Provence, 1970

by Luke Barr

Bedford’s comments were indirect, but unmistakably aimed at her. Had M.F. really been tipping far too much? She didn’t think so. It was true that she would rather leave too much than too little. She liked waiters. She paid particular attention to their shoes, which were, for a waiter, the tools of his trade, since he was always on his feet. There was a line in Simenon somewhere to that effect, she remembered, about waiters treating their feet well.

  She said none of this to Bedford. “Ah well,” she said again.

  Bedford got as much mileage as was possible to get from an English accent and European aristocratic bearing. She declaimed. She projected unimpeachable hauteur. She talked about wine with great vim and unstoppable vigor. And she had nothing but disdain for Americans. They had no taste. They tipped too much, M.F. had heard her say, for what must have been the fifth time that day.

  More distressing than Bedford’s pontification was Lord’s apparent subjugation. She murmured and demurred, deflected, and then lapsed into silence. She seemed unhappy most of the time. M.F. wanted to tell Lord that if she ever needed a place to stay, to flee for a while, she was always welcome to stay with her in California. M.F. hadn’t yet found the moment.

  But it was more than Bedford and Lord that was bothering her, more than silly talk about tipping that had her on edge. It was a creeping, ominous sense of being hemmed in by the past.

  It was her own doing. She and Norah had come to France in search of the scenes that had given them so many happy memories, and they had found them, in Dijon, Aix, Paris.… But since the moment Norah left for California, the spell had been broken. The sisterly intimacy, the shared memories, the Simenon novels and late afternoon glasses of wine had been a sentimental journey, and now it was over.

  In its place, she was seeing the dark side of sentimentality, the fossilized remnants of outdated attitudes and ideas, in the form of Bedford’s relentless enforcement of proper rules and opinions and behaviors. It wasn’t that Bedford was tedious or stupid; she was formidably intelligent. But she had no discernible sense of humor, unless you counted sarcasm. Her every utterance reflected a worldview that seemed unchanged since the 1930s.

  M.F. needed to escape, and soon, to move beyond both nostalgia and snobbery. She needed to write.

  She took the shrimp from the oven and spooned bread crumbs and minced garlic on each one. She dotted them with butter. She would take them out when the bread crumbs were brown and the shrimp had started to curl.

  At La Pitchoune, Julia and Paul cleaned up after the previous evening’s dinner party. It had been great fun, they agreed, as they corralled stray wineglasses and emptied ashtrays. (Lord smoked heavily, and had a disconcerting cough.) Seeing Beard and M.F. had been a pleasure, as always, though once again the Childs worried about the dire state of Beard’s health, wondering if his swollen legs were a sign of heart trouble.

  The Childs particularly enjoyed entertaining in Provence: the house was beautiful, and so was the countryside. The mood there always seemed a bit giddier than back home: everyone was on vacation. And now they were expecting another guest, Richard Olney.

  Olney arrived at La Pitchoune in midafternoon, just as Lord had said he would. Paul greeted him politely and then retreated to his study. Julia offered him a drink, but he declined. She told Olney, first of all, how much she admired his book. He was obviously deeply knowledgeable about wines, but he wrote about them without too much detail, and in such an accessible, approachable way. The recipes, too, were very personal. She liked that.

  Olney nodded. Of course she did.

  Olney did not say anything at all critical to Child, but he was reticent, and gave the impression of not quite wanting to be there. Cagey but polite, he told her he thought her grated zucchini recipe was a “valuable innovation.”

  He was referring to Courgettes Rapées, in which Child and Beck describe grating, salting, and squeezing the water from zucchini, and then sautéing them with butter and shallots. This was the base recipe for a number of variations.

  “I immediately tried it,” said Olney. But he was unable to resist adding: “I do prefer the sautéed paper-thin slices that I eat about three times weekly when alone.”

  Child congratulated Olney on the rave review of his book in the New York Times. He should count himself lucky, she said, for Nika Hazelton, the Times food writer, was a “nasty, vicious old cow.”

  Olney immediately resented the word lucky. As if he hadn’t quite deserved the acclaim. In fact, as he recalled, Hazelton had in the very same review pointed out the overcomplicated and not quite “Simon-pure French” nature of Julia’s book, while noting of his: “The unfussiness of the recipes is remarkable, though Mr. Olney sticks to the traditional French kitchen techniques with very little compromise.” His book was correct, demanding, and true.

  Whereas Child was a mass-market phenomenon. Her TV show was seen by millions. Her audience was American housewives—nothing should be too difficult or complicated. Or, if it was complicated, it needed to be explained in painful detail—like the endless recipe for French bread in Child and Beck’s new Mastering II book. Absolutely hair-raising, Olney thought. He would not think of trying to follow those instructions, and doubted anyone else would, either. “I am completely puzzled,” he wrote in a letter to his brother:

  It seems almost as if, after having successfully cajoled the American housewife into an acceptance of French-type cooking—after having, in fact, single-handedly transformed the culinary face of America—the coauthors had decided to play a good joke on her and scare her out of her wits—all that stuff wrapped in paste, and the explanations about how to stuff a pig’s gut are nearly as endless as for breadmaking.

  The very idea of baking a baguette at home was nonsensical in France, as was the thought of homemade sausage. These were things one bought at the local boulangerie or charcuterie. Olney might not have known, or might have forgotten, since he had not lived there since the 1950s, that in America decent bread and charcuterie were quite hard to find. Child’s goal was to make them accessible to Americans using ingredients from their local supermarkets, even if, from Olney’s perspective, her recipes were clumsy, inelegant, and inauthentic.

  Child, meanwhile, was perfectly aware of Olney’s not very well-camouflaged disdain, his sense that he represented the more authentically French approach. He had been far warmer with Beck when they met last summer, and no wonder. She was, after all, la Super-Française.

  Indeed, Olney considered Beck the far superior cook. Now he asked after her, and Child explained that Beck and her husband had gone to Paris and were coming back the following week. Beck was planning a New Year’s Eve réveillon dinner to which Olney was certainly welcome. Impossible—he would be in Italy, he explained, in Vicenza.

  Their conversation continued this way for some time. Pleasant and polite on the surface, but full of veiled, barbed remarks and prickly personality, hinting at an argument about the soul of cooking, how French it was, or ought to be. Olney’s lack of respect for Child boiled down to two seemingly contradictory points of authenticity. On the one hand, she catered to the American housewife, she appeared on television giving basic cooking lessons, and she focused in her cookbooks too much on the practical (full of “ahead-of-time notes” and the like) at the expense of the artistic. She wrote for beginners. And on the other hand, she was overly fond of the grandiose and dramatic, Olney thought—meats wrapped in pastry, ridiculously complicated desserts. Some of the recipes in Mastering II were not far removed from what Olney witheringly called “Grand Palace” cooking.

  So Child was too American, and her recipes were too French, in the wrong way. Not that Olney said any of this.

  But of course, Child could tell. And as she had with Beck, she decided she didn’t really care what Olney thought, or what the proper “French” approach to cooking was presumed to be. She was moving on.

  Olney and Beard had never met, and Olney’s first impression was of a “huge, gentle and benign creature—touching, sad, and very i
ll.” It was a remarkable contrast to the persona Beard presented in his columns, of the eminently authoritative and insatiable gourmet. Their meeting later that afternoon took place at Pathé’s clinic in Grasse, where Beard was staying for a few more days. Beard was happy to see his visitor—curious to meet Olney, and eager as always for any distractions: from his book and from his diet.

  Olney thanked him for the positive review of his book, which is what had brought them together. He knew that Beard was the godfather of the American food world, and he appreciated the generosity Beard had shown to a first-time author. (Beard had done the same for Julia and Simca when they started out—he was always a great champion of new talent, new chefs, new restaurants.)

  Beard was most amusing in his description of his “salt-free, alcohol-free, starch-free, food-free diet.” He jokingly suggested that the doctors had some secret plan to administer shock treatments, which would turn him away from food and wine for life. Impossible, of course. In any case, he said, he was due to escape this nuthouse in a matter of days.

  Olney described for Beard, by way of contrast, the elaborate CVF meal he’d had in Paris the previous weekend. It had in fact been overelaborate, but the wines had been stunning. The editor of CVF was a good friend, he said—Odette Kahn; Beard must meet her. Beard knew the magazine, of course, and held forth for a while on the food business in America and France, his book in progress, his newspaper column, and gossip about chefs and restaurants.

  He asked Olney if he was planning to write for any of the American food magazines—he knew all the editors and could make introductions. No need, said Olney; his literary agent in New York had already done so. “I have no idea if Gourmet magazine has accepted or will accept my socio-gastronomic study of the French lower classes,” he said, describing his first commission. “Although they assigned it, I believe they wanted something else.”

  The article he’d written was about rustic cooking traditions, something he’d been thinking about more and more. Pot roasts, braises …

  And what about his next cookbook? Beard asked. He would be happy to put in a good word at any of the publishing houses.

  If Olney was meant to be impressed, he wasn’t. As with Child, he felt secretly superior to Beard; he had almost no interest in the American Cookery book, for example. It sounded dreadful. Olney was entirely focused on the nuances of French cooking. He refused to be impressed with Beard’s status in the American food world. He just didn’t care about the inner workings of the New York restaurant business, or the New York food magazine business, or the New York cookbook publishing business. (Or at least Olney did not wish to appear to care about such things.) He held business matters at arm’s length, and viewed them with a bit of scorn. This was why he pointedly did not have a telephone. His interest was the art of cooking and not the commerce of cookbooks.

  And so Olney soon decided, in his uncharitable way, that Beard talked too much—all banal pronouncements and clichés. “He had arrived at the oracular period in his career,” Olney would write of Beard, “when he expected listeners to bow in silence to his superior wisdom. I bowed in silence to nonsense as long as it did not touch me, personally.”

  Olney was a man given to resentments; he nurtured and tended to them. When Beard asked him, a little over a year later, to give private cooking lessons to his longtime partner, Gino Cofacci, Olney readily agreed, while privately bemoaning Beard’s “selfishness and willingness to use friends.” At the same time, Olney was making good use of Beard’s connections and knowledge as he arranged to teach a cooking class (his first) in Avignon that summer, sending Beard incongruously affectionate, intimate letters all the while. He wrote about the menus he planned, who had enrolled in the class, his hopes that Beard would attend one of the dinners, and about his love life. “I continue to moon around dreaming of my baby,” he wrote of a boyfriend. “He keeps writing how much he wants to return here without promising that it can be a certainty.”

  When Beard asked Olney to demonstrate boning a chicken for his friend and protégé Carl Jerome, Beard had said, “Of course, I would teach him, myself, but my hands are too big.” To which Olney silently retorted, “Why are my hands not too big to bone a quail?” He resented the fact that Beard wouldn’t openly acknowledge his superior skill with a knife, and in the kitchen in general.

  Olney’s ambivalence about the food world was partly just a reflection of his personality. Beard, generous as always, immediately judged him to be a “deeply introspective” person, uncomfortable with those he did not know well, very much the opposite of Beard himself. But of course Olney was also a snob—quick to evaluate and always self-righteous, always holding himself aloof. More fundamentally, though, his dyspeptic view of Beard (and Child, too) reflected his allegiance to a purist, artistic outlook on cooking. The ingredients were pure, the dishes were pure, and he, too, was pure. It was an outlook oddly well suited to the historical moment.

  As Beard filled the small room in the Grasse clinic with a stream of talk and gossip, Olney smiled tightly and nodded politely. But in his reserve and silence were judgments. He found Beard wanting.

  The “collaboration dinner” was a slow-moving train wreck. It started off well enough. They poured drinks.

  M.F. drank vermouth on the rocks with a splash of gin.

  Olney drank scotch.

  Lord smoked cigarettes.

  Bedford was in her study, writing. It was late afternoon by now. Olney had completed his visits with the Childs and Beard, a gauntlet that left him feeling relieved and irritated in equal measure. He was happy to have acquitted himself well, to have charmed them as best he could. But he was also filled with quiet resentment at their complacency and self-importance. What he saw as his own obeisance—which anyone else might have seen as a simple courtesy, paid to people who had been generous to him—left a bitter taste in his mouth.

  Lord had made a lamb navarin, which was cooking in the oven. It had at least an hour to go, she said. The smells were delicious—the meat stewing in a light tomato broth with carrots, potatoes, turnips, and pearl onions.

  M.F. and Olney had greeted each other warmly, drawn together by their affection for Lord. They all sat in the dining room at Les Bastides, drinking and talking. Bedford emerged briefly and, in mock-regal fashion, explained that her contribution to the dinner had been to pour kirsch upon the fruit for their dessert. It was now macerating in the refrigerator. Then she returned to her manuscript, the biography of Aldous Huxley.

  Olney poured himself another scotch and lit a cigarette. He said little about his visits to La Pitchoune or to Grasse. The Childs were fine, he reported, wonderful. Beard seemed quite ill, but they knew that already; they’d seen him at dinner yesterday. Lord and M.F. chatted about restaurants and art—they’d been to the Grimaldi Museum in Antibes two days ago, and stopped for lunch at L’Oursin, sharing a couple dozen oysters between them. It was a good time of year for mussels and oysters—they were “small and crisp.” M.F. had been eating shellfish in great numbers, she said—dozens and dozens of them.

  Olney showed polite interest. He was half-expecting (and half-dreading) the conversation to turn to him, that M.F. might show her hand as a journalist. Presumably she would tell him at some point if she was indeed working on a New Yorker piece on him, and would ask questions about his cookbook and his life in France.

  But no, she was talking about Picasso.

  The Château Grimaldi displayed mostly works Picasso had produced immediately after the war, while living in the South of France and using whatever materials could be had in the mid-1940s, including house paint. He’d also begun making ceramics. All of it was vigorous, bright, and joyful. “Picasso was a happy man in his 60s!” M.F. exclaimed. She had turned sixty not that long ago herself, and was acutely aware of the ebb and flow of creativity. The perennial question of “What Next?” was looming ever larger in her mind.

  Olney glowered into his drink. Lord wandered off to the kitchen. More than ever these days, she
seemed elusive, wan, enigmatic. M.F. continued to worry about her, withering in Bedford’s shadow. Left alone with Olney, M.F. confessed that she was concerned about Lord, and what did he think? M.F. and Olney were Lord’s oldest friends, so they owed her support, M.F. thought. A place to stay, for example, if she were to leave Bedford.

  But Olney brushed her off. Lord was perfectly okay. Furthermore, he said coldly, he was “not into breaking up friends’ love relationships.” M.F. dropped the subject.

  It was dinnertime.

  SHRIMP TAILS

  NAVARIN OF LAMB

  MACÉDOINE OF FRESH FRUIT

  The meal was simple, nothing like the grand feast Olney had prepared. But that was its charm. It was a potluck.

  Bedford took charge of the wine. She opened a white to start. Olney told her about the wines he’d had at the CVF dinner. Petit Village, Mouton Rothschild, Margaux, Yquem—they had all been transcendent. Bedford asked about the vintages, and she and Olney were off and running: the Petit Village had been a ’64, the Mouton Rothschild a ’59 …

  M.F.’s shrimp were piled on a platter in the center of the table.

  The wine talk continued as they ate. The shrimp were sweet and delicious, although the cooking butter had congealed in the bottom of the dish as it cooled on the counter. Ah well. M.F. caught Olney’s studiously disapproving look as he maneuvered a shrimp to his plate.

  Bedford was assessing California wines as compared with French wines. The French were better, obviously. She and Lord had visited Napa Valley in the spring of 1969, and M.F. had taken them to a few of the local wineries.

  “Some pleasant wines,” Bedford decreed. “And some very very good ones; not great, but good.”

  This was just the sort of dismissive thing that Bedford would say, of course. And it was also, if she were completely honest about it, just the sort of thing M.F. herself might have said, not so long ago. Not about California wine, which she knew and loved, but about some other wine, perhaps. So why did the words rankle M.F. so?