My Life in France Page 28

  I could hardly wait to get started. But that was easier said than done.

  In mid-May 1970, a crew of about ten of us gathered at La Pitchoune to map out our shooting schedule. The plan was to start in Provence, then move to Paris, and finish in Normandy. As we had only a few weeks to get everything done, and no chance of returning to France with such a generous budget, we made detailed schedules for each day—down to the hour, and sometimes the minute—to ensure that everything went as smoothly as possible.

  We began our first morning of shooting in the market at the Place aux Aires, in Grasse. Peter, our enthusiastic thirty-two-year-old Dutch cameraman, wanted to film me buying fruit, vegetables, flowers, and crème fraîche. It all went smoothly until our bright lights and dragging electrical cables bothered one of the market women. She began to wave her arms around and make dramatic faces, while bawling: “Oh no! Enough is enough!” A large crowd pressed around us. “How am I supposed to sell my carrots and be a movie star, too?” she scolded us. “Here I am, surrounded by Hollywood, and only two more hours to sell—how are my customers going to buy anything? Tell me that, Hollywood! Now I’ll finish the morning with stacks of stuff on my stand. No! This is too much! Enough!”

  It was a legitimate complaint, so we wandered off to shoot elsewhere.

  Television production is a lot more tedious than people imagine. Each shot took seconds to watch on TV, and minutes to film, but required hours of preparatory work. When our troops moved into a restaurant, for example, tripods would be erected, light reflectors tilted, spotlights aimed, and rolls of orange electrical cable unspooled. We’d rehearse the scene and begin to shoot, but then my hairdo would have to be rearranged, or we’d have to wait for a cloud to pass. Finally, we’d get the shot we needed, only to break all of our equipment down and move on to the next scene.

  It helped that Paul and I were fluent in French and were friendly with many of the local merchants. As Chef Bugnard had tutored me, it was important not to rush, push too hard, or take people’s goodwill for granted.

  On the morning we invaded Les Oliviers, a restaurant on a hillside near Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Alex, the jolly maître d’hôtel, had set up the restaurant’s famous “avalanche” of forty hors d’oeuvres. It was a stunning sight: hot, cold, cooked, raw, mixed, plain, salty, oily, fish, meat, vegetable, and so on. But the food was under big yellow sunshades, and our director, David, grumbled, “This we cannot shoot!”

  “But we must,” cried Peter, the cameraman. “The restaurant’s lunch guests will be arriving any minute now, and then it’ll be too late!”

  “No! Not with this lemon-colored light!”

  “Okay, then, take down the umbrellas and shoot with direct sunlight.”

  “Wait, don’t do that—the mayonnaise will melt!” interjected Ruthie Lockwood, our producer.

  “Brush those flies away—the table looks like a garbage heap!”

  The umbrellas came down, the camera went up on Peter’s shoulder, the flies were shooed, and we shot the scene. Over and over. “Willie, your feet were sticking out,” Peter cried to the soundman, who was hiding under the table with his microphone while Paul and I ate for the camera.

  “Let’s shoot that sequence again,” David sighed.

  By three-thirty, we were finished, and our team fell on the “avalanche” like a starving wolfpack.

  One day, the crew filmed me driving around Plascassier and visiting our local butcher, Monsieur Boussageon. He ran a nice little shop with his wife and mother-in-law—a trio that, contrary to the usual tradition, worked very well together. We had scheduled to shoot the Boussageons making a pâté pantin together, but early that morning his wife gave birth to a little girl—two weeks earlier than expected. Ha! We had to improvise on the fly. With his wife and mother-in-law at the hospital, Boussageon showed us how to make a pantin: he used six and a half pounds of pork, veal, and foie gras with truffles, done up in a pâté à croûte, decorated with dough “leaves” glazed with a whole beaten egg, and cooked for two hours. It was a fabulous display, but in the midst of a particularly good sequence two locals barged into the shop loudly demanding the right to buy blood sausages. At the end of the day, we gratefully bestowed a bottle of champagne upon the wonderfully accommodating Boussageon.

  In Marseille we filmed the making of a bouillabaisse, and then took our cameras into the Criée aux Poissons fish market at 4:00 a.m., which was visually splendid. From there we moved to Paris. It was now June, and in rapid-fire succession, we shot segments on frogs’ legs at Prunier, cheese at Monsieur Androuet’s charming cave, hand-carved meat at the Paridoc supermarché, pastry decoration at Monsieur Deblieux’s pâtisserie, and, of course, cookware at Dehillerin’s Old Curiosity Shop.

  We had planned to shoot the making of beurre blanc at Chez la Mère Michel, but when we dropped in for dinner we were badly disappointed, and sadly crossed her off the list. On another evening, Paul and I ate at our old favorite, Le Grand Véfour. We wanted to use the restaurant’s venerable sommelier, Monsieur Hénocq, for a show on “Wine and How to Keep It.” At eighty-seven, Hénocq remained graceful and charming, but he was going deaf and had taken up long-winded philosophizing. As we left, I embraced Hénocq fondly, but it was obvious that he would not translate well to television.

  Even with a dear friend, I could not allow sentiment to cloud our professional standards.

  So—what to do about our wine footage?

  Halfway up an immensely old, steep street called the Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève was a wine store owned by one Monsieur Besse. He was a jolly fellow, with a tired old flapjack of a beret, a gray smock, and a gap where his front teeth had once been. The famous caves de Monsieur Besse had been written about many times, but no one had ever tried to record them on film. And for good reason. The caves penetrated deep into the earth, each level danker and moldier than the one before, like a series of dungeons connected by narrow tunnels and rotting ladders. Dust, candle-drippings, cobwebs, and la patine des âges lay thick on everything. It was a horrible yet fascinating place to explore. Thank goodness we didn’t suffer from claustrophobia! There must have been thirty to forty thousand bottles of wine stored in those Stygian depths—although “stored” was not the right word, for there were no shelves, and his bottles were piled haphazardly into mounds on either side of the narrow tunnels up to the top of the stone arches. The jagged edges of broken bottles poked at us in the gloom. Many didn’t have labels. There was hardly room to turn around, and if one were to brush against them, the whole jiggery place might crash down.

  Paul and I speculated that Monsieur Besse was a “wine miser,” who neither drank nor sold most of his collection, but kept amassing bottles to satisfy a personal craving. The catacombs seemed to be an external symbol of some twisted aspect of the Besseian brain.

  To film inside Besse’s caves would require a small hand-held camera and battery-powered lights. At a specialty shop we rented the camera and lights, and began to load them into our little truck. When our director, David, asked the store owner for a receipt, the man handed him a business card. “No, monsieur, I need a receipt to show how much I paid,” said David.

  The owner’s cheeks flamed red and he shouted: “Must I be accused of cheating by every passerby?! If you don’t trust me, then I refuse to do business with you!” He and his wife grabbed the cameras and lights, and rushed them inside.

  “No! No!” cried Daniel, our local guide. “We’ve just paid for that. Give it back!” He brought the equipment back outside.

  “Take your filthy money!” the owner shouted. “We don’t want it!” His wife stuffed the money back into our crew’s pockets, while he grabbed his equipment, slammed the door shut, and locked it. And that was the end of that. The famous caves de Monsieur Besse remained unfilmed—by us, at least.

  By mid-June, the weather in Paris was hot and humid. We kept waiting for a crackling thunderstorm to come along and cool things off, but it just grew hotter and hotter. And now we were delving i
nto what I considered the most important part of the whole expedition: how to make French bread.

  The heat was nearly unbearable inside Poilâne’s tiny, medieval-style bakery, where we worked from 8:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. one day. We filmed every step in the bread-baking process, from the development of the levain, to sliding the round loaves into the oven on long wooden paddles, then sliding them out again, and letting the huge golden loaves cool as they gave out wonderful smells. As far as I knew, this step-by-step making of a proper French loaf had never before been filmed.

  A few days later, our great bread teacher Raymond Calvel, Professeur de Boulangerie, École Française de Meunerie, gave me a similar step-by-step lesson on making baguettes. We spent all afternoon in his teaching laboratory, while outside the sky roared with thunder and lightning and dripped heavy raindrops. Calvel kneaded, rolled, and slashed the dough. I kneaded, rolled, and slashed. It was an important, triumphant moment, the passing along of one of mankind’s oldest life-sustaining traditions, and I prayed we had captured its essence on film.

  From Paris we drove to Rouen, to film another of my favorite rituals, the making of pressed duck at La Couronne, the restaurant that would forever remind me of my first meal in France. We warned the owner, Monsieur Dorin, that once we started to shoot there would be no stopping, no matter what. He shrugged, offered to keep his staff late, and said, “I’ll stay on the job with you until tomorrow noon, if necessary.”

  In Poilâne’s bakery

  The plan was to eat dinner at the restaurant and begin filming after the last guest had left, around midnight.

  That afternoon, Peter, our cameraman, announced that he had an excruciating pain in his left leg. He admitted he’d been suffering throughout the trip, but hadn’t mentioned it. Now he was going into the hospital! We were aghast. Without him, we had no show. What to do?

  We decided to say nothing to Dorin and to keep our dinner reservation at La Couronne for nine-thirty, as planned. As we ate our way through the fascinating stages of a pressed-duck dinner, we all had our ears strained to hear the telephone. Finally, it rang. The doctors had discovered that one of Peter’s vertebrae had been displaced (probably from hoisting the heavy camera to his shoulder), which had pinched his sciatic nerve. He was given injections and pills, and was advised to find a new career.

  Temporarily free of pain, Peter leapt into action. He set up his lights and camera and moved furniture around like an athlete.

  For visual drama, we decided to set a big fire burning in the medieval fireplace, where three special Rouennaise ducks would be spitted and roasted. (Dorin served thirty ducks a day, and the spit took so long to cook them that they were mostly roasted in the kitchen.) As the heat in the fireplace rose, it turned the blades of a fanlike contraption inside the chimney; this was attached by a chain to the spit, which slowly turned the birds before the fire. Beneath the ducks was a metal trough that collected the drippings, which were scooped up and used to baste.

  By 12:30 a.m., the ducks were cooked and we began our demonstration. Dorin was wonderfully relaxed and straightforward in his presentation, as if he were a television veteran. I asked him leading questions, and he answered me in accented English as he deftly dismembered a duck. Peter shot us from many angles and distances. Willie recorded every noise, from the crackle and snap of the fire to the sizzle of the roasting duck flesh and the gush of blood and wine as the silver press crunched down on the carcass. As we finished up, the big old horloge chimed 5:00 a.m. outside. The eastern sky was brightening. Cocks began to crow. A light breeze cooled our sweaty, flushed faces. We all felt elated, for we knew we had just shot one of our most successful sequences ever.

  After a snooze, Paul, Ruthie, and I drove to the town of Thury-Harcourt, near Caen, where we’d film “All About Tripe” at a restaurant that specialized in that interesting dish. From there, we’d continue on to an ancient abbey in Aulnay, where we’d shoot a bit on Camembert cheese, and conclude with a party in Caen. And then our French Chef expedition to France would be complete.

  When we arrived in Thury-Harcourt, we were given a message: “Call the Hôtel de la Grande Horloge in Rouen ASAP.” Wondering what we’d left behind, we dialed the number. David, our director, answered: “Peter has had a relapse and he can’t go on. The pills and shots aren’t working on his back. Daniel is driving him to Paris right now. He’ll fly home to Amsterdam and go straight into the hospital.”

  Pouf! That was it. No tripe. No Camembert. No party in Caen.

  Within minutes, the French Chef team scattered this way and that. Paul and I, meanwhile, felt like a couple of parrots who had just been let out of their cage: “Now what?”

  II. CONTRETEMPS

  I FOUND IT NEARLY impossible to write the introduction to Volume II amid the TV hubbub, and when McCall’s magazine asked if they could photograph Simca and me cooking together, I had said “No.” I simply didn’t have the time or energy.

  Nevertheless, while we’d been off shooting our documentaries, a team from McCall’s gathered at La Pitchoune. The magazine hired a French woman food writer to oversee the making of dishes from Volume II, and had contracted Arnold Newman to photograph them. I met the woman at Simca’s apartment in Paris. She was charming, but I stood firm: “I am finished working on the book. My time and energies are now devoted entirely to television. I will NOT cook anything for McCall’s. Furthermore, my husband has already taken hundreds of perfectly good photographs of Simca and me, and I see no point in taking any more.”

  It was not an uncomplicated situation. Knopf wanted to generate publicity to sell our book, naturally, and McCall’s was offering a cover story, which would give us a big push. I felt very loyal to our publisher, and to Simca. But I was tuckered out. And so was Paul, who was annoyed that his excellent work had been passed over for reasons we could only guess at. (For one thing, there had been a massive reshuffle of the McCall’s staff, and the editors who had hired Paul no longer worked there.)

  “Why don’t we avoid La Peetch altogether, and spend the next two weeks driving slowly through the Massif Central?” he suggested.

  “I am not going to be put out of my own house by a bunch of magazine people!” I snapped.

  We drove slowly along back roads toward the coast.

  IT WAS SUNDAY at La Pitchoune. Our rental-car keys were missing, and we were supposed to take Simca and Jean to the Cannes train station. I was worried about Simca—she had just visited her doctor for the first time in eight years, only to learn that she had heart-valve trouble and was losing her hearing. The doctor had advised her to change her life-style “completely.” This was hard to imagine. But my usually vigorous friend was noticeably despondent and diminished. Meanwhile, our little house was covered with cables, boxes, reflectors, and other photographic paraphernalia (somewhere in the midst of which, I just knew, were our car keys). Arnold Newman and a gang of McCall’s people were crowded into the living room, thinking they had finally coerced me into posing for yet another cover-photo shoot.

  “No!” I said.

  Paul eyed Patrick O’Higgins, one of the magazine’s editors, and reminded him: “Julia has been very clear about this from the start.”

  With a loud wail, Simca burst into tears. Glancing at me with a hurt expression, she exclaimed: “I had my whole heart set on this picture of you and me together on the cover of the magazine—and now you say no more photos! How can you treat me like that?!”

  I was speechless. This was the first time in twenty years of collaboration that she had said anything like that. Perhaps the outburst was an emotional reaction to her heart and hearing troubles. Whatever her reasons, I was caught in an impossible situation. I fumed for several minutes, but finally relented. For the rest of the afternoon, Simca and I stood and sat in various poses while Newman snapped off 175 traditional look-at-the-camera portraits.

  The next day, salty old Jeanne Villa took Patrick O’Higgins to the Marché aux Fleurs in Grasse and bought a car-full of flowers and vegetabl
es. These were to decorate the dining room at Rancurel’s restaurant, across the river. The idea was to create a hearty, country “fête champêtre” as background for dishes from Volume II that Rancurel and Boussageon would cook and Arnold Newman would photograph. For atmosphere, they invited a dozen local people to partake of the meal. Jeanne and Laurent made one “couple,” and they were joined by Cantan the contractor, Lerda the carpenter, Ceranta the electrician, their wives, plus a few others. Everyone got tight, screamed with laughter, told dirty jokes, ate huge amounts of food, and sang loudly. The kids from the kitchen sneaked in and poked their fingers into the whipped cream on top of the cake.

  III. MOVIE NIGHT

  MASTERING THE ART OF FRENCH COOKING, Volume II, was published on October 22, 1970, nine years after Volume I. Knopf had decided on a first printing of a hundred thousand copies, and Simca and I did a quick publicity tour across the country. About two weeks after the book launch, our colorful new French Chef TV series began broadcasting—featuring the documentary footage we’d shot in France—on PBS stations across the country. The first show was on bouillabaisse, and the reviews were mostly favorable. What a terrific way to launch our book!

  The first inkling of trouble arrived one evening in January 1971, when Judith Jones went to a dinner party in Manhattan. She happened to be seated next to a doctor from Mount Sinai Hospital, who mentioned that he was part of a team researching the possibility that asbestos was a carcinogen. A little bell went off in the back of Judith’s mind. “Asbestos . . . Hmm . . . Julia recommends using a piece of asbestos cement to create a bread-baking surface in her simulated baker’s oven in Volume II!”