Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (30 page)

Chapter 12
M
ARSEILLES:
F
ISHING FOR
R
EDS
(1953 – 1954)

“What a meaty, down-to-earth, vicious, highly sensual old city this is.”

PAUL CHILD, May 30, 1970

T
HOUGH MARSEILLES
, France’s first seaport, has always suffered from a lack of respect in the rest of France, Julia found it exciting, wonderful, and noisy (three words she would repeat in her many letters). The level of noise, pungent fish smells, and seedy streets excited her. She told Katy Gates she liked the “meridional” temperament and the warmth of the people, “always talking, gesticulating, eating, laughing.” The climate, roof tiles, and eucalyptus trees reminded them of California, the sound of the seagulls evoked Lopaus Point, Maine.

O
LD PORT HOME

Paul was appointed Cultural Affairs Officer for the southern coast of France, located in the American Consulate at 5, Place de Rome. Moving to Marseilles meant being pulled from the orbit of her Paris partners and her new career. But Julia and Paul understood the system and were good troupers, even eager for new frontiers. They had previously visited this southern port city on the Mediterranean for a week of reconnoitering in mid-February 1953—it was their first glimpse of sunshine in many months and they loved it. As usual, they made a study of their new base and read history books about the twenty-five centuries of Marseilles.

When Julia did not have to accompany Paul on his diplomatic survey of the region (they visited mayors, newspapermen, and academicians from Perpignan to Nice), she roamed Marseilles looking for the markets and for a neighborhood home. They would choose the rectangular Old Port (Vieux Port), where the fishermen first unloaded their catch. Here in the fertile south were abundant markets, especially the one behind Noailles in the Place du Marché des Capucins, where the first ripe fruit and vegetables appeared each season. Women of various shades of olive skin joked loudly among themselves and called out the price of their eel—hence the term
criée aux poissons
.

Before settling in, they returned to Paris for Paul to take photographs of Julia, Simca, and Louisette preparing food in their kitchen before it was dismantled. Paul and Julia went “weeping through the old streets” of Paris, she confided to Avis DeVoto, distressed at leaving and dismayed by “oriental tummy trouble” just when they planned to glut themselves with Parisian food and then “descend slowly to the south from one great restaurant to another, arriving bilious but filled with glory. What a thing, to have this trouble for someone in my profession!”

Julia had felt bilious since a farewell dinner party for twelve that Louisette and Simca gave her in Paris. Unbeknownst to Julia or Paul, who was urged to bring his camera, Curnonsky surprised her when she arrived. With cries of pleasure, they fell into each other’s arms like old pals. Indeed Julia had been visiting him, Paul noted, “like a public affairs officer keeping in touch with a
préfet.”
Paul added a description of this “Prince Elu des Gastronomes”: “short, fat, eagle-beaked, triple-chinned, pale-blue-eyed, witty, egocentric, spoiled and knowledgeable.” Curnonsky posed for pictures with the three Gourmandes, and the night before Julia left town, she paid a visit to give him the photographs. Privately she confided to Avis that at their party he acted like “a dogmatic meatball who considers himself a gourmet but is just a big bag of wind.”

In Marseilles, Julia threw herself into the constructing and testing of recipes, official entertaining, and shopping the markets, where she struggled to adjust her ear to the local dialects and accent (which added a
g
to many words:
ving blong
for white wine). Paul, meanwhile, was trying to adjust to an unhappy consulate, led by Consul General Hayward G. Hill, known as “Hill the Pill.” The staff was demoralized by what they saw as a fastidious “mother’s boy,” a stickler for protocol, afraid of germs, and always dressed, as if he were in Paris, in a gray suit and homburg hat. Paul described him as careful, mediocre, and twitchy, “nervous as a virgin in a whorehouse.” Furthermore, Julia added in a letter to a friend, he seems “uninterested in eating.”

From the windows and balcony of Apartment A at 28, Quai de Rive Neuve, the street that ran along the south side of the old port, Julia looked out on the vertical masts of the fishing boats and the seagulls circling against the blue sky. They were subletting from a Swedish consul home on leave for six months. Her view was “heavenly” as she typed, she told Simca. Looking seaward, she saw Fort St.-Nicolas to the left and Fort St.-Jean to the right, their stone breakwaters guarding the wide outer bay. Every vista was intersected by the vertical masts of the colorful boats. When she wrote to her sister Dorothy, who was expecting another baby and was now living in Sausalito near San Francisco, she would think of San Francisco Bay as well as their summers in Santa Barbara—both waters so different from this teeming gateway to Africa and the centuries-old quais at her feet.

“Sometimes at night we’d hear hearty shouting, and slapping of wet fish on the pavement at the edge of the water … where the boats were unloading their tuna under our window,” Julia wrote M. F. K. Fisher twenty years later. La Criée aux Poissons, the wholesale fish market, was on their quai, just steps from the front door.

Happily nestled in a new building in the row of tight old houses ringing the port, she could hear the seagulls. Some mornings she and Paul were awakened by arriving fishing boats beneath their windows. They could also hear the construction behind their building. A decade before, the Germans, under the pretext of public health, forced 40,000 inhabitants from the old quarter and razed the densely populated buildings and narrow streets, leaving only the houses along the quais. Ill-famed, this district was picturesque. Even in 1953, the consulate staff remarked about the danger of the Childs’ neighborhood. Though the year before Le Corbusier was making a name for himself in Marseilles with modern buildings known for their audacious and original designs, time would judge them ugly intrusions on the landscape.

The summer of 1953 brought with it the smell of wild lavender. After parsley (the only winter herb), thyme, and bay, Julia was enjoying the season of tarragon, chervil, and chives. In Provence, she learned, they added fennel and basil to their dishes. The French do not use many herbs, she informed one friend, and they never use wooden salad bowls! Such fine distinctions were irrelevant on the Fourth of July when she had to help turn inferior Navy canned food (sardines, salmon, liverwurst) into something edible for five hundred cocktail party guests of the consulate. After visitors from three U.S. Navy destroyers one week and an aircraft carrier the next, Julia and Paul relaxed on their balcony with friends on July 14, watching their adopted homeland celebrate its independence day with fireworks and “The Marseillaise.”

Of course, Julia and Paul frequently ate out, savoring the best restaurants in Marseilles and along the coast (their disappointment at La Baumanière in Les Baux was duly reported to Simca). They both loved the smell of fish and garlic in the restaurants along the waterfront, Julia always observing the presentations of the dishes and varieties of ingredients. “I loved the sea scallops in wine sauce baked in a seashell.” After one such meal she exclaimed, “I would happily die with a bottle of white Burgundy in my mouth.”

She soon struck up an important friendship with Monsieur Guido, whose restaurant by that name was located nearby on the rue de la Paix. It had been open eight months, and Julia believed it was the best fish restaurant in the city. Unrated when she discovered it, it received its second Michelin star by 1956 (“excellent cuisine, worth a detour”). Not surprisingly, the Michelin lists Guido’s first specialty as
bouillabaisse des pêcheurs à la rouille
. Occasionally during the coming months, Julia would ask him about the ingredients and techniques that he used, and he would recommend wine sources to Paul. His name came up frequently in their letters—even to Charlie, who bought holsters, a belt, and two “six-shooters” for Guido’s son, who was crazy about American cowboys. Guido was “a Mangelotte type,” Julia told Simca, “absolute perfection and care in everything he does.” “Thank god I can talk French,” she wrote to Avis. She did not care about her accent as long as she could “talk and talk and talk.”

“
I
S THERE A RED UNDER YOUR BED?”:
MCCARTHY WITCH HUNTS

The major topic of conversation among the U.S. Information Agency personnel was Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. They heard from friends at the embassy in Paris that Roy Cohn and David Shine, McCarthy’s assistants, came through the capital city to check the library and the correctness of the staff. Theodore White would say that they “moved through Europe examining the books and shelves of the USI[S].” They were apparently dismayed that they could not find the
American Legion Weekly
. When Larry Morris, head of the Paris cultural section of the USIS, came into his office and found two young men with their feet on his desk, he demanded that they remove themselves and give their names. McCarthy’s two henchmen immediately complied, but called a staff meeting for Easter Sunday. Afraid for their careers, everyone showed up and waited at length until someone checked Cohn and Shine’s hotel at four-thirty and learned that they had slept in after a late night. “Most people were scared to do anything,” Julia later explained. News of the harassment spread through the American diplomatic community. When Cohn and Shine got to Berlin they found White’s
Thunder Out of China
in the USIS library, burned it, and reported the purge to the
New York Times
.

Theodore White, located not far away on the Riviera in the fishing village of Le Lavandou since 1952, was writing books, fearing the blacklist, and hoping to redeem himself. White’s brother Robert (removed from his security clearance at MIT) and others from the China theater were threatened. On a number of occasions, Julia and Paul visited with Theodore and Nancy White in Les Mandariniers, their huge old whitewashed villa with its orange tiled roof. They had bouillabaisse and talked of the great Chinese food they had shared in Kunming. Nancy White later said that Julia “devoured every morsel” that her excellent cook Marie produced. Talk always turned to McCarthy and the general distrust they all had of Chiang in China. “Since when was China ours to lose?” asked Julia. “Chiang and [Tai Li] did the trick, helped on by the China lobby and Henry Luce.” Political tides ended White’s comfortable French life when, on June 17, workers rose in East Berlin and Russian tanks mowed them down. White and anyone who had appeared sympathetic to Mao or the communists were soon out of work. Later, in his book
In Search of History
, White recalled this period, saying there were many as yet unknown Americans in the south of France—he included Julia’s name here—who were “all there
doing
things.”

The growing power of Senator McCarthy was reported in the newspapers and magazines. His denunciations of communist sympathizers and traitors in every branch of government made his name symbolic of an era in American history that would see Julius and Ethel Rosenberg put to death for treason and anti-American demonstrations in Paris. Allen Dulles (formerly of the OSS, then the head of the CIA) stood up to McCarthy, Julia noted, but “[Secretary of State John] Foster Dulles did not stand up to anyone.”

Julia held strong opinions about the rise of political intimidation in her homeland and shared White’s views of China and the botched American policy there. Their friend Dick Heppner was now Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs under Eisenhower, but several other OSS friends lost their jobs, including John Carter Vincent and John Stewart Service. (The latter was reinstated after six years of litigation, directed by Heppner when he was still in Donovan’s law firm.) Duncan Lee (China-born Assistant General Counsel of the OSS) was accused but not charged. Charles E. (Chip) Bohlen was smeared by McCarthy, who questioned his sexual persuasion. Not surprisingly, Julia and Paul considered the possibility that the paranoia could touch them. Paul remembered signing a petition in the 1930s; Julia recalled putting one of her own books on China (written by a woman later identified as communist) in the USIS library. But neither thought seriously about their friendship with former OSS colleague Jane Foster. “She was lots of fun, and every time we went to Paris we would see her,” Julia informed her OSS correspondents.

“I’m terribly worried about McCarthyism,” Julia confided to Avis DeVoto on February 28: “What can I do as an individual? It is frightening. I am ready to bare my breasts (small size though they be), stick out my neck, won’t turn my back on anybody, will sacrifice cat, cookbook, husband and finally self … please advise. I’m serious.” Avis warned her to be careful because of Paul’s job. The DeVotos (in Cambridge, Massachusetts) could have told her stories of faculty opening student mail at Harvard for the FBI the year before and Princeton professors taping their lectures to avoid being misquoted by student moles. Bernard DeVoto had stood up to the House Un-American Activities Committee in September 1949.