Provence, 1970

by Luke Barr

  M.F.’s patience with the two of them was wearing thin. It would not be long before she was chafing at the effort of navigating these complicated personalities and different-size egos. The arch, glittering commentary about mutual friends and their books, all the astute wine talk, not to mention the simple fact of being a guest, the constant calibration of deference, obligation, and reciprocation—it was all getting to be too much.

  Norah had left on a brief trip to Florence by herself. From there she would return to La Roquette, and soon after that would board a freighter for the return trip to California.

  It was odd to be alone, suddenly, M.F. found. But it was what she needed, because it would give her the time and space to confront the uncertainty of her future plans. She was currently working on revisions of Among Friends, her memoir of growing up in Whittier, California. She and Judith Jones, her editor at Knopf, planned to meet over Christmas while they were both in Provence. The book would come out next fall, but what next? Something about France?

  M.F. continued to feel a little oppressed by Lord and Bedford, especially Bedford. “I almost never see Eda except through a dense Sybillian fog,” she wrote to Arnold Gingrich. “Sybille is hard to take, actually”; she was self-serious in the extreme. Lord, meanwhile, was perpetually flustered and nervous. It had been much easier for M.F. to stay aloof when Norah was there, but now she felt as if she were surrounded by “too many neurotic females.”

  She had to get away for a day. And fortunately, liberation was coming, in the form of James Beard.

  M.F. arrived at the Grasse clinic in Raymond Gatti’s Mercedes.

  Gatti was the best chauffeur on the Côte d’Azur, or the most famous anyway. He wore a dark blue suit and drove a dark blue Mercedes 300, a new one every year, and had been in business for himself since 1951. (Rental cars were not widely available in the immediate postwar period, and he had seen a market need and filled it.) Gatti drove the stars at the annual Cannes Film Festival to and from their hotels and out to dinner. His clients included celebrities and royalty of all sorts—Elizabeth Taylor, Gary Cooper, Pablo Picasso, the Duke of Windsor, Jack Benny, Sergio Leone, Anthony Quinn, and so on, not to mention Texas oil company chieftains, French politicians, and international pop stars. M.F. had met him four years earlier, in 1966, when she was working on the Time-Life Cooking of Provincial France book. The Childs had recommended Gatti to M.F. as they recommended him to all their friends, including James Beard. Gatti would drive them to La Colombe d’Or in Saint-Paul-deVence, or Le Moulin de Mougins, or the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo—to the best restaurants. He was also sometimes hired for longer trips: one year, he drove the Childs to Venice and back again.

  Gatti was in his forties, a compact man with a genial smile, and he loved to talk. His family was Italian, but he’d been born and raised in Plascassier. He was full of anecdotes about his exploits during World War II, when he fought the Nazis. He had been captured and made a prisoner of war in Frankfurt, escaped a Polish labor camp using his wits and expertise with cars, joined the U.S. special operations forces as they marched through Provence, and witnessed the liberation of Buchenwald. His nickname among the Americans was Frenchy.

  Today, Gatti was taking M.F. and Beard to the Maeght collection and the Matisse chapel, the expedition they had both been looking forward to. Beard sat in the front passenger seat, where there was more room for his large frame, and M.F. sat in the back. Gatti navigated the winding country road to Saint-Paul with care: he was a controlled and conservative driver. He drove the speed limit, pointing out the sights along the way: there was Plascassier, in the valley below them, and farther off, the Mediterranean. “On a clear day, you can see all the way to Corsica,” he said. Every once in a while he’d complain bitterly about French drivers, how they failed to look behind them when they drove, how they didn’t pay attention.

  M.F. and Beard chatted about this and that. They would be going to Plascassier for dinner with the Childs on Sunday night. Would Beard be allowed to eat or have a glass of wine? M.F. asked him. Beard lamented his diet. He had been asked by the doctors to name the single food he would want to subsist on if he could eat nothing else. He chose potatoes, which he thought of as “glamorous aristocrats among vegetables.” He and M.F. laughed. They talked about potatoes for a while. She had once eaten, as a very young woman, the most delightful potato soufflé, she said, made with chives and parmesan cheese. She’d been sitting in the courtyard of a restaurant in Avallon, a town not far from Dijon. The dish had struck her as a kind of tribute to the potato. It was the first time she could remember having potato on its own, without meat.

  Beard recalled his fascination as a child with the short-order cooks in diners and railroad cafés, making hash brown potatoes. They were not trained chefs, but they had an awe-inspiring speed and confidence, roughly slicing potatoes directly into the hot fat, shaking the pan and tossing the potatoes until they were crusty and brown.

  “Few potatoes ever tasted or looked better to me,” he said.

  “It was a fine moment,” M.F. said of the long-ago soufflé in the sunny courtyard.

  The day felt like a jailbreak for both of them—Beard freed however briefly from the confines of Pathé’s regimented clinic, M.F. from the claustrophobia of La Roquette. Saint-Paul was about a half hour’s drive away, another medieval town, like Grasse but much smaller and prettier, and set on a hilltop behind ramparts. It had been a center for artists and writers, including Renoir, Chagall, Gide, and others, since the 1920s. The town was empty at this time of year, and beautiful. The weather was sunny and cool. They had the place to themselves.

  First they were going to see the Matisse chapel, the Chapelle du Rosaire, in the neighboring town of Vence. It was a modest single-story building on the side of the road, plain and white with bright blue roof tiles. Matisse had designed it at the end of his life, in the late 1940s, and considered it his masterpiece.

  Gatti parked the Mercedes in front, and M.F. and Beard made their way inside. The interior was equally stark, all white with deep blue, yellow, and green stained-glass windows and crude, late-Matisse murals rendered on tile—black line drawings of angels and clouds, a Madonna and Child, robed figures and crucifixes. They stood in the empty chapel watching the light in silence.

  The chapel was “one of the most beautiful man-made things” she’d ever seen, M.F. declared, as they returned to the waiting car. Beard agreed.

  Gatti now drove back to Saint-Paul, past the walled town and up to the Maeght collection, in a wooded area on a steep bluff looking toward the Mediterranean. The museum had been built a few years earlier, in 1964, to house the private collection of the seminal Paris art dealer Aimé Maeght and his wife, Marguerite. The striking modern building, designed by Spanish architect Josep Lluís Sert, was capped by a pair of inverted half-pipe shapes, and seemed simultaneously whimsical and brutalist, with lots of exposed concrete and brick. The grounds, by contrast, were green and wild, even now, in December. There were expanses of lawn, and large-scale sculpture on display everywhere you looked, works by Calder, Chagall, Giacometti, Chillida, Miró, and Braque. The umbrella pine trees had a Dr. Seuss–like quality—long trunks and dense, bushy tops—that seemed to complement the often abstract art.

  Beard couldn’t walk very far because of his circulation troubles and swollen legs, so they limited themselves to a few favorites: the Braque pool, with its blue fish mosaic; the many Miró paintings inside, and his outdoor labyrinth, full of surprising, not-quite-beautiful gargoyles. This was the kind of museum with numerous doors opening onto courtyards, a sense of welcoming the outdoors inside, and art into the wild.

  “What a wonderful way to spend a fortune,” M.F. said, as they stood on a terrace looking down at the Braque pool, and up at the purple stained-glass window also designed by the artist. They walked slowly back to the car, where Gatti stood waiting.

  The afternoon had been most enjoyable, they agreed. And pleasure wasn’t something to take for granted. Certain
ly Beard, suffering the indignities of his salt-, sugar-, and calorie-free diet, of his uncooperative legs, and of his ungovernable cookbook, had needed the break. And M.F., too, for she had begun to feel like something of a hostage at Les Bastides, ensnared in the unavoidable social politics of the guesthouse resident—all that needed to be said so carefully, all that was so carefully left unsaid. And beyond the petty irritations of being a guest, there was, stirring in her, a rebellion against the pretensions and pomposity that seemed to intrude on her every conversation with Bedford and Lord. Food, art, restaurants—every topic an opportunity for another discourse, another opinion that would establish one’s superiority. But she knew she was as guilty as they were, and was glad of an opportunity to escape her own worst impulses.

  It was different with Beard. He and M.F. had found themselves momentarily liberated, immersed in the innate beauty and inspired artwork of southern France. And wasn’t that, as much as the food and wine they both so loved, why they came here again and again? The French dedication to pleasure, in all its various forms, was what spoke to both of them.

  8

  PARIS INTERLUDE

  M.F. AND HER SISTER NORAH WERE GOING TO Paris. They had dashed through the city on their way to Provence in mid-October, seven weeks earlier, and now they were dashing back so Norah could make her ship to California. (Norah had returned from Florence only a few days earlier.) They would spend a night in Marseille, and then catch the Mistral, the Trans-Europ-Express train, this time going north.

  Norah had a cabin on the Michigan, a French Line freighter bound for San Francisco out of Le Havre the first week of December. She would be at sea for about a month and arrive in California in early January. She had packed a large quantity of books for the crossing. It was a good thing Simenon was so prolific!

  There was no need for M.F. to accompany her sister to Paris, except that she wanted to. The Kennedy sisters, as they sometimes still thought of themselves, had a close and complicated relationship. They were the two survivors: their beloved brother, David, had killed himself in 1942, the day before he was to report for service in the U.S. Army, and their sister Anne had died in her mid-fifties, some years ago. M.F. was nine years older than Norah, and had taken on her quasi-parental role when the two were young. These days, ironically, it was Norah who presided more directly over the extended family, including looking after M.F.’s daughters—both now in their twenties and having children of their own—at those times when their relations with their mother had become distant and strained. M.F. and Norah had raised their families as single women.

  However often it had been left to Norah to bridge the gap between M.F. and her daughters, to take on the role of matriarch, Norah still looked up to her worldly older sister. M.F. in turn counted on Norah, her most intimate friend and relation, to absolve her of the sins of the writing life: the flights of fancy, the periodic absenteeism, the dark moods and “emotional climates,” the necessary self-centeredness of the artist. It was Norah who bound her most closely to the present, who played the peacemaker, and who kept her anchored in her family.

  Now Norah was leaving, leaving M.F. here alone in France. M.F. felt slightly unmoored. But the two women still had close to a week to spend together. They’d planned on two nights in Paris, and then Norah’s sailing was delayed for a few days—par for the course for a freighter, but who was complaining? They’d had so little time in Paris when they first arrived; now they’d make up for it, resuming their revisiting of the past.

  In Paris, they once again stayed at the pleasantly shabby Hôtel de France et de Choiseul (“a dream, a lasting bit of les neiges d’antan,” M.F. declared). They went on long walks around the city, shopping, sitting in cafés. One day, they found themselves passing by the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire, where they’d stayed in 1931, when Norah was fourteen and M.F. was twenty-three. The hotel looked out over the Seine and across at the Jardin des Tuileries and the Louvre. It was another genteel old place the sisters adored. They stopped in to take a look, reminiscing about that long-ago year in France when Norah went to the convent school M.F. had found for her in Dijon, when she and her first husband were living there. Norah remembered her sister telling her that Oscar Wilde had stayed at the Quai Voltaire, in a room with faded scarlet-striped wallpaper, upon which he’d written an illegible poem. Now the sisters stood in the lobby and surveyed the newly installed 1960s aluminum chic. Modernity had overtaken memory.

  It was hideous, they decided.

  The day before Norah’s departure, they ate lunch at Prunier, on avenue Victor Hugo.

  BELON OYSTERS AND PALOURDE CLAMS CHAMPAGNE NATURE 1969

  BROILED SCALLOPS EN BROCHETTE CHTEAU CENIS POMEROL 1964

  CAMEMBERT

  Prunier was everybody’s favorite Paris restaurant at the time, an art deco palace of seafood, totally calm and yet still buzzing with glamour. The Childs were frequent patrons and had filmed a French Chef segment there for the new season.

  Norah had the oysters, M.F. had the clams, and they shared the scallops, which they agreed were beautiful. The Pomerol was superb and so was the cheese. The weather outside was a soft gray drizzle, and they were happy.

  Norah set sail from Le Havre the next day. She wore M.F.’s old Eterna-Matic wristwatch, borrowed at the last minute to keep track of time during the long voyage.

  Richard Olney was also in Paris in early December 1970, attending one of the regular dinners hosted by Cuisine et Vins de France (CVF), the French culinary magazine. He had been attending these dinners for years. They were elaborate productions, meant to showcase chefs and winemakers for the gourmet elite. CVF also organized annual visits to the wineries of Bordeaux, among other places. It was on one such trip, in 1961, that Olney met and befriended the editors of the magazine, which led a few years later to his writing a monthly column: “Un Américain (Gourmand) à Paris: Le Menu de Richard Olney.” These columns opened the door at Simon and Schuster and led to the French Menu Cookbook.

  The CVF dinner was at the iconic Lucas Carton, on the Place de la Madeleine. It was a seasonal menu, with a focus on game.

  CREAM OF PHEASANT SOUP

  WHOLE ROAST PARTRIDGES

  HARE À LA ROYALE

  CUMIN SORBET

  WOODCOCK PTÉ

  SALAD WITH APPLES AND WALNUTS

  CHEESE

  PEACHES FLAMBÉ

  This was French cooking in the grand, classic style. The preparations were pure and refined, distillations of the flavors of the season. The soup was elegant, the partridges were tender, the woodcock pâté was rich, but the centerpiece was the lièvre à la royale, an iconic haute cuisine dish, versions of which had been described by the nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century arbiters of French culinary tradition, Auguste Escoffier, Ali-Bab, and Prosper Montagné. In her Book of Mediterranean Food, in 1950, Elizabeth David had given the recipe for what she said was the original (and exceedingly complicated) version, invented by the French politician Senator Aristide Couteaux in 1898, after he’d spent a week hunting for just the right rabbit in Poitou, in western France. At Lucas Carton, the wild rabbit was boned, stuffed with a delicate mixture of chopped giblets, truffles, foie gras, and bread crumbs, and then poached very, very slowly in white wine. It was served in slices with sautéed cèpes and an intense, enriched reduction of the poaching liquid; the meat was so tender it could be eaten with a spoon.

  The wine, too, was otherworldly: a 1964 Petit Village, a 1959 Mouton Rothschild, a 1953 Margaux, a 1962 Yquem, all preceded, of course, by champagne—Laurent-Perrier Grand Siècle.

  Olney sat at the dinner with the editor of CVF, Odette Kahn, by now a good friend of his. Kahn was a dynamo, a bona fide member of the French food establishment. (A few years later, in 1976, Kahn would sit on the infamous wine-tasting jury in Paris organized by Steven Spurrier, at which California Cabernets and Chardonnays were shockingly declared superior to their French counterparts in a blind test. When the results were announced, Kahn demanded to have her ballot back.)
Kahn congratulated Olney on the success of his cookbook. He told her he was taking the train to Cannes the following day to visit some of the preeminent American food writers, and that he hoped she and Beard in particular might one day meet.

  Now, in the private upstairs dining room at Lucas Carton, they discussed the menu. The wine was “sublime,” but the food was “too complicated,” Olney declared—too many dishes, too many sauces, too many distractions. He had great affection for the classics, and for long and arduous recipes and meticulous preparations, but he was always suspicious of the taint of luxury. “There exists a bastard cuisine that is too often assumed to be real French cooking,” Olney had written in the opening pages of his just-published cookbook:

  It patterns itself superficially on the classical grande cuisine, but, leaning heavily on the effects of spectacular presentation, it ignores the essential sobriety and integrity of the classic cuisine which becomes its victim. It is not grande cuisine but “Grand Palace”—or international hotel cooking. It has, however, many enthusiasts. Perhaps, having never encountered the genuine, they are nonetheless impressed by the presentation and complication of the false.

  The CVF dinner at Lucas Carton was a far cry from “international hotel cooking,” but Olney detected among the dishes an abstracted, overelaborate quality. He strived, in his own cooking, for a kind of purity; a dish should be simple and sublime at the same time. This was easier said than done.

  In the early sixties, Olney had made what became a legendary pot-au-feu, described at the time by the Paris food writer Michel Lemonnier as the best he’d ever tasted. Olney explained his method:

  I prepared an oxtail pot-au-feu, discarded the vegetables and bouquet garni, put the oxtail aside for a future meal and, with the broth, prepared a pot-au-feu with a boned, tied-up beef shank, and another bouquet, adding little carrots, turnips and potatoes toward the end; a quartered, blanched cabbage was braised apart in some of the broth. The bouquets were bundles of leek, celery stalk, fresh thyme and bay leaf.