My Life in France Page 24

  I began to feel nostalgic for Norway, with its good sturdy folk, its excellent educational system, its unspoiled nature, its lack of advertising, and its non-hectic rhythms.

  At a cooking demonstration for a women’s group in Los Angeles, two ovens, a range, an icebox, and a table, above which was a large mirror tipped at a forty-five-degree angle had been set up, so that the audience could watch our hands and see right into the pots as Simca and I cooked. Unfortunately, the club’s leader hadn’t bothered to get a single item on the shopping list we had sent her weeks ahead of time. Suspecting as much, we arrived at the theater an hour and a half early, which gave us just enough time to scrounge up the three garbage pails, five tables, rented tablecloth, buckets of ice water, soap, towels, implements, and other items we needed for our demonstration. And it was a good thing, too. About 350 women attended the morning show, and another three hundred arrived in the afternoon. Simca and I demonstrated how to make quiche au Roquefort, filets de sole bonne femme, and reine de Saba cake. All went smoothly. In between shows, we signed books, sat for interviews, and made the right noises to dozens of VIPs. Meanwhile, the esteemed former American cultural attaché to Norway was crouched behind some old scenery flats trying to wash out our egg- and chocolate-covered bowls in a bucket of cold water.

  By December 15, we were back in New York, where generous Jim Beard hosted a party for us at Dione Lucas’s restaurant, the Egg Basket. We invited thirty guests, mostly those who had been instrumental to our success, including Avis De Voto, Bill Koshland, and Judith and Evan Jones. Jim saw to it that a small but influential group of food editors and chefs were invited: Jeanne Owen, executive secretary of the Wine and Food Society; June Platt, a cookbook author; and Marya Mannes, a writer for The New Yorker.

  Dione Lucas had once run the Cordon Bleu’s school in London, but she didn’t strike us as especially organized, or sober. A few days before the party, the menu hadn’t been finalized and arrangements for the wine delivery had yet to be made. Paul and I made an appointment to discuss these details with Ms. Lucas, but when we arrived the Egg Basket was closed and dark. Tacked to the locked door was a note, saying something like “Terribly sorry to have missed you, my son is ill, very ill . . .” Hm. When Judith Jones had lunched at the restaurant two weeks earlier, Lucas had been missing due to “a migraine.”

  No matter. Simca and I pitched in, and prepared a braised shoulder of lamb at my niece’s apartment a few blocks away. Dione Lucas finally appeared, and made a good sole with white-wine sauce, salade verte, and bavarois aux fraises. The wine arrived intact from Julius Wile, the famous vintner, who was a lively presence. And Avis declared the event “snazzy.”

  The highpoint of the evening came when Jim Beard stood up and toasted me and Simca with the highest compliment imaginable: “I love your book—I only wish that I had written it myself!”

  III. I’VE BEEN READING

  POP WAS DYING. He had never fully recovered from his flu, and in January 1962 he was hospitalized with a bad mystery ailment: spleen swollen, high white-corpuscle count, perhaps pneumonia. Many tests had revealed little information, although the doctors suspected that they’d found a small tumor at the bottom of his lungs. Phila, one of her daughters, and Dort took turns keeping an eye on him in the hospital. If things took a turn for the worse, I had packed a bag and was ready to fly to Pasadena at a moment’s notice.

  In the meantime, Mastering was in its third printing of ten thousand copies, and I’d received our first royalty payment, a check for $2,610.85. Yahoo! I did some quick calculations, and discovered we were within $632.12 of paying off all of our book expenses. Soon, we would be able to send some real cash money to ma chérie, Simca.

  John Glenn had circled the globe in his little space capsule (we still didn’t have a TV set, and Paul was glued to the radio all day), and I had been invited to go on an egghead television show in Boston to talk about food and Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

  The show was called I’ve Been Reading, and it was hosted by Professor Albert Duhamel on WGBH, Channel 2, the local public television station. (This lucky break was thanks to our friend Beatrice Braude, who had worked for USIA in Paris, got chewed up by the McCarthy bullies, and now worked as a researcher at WGBH.) I was told that it was unusual for Professor Duhamel to invite a food person on I’ve Been Reading, so my expectations were low. But the interview went extremely well. Instead of the usual five-minute spot, we were given a full half-hour. I didn’t know what we’d talk about for that long, so I arrived with plenty of equipment. They had no demonstration kitchen, and were a little surprised when I pulled out a (proper) hot plate, copper bowl, whip, apron, mushrooms, and a dozen eggs. Before I knew it, we were on the brightly lit set and on the air! Mr. Duhamel was calm, clear, and professional; it helped that he loved food and cooking, and had actually read our book. After chatting with him for a bit, I demonstrated the proper technique for cutting and chopping, how to “turn” a mushroom cap, beat egg whites, and make an omelette. There was a large blowup of Mastering’s dust jacket projected on a screen behind me, but I was so focused on demonstrating proper knife technique that I completely forgot to mention our book.

  Ah me, I had so much to learn!

  In response to that little book program, WGBH received twenty-seven more or less favorable letters from viewers. I don’t think one of them mentioned our book, but they did say things like “Get that woman back on television. We want to see some more cooking!”

  BY THE END OF February, the renovation of our kitchen at 103 Irving was finished, and it was a good-looking workroom. We had raised the counters to thirty-eight inches all around, carved out more storage space, and added lights over the work surfaces. Paul chose an attractive color scheme of light blue, green, and black. I hated tile floors, which hurt my feet, so we laid down heavy vinyl, the kind used in airports. There was a thick wood butcher’s-block counter and a stainless-steel sink. We had an electric wall oven, and nearby was the professional gas range, in a corner by the door. Over the stove we installed a special hood with two exhaust fans and a utensil rack.

  Finally, I arranged all of my pots and pans on the floor the way I liked, and Paul drew their outlines on a big pegboard, so you would know where each one went. Then he mounted the pegboard on the wall, which made my gleaming batterie de cuisine look especially handsome.

  The kitchen was the soul of our house. This one, the ninth that Paul and I had designed together, was a real wowzer, a very functional space and a pleasure to be in.

  While I banged away at recipes suitable for a Washington hostess party for House & Garden, Paul devoted an entire day to fixing up a closet in the cellar as a wine cave. He even drew up an elaborate chart showing exactly how many bottles of which vintage he had in stock. But when he opened up the cases we’d sent from Norway, he found five bottles had broken—including a fine 1835 Terrantez Madeira, a loss which hurt. “Why did that one have to break and not one of the bottles of Jean Fischbacher’s homemade marc, a fire-water that I detest?” he wailed. “Oh, the injustice.”

  Mastering the Art of French Cooking continued to sell. With our first royalty check, we bought a book on how not to let plants die (for me), a dry-mount press (for Paul), and the latest edition of Webster’s dictionary (for both of us), which led us to scream at each other about the proper use of language. He was a language-by-use type, while I was an against-the-prostitution-of-language type. We also bought our first television set, a smallish square plastic-and-metal box that was so ugly we hid it in an unused fireplace.

  Encouraged by the response to our little cooking demonstration on I’ve Been Reading, the honchos at WGBH asked me and the show’s director, twenty-eight-year-old Russell Morash, to put together three half-hour pilot programs on cooking. The station had never done anything like this before. But if they were willing to give it a whirl, then so was I.

  MY FATHER DIED on May 20, 1962. In the preceding weeks he had lost forty-eight pounds and had grown white and f
rail; he was a ghost of his former self. The diagnosis was lymphatic leukemia. Dort, John, and I had arrived in L.A. just before he passed away.

  I was fond of Pop, in a way. He had been terribly generous financially, but we did not connect spiritually and had become quite detached. He never said much about my years of cookery-work, our book, or my appearances on radio and television. He felt that I had rejected his way of life, and him, and he was hurt by that. He was bitterly disappointed that I didn’t marry a decent, red-blooded Republican businessman, and felt my life choices were downright villainous. From my perspective, I did not reject him until the point when I could no longer be honest about my opinions and innermost thoughts with him, especially when it came to politics. As I looked back on it, I think that break—my “divorce” from my father—began with our move to Paris.

  I really loved my mother, Caro, and missed her. She was a warm and very human person, though non-intellectual. She died when I was still a semi-adolescent. Yet she—and so many other good people in Pasadena, including Phila—just adored Pop, so he must have had something in there. He had lots of good friends, helped many people, spent hours fund-raising for the Pasadena Hospital and other do-gooding organizations. But he did not communicate well with his children. He was no more sympathetic or decent to John and Dort than he was to me.

  I know there were times I could have been better, nicer, more generous toward him, and so forth and so on. But, frankly, my father’s death came as a relief more than a shock. I suddenly felt we could go to California whenever we wanted to, without restraints or family trouble.

  Big John had not been a churchgoer, so we held his memorial service at the house in Pasadena. About two hundred people were there, and so was his coffin. Phila remained strong and composed throughout. There was a short reading, a hymn or two sung, no eulogy. His body was cremated. We had found his father’s ashes in a cardboard box behind a living-room sofa. On a calm bright day, we took the ashes of my grandfather, my mother, and my father on a sailboat out by Catalina Island and strewed them into the sea. My brother read from the Episcopal burial-at-sea service. A few tears were wiped away. Eh bien, l’affaire conclue.

  IV. THE FRENCH CHEF

  I KNEW NOTHING at all about television—other than the running joke that this fabulous new medium would thrive on how-to and pornography programs—but in June 1962 I taped the three experimental half-hour shows, or pilots, that WGBH had suggested.

  WGBH, Channel 2, was Boston’s fledgling public TV station. It didn’t have much mazuma and was mostly run by volunteers, but they had managed to cobble together a few hundred dollars to buy some videotape. Russell (Russ) Morash, producer of Science Reporter, would be our producer-director, and Ruthie Lockwood, who had worked on a series about Eleanor Roosevelt, would be our assistant producer. Ruthie scrounged up a sprightly tune to use as our theme song. And after considering dozens of titles, we decided to call our little experiment The French Chef until we could come up with something better.

  Now, would there be an audience out there in TV Land for a cooking show hosted by one Julia McWilliams Child?

  The odds were against us. Jim Beard had done some experimental cooking shows sponsored by Borden’s Elsie the Cow, but although he had trained as an actor and opera singer, he came across as self-conscious on television. He would spend long silent periods looking down at the food and not up at the camera; or he’d say “Cut here,” without explanation, rather than, “Cut it at the shoulder, where the upper arm joins.” Unfortunately, his shows never drew a large audience. Dione Lucas had also done a TV series, but, alas, she was never comfortable in front of the camera, either. Her show fizzled, too.

  Our plan was to show a varied but not-too-complicated overview of French cooking in the course of three half-hour shows. We knew this was a great opportunity for . . . something, none of us was exactly sure what.

  Through some kind of dreadful accident, WGBH’s studio had burned to the ground right before we were going to tape The French Chef (my own copy of Mastering went up in smoke, too). But the Boston Gas Company came to our rescue, by loaning us a demonstration kitchen to shoot our show in. So that we could rehearse, Paul made a layout sketch of the freestanding stove and work counter there, which we brought home and roughly emulated in our kitchen. We broke our recipes down into logical sequences, and I practiced making each dish as if I were on TV. We took notes as we went, reminders about what I should be saying and doing and where my equipment would be: “simmering water in large alum. pan, upper R. burner”; “wet sponge left top drawer.”

  My trusty sous-chef/bottle-washer, Paul, had his own notes, for he would be an essential part of the choreography behind the camera: “When J. starts buttering, remove stack molds.”

  There. We had done as much preparation as we could. Now it was time to give television a whirl.

  ON THE MORNING OF June 18, 1962, Paul and I packed our station wagon with kitchen equipment and drove to the Boston Gas Company in downtown Boston. We arrived there well ahead of our WGBH crew, and quickly unloaded the car. While Paul parked, I stood in the building’s rather formal lobby guarding our mound of pots, bowls, whisks, eggs, and trimmings. Businessmen in gray suits and office girls rushed in and out of the lobby, eyeing me with disapproval. A uniformed elevator operator said, “Hey, get that stuff out of this lobby!”

  But how were we to get all of our things down to the demonstration kitchen, in the basement? Resourceful Paul found a janitor with a rolling cart, which we filled with our household goods and clanked down the stairs to the kitchen. There we set ourselves up according to our master plan.

  With Russ Morash on the set of The French Chef

  Our first show would be called “The French Omelette.” Ruthie Lockwood arrived, and we went over our notes and set up a “dining room” for the final scene, where I would be shown eating the omelette. Russ and the camera crew arrived, and we did a short rehearsal to check the lighting and camera angles. He was using two very large cameras, which were attached by thick black cables that snaked up the stairs and out to an old Trailways bus equipped with a generator.

  A live show was out of the question—partly due to the limitations of equipment and space, and partly because I was a complete amateur. But we decided to tape the entire show in one uninterrupted thirty-minute take, as if it were live. Unless the cameras broke or the lights went out, there would be no stopping or making corrections. This was a bit of a high-wire act, but it suited me. Once I got going, I didn’t like to stop and lose the sense of drama and excitement of a live performance. Besides, our viewers would learn far more if we let things happen as they tend to do in life—with the chocolate mousse refusing to unstick from its mold, or the apple charlotte collapsing. One of the secrets, and pleasures, of cooking is to learn to correct something if it goes awry; and one of the lessons is to grin and bear it if it cannot be fixed.

  When we were more or less ready, Russ said: “Let’s shoot it!”

  I careened around the stove for the allotted twenty-eight minutes, flashing whisks and bowls and pans, and panting a bit under the hot lights. The omelette came out just fine. And with that, WGBH-TV had lurched into educational television’s first cooking program.

  The second and third shows, “Coq au Vin” and “Soufflés,” were both taped on June 25, to save money. We had more time to rehearse these shows, and they went smoother than the first one. Once we had finished taping, our technicians descended on the coq au vin like starving vultures.

  On the evening of July 26, we ate a big steak dinner at home and, at eight-thirty, pulled our ugly little television out of hiding and switched on Channel 2. There I was, in black and white, a large woman sloshing eggs too quickly here, too slowly there, gasping, looking at the wrong camera while talking too loudly, and so on. Paul said I looked and sounded just like myself, but it was hard for me to be objective. I saw plenty of room for improvement, and figured that I might begin to have an inkling of what I was supposed to do after I’d s
hot twenty more TV shows. But it had been fun.

  The response to our shows was enthusiastic enough to suggest that there was, indeed, an audience for a regular cooking program on public television. Perhaps our timing was good. Since the war, more and more Americans had been traveling to places like France and were curious about its cuisine. Furthermore, the Kennedys had installed a French chef, René Verdon, in the White House. Our book continued to sell well. And television was becoming a hugely popular, and powerful, medium.

  WGBH boldly suggested that we try a series of twenty-six cooking programs. We were to start taping in January, and the first show would air in February 1963. And with that, The French Chef, which followed the ideas we’d laid out in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, was under way.

  V. LA PEETCH

  IN 1963, I was shooting four episodes of The French Chef a week while also writing a weekly food column for the Boston Globe. In the fall, we were scheduled to take a break from TV work, and had planned to visit Simca and Jean at their rambling farmhouse in Provence. But as November hove into view, we began to regret it. The quicksand of my cookery-work, Paul’s painting and photography projects, and all the many bits of upkeep and improvement that 103 Irving Street required were sucking at our feet.

  “I just don’t know if we have the time for a trip to France right now,” I sighed. Paul nodded.

  But then we looked at each other and repeated a favorite phrase from our diplomatic days: “Remember, ‘No one’s more important than people’!” In other words, friendship is the most important thing—not career or housework, or one’s fatigue—and it needs to be tended and nurtured. So we packed up our bags and off we went. And thank heaven we did!