Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (33 page)

The new year brought numerous upheavals. The most dramatic was the birth of Julia’s nephew. After a critical period in which the doctors believed that the baby would be lost, Sam was born two months early at three pounds—“No bigger than a fine roasting chicken? Ye gods,” gasped Julia.

Then came the news that Paul and Julia would have to leave France because the government decreed that diplomats could stay no more than four years in one country; they had been in France for more than five. Julia and Paul learned late in March that they would be transferred later in the year, though they were not told where. Soon they suspected Bonn, which did not please them. After living on the Mediterranean, Julia and Paul’s compass turned southward. Thus, when asked on their annual government form to express their future interests, they said they wanted to learn Spanish and go to Spain.

The good news this spring was the arrival, after much delay, of their contract with Houghton Mifflin. The contract was dated June 1, 1954; they would receive $750 as an advance against royalties, to be paid in three installments of $250. Paul’s nephew Paul Sheeline, acting as agent, declined the legal fee, suggesting that his aunt and uncle could buy something for his house worth $50. “If you become famous and on TV and another Dione Lucas and need a lawyer,” he added, “my firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, will be glad to represent you,” he wrote in March.

Riding high with her contract, Julia accompanied Paul to a five-day PAO conference at the American Embassy in Paris. During her stay she cooked with Simca, dined with chefs Bugnard and Thillmont at Louisette’s home, and visited other friends. The chestnut buds were ripe and ready to burst on the trees lining the Seine in Paris. While in Paris they learned they would be transferred to Bonn, a place “terribly GI,” Julia reported to Dort: “I had enough of that meat-ballery during the war to last me a lifetime.” She added a note of fear to her sister: “After the events of the last few years, I have entirely lost that nobility and esprit de corps. I feel, actually, that at any moment we may be accused of being Communists and traitors.” Every month there was news of a China associate losing his job.

Paul hated to think of leaving Marseilles: “This is hard on Julie’s Bookery. Just
Hellishly
hard. Every time she just gets settled-in, establishes a time-schedule, gets her pots and knives and spoons hanging, Wham!” Paul wrote her a “Nostalgic Folk Song” a decade later that began—

Carry us, Bach, to old Parigi,
Là où le Métro et Les
Halles sont toujours beaux!

Leaving France was also “painful” for Paul, who had spent eleven years of his life in that country. During April and May, before they began their packing, Julia experimented with rabbit,
pâte brisée, gratin dauphinois
, pork, and quenelles.

Before they were to report to Bonn, Julia and Paul were required to return to the United States for a sabbatical. They had a farewell dinner with Guido, and the Whartons gave them a grand final party. Months before, Julia confided to Freddie that she had “a terrible wave of homesickness for real and life-long friends, and the USA.” She blamed it on the fact that they had not made many intimate friends in Marseilles.

They saw their most intimate friends during a week’s stopover in Paris, having their last bouillabaisse, dining with Simca and Jean Fischbacher one evening and at the Baltrusaitis apartment the last night before the boat train. They sailed on June 18, 1954, and arrived in New York Harbor on the seventeenth. Charlie and Freddie Child met them at the dock.

Julia’s request was for a lunch of “US steak first thing” (it was the only dish the French could not match). According to her datebook, she found New York City “loud, fast, hot, mechanical.” Julia and Paul picked up their new Chevy and reported to Washington for a week. For their official holiday they visited the Sheelines in New York City as well as other friends and family before driving to Boston. When they finally drove up to 8 Berkeley Street in Cambridge to meet face to face with Avis and Bernard DeVoto, their book’s godmother and
Harper’s
“Easy Chair” columnist already seemed like “old friends.” When Julia said that she wanted “one of those martinis I’ve been reading about” (his famous
Harper’s
article on the dry martini was collected in
The Hour
, 1951), Bernard was smitten. Like Julia, he was a Westerner (Utah) and a “Populist … an honorable word,” wrote his friend and neighbor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Julia and Paul also had fish and Chablis at Locke-Ober and visited with May Sarton, Edith Kennedy’s longtime friend, and Edith’s sons. Julia concluded that Boston was “civilized,” with an “English feeling of old houses and tradition.”

It was a long train ride to San Francisco, where they stayed with Dorothy and Ivan and met baby Sam and his sister Phila. Julia visited the new, large supermarkets with Dort, impressed with the changes in American consumer products, television, and chlorophyll toothpaste. And finally, after much dreading by Paul since John McWilliams’s letter accusing them of aiding the “communist” agenda, they spent eight days with Julia’s father and Phila in Pasadena. Dorothy warned them that their father believed “McCarthy was a victim of an international Jewish plot in which Cohn and Shine are the bad ones.” Julia believed her father was “horrid” to Paul, avoiding whenever possible even addressing him by name. “It was a Westbrook Pegler atmosphere,” she confided in Dort.

They returned to the East Coast and the Child family vacation house in Maine. On the cool cliff over the ocean, they celebrated Julia’s forty-second birthday and then enjoyed two and a half weeks of continuous lobster prepared in every form, hot and cold. There were many visits from old friends and picnics with the Walter Lippmanns (who owned a nearby home). And, as usual after his visits with Charlie, Paul fretted about the twin bond during a final stop in Cambridge, where Julia and Avis finally met with Dorothy de Santillana, the editor who had signed them up with Houghton Mifflin.

During this visit to the United States, Julia investigated everything from cream and butter to meat thermometers, constantly noting changes in lifestyle. Americans were now more informal, people were eating more frozen food, wine was still not a national drink, and chickens differed, even between Massachusetts and Maine. Though she told Simca she would avoid “cooking experts” in New York City until their book was done (“They are a close and gossipy and jealous little group”), she did visit the kitchen of the A&P’s
Woman’s Day
.

In mid-September, they returned to Washington for less than a month of German study. In her datebook, under a list of people to see in Washington, she noted one couple and beside their names wrote “Democrats, Secretariat, good taste, intelligence. Eat and Talk.” All values she and Paul cherished. Then, on October 15 they sailed for Paris, crossing the Belgian border to Germany on the twenty-third. The following month, unbeknownst to them, Jane Foster would have her passport confiscated, beginning a chain of events that would shake their world.

Chapter 13
A
L
ITTLE
T
OWN IN
G
ERMANY
(1954 – 1956)

“It is such fun, this work of ours.”

JULIA CHILD to Simone Beck
,
December 3, 1954

“W
OE—HOW DID WE
get here!” Julia wrote in her datebook for October 24, 1954, the day they arrived in Bad Godesberg, Germany. They would spend two years here, learning the rudiments of the language, searching (in vain) for good restaurants, and going to Paris as frequently as possible for Julia to work with her collaborator. Though this was Paul’s most important government assignment, far surpassing his job in Marseilles (he was now in charge of exhibits for all of Germany), it would be their unhappiest assignment.

G
OLDEN GHETTO ON THE RHINE

Upon arrival Julia called their home in Plittersdorf on the Rhine “a housing project.” A year later she called it a “dump.” There was no denying that Apartment 5 at 3 Steubenring was modern, sterile, and efficient—without any of the charm or character of the German country itself. The inhabitants called it the “Golden Ghetto on the Rhine,” according to Lyne Few (a colleague in Düsseldorf), or “Westchester-on-the-Rhine,” according to Lee Fairley, who served here, as he had in Paris, as Assistant Cultural Officer.

Despite the military living environment, Julia immediately learned to love walking along the western bank of the mighty Rhine River. Still, Paul was ill at ease in an environment emphasizing weekly car washings, football scores, and drunkenness. Postwar Germany, not surprisingly, had the largest concentration of American military in Europe. There were 250,000 soldiers in this country alone, without counting support staff. Thus, the role of the USIA was the most vital one in Europe. But Julia and Paul valued quality of life above job status:

It was a terrible place because we did not like living in the military housing. The town housed mostly the military who really did not want to be there anyway and did not take any interest in the language or the people. We resented living in that kind of environment. We wanted to live with the Germans. If we had lived in the city and on the economy I would have been very happy.

“I feel we are on the moon,” she told Simca, and immediately threw herself into the poultry chapter of her book, testing the meat recipes Simca sent, and learning the language.

She began classes in German at the local university, telling Simca that “to function at all properly as a cuisinière, I must absolutely learn the language. Without it, one is too cut off.” Later she said, “I went to the university, but it takes more than two years to learn a language.” As she and Paul shopped, patronized restaurants, and visited the sights, they used their dictionaries as much as possible. Few Americans tried to learn any German or take part in the community, but the Childs were different. Within a year Julia was understanding the language and communicating, but Paul did not have her marketing practice or her sense of freedom to make mistakes and thus never learned the language well enough: “Paul just doesn’t like Germany, really, and he gets furious because he can’t speak German,” she confided to Simca the following July.

Plittersdorf was the riverside suburb of Bad Godesberg, a town just south of Bonn (now a suburb of Bonn). Julia soon realized that this province of North Rhine-Westphalia was a vital region of what was now the strongest country in Europe. Germany was broken in 1945, its cities in rubble and its bridges blasted, but now with massive Marshall Plan dollars it was booming, exporting resources and goods worth four and a half billion dollars a year. The occupation of Allied forces (under High Commissioner James B. Conant) would soon be dismantled. All this industry was thriving north in Cologne and in the Ruhr Valley or southeast in Frankfurt.

Bonn itself, though now the capital city, was relatively untouched by the bombing and had been the least Nazified. Yellow trolley cars rolled along cobblestone streets lined with trees. Famous as the birthplace of Beethoven, Bonn was once a sleepy university town “snuggled along the curve of the Rhine,” said Theodore White, “just across the river from the murky hills where Siegfried slew his dragon.” White compares the city to the university town of Cambridge, Massachusetts, fifty years before, a city where Paul and Julia would eventually settle. The gold, red, and black flag of the German Republic snapped in the wind above the government building where Chancellor Konrad Adenauer presided (White in 1949 had called him “a wrinkled mummy breaking into voice”). Compared with Berlin, this city was tranquil and placid, which is why Julia and Paul would have preferred to live there rather than in Plittersdorf had they the choice.

Among the hard-drinking Americans and what White called the “dull, dreary, plodding men of Germany,” Paul found few kindred spirits. One of Paul’s assistants, a German national named Freifrau Dorothea von Stetten, remembers Paul’s “gentle personality, his fairness and his quest for excellence.” He was “very sincere and totally unbureaucratic,” she adds, and when events at the office became difficult, he would take her home for Julia’s dinner and a dose of “the sincerity and warmth which surrounded me in their home.” She eagerly read each copy of
The New Yorker
when they finished it (they continued a subscription in her name when they left the country).

T
HANK HEAVENS FOR THE BOOK

“Thank heavens for the book,” Julia would say later about their years in Germany. At the end of the second week in Plittersdorf, they returned to Paris to see about their furniture and to work with Julia’s collaborators. On their way to Bonn, they had stopped in Paris and dined with the Fischbachers and Bertholles. This time they began with breakfast at Deux Magots, lunch at Le Grand Véfour, cocktails with the Walter Lippmanns, and dinner at La Grille. Just like old times. Julia attended one of their school’s cooking classes, conducted by Thillmont, and spent the entire next day with Simca in Neuilly, working on the organization of the book and discussing the letter to Louisette that Julia drafted and Simca approved. “We must be cold-blooded,” Julia told Simca, “… I shall love her more once we get this settled.”

“Dear Louisette,” Julia wrote, explaining that after months of working together and seeing “how we actually do function,” and after hearing from her that she “cannot put in the 40-hours a week that Simca and I can,” they wished to reassign duties and designations. Because the book would take another year and a half at least, and the “major responsibility for the book rests on Simca and me,” they wished to be known hereafter as “Co-Authors.” For her editorial criticism, ideas, and public relations, Louisette would be called “Consultant.” These titles, they said, in fact described how they were collaborating. Louisette’s responsibilities were clearly listed and amounted to three hours in the cooking school and six hours on research and kitchen work a week. The letter, postmarked November 19, 1954, praised Louisette’s gifts and her contribution.

Julia and Simca listed their own responsibilities, suggesting that the book be entitled
“French Cooking in the American Kitchen
by Simone Beck and Julia Child with Louisette Bertholle,” and stating a “fair split” of 10 percent for Louisette and 45 percent each for Simca and Julia. They long knew that Louisette had, in Julia’s words, “gotten mixed up in a type of Magnum Opus” that was not to her taste. By mid-December, Julia informed her lawyer and nephew Paul Sheeline that they were probably stuck with the three authors’ names as listed in the Houghton Mifflin contract, but confided to Simca that “it is bad for the book for her to present herself as Author, as she really does not cook well enough, or know enough, and it is not good publicity.” The final arrangement on the cookbook came sometime later, and was a distribution of royalties with Louisette receiving 18 percent and Simca and Julia each 41 percent. This agreement was clear and mutually agreed to years before the publication of the book, which carried all three of their names in alphabetical order. As far as the world knew, they were equal authors. Their private royalty agreement reflected the reality.

Snow-covered blocks of ice were floating down the Rhine in early spring when Julia moved into high gear on the poultry chapter (including some recipes that Simca had done two years before). It was a chapter Julia would work on all year. The chapters on soups, sauces, and eggs were finished. They thought they were almost done with the fish chapter, but would still be working on it in 1956. Simca was writing up the meats and sending them to Julia. Because Avis asked about
pommes de terre duchesse
, Julia spent one week cooking a different recipe each day (this pureed and molded potato dish would not appear until their second book). In January, Julia made chicken casserole several ways and
poulet farci au gros sel
(they finally chose a chicken stuffed with mushrooms); in February
poulet grillé à la diabolique
(broiled chicken with mustard, herbs, and bread crumbs); and in March several others of the more than two hundred possible chicken recipes
Larousse Gastronomique
listed.

They chose recipes for several reasons, primarily because a recipe was a traditional French dish. But they also considered its usability in the United States (where some ingredients were not available, and no one had a duck press), and its flexibility, meaning its potential for using several other ingredients to make another dish. In other words, they attempted to have a recipe for each method. For example, for sautéed chicken they included crisp, simmered, and fricasseed.

Julia and Simca took nothing for granted, checking every detail themselves. They consulted Carême, Larousse, Ali-Bab, Madame Saint-Ange, and lesser known great French cookbook authors—all of whom present their classical dishes in more or less summary fashion. “Mme Saint-Ange,” Julia said, “is an inspiration.” She thought
Good Housekeeping
“dull” whenever she looked at it, and
Gourmet
inaccurate: “I prefer Mrs. Joy
[The Joy of Cooking] …
and I love Saint-Ange. Ours must be the best of all!” For the availability and measurement of produce in the United States, Julia wrote to organizations such as the National Turkey Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

For this cooking Julia had to use electric burners, which she loathed because the heat was so hard to control (“but I am learning its problems”). Each chicken dish and several meat dishes appeared at the dinners Julia and Paul held for new friends. Julia and Simca wrote each other about every detail of ingredient and language. They already knew each other’s quirks, such as Julia’s dislike of tomato sauce, especially with beef or chicken, and Simca’s hatred of turnips, which Julia loved.

She and Simca now expected to spend two more years completing their book. They appear not to have taken notice of the appearance of
The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook
, published in 1954 in London. A collection of memoirs and largely untested recipes by the charming seventy-seven-year-old companion of Gertrude Stein, it was not in their league. Alice was a Sunday and holiday cook, and her book had celebrity appeal (custard Josephine Baker) and recipes that called for canned soup. She was scandalized when she discovered one recipe submitted by a friend included hashish in the cookie dough and succeeded in having it eliminated from the American edition of her book.

They took more seriously Sadie Summers’s
American Cooking dans la Cuisine
(1954), a book in two languages for the overseas American and her French cook, because it contained an equivalents chart; but they needn’t have worried, for its focus audience was narrow. Julia was concerned briefly the following March with a new series of
grande cuisine
dishes by Diat in
Gourmet
magazine. Another American who was working on a food book was Waverley Root, then living in The Hague and editing Fodor travel guides. His
The Food of France
, a regional history, would appear in 1958.

Food for the American enclave in Plittersdorf was provided by a modern American grocery store, full of all the most recent canned and frozen food. Julia missed the regional markets, but consoled herself with the idea that she needed to know all these products to be aware of what American women were buying in supermarkets. Their cookbook would have to accommodate itself to the food available in the United States, just as Julia was cooking Simca’s recipes with frozen chicken from the commissary on her American electric stove. For this reason, Julia constructed a table of American poultry names and their French equivalent to open their chapter (a stewing chicken is a
poule de l’année)
.

Julia learned about meats while in Germany. When she later mentioned the food of Germany, she said, “We had venison and lots of potatoes.” Another time she said the food was “interesting, with wonderful lamb and pork and sausages.” She told Simca she was safest in ordering well-known dishes such as sauerkraut, sausage, smoked pork, and beer. And she delighted in buying the large, heavy mixers and grinders sold in Germany (for a cooking performance with Jacques Pépin in 1996, she brought out a huge potato ricer from Germany that was a hit with the audience). When May arrived it was asparagus time, thick white juicy asparagus. She was also taken with the mushrooms, and told Simca and Louisette about the girolles, cèpes, and morels growing in the German forests. What should they do about such mushrooms in the book, when Americans cannot find them in their markets?

The Childs’ holiday celebrations this first winter were hardly worth mentioning, except for the frozen turkey from the PX, which Julia called a Turkey Fiasco Dinner for six people. There was a Wassail party on Christmas night, and a dull New Year’s Eve. “So many US army [are] depressing,” Julia wrote in her datebook for January 2. “But I got quite a bit of working and cooking in, so it was not wasted!” she told Simca. Julia planned weekend trips to distract Paul, including a brief one to Nuremberg on the first weekend of the year. Six months later, after many more German lessons, Julia informed Louisette:

Although I continue to dislike Les Tristes Lieux de Plittersdorf, every time I get out of it to market, or something, I am quite happy. Paul just doesn’t like it here at all, and has a blockage against the language
… il est trop français!
I, as seems to be my habit, am “adapting” quite well, and can get around fairly decently with the language. But I wish we were in Munich or Berlin, where there was a bit of civilization…. I am not a country girl!

As if to revolt against the German austerity and repression, Paul designed their Valentine’s card for 1955 with a naked man and woman (her nipples carefully dotted) pulling on each end of an arrow threaded through a heart with their names on it. It was a saucy and sophisticated scene amid floating hearts encircled by a continuous scroll of the word
liebenswürdig
(lovable). Many of their friends framed Paul’s annual work of art.

They spent weeks painting the hearts red, as they did every year to add a splash of color, and the individual messages were upbeat. “We are struggling to learn the language, which just bristles with grammar,” Julia told her old Smith friend Ellie (and Basil Summers). To Hadley and Paul Mowrer she wrote, “We shall never be so comfortably housed. Everything works, all is clean and utterly convenient. Only thing we lack is Germans! But we are not glued here by any means and have already made quite a few trips.”

Indeed, Paul and Julia explored the country, and “what a vigorous bustling country this is—we’d better keep it on our side!” Julia told Hadley. During their two years there they visited the cities along the castle-lined gorge of the Rhine: Düsseldorf and Cologne to the north of Bonn; Mainz to the south; and beyond Mainz, Heidelberg, Frankfurt (a two-and-a-half-hour drive), and Nuremberg. They also visited the large cities in the north of Germany: Bremen, Hamburg, and, on numerous occasions, Berlin (they found a good Chinese restaurant there). They went as far east as Dresden (in 1956) and as far south as Munich in Bavaria. Because they were in West Germany, which bordered the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, and Switzerland, they visited the major cities in each, most frequently Amsterdam, Antwerp (“fried potatoes everywhere—smell,” Julia wrote in her datebook), Brussels (once with Lee Fairley and his wife and several times to see Abe and Rosemary Manell), Strasbourg, Basel, and Geneva. Fairley remembered that Paul “kept meticulous notes on the wine.” The last city visit was for Paul’s exhibit on the peacetime uses of atomic energy, which President Eisenhower attended.

Part of their explorations included studying German wine. They visited the winemaker of Niersteiner Domtal, one of Paul’s favorites. In 1976, Paul would proudly show off his collection of Rhine and Mosel wines to
New York Times
wine critic Frank J. Prial.

Their tour of duty coincided with their desire to travel and explore. Paul, as Exhibits Officer of Germany, was visiting each of the Amerika Häuser, the U.S. cultural centers. Julia found most of the diplomatic dinners “boring,” but she loved walking through the cities with Paul, always checking out the local produce and cuisine. In her datebooks during these years, she listed restaurants, particularly in Brussels, Berlin, Düsseldorf, and Frankfurt, and wrote Ollie Noall, an early friend of Paul, “We spent the entire two years looking for a good French restaurant.”

Julia’s favorite trip was back to Paris and work with Simca. “Simca [is] an incarnate French driver,” Julia wrote in her datebook during a second visit to Paris. They were visiting Curnonsky, shopping at Dehillerin for pots and pans, and cooking together. While Julia was there, Louisette signed their new agreement.

K
AFKA MEETS MCCARTHY

When Paul was suddenly called back to Washington, DC, he and Julia assumed that after years of working at foreign service rank four (sometimes without diplomatic status), he was being promoted at last. Paul did not like the people he was working with in Germany, in part because of the military environment (the diplomatic corps always looked down on the military) and in part because one of the heads of the outfit and his wife were alcoholics. “It is terrible to be with people who are uninspired,” Julia later explained. “We did not admire them.” There were exceptions, of course, but morale was not high and Paul’s immediate boss was called “Woodenhead,” with his assistant known as “Woodenhead the Second.”

Paul was informed on Thursday, April 7, 1955, to report to Washington the next Monday. Julia and the Manells, who had come from Brussels for a visit, drove Paul to the airport in Dusseldorf on Sunday. Julia was full of anticipation: “I was sure he was going to be made head of the department.” Next day she attended the reception for High Commissioner Conant with a sense of pride in her husband.

“Situation confused,” Paul telegraphed from Washington, DC, his first day there. As if in a modern reenactment of Kafka’s novel
The Trial
, Paul sat outside one office after another waiting for various people to return. No one he talked to knew anything of why he was there. Each person with whom he discussed his situation (and he had friends in high places) suggested several possible reasons for his return, most of which involved new assignments or promotions (he eventually compiled a list of ten possibilities). He wrote to Julia suggesting she put off her trip to Paris because she might need to come home. When a man named Parker May told him he was “not allowed to” say anything, but the wait “was in [Paul’s] own interest,” he telegraphed Julia: “situation here like Kafka story I believe I am to [be] in same situation as [Rennie] Leonard.” Suddenly, Julia understood. “Paul is being
investigated!”
she wrote in her datebook on April 13, terrified of everything from Paul’s being fired to his being arrested. Immediately she consulted their trusted friends, talking that very night to foreign service officer James McDonald until four in the morning.