Sartre's Les Mains Sales (Dirty Hands) Les Mains Sales (Dirty Hands), Versailles the first Sat.u.r.day and Fontainebleau the second. Their most important walk was by his 1920s haunts: the Childs' favorite restaurant and the building where Charlie and Freddie had lived on the rue de Vaugirard were gone, as was Foyot's restaurant, now a little garden. He took her to the Cluny Museum, where in the 1920s he studied and copied the furniture on exhibit there. Paul detailed all the changes in letters to Charlie and Freddie. They walked by the American Church, where Paul had helped to install the stained-gla.s.s windows made by Charles Connick, Jr., of Boston. Paul worked for the stained-gla.s.s maker in 192021, and when he was in Hollywood in 1923 he also worked in stained gla.s.s (and painting sets).

There was still gasoline rationing, but food rationing was over; French governments would come and go during the coming years, but there were hot loaves of bread at least three times every day. There was still rubble, the weather was bitter cold (some evenings they huddled in bed to read their books), and the electricity occasionally went out. Whole chunks of the 4th Arrondiss.e.m.e.nt were "ripped out," Paul reported to Charlie. There were plaques commemorating those who fell in particular streets during the war, but he was too happy with Julia to mourn long the missing or bombed sites: he loved showing Paris on a cold autumn day to "a beloved and sensitive person who's always wanted to see it, and who wasn't the least bit disappointed."

Julia was in a constant state of excitement for months and could not get enough of Paris. "I was practically in hysterics from the time we landed," she explained. "I was a late bloomer who was still growing up. I didn't get started on life until I was about thirty-two, which was good because I was old enough to appreciate it. I had it all ahead of me." She ordered sole three times the first week, and spent an entire day speaking only French while she got the car repaired, filled it with gasoline, negotiated for French cla.s.ses at Berlitz, rode buses, ate out by herself, and contacted an apartment rental agency. She was a great sport and filled with enthusiasm, which in turn intoxicated Paul: "I love that woman," he wrote in mid-December, "... only pleasure and growing satisfaction, never once a harsh word, or a bitterness, or a sense of disappointment."

Almost immediately she began French lessons at Berlitz three times a week from ten o'clock to noon. Even Paul originally had trouble with the French colloquialisms and slang in the Sartre play, but Julia, even after years of schoolroom French, was in need of formal help. Twenty years before, her various French teachers at the Katharine Branson School for Girls described her "explosive consonants" (Mademoiselle Liardet), her "grammatical and inflectional vagaries" (Miss van Vliet), and her "insurmountable" oral French. Little did they know her present motivation.

In their effort to become a part of French life, they called on Madame Helene Baltrusaitis, who was recommended by George Kubler. Her husband, Jurgis (a Lithuanian art historian), was concluding a semester of teaching at Yale and would return at the new year. They loved her immediately. "Helene Baltrusaitis is charming, brainy, sophisticated, and quiet," Paul wrote two decades later. Her sparkly dark eyes telegraphed her mischievous wit. Just five years younger than Julia, she shared her sense of humor. "It was an emotional time for me right after the war and life had been so awful and I had lost so many people and suddenly this was such happiness to have Julia."

If Paul's artistic friends were literary in the 1920s, they would be art historians now. On December 1 they joined the Focillon group, which met each Wednesday night at the Baltrusaitis home to hear papers about art history by former students of Henri Focillon, Helene's deceased stepfather and Kubler's subst.i.tute father at Yale, when the elder French art historian taught there. (A similar Cercle Focillon met in New Haven.) When Paul taught at Avon, he met Focillon. Helene would hereafter be Julia's best friend in Paris. During these weekly wine-filled, intellectual discussions, Julia would miss about every fifth word-"like oyster stew," she characterized it-but she loved the company.

Julia was like a big tree [said Helene Baltrusaitis]. Everything she did was enormous. Never something small or dainty. Whenever she was cooking something, it was grand. She was always taller than everyone, but this never bothered her at all. She was intensely curious about the world around her. She had a great sense of friends.h.i.+p. I seldom in my long life saw anyone like her. We were more than sisters, we were great friends.

Julia and Helene met in the Closerie des Lilas, one of Paris's oldest cafes, which lay between their two apartments. "Julia spoke very poor French when we first began meeting. She wanted to read Baudelaire, and I wanted to read The New Yorker The New Yorker, and we exchanged magazines and books once a week. Julia later claimed, during an oral history for Smith College, that though she went to Berlitz, it was "Helene who really, I think, taught me French as much as anyone." Julia was reading the nineteenth-century novels of Honore de Balzac, which she borrowed from Adrienne Monnier's bookshop. "That's my man!" she would say about Balzac. "I was a Balzacian because you learn so much about French life from his novels." Later she added, "I did not consider Balzac fiction ... it is life!" and in 1980 linked him with Beethoven as "meat and potatoes [artists]-very out-front, essential-type people."

Julia found in Helene a charming French woman. Aside from the few Frenchmen she met in China, Julia's expectations were formed first by the gray and foreign French cla.s.ses of Smith, then by the glamour of Vogue Vogue magazine, and finally by the movies: exquisite, dainty women and Adolphe Menjou dandies. The first Frenchman she encountered on the dock in Le Havre as the crane swung their Buick from the hold to the dock was a burly blue-coated dockworker, Gauloise cigarette hanging from the corner of his lips. "There were actual blood-and-guts people in this country!" she exclaimed decades later. "I was immensely relieved." She gushed to her magazine, and finally by the movies: exquisite, dainty women and Adolphe Menjou dandies. The first Frenchman she encountered on the dock in Le Havre as the crane swung their Buick from the hold to the dock was a burly blue-coated dockworker, Gauloise cigarette hanging from the corner of his lips. "There were actual blood-and-guts people in this country!" she exclaimed decades later. "I was immensely relieved." She gushed to her Smith Alumnae Quarterly Smith Alumnae Quarterly, "I never dreamed I would find the French so sympathique sympathique, so warm, so polite, so tender, so utterly pleasurable to be with."

Paul was keenly aware of what he described as the occasional "b.i.t.c.hy and difficult" French temperament, as "uncooperative and shoulder-shrugging as ever (though with a certain sardonic charm. d.a.m.n them!)." But Julia adored the French. Though Paul noticed a distinct improvement, even acknowledging that he himself was now "less sour than I used to be," he believed, that one reason was Julia. "With her warmth and charm and directness she would bring out the best even in a polecat. So she naturally thinks the French are just the most charming and wonderful people in the world and she wants to stay here forever," he told the Kublers when thanking them for introducing Helene to their lives.

Julia loved the chestnut vendors, the white poodles and white chimneys, the fishermen on Ile St.-Louis, the gentle garlic belches after eating escargots, and the lengthy walks around Paris with Paul. They thought nothing of leaving the apartment at ten on Sat.u.r.day morning and exploring numerous quarters of Paris until nearly six in the evening. She wanted to live in the Place des Vosges; she saw her first wh.o.r.es parading their wares in the rue Quincampoix (no poules de luxe poules de luxe they); admired the gargoyles on Notre Dame and the tottering sides of old buildings sh.o.r.ed up with long poles. Paul never missed a detail during their walks. "Lipstick on my belly b.u.t.ton and music in the air-that's Paris!" he believed. they); admired the gargoyles on Notre Dame and the tottering sides of old buildings sh.o.r.ed up with long poles. Paul never missed a detail during their walks. "Lipstick on my belly b.u.t.ton and music in the air-that's Paris!" he believed.

THE LEFT BANK.

After December 4, Julia and Paul lived near the Seine River, almost nestled between the National a.s.sembly (Palais Bourbon, which faced the Place de la Concorde across the Concorde Bridge) and the Ministry of Defense. They were at 81, rue de l'Universite (Roo de Loo, for short), in the most elegant district of the Left Bank and within a fifteen-minute walk of the American Emba.s.sy on the Right Bank.

They rented the third floor of an elegant town house owned by Madame Perrier and her family, including Monsieur and Madame du Couedic. (In 1997 Madame du Couedic, recently widowed, still resided there.) The Couedic-Perrier family also had a chateau in Normandy, to which Julia and Paul would eventually be invited. As Americans, the Childs rented for $80.00 a month (the French would have paid $20). From their rooms they could see into the garden of the Ministry of Defense and, beyond, the twin spires of the church of St.-Clotilde. It was a location for an artist, and Paul painted the Paris rooflines and chimneys from his windows.

They could park directly out front or drive their car through the double doors, under the front of the building, past the entrance to the building to the open stone courtyard, and park next to the high wall that guarded the ministry. Parking was a factor in their location, and for a month Paul had searched every night in the dark (only parking lights were allowed) for a place to leave their Buick. Once inside the courtyard, they could look up and see the full length of their L-shaped apartment with its curved, gla.s.s-faced hallway that joined the two wings. This angle allowed him to take loving photographs of Julia looking out at the urban landscape. In their part of town, the city looked green: the lush ministry garden and the square in front of the church were typical of a quarter of vast gardens hidden behind stone walls that fronted the narrow streets.

From the courtyard they could see a small room built out from the back of the fourth-floor roof (formerly servants' rooms) to accommodate a large kitchen. A narrow stairway and dumbwaiter connected this kitchen to their five-room apartment. One room was given over to the furniture and bric-a-brac they took out of a dark and crowded, overdecorated and "very French" apartment. Julia described to the Kublers the Louis XVI salon with tapestries, gilt chairs, moldings and mirrors, the leather-walled dining room, and the bedroom that had been General Perrier's study. Little wonder that their visitors remember the apartment as dark with labyrinthine hallways. Initially the apartment was "as cold as Lazarus's tomb" and the potbellied stove made a feeble attempt to dry out and warm the place.

The week they moved in was during the worst fog on record across Northern Europe. The Berlin airlift was halted. Paris had the acrid smell of smoke, and Paul got tired of "blowing black sludge" into his handkerchief. Low air pressure and the burning of cheap coal occasionally cut visibility to zero. On what they called a "clear day" that winter, they could see five blocks. "We had enormous bouts of fog and had to have galoshes," said Julia, "and I remember on one trip in our car it was so foggy I had to walk in front of the car to lead the way." Later in 1949 Paul would pay to garage his car, away from the wildly undisciplined drivers in Paris's increasingly chaotic traffic.

France was still emerging from the war and struggling to return to the program for rural electrification that had started before the war. In many ways, it was still a nineteenth-century country. Few households had refrigerators, washers, or dryers, and the electricity in Paris frequently went out for hours. With few phones, people used pneumatiques pneumatiques, which were letters on blue paper sent through underground tubes from one post office to another and hand-delivered immediately. Bicycles outnumbered cars.

The facades of Paris were "grimier," historian Herbert Lottman points out, "and they had to wait more than a decade for a scrubbing," but the postwar celebration continued in intellectual cabarets and cellar jazz clubs and cafes. Various irreverent intellectual factions debated conflicting affiliations, and the communists were strong. Julia and Paul lived in the neighborhood of Andre Gide, who had won the n.o.bel Prize for Literature the previous November. Gide would die in three years at the age of eighty-one, and the new generation, which hung out in the St.-Germain-des-Pres area nearby, now ruled. There were Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus (The Plague (The Plague was published the previous year), Louis Aragon, the surrealist turned communist, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, the novelist. To compensate for what Beauvoir called its "having become a second-cla.s.s power," France glorified and exported its chief products: fas.h.i.+on, literature (existentialism), and (later) cuisine. Waverley Root, Alice B. Toklas, and Julia Child would figure in this effort. was published the previous year), Louis Aragon, the surrealist turned communist, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, the novelist. To compensate for what Beauvoir called its "having become a second-cla.s.s power," France glorified and exported its chief products: fas.h.i.+on, literature (existentialism), and (later) cuisine. Waverley Root, Alice B. Toklas, and Julia Child would figure in this effort.

The Childs were living near St.-Germain-des-Pres, which intellectual historian Lionel Abel (who arrived a month after they), called "the heart of Paris in 1948. You were always on the stage, always in front of the footlights." A major stage was the Deux Magots, their neighborhood cafe. Years later, Julia's friend M. F. K. Fisher said that journalist Janet Flanner remembered the Childs as "Apollonesque"-in other words, not part of the Dionysian crowd. Julia's curiosity took her alone to the spectacle of Bebe Berard's funeral in St.-Sulpice the next year. Christian Berard had been a painter and the set designer for Jean Cocteau and Louis Jouvet. Julia told Fisher it was her "first Parisian event" and she "marveled at the greats of the era [including Colette] tottering about in formal black and mink capes."

There were new expatriates in Paris as well, American novelist Richard Wright (who arrived in 1947), Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, and British novelist and biographer Nancy Mitford, who fled drab England for the "daylight" of Paris after the war. The Childs frequently spotted the Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov. Three American journalists lived at 44, rue du Boccador on the Right Bank: Theodore (and Nancy) White, who (as he put it) lived like a bourgeois on the strong dollar; Ann and Art Buchwald, a twenty-four-year-old ex-marine who wrote the "Paris After Dark" column for the Herald Tribune; Herald Tribune; and Irwin (and Marian) Shaw, who also worked for the and Irwin (and Marian) Shaw, who also worked for the Herald Herald at 21, rue de Berri (where it is still located) and wrote novels. "Everyone came to Paris in the fifties," wrote Buchwald, who took a course at the Cordon Bleu, better to write his restaurant reviews. He enjoyed Julia's company: "Julia Child was the only one in Paris who had a sense of humor about food." at 21, rue de Berri (where it is still located) and wrote novels. "Everyone came to Paris in the fifties," wrote Buchwald, who took a course at the Cordon Bleu, better to write his restaurant reviews. He enjoyed Julia's company: "Julia Child was the only one in Paris who had a sense of humor about food."

There were remnants of the expatriate 1920s crowd that Paul had known: Alice B. Toldas (Gertrude Stein's companion for forty years until the latter's death), Waverley Root (a newspaperman who spent the war in Vermont), Hadley and Paul Mowrer, and Janet Flanner (Paris correspondent for The New Yorker) The New Yorker). Others just turned up for visits, such as the Bissells and d.i.c.k and Alice Lee Myers (she had gone to school with Janet Flanner). Charlie had painted many of their portraits and sold his paneled screens for radiators in Mrs. Myers's boutique in the 1920s, a boutique founded to employ White Russians. Now it was chiefly the next generation, such as pals Honoria Murphy and f.a.n.n.y Myers Brennan, who visited Paris, and looked up the Childs.

The Mowrers became their family in France. Although they were more than a decade older than Paul, Julia immediately loved the natural and earthy Hadley, the mother of Jack Hemingway. Paul Child met Hadley when she was still married to Hemingway in the mid-1920s in Paris, and Julia heard stories of his neglect and humiliation of Hadley. "The Mowrers were our foster parents; we were like their children. We saw them all the time and went out to dinner and traveled with them." To one of Hemingway's biographers, she said, "They became rather like an aunt and uncle to us." Paul Mowrer was now foreign editor of the New York Post New York Post, a lesser a.s.signment, and Paul Child thought that the Mowrers had lost some of their "essential vigor." Julia and Paul spent Thanksgiving at the Mowrer apartment on the same street as theirs but across the expansive fields of the Hotel des Invalides.

Before Christmas, the art historians gathered to light their Christmas plum pudding. Julia would later use the incident when asked in 1996 for a "holiday cooking disaster": not knowing that the brandy had to be hot before it flamed, "they poured practically a whole bottle of brandy over it while trying to light it. It never did flame, but it was nicely soaked."

They would also spend their first Christmas at the country home of the Mowrers in Crecy-en-Brie (Paul's pressing office work kept them from visiting the Bicknells in England). To save money, the Mowrers had just bought a house in New Hamps.h.i.+re and planned to move there when he retired. Julia and Paul would spend at least one weekend a month at the Mowrers' country home until they left Paris.

WORKING THE COLD WAR.

The political climate during the Childs' tenure in Paris was pivotal: they learned of Truman's election the day they arrived in France, the United Nations met at the Place du Trocadero that fall, and then came the Prague uprising and the revelation of the atom blast in Russia the following September. The world was in transition, while De Gaulle was in Colombey writing his memoirs, and General Marshall resigned from the American delegation to the United Nations the following January to retire to his farm.

Theodore White called the Marshall Plan (194850), with its more than $13 billion investment, "an adventure in the exercise of American Power." Buchwald put it in more personal terms: "We arrived at the Golden Age for Americans in France. The dollar was the strongest currency in the world, and the franc was one of the weakest."

Paul was in charge of exhibits and photography for the U.S. Information Service, founded along with the Central Intelligence Agency when the war ended. It was America's propaganda agency, replacing the wartime Office of War Information and now directed against communism. Again Paul had to organize an office and staff with little money, yet meet demands for immediate photographs and exhibits. He had photo archives of everything from Hoover Dam to an American high school cla.s.sroom. Housed in the American Emba.s.sy (the old Rothschild mansion) at 41, rue du Faubourg St.-Honore, he often had dealings with the Marshall Plan office, located in the rue de Rivoli in the Talleyrand mansion.

Though personally frustrated with his office, Paul realized that to be in Paris during this period of history was to be blessed. Teddy White described this era as having a "wedding party" atmosphere. It was the story of money and romance. America was rebuilding France, and the Marshall Plan goodies were plentiful, for the Americans were determined to reverse Russia's plans to move across Western Europe. American money even financed the tobacco that the French smoked every morning in the cafes.

A turning point in the political climate and for Paul Child came when a senator from Wisconsin (elected in 1947) gave a speech in February 1950. Joseph McCarthy's denunciation of communists in the highest government offices brought him national attention and growing power. The tentacles of his paranoia would reach into the diplomatic service and eventually shake Paul and ruin several of their friends.