by Luke Barr
It was her.
If she felt trapped at Les Bastides by the stifling atmosphere, it was one that she had played a role in creating. She had been celebrating the good life in France in her books since her twenties, and she had never stopped. She had always been honest in her writing, and with herself, and she had never been a snob. She could write just as elegantly about a single ripe tomato, or the potato chips she ate at the bar at the Lausanne Palace, as she could about mounds of caviar. But she could see that her writing was now trapped in the past. The New Yorker column she’d been writing for the past couple of years was called “Gastronomy Recalled,” after all.
This trip, which had started out as a self-consciously nostalgic attempt to revisit the glories of France, had stirred in her a kind of elemental doubt. If there was one thing Bedford and Olney had caused M.F. to realize, it was that she could no longer keep telling the same stories over and over again.
She wanted to immerse herself in the present, to write about what she saw, now. She needed to move forward.
She would leave in a matter of days and travel to Arles, where she would spend Christmas, alone, and then go to Marseille. Judith Jones had called from New York, and they had agreed to meet in Marseille just after the New Year to go over edits on Among Friends. And so her travel plans were set.
She told Lord and Bedford that she needed to immerse herself in her writing and would not be staying on at Les Bastides. They were courteous enough, avoiding any prickly remarks, leaving much unsaid, as always. She did not see Olney, which was fine with her. He was staying at Les Bastides for the next few days.
She had never found the moment to talk to Lord—really talk to her. So that was another thing that went unsaid: M.F.’s fear that Bedford was grinding Lord down; her vague desire to rescue her old friend, to offer her sanctuary. Perhaps she hesitated, too, at the prospect of seeming sneaky or treacherous.
She called Raymond Gatti and arranged to be picked up and taken to Cannes in order to buy a train ticket and exchange money at the American Express office.
“I should be packing,” she wrote in a letter to Gingrich, “but feel rather more fatalistic than usual about What Next.”
What next: not only the trip to Arles, but the rest of her life.
When Gatti arrived they drove first to Grasse, to pick up Beard at the diet clinic. He’d called that morning and, hearing of her Cannes excursion, offered to join her.
M.F. was in a contemplative mood, but delighted to see Beard. He had an infectious laugh, and he laughed often. When they got to Cannes, Beard stayed in the car while M.F. ran her errands, reading his mail and a few recent weekly magazines from New York. When M.F. got back to the car, Beard handed her a story announcing that Craig Claiborne was leaving the New York Times.
Well, this was news—of the most intriguing sort! Why was he leaving? Who would replace him? Claiborne had single-handedly invented the position of the Times food critic, and made himself a power in the food world.
An old school Francophile, Claiborne was respected by all and beloved at the Times, but he was bored with reviewing restaurants. And now, apparently, he was branching out on his own and planning to launch a newsletter called The Craig Claiborne Journal. It would be serious food and restaurant journalism, and would free him from the daily demands of the newspaper.
M.F. and Beard discussed successors. Well, what about Michael Field? He certainly had the ambition. But could he put up with the grind? Or Gael Greene of New York magazine? She was young and irreverent. There was no obvious choice—it was like trying to find another Sheila Hibben for The New Yorker, M.F. thought—impossible. (Hibben was the original restaurant and food writer at the magazine and had died in 1964.)
The next day, M.F. bid farewell to the Childs and to Beard after they all went to lunch in Biot, a small town nearby. Julia drove them there through the hilly countryside, and Paul drove them back—it was a wild ride. Beard had been released from Pathé’s clinic (no thinner than when he’d arrived) and would spend the next few days at La Pitchoune. They were happy in one another’s company—Americans in France, perfectly at ease. And Americans who were all, in one way or another, rethinking their connection to France.
That afternoon, M.F. sent them a letter:
Dear Julia and Paul and Jim—it is only a few hours since I was with you, and I miss you very much. “Happy is he who can weep at a departure” is one of the two things Dillwyn Parrish ever quoted, and it took me many years to understand what it said. By now I do, and can agree!
Thank you for showing me the beautiful country, and taking me to that good little tavern (inn, pub, restaurant—). I loved every minute of it, and every bite and drop.
It will be odd to play the role, by now familiar and quite comfortable of course, of a ghost in Arles. I’ll drift among the pre-Christian carvings, and hope to find a midnight mass where there will be the piper and drum, and a lamb bleating. Marseille will be wild and noisy …
All my affectionate greetings, d*e*r*e f*r*e*n*s three—
MFKF
At dawn the following day, Gatti picked her up in La Roquette. The streets were icy. She was on her way.
Child, meanwhile, had a different sort of escape in mind: a clean break with Beck. Beck and her husband would be back just after Christmas, and Child dreaded the thought of her arrival. The success of the new book had not quite smoothed over their difficult year, the many arguments and lingering resentments. In fact, the very success of Mastering II had only highlighted the extent to which it was seen as Child’s book, an extension of her TV show. Child wanted to preserve the friendship but end the partnership.
The point of no return had occurred the previous summer, in June. Mastering II was done, and she and Paul had wrapped up the French filming for the new series, and arrived at La Pitchoune for vacation. And then came word that McCall’s magazine, which was producing a three-part story (“The Making of a Masterpiece”) timed to the book’s release, wanted Child to pose for more photos. The magazine had hired Paul, who was an excellent photographer, to take pictures for the story. But the editors had decided to send the legendary Arnold Newman to take pictures of the kitchen at La Pitchoune and of the food the magazine’s editors had prepared—and to shoot a portrait of the two women for the cover.
Julia had felt put upon and said no: “I am finished working on the book,” she announced. “My time and energies are now devoted entirely to television. Furthermore, my husband has already taken hundreds of perfectly good photographs of Simca and me, and I see no point in taking any more.”
Thus ensued the “contretemps,” as Julia later referred to it.
Newman and his team had set up shop in the kitchen at La Pitchoune. There were lights and photo equipment everywhere. Newman still hoped to convince Child to pose for some pictures, and when he saw her and Beck together, he thought he’d won her over.
“No!” she said to Newman.
“Fini les photos!” she said to Beck.
Beck burst into tears. She had her heart set on this portrait, she said. “How can you treat me like that?” she wailed.
So Julia relented, and the two of them stood smiling in various poses for the rest of the afternoon. But they both knew, then and there, that their days of collaboration were over. (That was the weekend when Olney had first met both women and had sensed, without knowing exactly what was going on, the great tension between them.)
Since then, Judith Jones had begun talking with Beck about a cookbook of her own, which was a terrific idea, Child thought. This was a book that Child, too, had been suggesting to Beck, though Beck was resisting it. She needed Beck to find her own way, just as she was doing. And she needed Beck to get out of her way. Beck just consumed too much energy at a time when Child was preoccupied with thoughts of what her future would be.
Yes, the future was very much on Child’s mind. Even as she prepared for the legions of guests who would be arriving in the coming days—including Paul’s brother, Charlie,
and his family, and Judith and Evan Jones—Julia found time to work on the scripts for the next season of The French Chef, also noting ideas and recipes that would form the basis of her next book. As was clearly signaled by the title, From Julia Child’s Kitchen, it would be her most personal yet.
She was ready to embrace her role as a pop culture heroine, to embrace pleasure, joy, knowledge, and style, without regard to the higher authority of the Cordon Bleu—or Simone Beck. She wanted to experiment with international cuisines and microwave ovens and pressure cookers. She might even tell stories about some of the recipes—about the best lamb brochettes she’d ever had (at a couscous restaurant in Paris), or her response to a viewer’s letter about the most humane way to kill a lobster.
The result would be something entirely new, combining the je ne sais quoi and self-assurance of France and the open-minded, can-do accessibility of America.
“Now I don’t have to be so damned classic and ‘French.’ To hell with that,” Child said to Jones, contemplating her next cookbook. “I am French trained, and I do what I want with my background.”
Child felt liberated.
13
THE GHOST OF ARLES AND AVIGNON
THE RESTAURANTS WERE CLOSED FOR THE holidays. The weather was grim. The Hôtel Nord-Pinus was unwelcoming. M.F. was alone. Was she the only guest in the hotel? It seemed that way.
She was looking for France: she wanted to see it in the intense light of a cold, clear December day, rather than through the fogged-up windows of Les Bastides, or the rosy tint of her own memories, which dated back to her first visit in 1929, over forty years before. She and Norah had joked about the nostalgic, time-travel quality of their journey—revisiting the cities and hotels of their youth. And why not? It had all seemed harmless fun. But M.F. was feeling a deeper purpose now, one that seemed all the more urgent after the previous weeks with Julia and Paul, Beard and Olney, Bedford and Lord. She wanted to bring France into focus, unvarnished and raw.
She would be relentlessly unsentimental. She was not looking for the past, or even for beauty. She was looking for the truth. What did France look, feel, and taste like in 1970? What did it mean? And how could she write about it in a way that captured the moment? Arles would be a test—a test of her ability to see and report and write, rather than reflect and remember. She would keep a journal, and maybe, when she was done, she would be able to use the material for an article in The New Yorker. But that didn’t matter now. More important was the opportunity to use her observations to contemplate her future. She had often idly thought that she would live out her final years in France. Now that her children were grown, and she had packed up her things at the old house in St. Helena and begun building Last House in Glen Ellen, now was the time to put this dream aside—or not. And she was clearly wavering, this way and that.
“I know, at this far date in my life,” she had just written in a letter to Gingrich, “that I was meant to live and if possible to die on a dry, olive-covered hillside in Provence. If only Last House were here instead of in the Valley of the Moon!”
Coming alone to Arles was a conscious test of M.F.’s strength and independence, of her will to move ahead. She had left the warm comfort of her friends and family. Norah was on a boat somewhere off the coast of Portugal. (She’d sent a letter the previous week from Lisbon: Rough seas. Bad wine.) M.F.’s daughters and their husbands and infant children were at their homes in California and Oregon. It had taken a certain single-minded fortitude to pack her bags and venture into the cold, alone.
And that fortitude was immediately tested.
At the train station on the way there she had called for a porter, and then waited and waited. She hadn’t counted on this. She’d had to put her bags in two lockers, and was sure she would lose the keys, or jam the locks, or miss her train. She felt strange, stumbling, and momentarily incompetent. “I recognized too many of my failings, willy-nilly, in the cold insecurity of the morning,” she wrote later that day in her journal.
This is what sometimes happened when she was alone—she could turn on herself. And now she was in danger of being swamped in a paralyzing tide, a slow-moving whirlpool of interiority.
The cure for such thoughts, she knew, was to write. To observe, to immerse herself fully in the world, in Arles. She planned to stay for two weeks. And so she walked the city streets, day after day. She ordered gin and vermouths and pieds et paquets and went to the museum of Christian art and to the theater. The play was a political piece, set in Haiti, called Les Nonnes, by a supposedly revolutionary Cuban writer named Eduardo Manet. She found it sophomoric.
Back in her room at the Nord-Pinus—the Chambre Jean Cocteau, with its enormous armoire—she took notes in her pale green notebook. She described the meals she ate, the people she observed in the streets, the churches that seemed to be inexplicably closed. All the bar-tabacs were closed, too, even the one supposed to be open on Sundays, so she could not buy a newspaper. She was approached by a gypsy who wanted to tell her fortune. She went to buy stamps. She examined the stands at the market, which were selling everything from olives to pheasants to potted plants. She wrote it all down in her journal. Every interaction, every scent, every fleeting thought.
She was turning her isolation into fuel for a jaunty, heroic, and ferocious reportage. The diary was intensely personal and precisely observed—an unusual combination of intimacy and dispassion. “Since I got into this report, I feel fewer of the qualms that I could not push out of my thoughts,” she wrote, “it is good for me to be writing, instead of carrying on the formless silent mumbling.”
The maid at the Nord-Pinus delivered a breakfast tray every morning with a café au lait and two croissants, a small dish of butter, and a large bowl of apricot jam. Delicious. The café au lait was over-milky and oversweet, an innocent sensuality that always made her want to get back into bed and read awhile longer. Some days she indulged herself. On others, to prevent this from happening, she would get dressed before the tray arrived, and write at the desk. She skipped the second croissant. If she was going to gain weight, she decided, she’d rather do it with some good pâtés.
After breakfast she was on her own. And M.F. continued to be troubled by food. The lack of it. The constant search for it.
She planned her days as cannily as if she were organizing a state visit. The museums were all closed from noon until two o’clock in the afternoon, for example, and she could not simply sit outside, not in this weather. The few restaurants that were open were not yet serving lunch at noon, which meant she’d have to find a café and have a drink before embarking on the next search for a place to eat. And since she did not want to sit silently staring out the window, she had to remember to bring a book—an Inspector Maigret mystery.
It was precisely these interstitial moments that she usually enjoyed most when traveling—waiting for trains, resting between engagements, eating. But they were hard to enjoy in Arles.
One day she sat in a shabby brasserie and ordered crudités and a cheese omelet and a demi of rosé. The sign on the sidewalk was a cutout in the shape of a fat chef and had large clumsy lettering: ICI SE HABLA ESPAÑOL. It was an ugly room. Her table had a paper place mat. The food was bad, though the wine was decent, albeit flecked with shards from a broken cork. She read, as always. This was a French lunchtime brasserie from which all the magic and romance had been leached away.
Still, it was food that connected her to the world, she realized. Even a mediocre omelet and a glass of wine with bits of cork in it. Lunch was a period of rest and escape; she needed it to be more than a mechanical stoking of the furnace, more than “a quick gobble and then crash bang out into the world again to walk until another museum is open.” In her journal, she wrote:
I could live well, and perhaps more sensibly than I do now, on a piece of fruit from one pocket and a handful of nuts and raisins from the other. But where could I go to eat them? The park benches are deserted even by the birds, this time of year. My hands in mitten
s would drop every raisin. What is more, I—not another different person but I—would grow more and more away from the human race, further into my own tumbled, troubled ponderings. No, it would be unwise—for me, that is. I am determined to stay on the human side, perforce.
Suddenly, there was a strangled whimpering sound from the other side of the restaurant. A sort of rhythmical moaning. Then a scraping of chairs and people standing, leaning, looking. Someone was ill. The proprietor of the restaurant came out from behind the bar, surveyed the scene wearily, and called for his wife, who clutched her breasts in alarm. Some of the other customers got up to look and then returned to their seats with pale faces. M.F. stayed where she was.
The restaurateur’s wife called an ambulance, and a few minutes later, a beautiful and very pale young woman was carried out of the restaurant on a stretcher. “Had she taken poison?” M.F. wondered. “Had her heart failed her? Was she dead?” No: she seemed to be breathing. Her crying had stopped. Her eyes were closed. M.F. took a sip of wine.
That night, describing the scene at the restaurant in her diary, M.F. wrote, “I returned to Maigret. I was not concerned. It was as if I were a fish in a bowl, watching another world through curved glass.”
How had she ended up on the wrong side of the glass? It wasn’t just this particular charmless restaurant that had left her cold: it was Arles. She had been here a number of times in her life, but the Provençal town’s toughness and vigor seemed careless and violent to her now. She couldn’t escape the lurking hostility of the place. She was ready to leave. She wrote in her journal:
People in Arles do not have happy natures—at least not in the winter! They frown and scowl a lot. There is a kind of surly belligerency in them. They are, subtly, ready for a fight, looking for a slur, an insult … Yes, I think the place is filled with suspicion and haughtiness, over-defensive.
She was writing about Arles but in invoking its people’s “suspicion and haughtiness” and their “surly belligerency,” was she not also writing, inevitably, about Richard Olney? About Sybille Bedford? About continental snobbery? Had she given up on Arles, or had Arles turned its back on her? That was the philosophical question, one that encapsulated her uncertainty about what France meant to her now.