by Bob Spitz
To celebrate, Julia decided to take a few days off and accompany Paul to a government conference in Paris. It had been a few months since her last visit there, and she longed to spend some face time in a kitchen with Simca and Louisette. Despite her fondness for Marseille, Paris enchanted her. “Paris is heavenly,” she wrote to Avis from her hotel on the Left Bank. “Such fun to wander around it again.” She had never found any place more suitable to her tastes. “Every thing about it satisfies everything in me.” Old friends came out of the crumbling woodwork to see her. Louisette entertained; a gala dinner included Julia’s old Cordon Bleu chefs, Max Bugnard and Claude Thilmont. Not even the weather, a raw, rainy spring, could dampen such pleasure.
It took more than weather to douse Julia’s spirit.
The look on Paul’s face was the first sign that something was wrong. He’d gone to see Charlie Moffly, his old liaison officer at the USIS, about some summer home leave for him and Julia. It had been a while, almost three years, since they’d been back to the States for Dort’s wedding. Julia wanted to see her father, who was struggling with the impediments of old age, and her sister, who had had two children. If possible, they planned to build in time to finally meet Avis in person at her home in Cambridge, then head up to Lopaus for a rest on the beach with Charlie and Freddie. Moffly approved the home leave without blinking, but intimated they wouldn’t be coming back to Marseille. Most likely, Paul would be transferred, by the summer at the latest. Nothing was certain yet, but “the likelihood,” he said, “is that you will be transferred to Germany.”
Oh no, not Germany, Paul thought. It hasn’t been ten years since that savage war, since Hitler.
“Or an opening may exist in the Middle East.”
Could it get any worse than that? Why? Paul wanted to know. What had he done to deserve such a posting?
A letter arrived shortly that laid it all out. “It has been the fixed policy of the Agency,” it read, “to rotate the assignment of personnel after they have served more than four years in a given country.” Paul had been in France for almost six years. It was time to pack up and move somewhere else.
“God damn it,” Paul groused, “we just aren’t ready to move again.” Especially to Germany, with “its conquered-country neuroses,” where he couldn’t begin to speak, let alone fathom, the language. One thing was certain: “This is hard—hellishly hard—on Julia’s bookery. Every time she just gets settled-in, establishes a time schedule, gets her pots and knives and spoons hanging: Wham!” They were back on the road.
Julia found it difficult to conceal her dismay. She was “just sick” about the prospects of a move, leaving Marseille—leaving France. “To think of living in Germany,” she wrote to the gang back home. “Will I ever get over the imagined smell of the gas chambers and the rotting bodies of the concentration camps?” It wasn’t likely. But, she admitted, “this is Paul’s career, and if he wants to stay in it, we’ve just got to resign ourselves to abrupt changes.”
She was also anguishing over the specter of McCarthyism. For the past year, it had dominated the American headlines, with nauseating tales of respectable citizens hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee and accused of being Communists. It was a witch-hunt designed to ruin anyone whose values were different than McCarthy’s—which is to say, arch-conservatism of the blackest stripe. Writers, artists, teachers, intellectuals, liberals were all prime targets of his smear campaign. Lately, he’d been rooting through the State Department, which he was sure was in the grip of Communists incognito. He’d already sent two notorious hatchet men, Roy Cohn and David Schine, barnstorming through Europe, to purge libraries of the USIS of books written by authors they deemed Reds. The diplomatic corps was riddled with them, they maintained. They’d ransacked Paul’s office in Paris just weeks after he’d moved to Marseille, and Avis had cautioned Julia that the situation was uglier and more toxic than she realized.
“I must warn you to be careful about what you say about McCarthy,” she wrote. “Paul has a job. And he could lose it. You two are particularly vulnerable because you are connected with State, so for heaven’s sake, watch your step.”
Lately, there was more than good reason for concern. McCarthy had begun to televise the so-called hearings, making entertainment out of what were really public lynchings. Many of those who lost their jobs had served with Julia and Paul in China during the war. “I feel, actually, that at any moment we may be accused of being Communists and traitors,” she wrote to Dort in March 1954. Even her father had turned against them. “My dear old Pop … feels we are supporting the Communist line,” she lamented.
Visiting him was always a delicate affair. They stayed eight days in Pasadena, but they were far from enjoyable, with the old man on the warpath, gunning for fascists and Reds. Having Julia and Paul in his home was an affront to decency. To him, they were “nasty foreigners, intellectual eggheads, who have always caused all the trouble.” It was consorting with the enemy. What a relief it was when they finally left.
By contrast, meeting Avis felt like a breath of fresh air. The two women had forged a close, improbable bond. They had been corresponding for almost two years, building a friendship that seemed extraordinary for all its drawbacks. They had never met, lived continents apart, needed to make extra effort to write to stay in touch, depended on each other’s good judgment not to misinterpret any number of strong opinions, endured long intervals between letters. And, yet, with each new letter, each new opus (some ran ten to twelve pages in length), the friendship became stronger, more intimate, more essential to their welfare. Food and cooking formed the heart of their interplay, but by 1954 their letters were like therapy, almost confessional and unburdening.
Avis lived with a difficult man. Bernard DeVoto was a dazzling intellectual, well read and read well by others, with an enormous scope of attitudes and opinions—and an ego to match. His blustery nature was notoriously tyrannical: DeVoto the Magnificent, DeVoto the Impaler. “He is a man of violent dislikes,” Avis warned, “he does not suffer fools gladly.” Those who were not well acquainted kept their distance. “If there is such a disease as infectious high blood pressure, he had it and communicated it,” wrote his biographer, Wallace Stegner. “He had Avis lying awake at nights” as she absorbed his atomic intensity, even while at rest. She always referred to her husband impersonally, as DeVoto—a nod to his force, and perhaps as a shield from it.
It would be fair to say that Julia, too, lived with a difficult man. Paul wasn’t a tyrant or high-strung, like Avis’s husband, but he was every bit as opinionated and aware of his effect. “He was quite intimidating,” says his niece, Phila, “and demanded your respect. If he didn’t agree with you, he’d let you know about it, pronto.” And he was compulsive: compulsively neat, compulsively fastidious, compulsively precise, especially about language. He was forever educating Julia, correcting her. Plus, he had phobias—about his bowels, about illnesses—and mood swings; he was “chronically depressed.”
The women shared the innermost details about their lives, confiding in each other, as sisters might do. Pen pals. Perfect strangers, except on paper. And now that was about to change.
Julia and Paul were determined to stop in Cambridge on their way to or from Maine. Still, they didn’t want to impose. “I got a letter from Julia asking if they could come and stay with us as cook-butler or as paying guests,” Avis recalled.
Benny DeVoto was finishing a manuscript and dead set against an invasion by total strangers. “I don’t want to meet those people,” he grumbled to Avis.
“Well, all right,” she said, “[but] this time we’re going to.”
Julia was so excited to finally meet her pen pal—and more than a little anxious. There was so much riding on their relationship. She’d invested so much of herself in it, something Julia rarely did. What if they met and it just didn’t click? What if Avis was prickly in person, or absentminded—or unnaturally short? Until now, they’d only exchanged pictures. “I f
eel that we do not have the definitive Avis here,” Julia said, gazing at the photo her pen pal had sent. “You are dark, anyway. That is a wonderful worldly expression you have on.” To hedge against an adverse reaction, Julia felt it necessary to describe herself in advance of sending a return photo. “Julia: 6 ft. plus, weight 150 to 160. Bosom not as copious as she would wish, but has noticed that Botticelli bosoms are not big either. Legs OK, according to husband. Freckles.” Even so, Avis was unprepared for the Amazon smiling back at her. “I am rather astonished that you are such a big girl. Six feet, whoops,” she responded.
The combination of photos sharpened Avis’s perceptions. Big women cast big shadows, she thought—the better to make an impression with the public. In any case, Avis was on tenterhooks to meet Julia. “Hurry, hurry,” she pressed her friend.
Since arriving in the East, Paul and Julia had been “hopping about,” visiting friends and family wherever possible. They were amazed at how much had changed since they’d left the States. “Everything seems bigger, shinier, faster, and I barely recognize anything I used to know,” Julia said. American food, they discovered, was completely unmemorable, especially when compared to French cuisine. Nothing they’d eaten had whetted their appetites, aside from a Nathan’s foot-long slathered with sauerkraut that Julia devoured with great gusto.
The day the Childs finally hit Cambridge, July 11, 1954, Avis and Benny DeVoto were otherwise engaged. “We were having a Sunday cocktail party,” Avis recalled, “and a large station wagon drove up, loaded to the roof with pots and pans and equipment of all kinds.” To the ever-so-genteel Cantabrigians, it looked like the Joad family had come a-callin’. “There were seven or eight people sitting around [our place] drinking martinis, and Benny wasn’t very happy about strangers.” He sulked like a discontented boy, while Avis and Julia fell into each other’s arms.
At last! They were no longer “words on paper,” but flesh and blood, “perfectly familiar.” It was, as Avis put it, “love at first sight.” The women hit it off like long-lost friends. For five or eight days, they were perfectly in sync, inseparable. Together they scoured the local supermarkets, whose overstocked aisles fascinated Julia. They pored over the manuscript. “And Julia took over the kitchen immediately,” making garden-fresh soups and skinning fresh halibut—“all very dramatic,” Avis recalled. Even Benny DeVoto was charmed. Avis was particularly struck by “his whole-hearted acceptance of the Childs.” It was a blessing, she reflected. “What could be sweeter?”
In the many hours they had spent together, Avis became more than a pen pal. She was the first to understand the potential of Julia’s cookbook, the first to express, distinctly and unconditionally, that it just might change the way Americans ate—and lived. It was hard for most people to appreciate the importance of Julia’s work—it was so different from what anyone else was doing at the time. But Avis could appreciate it. “My mother was the catalyst,” says Mark DeVoto. “She was the person who lit the fuse.”
It was Avis who’d fired up the interest at Houghton Mifflin, Avis who promoted Julia, Avis who believed the book would be taken seriously. Avis had taken Julia under her wing to the point of introducing her to Benny’s coveted magazine editors in New York—“for later, after you’re famous,” she said. “I have never known anyone so selfless and so generous,” Julia exclaimed. She felt a surge of confidence from Avis’s friendship, felt its impact “with an all-embracing bang.” Until now, it had been the one thing sorely missing in her life. She had many close acquaintances, but no one great intimate friend. She had found Paul, the intimate love of her life. And now Avis, the intimate female friend—the kind of person you could rely on in any circumstance, who gives you unquestioning support through difficult times. A person to talk over thorny situations and to help you decide which path to take. An outlet for humor, to help let the steam out when there was pressure. Before working on the book, Julia had never in her life taken on an all-consuming task that stretched her abilities to the limit. Having a friend like Avis made the task so much more manageable.
IF ONLY AVIS could do something about Germany. Julia and Paul dreaded the move. Leaving France was “painful” to them both. “We accept the concept intellectually,” Paul wrote to his brother, “but I expect the emotional aspects will hit us more … when we hear chimes at midnight or taste a Pouilly fumé or hear somewhere a snatch of that lowbrow tonk-a-tonk music that’s so typically French.”
No question about it, all those years in France had left their mark. It had become a part of them, a measure of who they were now. Julia had “grown up” there, discovered her passion, spoke the language fluently, dreamed in French. She was writing French Home Cooking, for god’s sake. How would that function from an outpost in Germany?
They flirted with bagging the Foreign Service altogether, taking early retirement and staying in Paris. Julia could finish work on the book with Simca and Louisette, she could resurrect her cooking school, and Paul could embark on a new career. Even at fifty-three, there were other things he could do. Something more exciting, something with photography, perhaps, his lifelong passion. Magazines were always looking for someone with his eye. While in the States, he’d seen Benny DeVoto’s literary agent, who had set him up with photo editors at Esquire and Holiday. All he had to do was pitch a story idea and the job would be his, easy as that. But that took the kind of initiative Paul didn’t have. He needed structure, guidelines, a steady paycheck—a support system. The Foreign Service had those in spades. In the end, the answer was a foregone conclusion: “We’d stick with the government,” Julia said, “and see where it took us.”
Fourteen
This Elephant of Ours
Gawd, how did we ever get ourselves into this pickle?”
On October 24, 1954, Julia and Paul arrived in the district of Plittersdorf, on the fringes of Bonn, and immediately sized up the situation. It wasn’t much to look at, that was for sure. The American Sector was nothing more than “a great big housing project”—a cluster of boxy white stucco low-rises, with garish red trim and brown tile roofs, from which radio antennas protruded like antlers—built to order and surrounded by sterile German housing projects on a plain near the Rhine, as if Oceania had been set down in Hansel-and-Gretel country.
“Our hearts sunk at the sight of it,” Julia explained. She expected a slice of Germany that would enlarge her view of Europe, where she could wrap herself in the country’s cultural fabric, as she had done so luxuriously in France. But Plittersdorf was more polyester than cashmere. It had been rebuilt quickly after the war with Marshall Plan money, so the architects naturally created it in their image. There were pizza parlors, movie theaters, a five-and-dime, and colonial-style churches. Because no frame houses were available, American personnel were quartered in dormitory-style apartments—cubicles so dark and charmless that lights were left on day and night, giving it the timeless effect of a Las Vegas casino. Perhaps worst of all, everyone stationed there was American—make that: American military, a species somewhat alien to the Childs. These weren’t OSS operatives, with college degrees and intellects to match. There were over 250,000 U.S. soldiers in Germany, most of them meat-and-potatoes GIs, thick and plodding, who preferred cases of thin, pale Budweiser from the PX to the exquisite nectar-like Lederbräu on tap at every pub. Who would Paul talk with about art or semantics or fine wine or Boswell’s years in Holland? Or even about Germany, which those stationed there knew nothing about. It infuriated Julia that the Americans in “sad old Plittersdorf” practiced a kind of post-war isolationism; they were obtuse, the quintessential Ugly Americans, confining themselves to the Sector and insisting on speaking English to the natives, while acting disdainful of the culture. Most people she encountered “just hate the Germans.” It embarrassed her to be a part of such a scene.
In the kitchen at Roo de Loo, Paris, 1950 (Photo credit 14.1)
“We feel as though we are on the moon, somehow,” she wrote to Avis DeVoto. The atmosphere was unnatural,
un-foreign; there was nothing authentic about it, nothing to embrace. “I feel too weird and uprooted.”
Determined to improve the situation in any small way possible, Julia made an effort to study German, taking lessons at a university in Bad Godesberg. She felt that in order “to function at all properly as a cuisinière, I must absolutely learn the language.” As in France, she practiced it by frequenting local markets, relying on her phrasebook and ingratiating personality to get by. There was nothing instinctive or beautiful about the way she spoke; she mangled those consonants as if they’d been put through a meat grinder. But she charmed the Germans, who were eager to help.
The Germans, as a tribe, actually exceeded her expectations. They seemed to be decent, upstanding, law-abiding people, much like the proud bourgeois she encountered in France; not the “half-savage” Krauts who had worshipped Hitler and brutalized the free world. The whole thing flummoxed her. “How can Germans, who are, as I know, monstrous people, be lovely people? Or are they not monsters?” She admired how they were struggling to emerge from the wreckage of war. Julia seemed especially susceptible to their upward surge. “They are building like mad, so things don’t seem to have been devastated somehow,” she wrote. “One’s impression is of immense vitality, vigor, bustling activity, prosperity.”
Too bad some of that “great surge of creativity” hadn’t rubbed off on new construction. The only housing available to Julia and Paul was, well, jerry-built—bland pre-fab apartments, “very much like a Statler hotel,” as Julia described them. You couldn’t tell one from the next, aside from the wood finishes inside: either blond or mahogany. No charm or character whatsoever on the premises. Otherwise everything operated with German efficiency (Julia called it “rigidity”). They chose a flat, Apartment 5, on Steubenring, from which they could just about make out the Rhine, if they stood on their tiptoes and squinted. It was one of the blond models, brand-spanking new: new heating, new plumbing, new-apartment smell throughout. Only the kitchen drew Julia’s disfavor. “Not much room to cook much here,” she complained. And the stove was electric—a word Julia uttered in the same way she said Republican.