Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (24 page)

They rented the third floor of an elegant town house owned by Madame Perrier and her family, including Monsieur and Madame du Couëdic. (In 1997 Madame du Couëdic, recently widowed, still resided there.) The Couëdic-Perrier family also had a château 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, glass-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
, 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 cafés. Various irreverent intellectual factions debated conflicting affiliations, and the communists were strong. Julia and Paul lived in the neighborhood of André Gide, who had won the Nobel 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-Prés area nearby, now ruled. There were Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus
(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-class power,” France glorified and exported its chief products: fashion, 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-Prés, 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 café. 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 Bébé Bérard’s funeral in St.-Sulpice the next year. Christian Bérard 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;
and Irwin (and Marian) Shaw, who also worked for the
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.”

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)
. Others just turned up for visits, such as the Bissells and Dick 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 Fanny 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
, a lesser assignment, 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 Hôtel 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 Hampshire 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.

W
ORKING 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 Trocadéro 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 (1948–50), 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 classroom. Housed in the American Embassy (the old Rothschild mansion) at 41, rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré, 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 cafés.

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.

The Marshall Plan, not the USIS, received the generous budget from Washington, and though Al Friendly and his other Marshall Plan friends promised help with USIS funding, Paul squeezed very little from them. In an interview about their diplomatic service in France, Julia later said, “The USIS was kind of a stepchild, and we were not really considered part of the brotherhood. We were always down around rank four, so we didn’t have to do any embassy things. We were free to live a normal life.” Sylvie Pouly, who was Paul’s “smart and stable” assistant from 1949 to 1951, remembers that Julia did not do any official entertaining (the embassy did that), but she did invite Paul’s colleagues to dinner. The young French woman was impressed with the numerous copper pots and the refrigerator in Julia’s kitchen. She also noted that Julia was “always in a good mood” and had a “marriage of love.” Several in Paul’s office remember him talking about Julia’s desire for a career, including a young woman named Janou, the reference librarian for the USIS.

T
O EAT LIKE A GOD IN FRANCE

Julia and Paul explored a different quarter of Paris each weekend, including its bistros and restaurants. Though the
Guide Michelin
was their bible, they did some independent testing, placing the names and addresses of their favorite places inside Julia’s datebook. In the back she listed the wines and their good years. They noticed that most restaurants, like the ones they visited in China, had potbellied stoves with stovepipes going across the ceiling and out the window.

They enjoyed
poulet gratiné
at Au Gourmet in the rue des Canettes and tripe at Pharamond near Les Halles, took Dick Bissell to Au Cochon de Lait, returned frequently to La Truite, located off the rue Boissy-d’Anglas near the American Embassy, owned by the same family who owned La Couronne in Rouen. Michaud remained a favorite, as did Escargot d’Or, where the first week they lunched on a dozen escargots with a half bottle of Sancerre, followed by
rognons Bercy
in wine and mushroom sauce with a half bottle of Clos de Vougeot, followed by
escarole salade
, and finished with
café filtre
. They thought they had discovered Le Grand Véfour and its chef, Raymond Oliver, and its sommelier, Monsieur Hennoq, until they caught a glimpse of Colette there. “I remember the
estouffade
at Le Grand Véfour. It is a dish made by hollowing out a loaf of bread and rubbing it with creamy butter, then baking it to a golden brown and filling it with
crevettes
[shrimp] in cream and butter.” They had “truly elegant” gratins of shellfish at Lapérouse, beer and sandwiches at La Closerie des Lilas, and oysters and wine at the Brasserie Lipp after a cold day prowling Montmartre. And it was almost always to the Deux Magots for drinks or after-dinner coffee.

Although Michaud’s has since disappeared, a number of the restaurants that Julia listed in her datebooks of this period are still serving meals under the same name fifty years later: Chez George, Marius (rue de Bourgogne, just steps from the Childs’ flat), Pierre, Prunier, Pharamond, and Lapérouse. Paul frequently expressed gratitude that “Julie loves Paris so much.” She is a “darling, sensitive, outgoing, appreciative, characterful and interesting woman!” he wrote Charlie and Freddie early in 1949. “Well, let’s face it: I’m a lucky bastard.”