by Luke Barr
Well, the opinion was wrong, first of all. There were indeed great Napa Valley wines—she’d had them! But Bedford’s opinion, conforming as it did with conventional wisdom and French prejudice, sounded impeccably authoritative and true, and rankled therefore all the more. And her voice—that casually assured tone of definitive judgment, on something about which definitive judgments were elusive, if not impossible.
M.F. said she had to disagree about Napa wines. What about Beringer, and Beaulieu, and Inglenook? She’d been closely involved with the developing wine culture in Napa throughout the sixties, as a founding trustee of the Napa Valley Wine Library, a collection of rare books and historical documents related to wine. She was one of the original champions for the local winemakers, hosting dinners and tastings at her house in St. Helena. And some of the wine, by now, was spectacular.
Bedford nodded without seeming to agree. Then it was back to French wine:
The 1953 Margaux he’d had the other night, Olney said—now that was great. It had reminded him of the scintillating, filigree-structured 1924 Margaux. But gentler, somehow.
On and on the oenological conversation went until Bedford finally changed the subject. She and Lord had been invited to four masquerade parties over the holidays, she said. They were becoming a highlight of the expat social calendar. Their entree into this world was Allanah Harper, who was for Bedford a kind of patron saint of the arts—not to mention of real estate, as they were living on her property, Les Bastides. They loved it here.
“We were living in year’s or half-year’s snatches in rented houses or flats in Dorset, in London, in Portugal, in Essex,” Bedford explained, describing her and Lord’s peripatetic life in the sixties. “Then London again, then Italy: the Browning villa at Asolo, an intolerable mistake with a sudden recourse to where we should have started: the south of France.”
The “intolerable” Asolo villa had been owned by the poet Robert Browning in the late nineteenth century, had later belonged to the Guinness family of Ireland, and was now a small hotel run by Giuseppe Cipriani. Bedford specialized in this sort of name-dropping. She did not explain what had been intolerable about the place, beautiful as it was. The “sudden recourse” had been Harper’s invitation to stay in the annex at Les Bastides.
Harper had attended the masquerade party last year dressed as a prince, Bedford continued, and had brought her coiffeur from Paris to do her hair in Grecian curls of pure gold, to match her gold body paint and makeup.
The very thought of this scenario—the cross-dressing socialite in gold body paint—had Bedford laughing. It struck her as the height of winking panache and audacity.
To M.F., the party sounded like one of the lower depths of hell, passé and a little embarrassing, decadent in all the wrong ways. What were these people thinking exactly? It was as if they were living in a tiny little bubble, self-satisfied and self-amused, putting on masks so as to see even less.
The party this weekend was at a hotel in Cannes, and Bedford had devised a brilliant costume of her own, she said; it was absolutely hilarious. She had rented a palanquin, and would be carried into the ballroom wearing a fantastic robe and holding a bottle of 1879 vintage port wine, which she would present to the hostess as a gift. Then she would reveal, opening her robes, that she was dressed as a “Limey sailor” from that same period.
M.F. really ought to come, Bedford said.
M.F. made noncommittal noises.
Lord brought the navarin to the table in an enameled pot. She had parboiled green beans and strewn them on the stew in the final minutes of cooking, a beautiful dash of color on the rich, still-simmering surface. Olney piled the stew into large bowls. Bedford opened another wine, and they toasted again. The navarin was robust, warming—it was “admirable,” Olney said. They ate in silence.
And now M.F. seized the moment. After the never-ending wine talk and the discussion of Italian villas and masquerade ball plans, steeped as it all was in retrograde snobbery and privilege, M.F. felt compelled to turn the conversation to politics. Left-wing politics. California liberal-radical politics. The civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the antiwar movement, the antipoverty movement, the student movement. Were they interested in these things in Europe?
A few years earlier, in the summer and fall of 1964, M.F. had gone to Mississippi to teach at a boarding school for black children called Piney Woods—this was during the “Freedom Summer,” which saw the lynching of three civil rights activists in the state. She taught literature and composition classes to high school and junior college students. She had gone because she felt the need to “do more than stand here,” she said, as the struggle for civil rights was taking place. Piney Woods had made 1960s politics tangible and personal. She told the story, by way of illustrating the changing cultural and social atmosphere, of a lunch at her house in St. Helena this past fall, just before she came to Europe. She’d invited her friend Paul Cobb and his sister Mary over, and various other friends had dropped in, turning the lunch into an impromptu party. Paul was head of the antipoverty program in Berkeley, and a labor and civil rights activist. Charismatic and egomaniacal, he was frequently arrested for his civil disobedience. His sister—tiny, but with a big, exciting voice—had started to sing, and the songs had filled the air.
“We all sat there in the living room, hardly breathing,” M.F. said. “She just put back her head and let it flow … a lot of freedom songs, and then several parts of Le Nozze di Figaro. I felt quite moved by all of it.”
It’s not that M.F. expected them to care about black activists singing protest songs and Mozart operettas at liberal lunch gatherings in Napa Valley, but she did want to get across the idea that there was more to life than masquerade balls and a 1953 Margaux. That America was changing, and like it or not, so was France, however slowly. She had felt it in Aix: the energy on the streets, even on the stately Cours Mirabeau. The aftereffects of the May 1968 protests could still be felt. The old order was giving way.
Still, it was in America that the changes could be felt more immediately, where a generational shift and numerous political movements were forcing the country to become its better self. That was why she’d gone to Mississippi.
With her soft voice and in a roundabout, anecdotal way, M.F. had driven straight to the heart of the moral problem of the evening, as she saw it. In Mary Cobb’s searing, spine-tingling voice—M.F. could almost feel it now—was the sound of liberation and openness, the very opposite of the insular world Bedford represented. Could there be a greater contrast? There was Mary Cobb, “black as coal,” singing freedom songs. And there was Allanah Harper, painting herself gold. There was the tangible, human desire for justice. And there were the corruptions of privilege.
Olney yawned.
M.F. left soon after dessert. Lord went to bed.
Olney and Bedford poured more drinks. And a few more after that. And now the truth came out.
What Olney felt was nothing but disdain for the American gastronomes he’d seen that day, he told Bedford. M.F.’s whining, liberal nonsense. Child’s undeserved fame and stature. Beard’s self-satisfied self-importance.
Olney held forth:
On Child: “The fact that she’s a television star doesn’t mean she knows how to cook.”
On M.F.: “She remains sweet but is essentially empty-headed, has no palate (eats practically nothing and drinks great tumblers-full of vermouth all day) and her writing is silly, pretentious, sentimental and unreadable drivel.”
On Beard: “A pompous buffoon.”
And more on M.F.: “A pathetic creature.”
And on Child: “Bitter … irrationally anti-French.”
Olney and Bedford were enjoying themselves.
“I came away feeling rather unclean for having been such a bitch,” Olney wrote in a letter to his brother later that week, “and, at the same time, feeling quite cleansed for having been forced into being verbally honest about what I felt.”
It was as if all th
e lingering resentments of the day had found a sudden, cathartic outlet in Olney’s late-night encounter with “mad old Sybille,” as he called her, who was, not coincidentally, just as vicious as he. They brought out the worst in each other: cutting, cruel superiority and a sneaking and rather pleasurable misanthropy, all expressed in the form of bitter complaint and vindictive character assessments. They issued “critical, negative, destructive judgments about everything and everyone,” Olney wrote his brother. “The terrible thing is that we agreed about everything.”
He knew they were being petty and personal, but he did enjoy the almost camp theatricality of Bedford’s snobbery. Her ruthless, aristocratic views appealed to his own resentments, his sense of unrecognized superiority. He was seen by the others as the newcomer and ingénue, and yet it was he who had written the more important and more sophisticated cookbook. Child and Beard represented compromise and commerce. Selling books and appearing on television was what mattered to them. They were vulgar.
As for M.F., her “interminable and pointless” stories about California politics were reviled, and her writing dismissed. It was clear enough that she was not working on any story about Olney for The New Yorker, as Lord had intimated, and that was just as well. Lord had piled M.F.’s books in his arms and asked him several times what he thought of her old friend: “Very nice, ever so sweet, I like her very much,” he’d said. But the truth was he thought the books were terrible.
“Trash,” he told Bedford.
The problem was he just didn’t respect these people. They were not authentic. Indeed, they were frauds, with their American-accented French, their inability to cook with any kind of intuitive grace, their follow-the-numbers cookbooks for American housewives.
Olney justified his vicious outburst with his belief in himself as an auteur. Cooking was something he had elevated to an art form. He had found a way to express the deep connection between French food and the French way of life—its insistence on only the freshest, in-season ingredients, its refusal to take shortcuts, its celebration of taste.
And it was true: he had indeed written an original and brilliant cookbook.
He viewed himself as uncompromising in his commitment to excellence, and therefore entitled to his scorn for the other Americans, all of whom he found compromised in one way or another. But it was also true that he was someone who simply enjoyed feeling scornful, whatever the circumstances.
Olney circled back to Child, taking note of her penchant for wrapping meats in pastry dough, as evidenced by the multiple recipes for meat en croûte in the new Mastering book. (He blamed Child, not Beck, for everything he didn’t like about the book.) “In Escoffier’s Guide Culinaire,” he said, referring to the 1903 classic, “out of forty-five recipes for roast filet of beef, not one is served in pastry.” And what about all the recipes for various things being flambéed? Desserts and other dishes flaming dramatically, causing children and Americans to ooh and aah. “None of Escoffier’s recipes for crêpes are flamed,” he said, “including crêpes Suzette—whose distinguishing characteristic, after all, is the presence, not of flames, but of tangerine juice.” Flambéing was ridiculous—it was a cliché!
Speaking of uncouth, unknowing Americans, Bedford said, they tipped too much. Had she mentioned that?
“I have a feeling,” Olney said, by now quite drunk, “that I shall shortly break ties with the whole fucking business and run and hide (who knows, perhaps paint). I’m more and more surprised, in retrospect, that anyone accepted to publish my book.”
Of course, none of Olney’s targets heard his bitter words. But the suddenly pressurized atmosphere surrounding all the food people at this time, on this very day, was something they all felt. The sparks were flying for a reason.
It was Olney who had set them off. His arrival on the train that morning served to crystallize the changes that had been developing over the previous weeks and months among this small circle of friends, particularly for M.F. and Child. So much was changing so quickly—in America, in France—and they could tell they themselves were changing, too, even if they weren’t sure how. But the sudden, bracing appearance of the cantankerous Olney was a tipping point.
His cagey contempt for all of them, his insistent purity, his obvious talent. His relative youth.
Olney was a snob. And he was provocative because he was a new kind of snob—perfectly conversant in the authoritative snobbery of Old Europe, the unspoken but rigorous assertion of “good taste” above all else, as represented by “mad old Sybille,” but just as likely to find fault with an overelaborate CVF dinner at Lucas Carton. Bound up in his unforgiving personality were claims on both French tradition and refinement, and Provençal kitchen-garden bohemianism.
It was a combination that propelled the others to continue to reevaluate their own devotion to France—to begin to move away in decisive fashion from their France fixation. Olney had arrived at just the moment at which M.F. and Child were losing their patience with snobbery, and at which Beard was in the final throes of writing his American cooking opus.
They were all contending with what amounted to a philosophical problem: a question of taste and style and authenticity, and specifically how those qualities were expressed in food and cooking—things they all cared deeply about. What was it, exactly, that they were doing? Teaching Americans to cook French food? No, that wasn’t it, that had never been it. Child had always known that what she did was teach people to be fearless, unintimidated, to try and if necessary to try again, to cook, to taste, to enjoy, to have fun—although she herself had been having ever less fun with Beck. That was going to change. And M.F., too, had not simply been celebrating French food and hedonism all these years; she’d been writing about something more essential, about how to live, to find pleasure in the moment. But was she herself living too much in the past? She was determined to find out.
In some ways, this day marked an inevitable break, the moment of American disillusionment with the sentimental glories of France. It was a world that M.F. and Lord and Bedford had all preserved in their books, and one that could still be tasted in a bottle of 1924 Margaux. It was this world that had inspired Child and Beard to learn to cook, and M.F. to do much of her writing (and living). The glamour of the prewar Europe of their youth—of the 1920s and ’30s—was a lifelong influence. They had all absorbed in some unconscious way the era’s terms of art, the art of eating, a way of being.
It was a beautiful world, preserved in the amber of fiction and memory. A world of faded aristocrats and remembered vintages, of boat trains and small family-run hotels that never changed, of excursions to Switzerland and meals in French restaurants where the sole meunière was always impeccably fresh and perfectly cooked. The ethos and aesthetic of the period had survived all the way through the 1960s, a worldview held together with wit and irony, tone and inflection, unimpeachable taste, and finally, at bottom, enforced by the logic of money and privilege.
But the mood had changed. The easy authority of the cultured and discerning was not so easy anymore.
For M.F., who had invented the very tropes of the genre, there was no going back. She would not be writing about ocean crossings and excursions to Switzerland anymore. Or idealized recollections of sole meunière. Olney and Bedford’s curdled snobbery was a sign of the end of an era.
Even Olney could tell.
When he saw Bedford again in London, some months later, he described her in a letter to Beard:
Eda and Sybille were also there, the latter suffering from a knee infection and being very grand dame limping around, clinging desperately to her cane with lace white gloved hands, her sharp tongue in no way affected by her affliction.
Olney adored Bedford and her sharp tongue, and had an ironic appreciation for the comedy and cruelty inherent in her militant policing of taste. But, twenty years younger than she, he was also aware that she was an artifact of the old order—that she was clinging desperately not just to her cane, but to a way of life that had run its
course.
During that same London trip, Olney met Elizabeth David for the first time. She had read his cookbook and, knowing he was a friend of Bedford and Lord’s, sent him a letter asking him to look her up next time he was in London. Also very much in “grand dame” mode, David purported to be shocked when Olney pronounced basil with an American accent, using a long a: “You don’t r-e-a-l-l-y pronounce it that way, do you?” she asked. She hated basil: “I have no use for it,” she said. As for his cookbook: “Of course, your food is much too grand for the likes of me,” she said, mockingly. And so it went over an afternoon bottle or two of white wine, the judgmentalism part real, part comic put-on. By the end of the day they were great friends.
“Her observations about people were often scathing, but only because they were so devastatingly accurate,” Olney later wrote. About M.F., for example, they agreed entirely: “Of course I am not supposed to say this [muffled laughter] but I do find her writing to be too detestable,” David remarked.
Both of these encounters—with Bedford and with David—were emblematic of what M.F. and Child knew they had to put behind them: the ancien régime clinging to its privileges with lace-gloved hands, issuing scathing insults interrupted by muffled, cruel laughter. As Olney himself recognized, in spite of his great affection for both women, there was an air of self-parody and incipient irrelevance in the hollow superiority they projected. And they seemed to know it, too, to know that their time was past, which was perhaps what made them so spiteful.
This was the twilight of the snobs. Snobbish as he was, Olney had no desire to disappear into the twilight with them.
12
ESCAPE
M.F. HAD TO LEAVE. SHE WOULD NOT SIT THROUGH another dinner like the one of the previous night. Nor would she be attending any costume balls. She’d had enough. Enough of Bedford and Olney, their insufferable snobbery and boozy one-upmanship, enough of her own polite, too-mild responses to them.
She had realized, thinking back on the evening, that the problem wasn’t Bedford or Olney.