Provence, 1970

by Luke Barr

  The Childs were a warm if slightly frenetic couple, M.F. thought. They were always on the move, organizing and filming the French Chef programs, preparing cooking demonstrations, wrangling recipes for the next edition of the cookbook. Just a few weeks before M.F.’s departure on the France, Paul Child had written, “Such a time we’ve been having … oh my, oh my! Not that it was awful, just awfully intense. The intensity was compounded of the final deadliney days of Mastering the Art’s Vol. II overlapping, and sometimes even confused with, our new series of TV programs, their planning, their rehearsals, their tapings.”

  This was so different from M.F.’s style, she being the quietly observant sort, a writer, after all. And yet she found the Childs simpatico, amiable. M.F. liked the charming Beard as well, and it seemed he would be in the neighborhood, too. So would Simone Beck, of course—the Childs had built their vacation house, called La Pitchoune, on Beck’s Provençal estate. Indeed, the fall and winter were shaping up to be a kind of impromptu gathering of the American food world in France. Judith Jones and her husband, Evan, were also coming, and Eda and Sybille were eager to introduce everyone to their friend Richard Olney. M.F. looked forward to a bonanza of expat gourmet socializing.

  M.F. and Norah were drinking brandies at the Bar de l’Atlantique, which was open to both first-and tourist-class passengers. They were smartly attired, in simple dresses and minimal jewelry. It would have been clear to any observer that they were sisters, both of them slightly regal in late middle age, but Norah the taller of the two. Veterans of a number of transatlantic crossings, they had been highly amused by the brochure the French Line sent them a few weeks before departure instructing them on how to dress on board. It noted that “while a lady does not wear formal dinner dress on either the First Night or the Last, she will instinctively wear cocktail or long robes.” The brochure went on to discuss the many social events on board, when tropical whites were appropriate, and more. “Shades of my great aunts!” M.F. said. She and Norah could not bring themselves to buy clothes they would seldom use, and that was another reason, aside from the fare, that they were happy to be traveling in tourist class. They lived well—having inherited the proceeds of the sale of the newspaper their father had owned and edited, the Whittier News, in the mid-1950s—but they were not wealthy. Norah worked as a social worker in the Berkeley public schools.

  It was the evening of their second day at sea, and they were enjoying the relative calm of the ship after their headlong rush across the continent from San Francisco, mostly by train, just as they’d traveled in decades past. They’d had a day of rough seas, but things were smoothing out, and the worst was behind them. Now they were talking and laughing quietly, which they seemed to do quite frequently, their relaxed intimacy with each other as much a clue to their relationship as their physical resemblance. The place was empty, except for a young couple at the other end of the bar, also drinking brandies.

  As the sisters got up to leave for dinner and were making their way to the elevator, the couple from the bar came rushing after them.

  “Excuse me,” one of them said, slightly breathlessly, “but are you M. F. K. Fisher?”

  This was a surprise. “Why, yes, I am!” M.F. replied. “But how did you know?” As it turned out, the couple had seen an announcement in the ship’s Daily News about an unclaimed package for someone by that name and, overhearing some of the sisters’ conversation, had decided she sounded like vintage Fisher. M.F. wasn’t exactly a celebrity, but she did have a devoted literary following, including, apparently, these two, and she was rather pleased by the recognition. M.F. thanked them for telling her about the announcement, which she might otherwise have missed.

  After inviting the young couple to join them for dinner the following evening, M.F. and her sister made their way to the dining room.

  The restaurant on board was unnamed, but it was spectacular. The ship’s enormous kitchen was state of the art, with a staff of 130, and the menus were designed to show off French haute cuisine. The New York Times food critic Craig Claiborne had recently published a long and hyperbolic treatise in the paper declaring the France’s first-class dining room “the finest French restaurant in the world.” The chef, Henri Le Huédé, had been on the ship since its maiden voyage in 1961. Claiborne had taken a twelve-day cruise on the ship and had never been served the same thing twice; furthermore, he pointed out,

  if there is nothing on a given menu to tempt the palate … almost any dish of classic or regional cooking can be commanded a few hours in advance, and it will be made with brilliance and no particular ceremony. On a recent crossing it was not at all uncommon to see an unlisted rack of hare being carved in the dining room, or a venison stew being ladled out, or an intricately put together chartreuse of pheasant or a heaping platter of snails being served.

  Claiborne seemed also to have been quite soberly impressed by the restaurant’s silly menu for pets, which included items such as “La Gâterie France—Haricots Verts, Poulet Haché, Riz Nature, Arrosé de Jus de Viande et de Biscottes en Poudre” (The France Treat—Green Beans, Ground Chicken, and Rice, served with meat drippings and over biscuits). The article ran alongside a photograph of Salvador Dalí and his pet ocelot, Babou, on a leash in the dining room. Babou’s “culinary preferences,” according to Claiborne, were boiled fish and grilled meats.

  It was all a bit preposterous, but the food was delicious. The decor was modern: an avocado green carpet set off the lime-, lemon-, and salmon-colored chairs. The wineglasses were small and stemless, for stability’s sake. M.F. and Norah ordered some caviar and looked at the menu. They would begin with the salad with chervil. “You don’t see chervil outside France,” said M.F., approvingly. The herb was a sign of quality and authenticity—a rarity. Norah couldn’t recall ever having tasted it until that night.

  The unclaimed package the young couple had mentioned turned out to contain magnums of champagne and sparkling wine—a Taittinger and a Schramsberg. They were gifts from Arnold Gingrich, M.F.’s long-distance lover, whom she hadn’t been able to see during the very few hours they’d been in New York. Gingrich was the founding editor of Esquire, and he and M.F. had known each other since the mid-1940s, when he hired her to write a column for Coronet, an Esquire spin-off. The column was called “The Pepper Pot” and included M.F.’s take on everything from the oysters at Delmonico’s to southern corn bread.

  Gingrich was married, but apart from that, he and M.F. were almost the perfect couple—they epitomized a kind of postwar, grown-up glamour. He’d edited Hemingway and Fitzgerald, written elegant books about fly-fishing (The Well-Tempered Angler), and was an accomplished violinist. He wore fedoras and pinstriped suits. He had a gray moustache and a piercing glare. He was every bit the sophisticated New York literary man. M.F., meanwhile, was the arch and witty literary stylist, biting one minute and effortlessly sensual the next. Her books were about food and love. They wrote each other letters with great frequency. It was an epistolary love affair, and a mostly chaste one.

  Needless to say, they lived apart, on opposite coasts. M.F. had great affection for Gingrich. But there was the fact that he was married, and that she had already loved (and lost, to an early death) the man who was the great romantic passion of her life, Dillwyn Parrish. He had suffered from a progressively debilitating and painful condition called Buerger’s disease and committed suicide in 1941. After three husbands—M.F. later married Donald Friede, a well-known figure in the publishing world—and many lovers, she had raised her children and lived alone for some twenty years. She preferred it that way.

  M.F. and Norah arrived in Paris in mid-October, after landing at Le Havre and taking a train from there to the city. The weather was glum. You couldn’t see anything in the fog—the Eiffel Tower was invisible from as close as the Place de la Concorde. It was beautiful anyway, they decided. They were staying at the Hôtel de France et de Choiseul on rue Saint-Honoré, a delightfully rundown place, with cracked tiles in the bathroom and dreadful caf
é au lait, but a pleasant staff. It was just the sort of hotel they both loved. They’d been given a sprawling suite, with a salon, three bedrooms, and an enormous bath.

  A day or two after arriving they had lunch with New Yorker writer Janet Flanner (who’d been writing the “Letter from Paris” under the pen name Genêt since the magazine launched in 1925) and then walked to the Musée de l’Orangerie to see the Goya show. The art was beautiful, M.F. thought, but there were too many people and there was not enough air. They planned to have dinner at Brasserie Lipp, a nostalgic favorite, but now it was late afternoon, and they “stopped in a small bar for a good drink,” M.F. wrote in a letter to Arnold Gingrich.

  “A small bar for a good drink”: M.F. had a knack for finding just that sort of place. She was a connoisseur of tastes and small bites, of tidbits and flavors, an oyster here, a touch of pâté there, and a glass of wine. She knew, for example, that the first-class buffet at the Gare de Lyon—where several days later they found themselves while waiting to catch the “Mistral” to Dijon—was just the spot for a glass of champagne and some jambon de Parme. She’d been here many times over the years; stopping for champagne at the station was something of a tradition.

  M.F. and Norah toasted their excellent adventure so far—their “watery spree,” first on board the France, and soon to continue with a week-long voyage on the Palinurus, a small but luxurious canal boat that would take them from Corbigny to Auxerre. Travel had become more difficult, they both agreed: there was a general dearth of porters and taxis all around, compared with even just a few years earlier. But it didn’t matter—they loved being on the road together, and in France in particular. M.F. declared herself a “relaxed philosopher” when it came to the stresses and inevitable long waits of contemporary travel. It was simply a matter of arriving early and ordering a glass of champagne to enjoy during the wait.

  The Mistral left in the early afternoon; they had reserved seats. After arriving in Dijon a couple of hours later, they checked in at the Hôtel Terminus, where their room, like every room in the hotel, was outfitted with wine faucets, one for red and one for white, in the bathroom. It was a marketing gimmick, meant to promote the hotel and the local wine. Hanging beside the faucets was a pair of silver tastevins—wine tasting cups. The wine was on the house, according to the small sign, and it really wasn’t bad. They could only laugh.

  M.F. and Norah had a few days in Dijon, and these were spent retracing the steps of their long-ago 1931 sojourn. They walked to the edge of town, to the vineyards that were as blazing as they remembered. They saw the tiny owl carved in the foundation stone of the Notre-Dame, and the house that once made famous gingerbread. They stood before it and remembered the aroma. This was why they had come: to immerse themselves in the happy echoes and recollections of the past.

  On the day of their departure, they took a hired car to Corbigny to meet the riverboat.

  The sisters were on a Georges Simenon kick—those mysteries were the perfect light vacation reading, and a way of practicing their French to get back into the groove. So it was fitting somehow that when they boarded the Palinurus they discovered that the passengers and crew seemed to have stepped right out of the pages of an Inspector Maigret murder mystery. “One has to be a real nut to do a trip like this!” M.F. said, noting the close quarters and instant intimacy. There were eight other guests on board, including a charming Parisian career woman; an elderly, voluble upper-class Englishwoman with her daughter and son-in-law; and a young and wealthy English couple. The crew included Captain Jim and his smashing blond wife, Dinah, both English; and various cooks and helmsmen, all French, all with fashionably long hair and flowing moustaches.

  Fortunately, there was no murder. Instead, day after day there was mesmerizing beauty and excellent food. The October weather was clear, with temperatures in the fifties. All the food was fresh—fat ducks, fish, veal stews, and lots of vegetables. There were local cheeses and fruits and endless wines. At night, when they docked, the boat’s batteries would stop and they’d go to bed in dimness—no reading, but who cared? There was not a sound anywhere, except when a frog fell off the bank. The trip was everything they had hoped it would be.

  M.F. and Norah traveled by train from Auxerre to Aix, which was the heart of Provence in M.F.’s opinion. The sisters wandered along the Cours Mirabeau, the grand avenue in the center of town, lined with a double row of towering plane trees and punctuated every block or so with another fountain. Some were ornate—grandiose, even—but the best were large, simple stones covered in moss: bastions of quiet solidity. Just off the Cours, on the rue du 4 Septembre, was the family favorite, the Quatre Dauphins. This was very different from the others—an exuberant and cheerful fountain with four dolphins, each spouting a stream of water from its mouth into the pool below. M.F.’s daughters and Norah’s sons had loved this one when they lived outside Aix in 1959. The kids had been enrolled in the local French grammar school, where they spent months learning French, reading Tintin comics, and riding Solex-powered bicycles with small motors attached to their front wheels.

  It was all more beautiful than ever, thought M.F., at least here in the vieille ville. There were interesting new shops selling housewares and clothes—things one could never find back in the States—lining the narrow streets. She bought a set of snail forks, which were the perfect size for California cracked crab. The Saturday open-air market was as sprawling as she remembered. They were staying at the Roi René, a gloriously old-fashioned hotel in the center of town. They ate vast quantities of clams, urchins, and oysters, all of which were in season. Another night, they ordered in: “Norah and I did our secret trick for strength-through-joy, and took long baths and ate in our room—a pâté maison, haricots verts frais, sauce vinaigrette, and a bottle of local rosé,” M.F. wrote to Gingrich, describing house pâté and green bean salad. “Then we fell into bed with two Maigrets!”

  There was an out-of-time quality to moments like that—and a distinctly French one, too. The dowdy yet proper hotel, the long baths. This was how they’d always traveled in France—they had stayed at this very hotel numerous times: back in the 1950s with their children, for example, watching the Tour de France zoom by from their balcony above the street.

  But outside the Roi René, things were changing. Parts of town had been built up with high-rise apartments, and the traffic and noise and fumes were noticeably worse. And in addition to the construction and overdevelopment, there were hippies, another sign of the times, Aix being a university town. M.F. viewed the kids fondly. The girls wore midi or maxi skirts, and the boys had longish hair and Abe Lincoln chin whiskers. They were relatively clean-cut compared to the kids in California, she thought. Back home, the scruffy and stoned side of the counterculture had become apparent, and so had the dark and scary side—from Altamont to the Manson family. And then there was the dark and scary side of the police response to the counterculture: the Kent State shootings, to take just one example, had happened the previous May. Still, France was not unscathed; in Aix, the venerable Les Deux Garçons café had recently been shut down for six months for drug violations.

  But if France was changing with the times, so was M.F. She was sympathetic toward the antiwar and student movements in Berkeley and San Francisco. She and Norah both reviled Nixon, and they had many friends who were active in politics, as were their own children. M.F. felt unsettled, ready for something new. Would she find it here, in France? Or was her attachment to this place a figment of her nostalgia?

  The sisters were headed east, to the hills above the Riviera, not far from Cannes. For the coming weeks, they’d be planted just across the way from Les Bastides, the estate in La Roquette-sur-Siagne where Lord and Bedford lived.

  M.F. was eager to do some writing, and to see old friends and meet new ones. Just a few weeks earlier, Paul Child had written:

  You and Norah are officially forbidden to leave your cellar at Les Bastides until we have appeared at La Pitchoune! We hope to make it by the 1st w
eek of December. It would be silly to miss each other by a few days. Don’t you agree?

  So—you are leaving St. Helena … We too are regretful we’ve never seen your house there, with you in it. A house without its occupant is a shell without its snail—nothing on which to dab one’s personal garlic butter—and the new Sonoma palazzo will of course have your familiar delicious flavor.

  I am slowly—and with delight—reading With Bold Knife and Fork aloud, to Julia, as she prepares dinner: a most fortuitous wedding of pleasures. Do try to stay at Les Bastides until we get to La Peetch. We must see you and touch you again. Letters are long-distance, once-removed, forms of companionship. Stay! Be seen, be touched …

  3

  EN ROUTE TO PROVENCE

  LA PITCHOUNE WAS AN ESCAPE FOR JULIA and Paul Child, a place where they could really relax. In Cambridge, Paul wrote, they were “invaded by telephone, telegraph, and letter, by peeping people, news editors, food writers, television tipsters, photographers, High School Year Book interviewers, cooking utensil salesmen, almond growers, fish experts, oven salesmen, restaurateurs, orchardists.” At La Pitchoune, on the other hand, they could forget their intense American life and be quiet and anonymous.

  The Childs had built the house on the grounds of Beck and Fischbacher’s estate in 1965, on a hillside in the South of France. They’d paid for it using the advance money Julia had received to write Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume II. In a handshake deal, they agreed that the property would belong to the Childs as long as they lived, and then revert back to the Beck family. It was a simple house surrounded by olive trees, with a large kitchen and three bedrooms. The closest town was a tiny village called Plascassier, and while the crowds and sometime glamour of Cannes and Antibes were only a half-hour drive away, life in the hills above the coast was pleasantly sedate.