Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  Julia was always aware that Paul painted, but until she visited Lumberville for the first time she did not see much of his work. She knew he was happiest when he was working on a new painting, and many of his letters to Charlie through the decades, especially from Paris, talk of his work and his theories of painting. Paul’s work is “very accomplished,” according to Professor Colin Eisler of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. Had he wanted to be a professional artist, he had the talent to do so. Eisler places Paul’s painting in the Precisionism of the 1920s and 1930s, which is hard-edged and studied.

  Paul himself analyzed the difference between his and his brother’s painting: he was stirred by “formal relationships” (shapes) in nature, while Charlie was stirred by “energy expressions” (movement). Indeed, Paul’s paintings are so completely detailed that they do not seem to have any air in them. Unlike James Thurber, his acquaintance in 1920s Paris who drew in minimalist pencil strokes like a blind man, Paul completed every detail of a scene like a photographer. Both Paul and Thurber were marked for life when a brother accidentally blinded them in one eye during play, and yet both became skilled draftsmen (Thurber for The New Yorker).

  THE JOY OF COOKING

  Commerce and psychology were reinforcing the image of a “wholly compliant femininity,” says writer Laura Shapiro of the 1950s woman. The Ladies’ Home Journal, which had shown women defending the home front in uniform, now reproduced smiling wives and mothers hanging up the wash or transporting children. As these roles of femininity grew more powerful, Shapiro points out, “cooking went into retreat.” Campbell’s Soup and women’s magazines portrayed cooking as a nuisance, in a trend for convenience that would culminate in the first frozen TV dinner in 1953.

  Going against this trend, Julia focused on learning to cook the food that Paul valued and enjoyed. Contrary to the feminine image of the day, she had an appetite and labored over recipes calling for fresh ingredients, taste, and texture. Reinforcing her labors was Paul’s view of the centrality of good food and drink and the artistry of the toiler in these vineyards. In France cuisine des mères was venerated, and all professional chefs were men. While Julia labored for hours, The Ladies’ Home Journal advertised: “Learn to Cook in five meals!”—meaning learn to open tins, pudding boxes, and frozen vegetables (“cut two boxes of frozen cod fillets in halves”). Julia was learning to cook with the 1943 edition of Mrs. Irma Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking: published seven years earlier, it became the best-selling edition.

  The Joy of Cooking was the first real attempt to move away from the antiseptic, diet-reform boredom of the domestic-science home economists. The daughter of German immigrants, Rombauer wanted to find a balance between French béarnaise sauce and American pancakes. Historian Robert Clark claims her book represents a movement away from the domestic science of Fannie Farmer “toward flavor.” Her directions were accessible and her style ebullient, even blithe. There was a vivid sense of personality in the writing that appealed to Julia. Indeed, Rombauer’s biographer describes the style as “charming, civilized, irreverent, original, [and] irrepressible”—adjectives that could describe Julia’s own speech. Joy was American, not because it focused on indigenous produce, but because it was egalitarian and middlebrow, avoiding both the gourmet and the cooking school marm. It was American because it focused on meat and potatoes, or, specifically, hamburgers, casseroles, and cakes.

  Though the book was a huge compendium of recipes and sold nearly 1.1 million copies by the end of the decade, it changed little about the average American diet. Contrary to James Beard’s later assertion that the GIs returned from World War II with a taste for “the real thing,” Americans, whether GIs or civilians, preferred instant coffee, Jell-O products, and gloppy casseroles.

  Julia, apparently not a natural or instinctive cook, struggled with recipes. Her first broiled chicken: “I put it in the oven for twenty minutes, went out, came back, and it was burned; I needed better directions.” Sometimes Paul had to wait until late in the evening for the dishes to be ready for eating, but they enjoyed entertaining their friends for meals:

  I was not much of a cook when we first married. I was using magazines and The Joy of Cooking. We would not eat dinner until around ten because it took me so long to cook. I was doing fancy things. Paul would help. He would do anything. He was a wonderful companion; he was never, ever boring.

  Julia and Paul set a pattern as ideal hosts. Her spontaneous merriment matched his tight order and structure. While she busily banged away with pots and pans, he set a perfect table, coordinating the colors and placing the silver precisely. With their guests, she showed instant rapport and cozy friendship, while he poured the wine and directed the dinner conversation to weighty and stimulating topics. “Paul was somewhat more of a recluse,” says later friend Mary Dorra, “but Julia was a vacuum cleaner: She picked up everybody.” Paul agreed that Julia was his “magic catalytic agent for friendships.”

  Julia continued her education, reading, in addition to Time, Harper’s (Paul was fond of Bernard DeVoto’s “Easy Chair” column), The New Yorker, and the Paris Herald Tribune. She also subscribed to a magazine founded in December 1941 called Gourmet. Within the next few years she became aware of several people who were writing about food—Lucius Beebe, Clementine Paddleford, M. F. K. Fisher, and, by the summer of 1948, James Beard, who contributed a two-part series on outdoor cooking. Because the Childs had no television, she did not see Dione Lucas’s or Beard’s cooking programs from New York City.

  After living in close proximity to Charlie again, Paul occasionally suffered what he called “anxiety neuroses or phenomena of generalized fear,” for which he would seek professional help early in 1948. He carefully analyzed the intense love-hate relationship with his twin brother and his long tendency to define himself in opposition to Charlie. He now determined to live as a separate entity, to control his own attitudes and shape events and his own future. He also reprimanded himself for his pessimism. Though he did not say as much, he certainly married Julia in part for her optimism. He later claimed to have been “trained as I am in the Pollyanna attitude” by her.

  THE CHILD-BICKNELL COMMUNE

  After a year on Wisconsin Avenue, Julia and Paul moved into the very large house that Chafred still owned at 1311 Thirty-fifth Street in Georgetown. It was Paul’s home after his return from China, and he used the studio in back of the garden for his painting. Beginning in October 1947, they shared the house with Sally and Nigel Bicknell, neighbor friends who were looking for larger quarters. The Bicknells vacationed in August in Maine with all of the Childs before moving into the Thirty-fifth Street house. Nigel was a “golden boy” of the Royal Air Force and stationed in Washington. Julia thought he was “difficult,” and he did not get along well with Paul. (Their opinions of him were reinforced later when he left Sally for his mistress of eight years.) But they both adored Sally (“Paul loved intelligent women,” Julia explained), who was pregnant. Their first son, Julian Bicknell, was four years old and had a Scottish nanny, who also lived with them.

  Sally remembered that the day she went into the hospital to give birth to Marcus, Julia babysat Julian, Paul drove her to the hospital, then Julia prepared a beef heart for company that night: “She had begun to be adventurous and go to the meat and the fish markets. She had a healthy appetite always. When I returned, Julia told me that she had thrown away the beef heart because ‘it did not work out.’” Sally added, “Julia at that time was not a great cook, but she wanted to know how food worked. She wanted to know about everything.” Mary Case Warner, Julia’s Smith College roommate, remembers visiting the “commune in DC” and being served kidney pie, “which I couldn’t eat. And we had cocktails with avocados in them. Avocado cocktails! We sat on orange crates, but Julia was always herself.”

  The Childs and Bicknells ate every meal together, and the women loved cooking together. Because of Julia’s adventurous cooking and because Nigel’s diplomatic work as a civil air attach
é demanded entertaining, they had many cocktail parties and dinners, their guests including Rosamond and Thibaut de Saint Phalle, Dick Heppner and Betty MacDonald, Cora DuBois and Jeanne Taylor, as well as General Wedemeyer and columnist Joe Alsop. When Julia sat down at the piano to play something silly, Paul was not pleased, Sally Bicknell observed. She and her husband noted Paul’s serious and restrained demeanor, but Nigel responded to it with humor, if not a mean spirit. He deliberately placed Paul’s tools on the wrong hook in the garage. In his careful manner, Paul would always outline the tool or the pot or pan on the wall of his workroom and in Julia’s kitchen.

  Julia and Paul bought a house at 2706 Olive Street in Georgetown. The title cleared on May 17, just a couple of days before the farewell party for the Bicknells, who were transferred back to their Foreign Office in London. Julia was thrilled with their first home. Despite their car accident, the destruction of some of their possessions in the fire, and Paul’s job loss, she was optimistic. She lacked only a child or a career. Though Paul always admired bright and accomplished women, Julia refused to work again for the government as a file clerk.

  Three days after the title to the house cleared, they drove to Boston with Chafred for the wedding of Paul’s nephew, Paul Sheeline, to Harriet Moffat. Sheeline was the first son of Charlie and Paul’s sister, Meeda, of whom they disapproved and about whom they rarely spoke. She had several marriages (Sheeline counts a total of nine marriages between his parents) and wrote for Town & Country in Paris before her death in 1941. Sheeline grew up in Paris, attended boarding school with Jack Hemingway near Versailles, and served with the OSS in France during the war (the schoolboys Paul and Jack met again at OSS headquarters in Avignon). He was attending Harvard when he met his wife-to-be, and he would go on to become a corporate lawyer on Wall Street. Sheeline had not seen his uncles in many years, nor had he met his Aunt Julia, whom he liked immediately.

  Following a month on Lopaus Point in Maine, where they ate lobsters cooked in every manner and celebrated the birthday of young Rachel Child, Paul returned to Washington to rejoin the State Department with the promise of work overseas. As if to say farewell to family, they also paused on the way up to see John and Jo McWilliams in Pittsfield and on the way back stopped at Avon and Lumberville. Paul wrote to the Kublers in late September that “the FBI has finally declared us Kosher, so we’re back—sucking at the govt. tit—and we’ll be leaving for Paris around the end of October….” They rented their new house, got all their medical shots, bought spare parts for the Buick, which they called the Blue Flash, and three cases of whiskey, gave away their cat, and made plans to spend Christmas with the Bicknells in London.

  They boarded the SS America in New York City on October 27, 1948, with fourteen pieces of luggage and six or seven trunks along with their car. The following day the ship’s photographer caught the Charlie Child family waving from Pier 61 at Twenty-first Street as Paul and Julia sailed toward France. In yet another reversal of her McWilliams family migratory history, Julia was crossing the path of her grandfather’s Scottish grandfather, who was born on board a ship to America.

  After five days of a bone-bruising, stomach-heaving gale and then wet fog—cheered only by the showing of Unfaithfully Yours, a movie by Paul’s pal Preston Sturges—Julia and Paul docked at Le Havre, claimed the big blue Buick, and headed toward his new appointment as “Exhibits Officer” for the United States Information Service in Paris. More important, they were heading toward a career for Julia.

  Chapter 10

  À PARIS

  (1948 – 1949)

  “There are so many kinds of hunger … memory is hunger.”

  ERNEST HEMINGWAY

  HER EPIPHANY occurred in Rouen, in a restaurant called La Couronne. Julia and Paul stopped for lunch on November 3 on their journey to Paris, the back seat and trunk filled with suitcases. They had been up since 5:45 A.M., before the ship landed, then sat around yawning and smoking for two hours before the car was off-loaded to the dock. Their stomachs were shriveled after five days of the tasteless food on board ship.

  TASTING FRANCE

  Briny oysters portugaises on the half shell and a bottle of chilled Pouilly-Fuissé awakened their palates and hearts. The ritual of an expectant welcome, white tablecloth, formal wine presentation, and incredible tastes brought time to a worshipful standstill. Sole meunière, sputtering hot and browned by “golden Normandy butter,” followed. Then a green salad, crème fraîche, and finally café filtre. All at a reverential pace. Julia savored each dish as if it were the first food she had ever tasted. In a way, it was.

  When they left the medieval, quarter-timbered house of La Couronne to walk through the streets of Rouen past the mighty cathedral, still damaged from the war, past the merry-go-round of the festival of St.-Romain, Julia was full of a warm, winy awareness that the world of pleasure lay before her. She later described the meal, and by implication herself, as “quietly joyful.” Thus began the second romance of her lifetime. “The whole experience was an opening up of the soul and spirit for me…. I was hooked, and for life, as it has turned out.”

  At Ambassador Caffery’s crowded cocktail party for General Marshall the next night, “Julie with green-feathered hat” looked “divinely tall and svelte,” according to Paul. It was “like a Washington clambake,” he wrote Charlie, “and there were Avis and Chip Bohlen.” (Bohlen would become U.S. ambassador to Russia in 1953.) According to Theodore White, their journalist friend from the China years, America’s “finest group of American civilians in government since Roosevelt gathered his war cabinet in 1940–42” was working on the Marshall Plan: W. Averell Harriman, Paul Gray Hoffman, David Bruce, Richard Bissell, to name just a few of those who were in Paris during the coming months. All had a common purpose: the Cold War.

  Julia and Paul took their morning café complet at the Café aux Deux Magots, a sentimental place for Paul, who, during a bone-chilling day in China, recalled for Charlie the days the two brothers had huddled with Edith and Freddie by the charcoal braziers of this literary café in St.-Germain-des-Prés. That first week when Julia and Paul were sitting outside facing the church and watching a mob of actors with reflectors and cameras making a movie with Franchot Tone, Paul talked to Buzz Meredith, an actor friend from Hollywood, dressed in bohemian clothes and smeared with greasepaint. Julia and Paul immediately began a month of whirlwind diplomatic social life and paperwork, apartment hunting, and dining out with friends. They preferred, according to Julia’s datebook, the Michaud restaurant, just around the corner from their hotel.

  Michaud, an Old World place at the corner of the rue des Saints-Péres and the rue Jacob, was where the James Joyce family ate regularly when they lived in the neighborhood in 1922 and where Hemingway and Fitzgerald had a famous lunch. Julia and Paul’s first Paris lunch cost a total of $3.00 (there were 310 francs to the dollar in 1948). Julia had to have sole again, this time with spinach, and Paul had rognons sautés au beurre (kidneys) with fried potatoes; and finally Brie for them both. “Julia wants to spend the rest of her life right here, eating sole, rognons, drinking wine and looking at Paris,” Paul wrote in his diary to Charlie.

  The Childs lived a month at the Hôtel du Pont Royal on the corner of the rue Montalembert and the rue du Bac, halfway between the Seine and the Boulevard St.-Germain on the Left Bank. They could see the Seine and the old pewter buildings and green mansard roofs of Paris. The embassy lay on the Right Bank, with its elegant shops, commerce, and banks; the Childs always chose to live on the Left Bank, with the artists, publishers, and university people. Their hotel was steps from Gallimard, France’s most prestigious publishing house, and its editors and writers hung out in the hotel bar beneath the lobby.

  While Paul made his first visit to the embassy office that Friday, Julia took the car and, map in hand, found the ambassador’s residence, where she left their card. Employees were expected to leave a total of two hundred cards at the residences of all persons of their own rank and higher. An anac
hronistic practice, Paul thought. He showed Julia the Paris he had not visited for eighteen years: they walked along the Seine, past medieval churches, the Louvre, and theaters (the first week alone they saw a French farce, a film of Hamlet, and Sartre’s Les Mains Sales (Dirty Hands), Versailles the first Saturday and Fontainebleau the second. Their most important walk was by his 1920s haunts: the Childs’ favorite restaurant and the building where Charlie and Freddie had lived on the rue de Vaugirard were gone, as was Foyot’s restaurant, now a little garden. He took her to the Cluny Museum, where in the 1920s he studied and copied the furniture on exhibit there. Paul detailed all the changes in letters to Charlie and Freddie. They walked by the American Church, where Paul had helped to install the stained-glass windows made by Charles Connick, Jr., of Boston. Paul worked for the stained-glass maker in 1920–21, and when he was in Hollywood in 1923 he also worked in stained glass (and painting sets).

  There was still gasoline rationing, but food rationing was over; French governments would come and go during the coming years, but there were hot loaves of bread at least three times every day. There was still rubble, the weather was bitter cold (some evenings they huddled in bed to read their books), and the electricity occasionally went out. Whole chunks of the 4th Arrondissement were “ripped out,” Paul reported to Charlie. There were plaques commemorating those who fell in particular streets during the war, but he was too happy with Julia to mourn long the missing or bombed sites: he loved showing Paris on a cold autumn day to “a beloved and sensitive person who’s always wanted to see it, and who wasn’t the least bit disappointed.”