Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  Julia was in a constant state of excitement for months and could not get enough of Paris. “I was practically in hysterics from the time we landed,” she explained. “I was a late bloomer who was still growing up. I didn’t get started on life until I was about thirty-two, which was good because I was old enough to appreciate it. I had it all ahead of me.” She ordered sole three times the first week, and spent an entire day speaking only French while she got the car repaired, filled it with gasoline, negotiated for French classes at Berlitz, rode buses, ate out by herself, and contacted an apartment rental agency. She was a great sport and filled with enthusiasm, which in turn intoxicated Paul: “I love that woman,” he wrote in mid-December, “… only pleasure and growing satisfaction, never once a harsh word, or a bitterness, or a sense of disappointment.”

  Almost immediately she began French lessons at Berlitz three times a week from ten o’clock to noon. Even Paul originally had trouble with the French colloquialisms and slang in the Sartre play, but Julia, even after years of schoolroom French, was in need of formal help. Twenty years before, her various French teachers at the Katharine Branson School for Girls described her “explosive consonants” (Mademoiselle Liardet), her “grammatical and inflectional vagaries” (Miss van Vliet), and her “insurmountable” oral French. Little did they know her present motivation.

  In their effort to become a part of French life, they called on Madame Hélène Baltrusaitis, who was recommended by George Kubler. Her husband, Jurgis (a Lithuanian art historian), was concluding a semester of teaching at Yale and would return at the new year. They loved her immediately. “Hélène Baltrusaitis is charming, brainy, sophisticated, and quiet,” Paul wrote two decades later. Her sparkly dark eyes telegraphed her mischievous wit. Just five years younger than Julia, she shared her sense of humor. “It was an emotional time for me right after the war and life had been so awful and I had lost so many people and suddenly this was such happiness to have Julia.”

  If Paul’s artistic friends were literary in the 1920s, they would be art historians now. On December 1 they joined the Foçillon group, which met each Wednesday night at the Baltrusaitis home to hear papers about art history by former students of Henri Foçillon, Hélène’s deceased stepfather and Kubler’s substitute father at Yale, when the elder French art historian taught there. (A similar Cercle Foçillon met in New Haven.) When Paul taught at Avon, he met Foçillon. Hélène would hereafter be Julia’s best friend in Paris. During these weekly wine-filled, intellectual discussions, Julia would miss about every fifth word—“like oyster stew,” she characterized it—but she loved the company.

  Julia was like a big tree [said Hélène Baltrusaitis]. Everything she did was enormous. Never something small or dainty. Whenever she was cooking something, it was grand. She was always taller than everyone, but this never bothered her at all. She was intensely curious about the world around her. She had a great sense of friendship. I seldom in my long life saw anyone like her. We were more than sisters, we were great friends.

  Julia and Hélène met in the Closerie des Lilas, one of Paris’s oldest cafés, which lay between their two apartments. “Julia spoke very poor French when we first began meeting. She wanted to read Baudelaire, and I wanted to read The New Yorker, and we exchanged magazines and books once a week. Julia later claimed, during an oral history for Smith College, that though she went to Berlitz, it was “Hélène who really, I think, taught me French as much as anyone.” Julia was reading the nineteenth-century novels of Honoré de Balzac, which she borrowed from Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop. “That’s my man!” she would say about Balzac. “I was a Balzacian because you learn so much about French life from his novels.” Later she added, “I did not consider Balzac fiction … it is life!” and in 1980 linked him with Beethoven as “meat and potatoes [artists]—very out-front, essential-type people.”

  Julia found in Hélène a charming French woman. Aside from the few Frenchmen she met in China, Julia’s expectations were formed first by the gray and foreign French classes of Smith, then by the glamour of Vogue magazine, and finally by the movies: exquisite, dainty women and Adolphe Menjou dandies. The first Frenchman she encountered on the dock in Le Havre as the crane swung their Buick from the hold to the dock was a burly blue-coated dockworker, Gauloise cigarette hanging from the corner of his lips. “There were actual blood-and-guts people in this country!” she exclaimed decades later. “I was immensely relieved.” She gushed to her Smith Alumnae Quarterly, “I never dreamed I would find the French so sympathique, so warm, so polite, so tender, so utterly pleasurable to be with.”

  Paul was keenly aware of what he described as the occasional “bitchy and difficult” French temperament, as “uncooperative and shoulder-shrugging as ever (though with a certain sardonic charm. Damn them!).” But Julia adored the French. Though Paul noticed a distinct improvement, even acknowledging that he himself was now “less sour than I used to be,” he believed, that one reason was Julia. “With her warmth and charm and directness she would bring out the best even in a polecat. So she naturally thinks the French are just the most charming and wonderful people in the world and she wants to stay here forever,” he told the Kublers when thanking them for introducing Hélène to their lives.

  Julia loved the chestnut vendors, the white poodles and white chimneys, the fishermen on Ile St.-Louis, the gentle garlic belches after eating escargots, and the lengthy walks around Paris with Paul. They thought nothing of leaving the apartment at ten on Saturday morning and exploring numerous quarters of Paris until nearly six in the evening. She wanted to live in the Place des Vosges; she saw her first whores parading their wares in the rue Quincampoix (no poules de luxe they); admired the gargoyles on Notre Dame and the tottering sides of old buildings shored up with long poles. Paul never missed a detail during their walks. “Lipstick on my belly button and music in the air—that’s Paris!” he believed.

  THE LEFT BANK

  After December 4, Julia and Paul lived near the Seine River, almost nestled between the National Assembly (Palais Bourbon, which faced the Place de la Concorde across the Concorde Bridge) and the Ministry of Defense. They were at 81, rue de l’Université (Roo de Loo, for short), in the most elegant district of the Left Bank and within a fifteen-minute walk of the American Embassy on the Right Bank.

  They rented the third floor of an elegant town house owned by Madame Perrier and her family, including Monsieur and Madame du Couëdic. (In 1997 Madame du Couëdic, recently widowed, still resided there.) The Couëdic-Perrier family also had a château in Normandy, to which Julia and Paul would eventually be invited. As Americans, the Childs rented for $80.00 a month (the French would have paid $20). From their rooms they could see into the garden of the Ministry of Defense and, beyond, the twin spires of the church of St.-Clotilde. It was a location for an artist, and Paul painted the Paris rooflines and chimneys from his windows.

  They could park directly out front or drive their car through the double doors, under the front of the building, past the entrance to the building to the open stone courtyard, and park next to the high wall that guarded the ministry. Parking was a factor in their location, and for a month Paul had searched every night in the dark (only parking lights were allowed) for a place to leave their Buick. Once inside the courtyard, they could look up and see the full length of their L-shaped apartment with its curved, glass-faced hallway that joined the two wings. This angle allowed him to take loving photographs of Julia looking out at the urban landscape. In their part of town, the city looked green: the lush ministry garden and the square in front of the church were typical of a quarter of vast gardens hidden behind stone walls that fronted the narrow streets.

  From the courtyard they could see a small room built out from the back of the fourth-floor roof (formerly servants’ rooms) to accommodate a large kitchen. A narrow stairway and dumbwaiter connected this kitchen to their five-room apartment. One room was given over to the furniture and bric-a-brac they took out of a dark and crowded, ov
erdecorated and “very French” apartment. Julia described to the Kublers the Louis XVI salon with tapestries, gilt chairs, moldings and mirrors, the leather-walled dining room, and the bedroom that had been General Perrier’s study. Little wonder that their visitors remember the apartment as dark with labyrinthine hallways. Initially the apartment was “as cold as Lazarus’s tomb” and the potbellied stove made a feeble attempt to dry out and warm the place.

  The week they moved in was during the worst fog on record across Northern Europe. The Berlin airlift was halted. Paris had the acrid smell of smoke, and Paul got tired of “blowing black sludge” into his handkerchief. Low air pressure and the burning of cheap coal occasionally cut visibility to zero. On what they called a “clear day” that winter, they could see five blocks. “We had enormous bouts of fog and had to have galoshes,” said Julia, “and I remember on one trip in our car it was so foggy I had to walk in front of the car to lead the way.” Later in 1949 Paul would pay to garage his car, away from the wildly undisciplined drivers in Paris’s increasingly chaotic traffic.

  France was still emerging from the war and struggling to return to the program for rural electrification that had started before the war. In many ways, it was still a nineteenth-century country. Few households had refrigerators, washers, or dryers, and the electricity in Paris frequently went out for hours. With few phones, people used pneumatiques, which were letters on blue paper sent through underground tubes from one post office to another and hand-delivered immediately. Bicycles outnumbered cars.

  The facades of Paris were “grimier,” historian Herbert Lottman points out, “and they had to wait more than a decade for a scrubbing,” but the postwar celebration continued in intellectual cabarets and cellar jazz clubs and cafés. Various irreverent intellectual factions debated conflicting affiliations, and the communists were strong. Julia and Paul lived in the neighborhood of André Gide, who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature the previous November. Gide would die in three years at the age of eighty-one, and the new generation, which hung out in the St.-Germain-des-Prés area nearby, now ruled. There were Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus (The Plague was published the previous year), Louis Aragon, the surrealist turned communist, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, the novelist. To compensate for what Beauvoir called its “having become a second-class power,” France glorified and exported its chief products: fashion, literature (existentialism), and (later) cuisine. Waverley Root, Alice B. Toklas, and Julia Child would figure in this effort.

  The Childs were living near St.-Germain-des-Prés, which intellectual historian Lionel Abel (who arrived a month after they), called “the heart of Paris in 1948. You were always on the stage, always in front of the footlights.” A major stage was the Deux Magots, their neighborhood café. Years later, Julia’s friend M. F. K. Fisher said that journalist Janet Flanner remembered the Childs as “Apollonesque”—in other words, not part of the Dionysian crowd. Julia’s curiosity took her alone to the spectacle of Bébé Bérard’s funeral in St.-Sulpice the next year. Christian Bérard had been a painter and the set designer for Jean Cocteau and Louis Jouvet. Julia told Fisher it was her “first Parisian event” and she “marveled at the greats of the era [including Colette] tottering about in formal black and mink capes.”

  There were new expatriates in Paris as well, American novelist Richard Wright (who arrived in 1947), Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, and British novelist and biographer Nancy Mitford, who fled drab England for the “daylight” of Paris after the war. The Childs frequently spotted the Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov. Three American journalists lived at 44, rue du Boccador on the Right Bank: Theodore (and Nancy) White, who (as he put it) lived like a bourgeois on the strong dollar; Ann and Art Buchwald, a twenty-four-year-old ex-marine who wrote the “Paris After Dark” column for the Herald Tribune; and Irwin (and Marian) Shaw, who also worked for the Herald at 21, rue de Berri (where it is still located) and wrote novels. “Everyone came to Paris in the fifties,” wrote Buchwald, who took a course at the Cordon Bleu, better to write his restaurant reviews. He enjoyed Julia’s company: “Julia Child was the only one in Paris who had a sense of humor about food.”

  There were remnants of the expatriate 1920s crowd that Paul had known: Alice B. Toldas (Gertrude Stein’s companion for forty years until the latter’s death), Waverley Root (a newspaperman who spent the war in Vermont), Hadley and Paul Mowrer, and Janet Flanner (Paris correspondent for The New Yorker). Others just turned up for visits, such as the Bissells and Dick and Alice Lee Myers (she had gone to school with Janet Flanner). Charlie had painted many of their portraits and sold his paneled screens for radiators in Mrs. Myers’s boutique in the 1920s, a boutique founded to employ White Russians. Now it was chiefly the next generation, such as pals Honoria Murphy and Fanny Myers Brennan, who visited Paris, and looked up the Childs.

  The Mowrers became their family in France. Although they were more than a decade older than Paul, Julia immediately loved the natural and earthy Hadley, the mother of Jack Hemingway. Paul Child met Hadley when she was still married to Hemingway in the mid-1920s in Paris, and Julia heard stories of his neglect and humiliation of Hadley. “The Mowrers were our foster parents; we were like their children. We saw them all the time and went out to dinner and traveled with them.” To one of Hemingway’s biographers, she said, “They became rather like an aunt and uncle to us.” Paul Mowrer was now foreign editor of the New York Post, a lesser assignment, and Paul Child thought that the Mowrers had lost some of their “essential vigor.” Julia and Paul spent Thanksgiving at the Mowrer apartment on the same street as theirs but across the expansive fields of the Hôtel des Invalides.

  Before Christmas, the art historians gathered to light their Christmas plum pudding. Julia would later use the incident when asked in 1996 for a “holiday cooking disaster”: not knowing that the brandy had to be hot before it flamed, “they poured practically a whole bottle of brandy over it while trying to light it. It never did flame, but it was nicely soaked.”

  They would also spend their first Christmas at the country home of the Mowrers in Crecy-en-Brie (Paul’s pressing office work kept them from visiting the Bicknells in England). To save money, the Mowrers had just bought a house in New Hampshire and planned to move there when he retired. Julia and Paul would spend at least one weekend a month at the Mowrers’ country home until they left Paris.

  WORKING THE COLD WAR

  The political climate during the Childs’ tenure in Paris was pivotal: they learned of Truman’s election the day they arrived in France, the United Nations met at the Place du Trocadéro that fall, and then came the Prague uprising and the revelation of the atom blast in Russia the following September. The world was in transition, while De Gaulle was in Colombey writing his memoirs, and General Marshall resigned from the American delegation to the United Nations the following January to retire to his farm.

  Theodore White called the Marshall Plan (1948–50), with its more than $13 billion investment, “an adventure in the exercise of American Power.” Buchwald put it in more personal terms: “We arrived at the Golden Age for Americans in France. The dollar was the strongest currency in the world, and the franc was one of the weakest.”

  Paul was in charge of exhibits and photography for the U.S. Information Service, founded along with the Central Intelligence Agency when the war ended. It was America’s propaganda agency, replacing the wartime Office of War Information and now directed against communism. Again Paul had to organize an office and staff with little money, yet meet demands for immediate photographs and exhibits. He had photo archives of everything from Hoover Dam to an American high school classroom. Housed in the American Embassy (the old Rothschild mansion) at 41, rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré, he often had dealings with the Marshall Plan office, located in the rue de Rivoli in the Talleyrand mansion.

  Though personally frustrated with his office, Paul realized that to be in Paris during this period of history was to be blessed. Teddy White described this era as
having a “wedding party” atmosphere. It was the story of money and romance. America was rebuilding France, and the Marshall Plan goodies were plentiful, for the Americans were determined to reverse Russia’s plans to move across Western Europe. American money even financed the tobacco that the French smoked every morning in the cafés.

  A turning point in the political climate and for Paul Child came when a senator from Wisconsin (elected in 1947) gave a speech in February 1950. Joseph McCarthy’s denunciation of communists in the highest government offices brought him national attention and growing power. The tentacles of his paranoia would reach into the diplomatic service and eventually shake Paul and ruin several of their friends.

  The Marshall Plan, not the USIS, received the generous budget from Washington, and though Al Friendly and his other Marshall Plan friends promised help with USIS funding, Paul squeezed very little from them. In an interview about their diplomatic service in France, Julia later said, “The USIS was kind of a stepchild, and we were not really considered part of the brotherhood. We were always down around rank four, so we didn’t have to do any embassy things. We were free to live a normal life.” Sylvie Pouly, who was Paul’s “smart and stable” assistant from 1949 to 1951, remembers that Julia did not do any official entertaining (the embassy did that), but she did invite Paul’s colleagues to dinner. The young French woman was impressed with the numerous copper pots and the refrigerator in Julia’s kitchen. She also noted that Julia was “always in a good mood” and had a “marriage of love.” Several in Paul’s office remember him talking about Julia’s desire for a career, including a young woman named Janou, the reference librarian for the USIS.