by Bob Spitz
Julia and Paul wasted no time in bringing down the curtain.
They had disappeared the last morning of their visit to Maine, leaving the cabin just after breakfast with instructions that they’d return in time for lunch. Paul never missed a chance to walk the rock-ribbed ledges that framed the beach below the point. “He loved to go out and look at the view,” Rachel recalled. With Julia, he would sit on a craggy bluff sketching the spectacular Acadian landscape where glaciers had gouged freshwater troughs from breaches in the soft sea banks. In the distance, they could see the village of Blueville, sparsely settled like an undiscovered continent, where, before the war, Charlie had apprenticed for a professor from Harvard. Since then, little had changed. Nature had cast its sentimental spell on the cove, leaving it protected from the tourists who would invade in due time. An ever-present platoon of gulls stood sentry on the tide-lashed rocks, occasionally breaking rank to plunge for fish, while, above, almost motionless against the breeze, terns floated like delicate kites. It was tailor-made for inspiration, the perfect place to reflect and contemplate the future.
Julia completely shared Paul’s attachment to this rugged sanctuary. Yet, it was enough that they had finally come to a lovely place in two lives that only a year before had seemed nothing but barren and desperate. “The war had opened them up amazingly,” Erica says. “Now they were giving each other an inner worth.”
That day it must have all made sense to them. The years of restlessness, frustration, longing, and discontent—“the pursuit of the perfect,” as Matthew Arnold had alliterated it—became a blur they were leaving behind.
Over lunch, they waited for a lull in the conversation. Finally, Paul raised a glass and gazed meaningfully at Julia. “We’re going to get married—and right away,” he announced.
A joyous outcry resounded from the family.
Freddie Child waited until the congratulations died down. She clapped her hands in delight and leaned halfway across the table. “Well,” she said, “we thought you’d never come out with it!”
PAUL WASN’T KIDDING when he promised a wedding right away. With little time left on their hiatus from real work and real life, he and Julia set the date—September 1, 1946—less than a month off, and plenty of arrangements still to be made. The only definite detail was the place: the garden of Charlie and Freddie’s house, nicknamed Coppernose, in Lumberville, Pennsylvania, where Paul had his own room in an upstairs alcove. Aside from the cottage he’d shared with Edith, in Cambridge, it was the only place he’d ever called home. Julia was all for it, although the logistics created a sticky family problem. Her father believed it was his duty to make the wedding—in Pasadena, of course, on his turf, at the country club where he was chief. He had already taken the first steps in that direction, drawing up a guest list of prominent friends.
Paul was understandably opposed. Pasadena—and Julia’s father—stood for everything he despised. What’s more, the old man had made clear his distaste for Paul Child—the artist, the intellectual, the French food lover, the liberal. From the beginning, John McWilliams disapproved of the marriage. He believed that Julia could have done better by marrying that Los Angeles Times heir, whose politics were more in line with his own. As late as February 1946, Julia had again refused Harrison Chandler, making it clear that this was the last time he should ask. That certainly didn’t endear her to Pop. The thought of sharing his daughter with Paul was bad enough; taking the wedding out of his hands, however, was the coup de grâce. It was an unprecedented act of disrespect—and of independence, another unsavory trait in his book. According to Dort, it “got Julia and Paul off on the wrong foot with Pop,” but it wouldn’t be the last time they stepped on each other’s toes.
The wedding was going to be an intimate event: the immediate families and a small selection of friends. Julia’s family promised to attend. Pop and Phila were flying in from California, Dort was driving from New York, and John Jr. and his wife, Jo, were coming from Massachusetts. Paul’s relatives, aside from Charlie, were conspicuously absent. His mother, Bertha, had died during the war, and Meeda, who grappled with alcoholism, was off somewhere, “gallivanting around Europe, engaged in a string of liaisons with men.” Aside from Charlie and Freddie, a group of Paul’s extended family and friends from his Paris and Connecticut days rounded out his side.
At last, everything was set. The only remaining detail was securing the marriage license, which Julia and Paul had left until the last minute. On Friday, August 30, two days before the ceremony, they drove to the Doylestown town hall to fill out the requisite papers. Unbeknown to either of them, Pennsylvania law required that they take a blood test, which was fine, except that the results wouldn’t be available for five to seven days. No matter how Paul argued, the registrar wouldn’t budge: the law was the law. There was no way they could be married on Sunday, as planned.
What were they going to tell everyone? Guests had already started arriving from points far off, with schedules requiring they be back at work on Monday. Pop, of course, would think them both complete idiots. What a way to start their lives together.
In desperation, they enlisted Charlie and Freddie to help solve the problem. A few high-placed friends were called to no avail. An even better scheme was proposed: have the ceremony anyway, with a blank license, which would be signed a few days later when the test results were back; the plan seemed feasible, but the justice of the peace refused. Finally, Charlie realized they were only two miles from New Jersey, where blood, at least in terms of marriage, didn’t seem to be an issue. Their friends the Seymours lived in Stockton, just across the Delaware River. If they were amenable, it would make sense to have the ceremony there, on the Jersey side, and the reception back in Lumberville.
Everyone was satisfied with the new arrangement. So on Saturday afternoon, with everything apparently settled, Julia and Paul left Lumberville, headed for New York City, where her father was throwing them a rehearsal dinner at the posh River Club. It was a beautiful day. The drive wouldn’t take long—two hours tops, once they hit the main highway. A few miles out of town they came to an intersection where the road collapsed into a three-lane affair. As they slowed to accommodate the shift, Paul glanced in the rearview mirror and saw a huge truck coming up from behind, moving fast—way too fast. It was barreling straight toward them. There was no way to know its brakes had failed, nowhere to go on that cramped, unshouldered road. Paul jerked the steering wheel, trying to swerve out of its path, but—too late. The truck slammed into them on the driver’s side, crushing the car into an accordion fold. This was long before the days of seat belts, so the car was a chamber of bodies in motion. Paul was flung forward into the steering wheel. The last thing Julia remembered was that she “hit the windshield and was thrown out the door.” Fortunately, her outstretched arms broke the fall, protecting her from a more serious head injury. Still, “I was knocked out and covered in blood,” she recalled afterward.
A couple passing by scooped up Julia and Paul and rushed them to the nearest hospital. An X‑ray revealed Paul had no broken ribs, but Julia was in more serious shape. Shards of glass were painstakingly removed from her arms. Lacerations streaked one side of her face and her head required a Frankenstein track of stitches. They were a mess, but “lucky to be alive.” Paul needed a cane to walk; the bride wore white—white bandages, white sling. It seemed a perfectly reasonable decision to postpone the wedding.
Julia, however, wouldn’t hear of it. A few wounds weren’t about to stop her from marrying Paul Child. Promptly at noon the next day, under a gorgeous sunny sky, about two dozen guests gathered at the home of Whitney North Seymour,1 in a lushly planted garden at the back of the house. It was a conspicuously casual affair—no formal attire, no bridesmaids, no processional of any kind. Julia simply appeared on Paul’s arm, looking “exuberant,” according to a guest. She was dressed stylishly, in a brown-and-white polka dot pinch-waisted suit, with high heels that exaggerated her long, long legs. Aside from the bandage
pasted to the left side of her forehead, no one would have known how close to a tragic end she’d come.
Jon Child, who held his mother’s hand during the brief ceremony, recalled glancing around at the “insanely tall” crowd. The Seymours were tall people to begin with, but nothing compared to the McWilliamses. He gawked at Dort and John Jr., who were standing behind their sister. “Julia was tall,” Jon says, “but these people were tall, really tall.” John Jr., who was six foot four, stooped slightly as a result of a war wound he received in France. But Dort, at six foot five, seemed “gigantic” to a six-year-old. Paul, by comparison, appeared almost comically out of place. He was barely five foot nine and leaning on a cane, but this happened to be his lofty day. Julia McWilliams was becoming Julia Child, and from the look on his face he might have been seven feet tall.
* * *
1 Seymour was solicitor general from 1931 to 1933 and later the U.S. attorney in the Nixon administration, a post that no doubt would have pleased Julia’s father.
Menu from La Couronne: that lunch in Rouen, November 3, 1948
Nine
Devouring Paris Whole
She smelled it before she saw it. For an instant, there was sweetness of a kind she had never experienced before—butter perhaps, but more full-bodied, like a butter bomb, with a smoky, scorched tang. An instant later, the sea—probably a briny fish fumé with a splash of white wine. Wait! A faint lemony whiff drifting by … now gone. The ensemble of smells was impossible to contain. Seconds later, a waiter set a large oval platter on the table, and all the aromas shot off like Chinese fireworks. But the scents refused to sync with the sight. The presentation was ridiculously simple: a fish on a plate, with a sprinkling of parsley. From the sides, tipped inward at an angle, a stream of molten gold pooled around the fish. Otherwise, there was nothing unusual about it, nothing to suggest the explosion of smells. She leaned over and inhaled with conviction. A delirious rush of pleasure filled her lungs. Wave upon wave: the aromas began to overlap and coalesce. The butter brought a richness to the fresh saltwater fish. By adding some wine to the sauce, the richness took on a honeyed brightness. Each ingredient influencing the aggregate.
Julia stared at it for a minute or two. Something undecipherable was churning inside of her. But what? With more than a trace of impatience, she picked up a fork.
A meal was about to change Julia Child’s life.
IN THE YEARS before World War II, when travel to Europe was still at a premium for most Americans, French food existed as an idealization, courtesy of Hollywood. In many a bistro re-created on the MGM or Paramount lots, a stiff-backed man with a beret and phony French accent would serve snails or frogs legs or crêpes to snooty assembly-line Gauls, who ogled their plates with a couple of ooh-la-las. Tourists, like Julia’s father, who actually dined in an authentic Parisian restaurant, often fumbled over menus that offered nothing familiar. They told of nightmarish experiences, trying to order something French. “Duck ah-rahnge. Duck! Duh-uck! You know: quack-quack! Don’t you understand French?”
Julia Child’s lunch on November 3, 1948, was not the typical experience of a clueless American tourist. There was no need for her to stare squint-eyed at the litany of incomprehensible entrées on the menu: Pigeonneau Cocotte Forestière, Ris de Veau Clamart, Ecrevisses Bordelaise, Canetons à la Houennaise ou Lapérouse le demi. Paul, who “spoke [French] beautifully,” according to Julia, perused the offerings with an accomplished ease. There were so many wonderful selections to choose from, he assured her. It was his first visit to France in eighteen years, and the prospect of eating such well-prepared food again, after all that time in the culinary desert, filled him with anticipation and joy. He had been extolling the delights of French food to Julia since they’d met, in Ceylon. In lovingly minute detail, he’d described meals he’d shared with Edith or Charlie or his mother or friends, recalling each dish as if it were a work of art. Julia had never met anyone who held food in such esteem. It seemed almost “absurd” the way he went on and on, but Paul’s exuberance, his impassioned reminiscence, was impossible to dismiss. There was something beguiling yet elusive about his attitude toward food that she wanted to grasp. “The French dining experience,” as he called it, had intrigued her no end. Now, the long-awaited moment was finally upon them.
La belle France! Paul talked about it day and night—its abundant charms, the urge to return there—but earlier that year, in 1948, it seemed ever more a pipe dream. In the two years since their marriage, Julia and Paul had lived in Washington, D.C., where they were more or less wards of the government apparatus. The war had shielded them from the rising tide of anxiety that both of their lives were stalled in midstream. At thirty-five, Julia had nothing solid to fall back on, nothing to occupy her febrile mind. Her war experience, to say nothing of Paul, had opened her up to a world of new ideas that lit her from within. But—what to do about it? She had a burning ambition to do something useful, something important, but none of the training a meaningful job required. File clerks, however, were in great demand. The State Department was scooping up college-educated women for all kinds of administrative work. An intelligence agency gladly would have hired Julia to run its equivalent of the Registry. But she’d put her foot down: no more secretarial work. “There were days in the Registry when I thought I’d just scream,” she recalled, describing the monotony of it as “the same damn thing, over and over, over and over.” Nothing short of desperation could entice her back to that. And Julia wasn’t desperate, not by any stretch of the imagination. Paul had a desk job with the State Department that paid a decent wage, and there was the inheritance from her mother that subsidized them very nicely.
In the meantime, she was content with being Mrs. Paul Child. There was plenty of busywork to occupy her time, setting up house and entertaining new friends. With the help of Charlie Child, who also worked at State in the Division of Cultural Affairs, they found a quaint nineteenth-century house of eight rooms in need of considerable repair on Wisconsin Avenue, in Georgetown. Paul and Charlie did a quick renovation, while Julia filled the rooms with their ragtag belongings, a combined eighty years of accumulated stuff: her clothes and books, Paul’s cameras and paints, along with thousands of his photographs. “It was a lovely little place, just big enough for a couple,” Julia recalled. “The rooms were small, but cozy. There was a fireplace in the parlor that we always used.” The kitchen wasn’t much, considering Julia’s lack of cooking skills, but she made the most of it, putting up a pegboard to hold the pots and pans and “25 cookbooks on the shelf over the stove.”
At Paul’s prompting, Julia endeavored to prepare their dinners, but despite her considerable efforts, most nights were a struggle. “I was not much of a cook when we first married,” she told a previous biographer. Her daily menus were culled from a miscellany of sources—women’s magazines such as Family Circle and Ladies’ Home Journal, as well as from Gourmet and Joy of Cooking, the most essential cookbook of its day. Even with these aids, however, Julia was in over her head. “I was doing fancy things,” she recalled, trying to please Paul’s refined palate. The elaborate recipes would take her all day to prepare and even then they never turned out anything like their scrumptious descriptions. The work involved was well beyond her means. “We would not eat dinner until around ten [o’clock] because it took me so long to cook.”
Julia was better off when she kept her menu simple. Still, there was no guarantee things would turn out as planned. Her attempt to make broiled chicken was a complete disaster. At first glance, the recipe seemed idiot-proof: put the chicken in the oven, turn on the broiler, and—presto—broiled chicken. But, as it happened, the directions were inexact. “I put it in the oven for twenty minutes, went out, came back, and it was burned.” Another convoluted recipe, this time for beef heart, prepared for a dinner party, took an early detour from the stove straight to the trash.
Paul reassured Julia that her cooking would improve, but all evidence weighed against a speedy turnaround.
“I was hopeless,” she recalled many years later. “Nothing I did seemed right. The kitchen was a place I truly enjoyed being, but I was convinced I had no talent for making food that tasted good.”
For the rest of the year, Julia worked with her sister-in-law Freddie at her house a few blocks away on Thirty-fifth Street, where she was given daily tutorials, developing her cooking skills in exchange for her abundant good company. Starting with the basics, like chopping and marinating, then gravitating ever so gingerly into the province of uncomplicated sauces, they would prepare a dish using only several essential steps. Simplicity and taste proved remarkable bedfellows; there was no need to embellish a straightforward recipe. If the sauce was too thin or weakly underseasoned, Freddie taught Julia how to correct it without fuss. When bits of meat or fish stuck to a pan, the magic of deglazing was demonstrated, rescuing the dish with a little stock or wine. For the most part, they worked without recipes. Freddie cooked instinctively, from feel, just a sense of the finished product on the plate. After Julia’s frightful encounters with challenging—bewildering—recipes, she must have thrilled at the relative ease of the cook’s craft, at the satisfaction of throwing a few fresh ingredients into a pan and just cooking.
The highest good in cooking, the French food critic Curnonsky argued, was above all simplicity—“the simplicity of art, the purity and the spontaneity of the effect justifying any means.” But while Freddie Child could prepare a meal relying on the “purity” and “spontaneity” of her imagination, projecting from the outset how it would eventually turn out, Julia’s process was still wildly chaotic. Recipes demanded too much of her. The various steps came at her too quickly, the ingredients never seemed to do what she expected, the results were unlike those promised by pictures in the magazines. Often, a dish she was preparing would transform in the pot from whisk to whisk, altering its consistency as a result of nothing but heat and sometimes falling apart altogether, forcing Julia to start over, from scratch. A college friend, who visited at the Georgetown house, remembers Julia’s frustration. “She made a chowder with cod that had dissolved into mush. The fish just disintegrated from overstirring and overcooking. It was obvious she didn’t know what she was doing.” Although Julia had incited any number of ugly kitchen upheavals that year, she wasn’t about to admit defeat. Granted, her mechanics were clumsy, her creative instincts more suited to filing than filleting. Any “purity” and “spontaneity” were still lightyears away. But the challenge was ordained. Confidence, Freddie assured her, would develop in time. She wasn’t yet comfortable with cooking, but she was excited by it.