Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (34 page)

Paul was called into the Office of Security for the USIA and relentlessly interrogated the rest of the day and evening by Special Agents Sullivan and Sanders, “McLeod’s Boys,” he called them. R. W. (Scott) McLeod, whose mentor was J. Edgar Hoover, was a former FBI official whom Hoover had placed in the Department of State when Eisenhower became President in 1953. McLeod headed the Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs and essentially took over Personnel through his appointment of Ruth Shipley as head of Passports. Neither Eisenhower nor his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, could or would curtail the reign of terror that ensued. Shipley proudly confiscated or denied passports to any left-winger who criticized the government, from Howard Fast (novelist and biographer of Thomas Jefferson) and Paul Robeson to Dulles’s sister Eleanor. In one year more than three hundred passports were taken or denied.

Sitting before McLeod’s Boys that day was a foot-high dossier on Paul Child. First they grilled him for hours as to what he knew about Jane Foster, then they asked about Morris Llewelyn Cooks, an old-time liberal whose name Paul once gave as a reference. Guilt by association. They asked him “a type of question particularly embarrassing to them.” In his dossier was a charge he was homosexual: “How about it?” Paul burst out laughing. “Drop your pants,” they insisted. Paul got angry and refused. “Homosexuals often have wives and children,” they explained. “As I have a wife but
no
children perhaps that gets me off the hook,” Paul responded. Except for the bitterness of his humor, he kept cool and rational. They soon veered off to Jane Foster again, apparently judging by his response that he was not a homosexual. Because the records were “routinely destroyed” in 1986, there is no way of knowing if an informant interpreted Paul’s European refinement as fey, but during McCarthy’s reign, communists were frequently linked with homosexuals and aliens. McLeod was fond of saying, “I hate drunks, perverts, and commies!” But Paul called their bluff with his rhetorical logic. Eventually he charged his tormentors with handling the entire business “in an amateurish and preposterous fashion,” and left believing he was cleared, “a monument of innocence.”

“Investigation concluded successfully for me,” he telegraphed Julia, writing her to give copies of his detailed letters to two friends and colleagues, including Joe Phillips, the Director of Public Affairs for Germany. When he demanded a written clearance, they mentioned a thirty-day period of investigation. Paul went directly to the top security official in the USIA and demanded clearance, which he received, telegraphing the news to Julia. Staying in Washington, he threw himself into securing Edward Steichen’s “Family of Man” exhibit for Berlin, going to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (where Steichen took him on a two-hour private tour). The exhibit (and the universally popular book that would follow) included five hundred photographs of faces from twenty-six countries. Paul’s calm and professionalism were betrayed by a series of physical ailments and insomnia that plagued him all month. The only solace and balance he had were the letters from the woman he called “my beloved wifelet,” and the knowledge that she was driving to Paris, their city, where he would eventually join her. “I can’t get over how
good
I feel about your being in Paris! And I love to think of you and Bugnard working together. And you and Simca.”

It was ironic that during the time Paul was suffering under accusations of treason, he was being entertained with a party honoring him in Washington by Marie Bissell, the mother of Richard Bissell, his friend and a leader in the CIA. Of course, Bissell was considered “a liberal.” Hoover’s witch hunt always focused on the Department of State, and recent history has uncovered the antagonism that Hoover and the FBI had for the OSS/CIA, a “secret war” that claimed a number of former OSS people as its victims. “The FBI happily assisted in the purge of CIA officers,” says historian Harris Smith.

Julia, who thought the “investigation inexplicably weird,” sent special delivery letters and telegrams to Paul and called on the telephone. “You are finer, better, more lovable, more attractive, deeper, nicer, nobler, cleverer, stronger and more wonderful [than other men] … and I am so damned lucky even to know you, much less (or more) to be married to you,” she assured him. “Your lovely long letter came in this morning,” he wrote back April 26, 1955, “in which you made a two-line list of superlative adjectives about your husband, which he lapped up like a cat lapping up cream, shame on the old bastard.” Not only his wife was smiling on him: Paul finally received clearance for the “Family of Man” exhibit for Germany (its first European showing) and was asked by the government to go to Brussels on his way home to negotiate with the Commissioner-General for a noncommercial American exhibit in a World’s Fair planned for 1958.

Though Julia and Paul would never forget the injustice of the charges leveled against Paul, the Jane Foster affair was not over. In August, when they were again in Paris sunning themselves at the Deux Magots, they encountered Jane’s husband, George Zlatovsky, who told them that when Jane went to see her dying mother in San Francisco she was caught there, her passport confiscated by Ruth Shipley. Julia and Paul decided to write a letter defending their friend: “We cannot with decency turn our back on a former colleague,” Julia wrote in a letter to warn her father that they might be thrown out of the government. They did not send the letter to Pop, but did write to Jane in New York City: “We really don’t know anything about your political affiliations … but consider you our friend. And we are terribly sorry you are in this predicament.” Two years before, Julia had written to Avis DeVoto wondering what she could do to fight McCarthyism: this letter was her stand. She wrote it believing they would pay the consequences. (Some of their friends, for example Budd Schulberg, who named fifteen people, did not stand by their friends and appeared as friendly witnesses before House Un-American Activities Committee.)

Jane, who suffered an emotional breakdown and was hospitalized, eventually found a good lawyer and regained her passport. She immediately sent a telegram on August 27 to the Childs saying she was safely in Paris with her husband. She followed through with a lengthy letter to “Julie and Paul” thanking them for their support and detailing her travails. Jane and George were safely in Paris in 1957 when they were indicted on five counts of spying. The United States and France did not have an extradition treaty related to espionage, so Jane held off the press behind locked doors in Paris until the charges were dropped. Julia and Paul stood by a friend they believed innocent (while holding doubts about her husband); Julia was surprised and disappointed when Jane gave up her citizenship for a French passport.

Finally, on October 25, 1955, six months after his interrogation, Paul received a letter from the Chief of the Office of Security at the USIA (Charles M. Noone) informing him that his “case had been considered … and a favorable decision reached.” His “case” was over, but the hysteria lingered on, ensnaring other former OSS personal friends, including Duncan Lee, George Jenson, and John Paton Davies, Jr. Davies, born in China of American missionaries, was transferred to an obscure post in Peru the same month as Paul’s investigation. Indeed, in his 1995 memoir, Robert McNamara charges that the “ignorance” about Southeast Asia that led up to the war in Vietnam “existed largely because the top East Asian and China experts in the State Department—John Paton Davies Jr., John Stewart Service, and John Carter Vincent—had been purged during the McCarthy hysteria of the 1950s. Without men like these to provide sophisticated, nuanced insights, we—certainly I—badly misread China’s objectives and mistook its bellicose rhetoric to imply a drive for regional hegemony. We also totally underestimated the nationalist aspect of Ho Chi Minh’s movement. We saw him first as a Communist and only second as a Vietnamese nationalist.”

Despite Paul’s exoneration, he was to witness the continuing threat of McCarthyism when exhibits were suddenly canceled because some U.S. senator objected to something trivial such as “the brother of one of the artists who once subscribed to the
New Masses”
journal. He was angry that Eisenhower did not stand up to McCarthy and was dismayed the following year when Ike, after a heart attack, announced he would run for a second term. He and Julia preferred, as they had four years before, Adlai Stevenson.

E
SCAPING TO PARIS
AND POULTRY

Loading their car with her files and a food-stained manuscript, Julia drove to Paris for a three-week working session as soon as she realized that Paul would be in Washington for a while. Their best friends were in Paris, and they supported her, as Paul’s friends (including Charlie and Freddie) supported him through his ordeal in Washington. Julia expressed her anger, talking over
l’affaire
and McCarthyism with Paul’s former colleague Bob Littell. She also attended the Gourmettes luncheon and the Trois Gourmandes cooking classes, cooked twice with Bugnard, and dined with the Bertholles and Fischbachers, and worked diligently with Simca in choosing, cooking, and composing the introductions and recipes for their book. Paul urged that they keep their introductions lighthearted.

Julia returned to Bonn, German lessons, and further chicken recipes. By summer she completed the section on sautéing and gave a few private cooking classes. Louisette sent her comments on the poaching and stewing sections (thirty-two pages), and Simca and Jean visited in time for the brief asparagus season. Julia and Paul celebrated Julia’s forty-third birthday with a brief weekend in Paris. They had breakfast once again at the Deux Magots, visited Dehillerin’s (for some knives for Avis), saw an exhibit of Picasso’s work, and dined for her birthday lunch at Lapérouse, just down the street from Picasso’s former studio on the rue des Grands-Augustins. Julia was disappointed in the meal of
tourte gelée
(crab) and
ris de veau braisés
(sweetbreads). Her improved recipe for the latter dish would appear in the book in progress.

With each return to Germany, she threw herself into another poultry dish each day: fricassée, sauté, and
canard à l’orange
with a disappointing sauce. “Our tenure in Cologne was all poultry,” said James McDonald, who frequently dined with his wife at the Childs’ home. Each of these recipes would be perfected for the book. And each one was tried by Avis DeVoto in Cambridge, as well as by Julia’s other “guinea pigs.” With hundreds of traditional and precisely named French recipes for chicken, duck, and goose, they would choose the recipes Julia thought most Americans could and would prepare. They already had hundreds of pages of recipes to date, far more than would eventually be included.

When she got discouraged and “beset by doubts, wishing we had been working with Escoffier for twenty years before ever undertaking such an enterprise!” she reminded herself and Simca that “then, of course, we would not have a housewife’s point of view at all.” “We” must do exacting experiments “to be absolutely sure of our conclusions,” she told Simca in May 1954 as she tested their
pâte feuilletée
with the flour she bought in Bonn. Julia continued to experiment with her duck in orange sauce, which would be one of only three duck recipes included, each with variations. For example,
canard à l’orange
had two variations (cherries and peaches:
caneton aux cerises
, also called
caneton Montmorency
, and
caneton aux pêches)
. Accompanying these recipe groups were clear and simple descriptions of how to choose, wash, disjoint, truss, or stuff poultry, how to tell when it is done, and suggestions for vegetable, sauce, and wine with each.

Julia took her manuscript and files with her during the Steichen exhibit in Berlin in September (where 30,000 people saw “The Family of Man”) and in Frankfurt and Munich in November, as well as on their two-week gastronomic vacation in France in October. They drove through Colmar, Bourg-en-Bresse, and Les Baux to Marseilles, where they stayed with the Whartons, then through the wine country, where the air was filled with the work of wine presses, to a foggy Paris, for a full day of work with Simca.

While nursing Paul through nearly two months of infectious hepatitis, with his high fever and jaundice, Julia finished and sent to Simca (and Houghton Mifflin) the section on cut-up chickens, asked Louisette for vegetable suggestions, and worked up the section of recipes for
suprêmes de volaille
(skinless, boneless chicken breasts). Not surprisingly, these recipes with little fat
(pot-au-feu, poule-au-pot)
came at a time when Paul was restricted to a no-fat regime. “I find to my surprise that I can grill meats and chicken with no fat … I usually put in a bit of salt and lemon juice.” She also learned to vary her recipes by using shallots, lemon juice, and vegetable stock. By the time Paul was able to return to work for half days in January 1956, she had completed this work. Unfortunately, they missed their second Christmas in Cambridge with the Bicknells. The day after Paul’s doctor told him to go south for two weeks, he bought train tickets to Rome and Julia began her first research on cooking a goose. In Rome she had the best baby peas of her life and for the first time had the fennel bulb thinly sliced in a salad.

“Have you seen Dione Lucas’s new book?” Julia asked Louisette in January. “I find it very poor in many respects … and it is certainly not French cooking.” She told Simca
(“ma plus que chère et adorable amie”)
three months before that Lucas’s
Meat and Poultry
was a little “sloppy” and not as detailed as theirs, but “with our snail’s pace we have a chance to study our competitors.” None of the Trois Gourmandes personally knew Dione Lucas, the most prominent cooking figure in New York City in the 1950s, but since 1948 she had both a cooking school and a local television cooking program. Lucas was a severe and dry English woman, but her cooking programs (her name was synonymous with omelets) hold up even today. Several people in the New York food world, including cookbook writer James Beard, questioned the validity of Lucas’s claim to Cordon Bleu training, a question echoed in Julia’s judgment. But her book first gave Julia and Simca the idea that they might publish their work in several volumes.