Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child

by Bob Spitz

  ALMOST SIMULTANEOUSLY OTHER news arrived that elicited a weaker and halfhearted hooray. On January 15, his fifty-first birthday, Paul’s new orders finally came through: he was being made a Public Affairs Officer, given charge of all southern France—from the Italian border to the Pyrenees—requiring an immediate move to Marseille. It was a huge step up as far as promotions go—and a huge step down in regard to locales. Nothing beat Paris as a foreign posting. Sure, as Paul noted, “it might have been Reykjavik or Addis Abbaba,” but measured against Paris, Marseille was Dubuque.

  Marseille. A move south threatened to undo all the blessings of the last few months. Still, Julia put the best face on the news. She “knew Paris could not last forever,” knew, after four years in paradise, they’d “been living on borrowed time.” But—Marseille. It was another France entirely, the other end of the country, where they spoke a dialect of French that sounded like Uzbek. An eight-hour drive from Simca and Louisette, from a restaurant scene that never failed to amaze, from haute couture on every street corner. At least they’d still be in France, Julia recognized, on the Mediterranean, no less. And it would “mean a wonderful acquaintance with Provençal cooking,” an invitation to road test recipes for bouillabaisse, ratatouille, tapenade, moules frites, pissaladière, aïoli, pistou, and myriad dishes rife with tomato, garlic, onion, and pepper. As food went, it would be a welcome break from the super-rich cream sauces that had begun to do a number on her and Paul’s stomachs.

  “It means, of course, that we three G’s can’t work closely together, and the school will suffer, and from the point of view of a cooking career, a real blow,” she lamented. Simca, especially, was “sad to see her go.” The two women had forged an extraordinary relationship both in and out of the kitchen. After long days cooking, they still chose to spend most evenings socializing, enjoying long dinners locked in noisy repartee, their husbands developing a similar friendship. The couples vacationed together in Normandy, exchanged friends and other intimacies. This was going to be a difficult separation.

  Even so, they’d press on with the cookbook. Most of the work, the recipe testing, was done individually anyway. They’d have to post their results for the time being. Besides, Julia planned frequent trips to Paris, and the Fischbachers had a farmhouse they spent summers at, in the countryside, near Nice. There would be plenty of opportunity for consultation. “It’s the personal getting together and quick exchange, and experiments together that will not always be possible,” she despaired. Tant pis. C’est la vie.

  Anybody else might have thought they’d been banished to the provinces, but Julia immediately embraced the move. Marseille was someplace different, someplace new, someplace else. It was a typical Julia Child reaction: decisive, pragmatic, unemotional, and utterly selfless, in particular when it came to her husband’s welfare. Part of her behavior could be attributed to pride, with roots stretching back to the family dynamic. Like her marriage to Paul, the move reinforced Julia’s independent streak. Being open to change, exploring new cultures—it ran counter to everything her father stood for. At the moment, this reflex was especially strong. In November, she had spoken by phone to her father, who laced into her about her liberal views. “You wouldn’t know how the country feels,” he sneered, alluding to the recent election in which Eisenhower became president. According to Pop, Julia was an outsider, un-American—“you people over there,” as opposed to the patriots back home. “This was hard to take,” Julia admitted. She considered John McWilliams “a darling man, a generous father, a real do-gooder in his community,” yet a person who refused to respect an opposing view. Her view. Apparently, he considered her “persona traitoria,” as she termed it, a reprobate better left to the French.

  Still, Julia wrote to him “religiously every week,” not so much a daughter’s responsibility as a link to the family she missed and loved. He’d never understand her, that much she knew—or approve of her lifestyle or the choices she made. Be that as it may, blood was thicker than water. He was her father and the patriarch of the McWilliams clan and she loved him.

  She would have gone on writing him, too, were it not for a letter from her stepmother that arrived the following week. In it, Phila warned her against upsetting her father, which meant saying nothing to him “about either politics or Charlie Chaplin.” Another letter, from her brother John, a few days later, inveighed against the evils of foisting her ideas on other people. “Furthermore,” he wrote, “the only real red-blooded Americans are the Republicans.”

  Okay, okay, she got the message. Nothing compelled her to win political points. Her family was what they were, she conceded: “Old Guard Republicans of the blackest and most violently Neanderthal stripe.” Instead, she’d confine her updates back home to work on the cookbook. No, that wouldn’t do either; her father would equate that with French cooking, another of his peeves. Paul’s promotion was also off-limits since Pop disapproved of her husband—that “New Dealer”—almost as much as his job. Unfortunately, they were “on such different beams.” All her remarks would have to be health- and weather-related from now on. And he’d hear about Marseille, like it or not.

  There was so much to do to prepare for the move. Leaving Roo de Loo was a chore in itself, to say nothing of being a heartbreaking affair. Julia and Paul had loved the place. It was perfect, perfectly funky, a period piece with charm. Over the last four years they’d squeezed half a lifetime within those walls. They’d lived, loved, celebrated, dreamed, grown, discovered the beginnings of who they were meant to be. Now packing up had become a killer of a job. “Julie wants to keep everything,” Paul noted. “I want to eliminate everything, and we meet in the middle somewhere, not without misgivings on both sides.”

  Paul had taken hundreds, maybe thousands, of photographs of Paris. They’d collected a similar amount of books and Venetian glassware. His wedge of easels lay stacked against a wall, his wine cellar stowed in crates beneath an eave. Julia’s book research filled “two wretchedly heavy steamer trunks.” And her cooking tchotchkes—she had enough to open her own Dehillerin annex. “God,” Paul moaned, “what a pile of stuff!” Everything needed sorting—and culling. Space in their luggage was at an extra-precious premium. Paul’s orders read “on temporary duty,” which meant they would not be in Marseille on an “official” basis until his transfer papers arrived from the State Department. That could take a week—or an eternity, you never knew. Nothing, not even their income, was guaranteed. So they were in “one of those Kafka-like limbos”—neither able to give up the lease on Roo de Loo nor rent a place of their own in Marseille. For weeks, maybe months, they’d be living out of suitcases in a hotel. It was crunch time: sacrifices had to be made.

  One of the hardest things to leave behind was Minette, Julia’s beloved cat, but there was no room in the car, nowhere to keep her in Marseille. Between the owner of Roo de Loo and a long list of friends, no one stepped forward to adopt. A shelter was out of the question; putting her out was unthinkable. Julia wouldn’t leave Paris, she said, until a proper home was found. Unfortunately, she was running out of prospects—and time. She hustled up and down the rue de Bourgogne, looking for a suitable candidate. At the last minute, she arranged to leave Minette with the concierge family that owned the charcuterie on the rue de Bourgogne. They had “a nice old dog,” and Mini could patrol the shop for mice and scraps.

  That left only the farewells to be made. Julia and Paul covered the city like “two steam engines,” darting in and out of old haunts on both banks of the Seine in a concerted effort to tie up loose ends. Their last day in Paris was a whirlwind, as they called on Paul’s teary staff at the American embassy; Madame Ettlinger, “the ancient Queen Bee of Les Gourmettes”; that old fox Curnonsky, who received them in long underwear; Madame Focillon, the titular head of their art salon; Simca; Louisette; a half-dozen friends and acquaintances who made their stay in the city a memorable feast. Then a final memorable feast: supper—but where? There were so many choices, so many favorites. Whi
ch place deserved to host their gustatory send-off? Since that first life-changing meal at Rouen, dozens of restaurants had dazzled Julia Child, each one a priceless tutorial in the education of a cook.

  Julia ran through all the obvious choices—Brasserie Lipp, Le Grand Véfour, Lapérouse, des Artistes. No one place could do the city justice. In the end, she hit on the perfect spot.

  Sometime just after nine o’clock, after all the tears and goodbyes and farewell toasts, Julia and Paul, weary from their rounds, parked outside Roo de Loo and took the rickety cage elevator up to the fourth floor. A soothing soup, a crisp salad, a baguette, a bottle of wine. There, in the candlelit glow of the three French windows that opened onto the garden, they enjoyed “supper à deux in [their] darling, soon-to-be-dismantled kitchen,” oblivious to the stacks of boxes downstairs. The night was clear, the view toward Montparnasse a starry rooftop triptych. A montage of memories wafted through the room.

  This, they decided, was the place to celebrate Paris, the city that made hungry where most it satisfied.

  Thirteen

  Frenchy French

  As it turned out, Marseille wasn’t Dubuque. There was no timber, no tech, no Mississippi, no John Deere. There was no Lapérouse or Max Bugnard, either, but some things don’t signify once outside of Paris. Julia regarded her new home as “a great bouillabaisse” of a city, a place whose sensory mix was as different from Dubuque as it was from Paris—or Prague or Peoria, for that matter—yet every bit as vibrant. “Such a feeling of life and movement,” she enthused, trying to describe it for the folks back home, “gurgling crowded streets, wonderful overflowing markets … great hearty, howling, laughing vendors.” No doubt about it, Marseille was as raucous as it was colorful. Paul couldn’t get over its symphonic din. “There seems to be ten times as much horn-blowing, gear-clashing, shouting, whistling, door-banging, dropping of lumber, breaking of glass, blaring of radios, boat-whistling, gong-clanging, brake-screeching, and angry shouting as anywhere else,” he remarked.

  The first time the Childs set foot in Marseille, they walked the entire city, from hilltop to hilltop, trying to gauge its mongrel sprawl, but ultimately they found there was no better place for people-watching than from a café table in the bustling Old Port. You could sit for hours on that horseshoe-shaped marina, gorging on freshly shucked oysters and a cool cassis, as its crazy-quilt community paraded by. And what a spectacular sight they were! “The Marseille-types are terrific in their variety and color,” it was noted, “lots of very black Senegalese with tribal cicatrices on their faces looking like tiger-claw marks and Arabs in costume and wonderful Paxinou-like Spanishy women with breasts like headlights and bronze fishermen with tattoos and gamins galore and great mounds of fresh fish being unloaded and nets being dried and good solid waterfront stinks in multitudinous profusion.”

  In the Marseille kitchen overlooking quai de Rive Neuve, March 16, 1953  © The Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts (Photo credit 13.1)

  To Julia’s eye, Marseille stood as “a rough, rude, ‘Southern’” town. Its people took “in pleasure through every pore, in every form, as much as they could,” wrote Flaubert. Sailors crowded “into the cabarets, laughing with the girls, turning over jugs of wine, singing, dancing, love-making at their ease.” The street life was vivid, there was a persisting tug of intrigue in the air, with its funneling mass of Italians, Russians, Greeks, Armenians, Corsicans, Algerians, Moroccans, and Tunisians. One heard “a hundred unknown languages spoken.” Julia clearly felt the raw combustible energy in the city. “It struck me as a rich broth of vigorous, emotional, uninhibited Life,” she said.

  The robust character signaled a reawakening of Marseille. As France’s largest commercial seaport, it had been bombed senseless during the war, first by German and Italian forces in 1940, then by the Allies in advance of the liberation. When Julia and Paul arrived, in March 1953, a noticeable rebuilding had begun, but it was a slog, hampered by graft and bureaucracy. The one notable development was Le Corbusier’s “massive block of flats”—Unité d’Habitation—opened in 1952, but its severe, cell-like architecture eluded the sober Marseillais, who called it la maison du fada, slang for “the nuthouse.”

  At the outset, Julia and Paul were merely uneasy guests. They lived out of suitcases in a rather shabby, boxlike hotel room “covered with flowered wallpaper and twenty-five watt bulbs,” with no kitchen, no view, nowhere to escape to collect one’s thoughts. All their meals were eaten out, in one of the endless Provençal cafés whose regional dishes satisfied Julia no end. The varieties of fresh fish on offer aroused her relentless curiosity, especially the loup, a Mediterranean sea bass grilled simply over fennel. She knew enough to avoid some of the more exotic specialties. Years ago, on her first visit to Marseille, she had eaten the pleasant-sounding tripou, a variation on tripe wrapped around bits of pig and sheep feet, sewn into a pillow and boiled in bouillon. As far as its ingredients went, “there was something else,” she suspected: “faint herbs, and, I am quite sure, a bit of pig shit rolled in also.” She’d been looking forward to the dish until arriving at that conclusion. In any case, she determined it wasn’t her style. “Possibly an acquired taste, pig shit.” No doubt.

  Marseille certainly had its share of character, but it wasn’t Paris, that much was sure. From what Julia gathered on an initial look-see, “Marseille is a place where women are seen but not heard, and stick close to home”—in which case it had come up against the wrong gal. Muzzle Julia Child? Not in Marseille, not anywhere on the planet. On first impression, it seemed Marseille wouldn’t offer her many opportunities. Only a week after they’d arrived, Julia was already bored stiff. Their first Sunday in the city brought it all crashing down. The cold, gray day, bleak and grimy, mirrored the lethargy she was feeling. Stomping around in a circle, she vented to Paul: “Well, dammit, we can’t cook: no kitchen; can’t paint: no paints; can’t visit: no friends yet; can’t drown sorrows either in bouillabaisse or wine because of our feeble guts; and I don’t want to write any more. I’m wrote-out, and I’m slept-out, and I’m read-out—and still two hours to dinner time.”

  Julia’s frustration was exacerbated by the scarcity of potential friends. The consulate was usually a touchstone for the fragmented circle of ex-pats, with plenty of Americans and their wives on staff. In Marseille, she found them to be “an awfully nice bunch, serious, hard-working and warm-hearted,” but with no one destined to amuse or inspire her. “Very nice folk—” she reflected, “but no blood-brothers.”

  Everything Julia did in those first few weeks was framed by struggle. Her writing stumbled with self-doubt as she vied with her troubled mood. She grew peevish, distracted. “What with all this moving and settling,” she wrote to Avis DeVoto, “I was becoming frantic, schizophrenic … combined with anguish, frustration and ill-temper.”

  All of that changed, however, when she found a suitable apartment. It was a charming little place on the quai de Rive Neuve, a sun-filled, fifth-floor railroad flat overlooking the Old Port, which Julia sublet from the Swedish consul, who was on leave for six months. From the tall parlor windows, there were views out to sea and an ongoing scene that filled her with delight. “There is a small, two-masted schooner filled with fish right under my nose,” she reported, “little fishing boats parked across the way, seagulls flying.” Dozens of sun-baked stevedores unloaded their catches onto the quay. Inside, the furniture was as Swedish as Ingrid Bergman: blond, pale, not a hair out of place. It was obvious from the layout that the consul was fastidious; odds were he’d never touched the gas stove. “Though the kitchen is presumably ‘fully furnished,’ ” Julia grumbled, “it is more fully furnished like a eunuch.” But—never mind. With a few clever changes she began cooking again, which banished the doldrums like a fast-moving cloud.

  And more sun shone through: La Criée aux Poissons, the wholesale fish market, happened to be steps from her front door, which helped to jump-start Julia’s work for the book. She had begun r
esearch on the fish chapter before leaving Paris, and, as March faded into April, she gunned it into high gear. “The French are magnificent with fish,” she wrote as an introduction to the recipes. “[T]he art of its cooking and saucing is accomplished with great taste and skill.” Such wasn’t the case in America, she knew, where it was next to impossible to buy fresh fish in cities such as Minneapolis, Omaha, Phoenix, and, well, Dubuque. Even in Pasadena and Santa Barbara, within spitting distance of the ocean, McWilliams family fish dinners had been achingly grim. “We had broiled fish for Friday dinners, pan-fried trout when we camped in the High Sierras, and boiled salmon the Fourth of July. That was it.” In early 1953, only the most adventurous Americans ate fresh local fish; otherwise, the choice was limited to frozen cod or flounder—or fish sticks, a brand-new phenomenon infiltrating supermarket freezers. It was unlikely that people knew the names of most fish, aside from the usual suspects, a local lake fish, perhaps, or shrimp—not much more. But ever since that sole meunière in Rouen—that sole meunière in Rouen!—Julia was sold. “I [never] imagined fish could be taken so seriously or sauced so voluptuously.” And she was determined to spread the gospel to the flock back home.

  But—how to convey all of this to the American cook?

  There were more than two hundred recipes for fillet of sole alone in her food-stained copy of Répertoire de la cuisine. And all those masterpieces she ate in Paris—whole roasted fish, mousses, brochettes, bisques. Bouillabaisse! (Now that she was in Marseille, she intended to solve that shifty little fellow.) Trouble was, there was no way to identify the equivalent names for French versus American fish. “Many types of European fish did not exist in the States and vice versa,” she discovered. For example, the sole found on American plates wasn’t sole at all, but a version of flounder that was smaller and bland. Lotte, a staple of every French menu, was called monkfish in the States and rarely, if ever, served. What about langoustines? Neither shrimp (too small) nor lobster (too large); maybe a prawn, which was more British, but prawns wouldn’t fly back home. And what the hell was she to do with rascasse? There was a West Coast fish called sculpin, or rockfish, that might do as a stand-in, but really just a second or third cousin, at best. Somehow, she had to find a reasonable American facsimile for each of the species so that the great French recipes could “be cooked in the USA with approximately the same end-result.”