Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  When Louisette expressed her regret that she was not contributing as much work as her partners, Julia wrote an understanding letter in March about Louisette’s family and social demands and suggested that her contribution would be a careful review of the manuscript, some suggestions for nice touches, and connections to women’s clubs, their potential mass market (“Get hold of a mailing list from them”). When Julia and Simca finished the chicken recipes, Julia suggested that Louisette could write the list of suggestions for accompanying vegetables, which she did.

  The new year brought numerous upheavals. The most dramatic was the birth of Julia’s nephew. After a critical period in which the doctors believed that the baby would be lost, Sam was born two months early at three pounds—“No bigger than a fine roasting chicken? Ye gods,” gasped Julia.

  Then came the news that Paul and Julia would have to leave France because the government decreed that diplomats could stay no more than four years in one country; they had been in France for more than five. Julia and Paul learned late in March that they would be transferred later in the year, though they were not told where. Soon they suspected Bonn, which did not please them. After living on the Mediterranean, Julia and Paul’s compass turned southward. Thus, when asked on their annual government form to express their future interests, they said they wanted to learn Spanish and go to Spain.

  The good news this spring was the arrival, after much delay, of their contract with Houghton Mifflin. The contract was dated June 1, 1954; they would receive $750 as an advance against royalties, to be paid in three installments of $250. Paul’s nephew Paul Sheeline, acting as agent, declined the legal fee, suggesting that his aunt and uncle could buy something for his house worth $50. “If you become famous and on TV and another Dione Lucas and need a lawyer,” he added, “my firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, will be glad to represent you,” he wrote in March.

  Riding high with her contract, Julia accompanied Paul to a five-day PAO conference at the American Embassy in Paris. During her stay she cooked with Simca, dined with chefs Bugnard and Thillmont at Louisette’s home, and visited other friends. The chestnut buds were ripe and ready to burst on the trees lining the Seine in Paris. While in Paris they learned they would be transferred to Bonn, a place “terribly GI,” Julia reported to Dort: “I had enough of that meat-ballery during the war to last me a lifetime.” She added a note of fear to her sister: “After the events of the last few years, I have entirely lost that nobility and esprit de corps. I feel, actually, that at any moment we may be accused of being Communists and traitors.” Every month there was news of a China associate losing his job.

  Paul hated to think of leaving Marseilles: “This is hard on Julie’s Bookery. Just Hellishly hard. Every time she just gets settled-in, establishes a time-schedule, gets her pots and knives and spoons hanging, Wham!” Paul wrote her a “Nostalgic Folk Song” a decade later that began—

  Carry us, Bach, to old Parigi,

  Là où le Métro et Les

  Halles sont toujours beaux!

  Leaving France was also “painful” for Paul, who had spent eleven years of his life in that country. During April and May, before they began their packing, Julia experimented with rabbit, pâte brisée, gratin dauphinois, pork, and quenelles.

  Before they were to report to Bonn, Julia and Paul were required to return to the United States for a sabbatical. They had a farewell dinner with Guido, and the Whartons gave them a grand final party. Months before, Julia confided to Freddie that she had “a terrible wave of homesickness for real and life-long friends, and the USA.” She blamed it on the fact that they had not made many intimate friends in Marseilles.

  They saw their most intimate friends during a week’s stopover in Paris, having their last bouillabaisse, dining with Simca and Jean Fischbacher one evening and at the Baltrusaitis apartment the last night before the boat train. They sailed on June 18, 1954, and arrived in New York Harbor on the seventeenth. Charlie and Freddie Child met them at the dock.

  Julia’s request was for a lunch of “US steak first thing” (it was the only dish the French could not match). According to her datebook, she found New York City “loud, fast, hot, mechanical.” Julia and Paul picked up their new Chevy and reported to Washington for a week. For their official holiday they visited the Sheelines in New York City as well as other friends and family before driving to Boston. When they finally drove up to 8 Berkeley Street in Cambridge to meet face to face with Avis and Bernard DeVoto, their book’s godmother and Harper’s “Easy Chair” columnist already seemed like “old friends.” When Julia said that she wanted “one of those martinis I’ve been reading about” (his famous Harper’s article on the dry martini was collected in The Hour, 1951), Bernard was smitten. Like Julia, he was a Westerner (Utah) and a “Populist … an honorable word,” wrote his friend and neighbor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Julia and Paul also had fish and Chablis at Locke-Ober and visited with May Sarton, Edith Kennedy’s longtime friend, and Edith’s sons. Julia concluded that Boston was “civilized,” with an “English feeling of old houses and tradition.”

  It was a long train ride to San Francisco, where they stayed with Dorothy and Ivan and met baby Sam and his sister Phila. Julia visited the new, large supermarkets with Dort, impressed with the changes in American consumer products, television, and chlorophyll toothpaste. And finally, after much dreading by Paul since John McWilliams’s letter accusing them of aiding the “communist” agenda, they spent eight days with Julia’s father and Phila in Pasadena. Dorothy warned them that their father believed “McCarthy was a victim of an international Jewish plot in which Cohn and Shine are the bad ones.” Julia believed her father was “horrid” to Paul, avoiding whenever possible even addressing him by name. “It was a Westbrook Pegler atmosphere,” she confided in Dort.

  They returned to the East Coast and the Child family vacation house in Maine. On the cool cliff over the ocean, they celebrated Julia’s forty-second birthday and then enjoyed two and a half weeks of continuous lobster prepared in every form, hot and cold. There were many visits from old friends and picnics with the Walter Lippmanns (who owned a nearby home). And, as usual after his visits with Charlie, Paul fretted about the twin bond during a final stop in Cambridge, where Julia and Avis finally met with Dorothy de Santillana, the editor who had signed them up with Houghton Mifflin.

  During this visit to the United States, Julia investigated everything from cream and butter to meat thermometers, constantly noting changes in lifestyle. Americans were now more informal, people were eating more frozen food, wine was still not a national drink, and chickens differed, even between Massachusetts and Maine. Though she told Simca she would avoid “cooking experts” in New York City until their book was done (“They are a close and gossipy and jealous little group”), she did visit the kitchen of the A&P’s Woman’s Day.

  In mid-September, they returned to Washington for less than a month of German study. In her datebook, under a list of people to see in Washington, she noted one couple and beside their names wrote “Democrats, Secretariat, good taste, intelligence. Eat and Talk.” All values she and Paul cherished. Then, on October 15 they sailed for Paris, crossing the Belgian border to Germany on the twenty-third. The following month, unbeknownst to them, Jane Foster would have her passport confiscated, beginning a chain of events that would shake their world.

  Chapter 13

  A LITTLE TOWN IN GERMANY

  (1954 – 1956)

  “It is such fun, this work of ours.”

  JULIA CHILD to Simone Beck,

  December 3, 1954

  “WOE—HOW DID WE get here!” Julia wrote in her datebook for October 24, 1954, the day they arrived in Bad Godesberg, Germany. They would spend two years here, learning the rudiments of the language, searching (in vain) for good restaurants, and going to Paris as frequently as possible for Julia to work with her collaborator. Though this was Paul’s most important government assignment, far surpassing his job in Marseilles (he was now in charge o
f exhibits for all of Germany), it would be their unhappiest assignment.

  GOLDEN GHETTO ON THE RHINE

  Upon arrival Julia called their home in Plittersdorf on the Rhine “a housing project.” A year later she called it a “dump.” There was no denying that Apartment 5 at 3 Steubenring was modern, sterile, and efficient—without any of the charm or character of the German country itself. The inhabitants called it the “Golden Ghetto on the Rhine,” according to Lyne Few (a colleague in Düsseldorf), or “Westchester-on-the-Rhine,” according to Lee Fairley, who served here, as he had in Paris, as Assistant Cultural Officer.

  Despite the military living environment, Julia immediately learned to love walking along the western bank of the mighty Rhine River. Still, Paul was ill at ease in an environment emphasizing weekly car washings, football scores, and drunkenness. Postwar Germany, not surprisingly, had the largest concentration of American military in Europe. There were 250,000 soldiers in this country alone, without counting support staff. Thus, the role of the USIA was the most vital one in Europe. But Julia and Paul valued quality of life above job status:

  It was a terrible place because we did not like living in the military housing. The town housed mostly the military who really did not want to be there anyway and did not take any interest in the language or the people. We resented living in that kind of environment. We wanted to live with the Germans. If we had lived in the city and on the economy I would have been very happy.

  “I feel we are on the moon,” she told Simca, and immediately threw herself into the poultry chapter of her book, testing the meat recipes Simca sent, and learning the language.

  She began classes in German at the local university, telling Simca that “to function at all properly as a cuisinière, I must absolutely learn the language. Without it, one is too cut off.” Later she said, “I went to the university, but it takes more than two years to learn a language.” As she and Paul shopped, patronized restaurants, and visited the sights, they used their dictionaries as much as possible. Few Americans tried to learn any German or take part in the community, but the Childs were different. Within a year Julia was understanding the language and communicating, but Paul did not have her marketing practice or her sense of freedom to make mistakes and thus never learned the language well enough: “Paul just doesn’t like Germany, really, and he gets furious because he can’t speak German,” she confided to Simca the following July.

  Plittersdorf was the riverside suburb of Bad Godesberg, a town just south of Bonn (now a suburb of Bonn). Julia soon realized that this province of North Rhine-Westphalia was a vital region of what was now the strongest country in Europe. Germany was broken in 1945, its cities in rubble and its bridges blasted, but now with massive Marshall Plan dollars it was booming, exporting resources and goods worth four and a half billion dollars a year. The occupation of Allied forces (under High Commissioner James B. Conant) would soon be dismantled. All this industry was thriving north in Cologne and in the Ruhr Valley or southeast in Frankfurt.

  Bonn itself, though now the capital city, was relatively untouched by the bombing and had been the least Nazified. Yellow trolley cars rolled along cobblestone streets lined with trees. Famous as the birthplace of Beethoven, Bonn was once a sleepy university town “snuggled along the curve of the Rhine,” said Theodore White, “just across the river from the murky hills where Siegfried slew his dragon.” White compares the city to the university town of Cambridge, Massachusetts, fifty years before, a city where Paul and Julia would eventually settle. The gold, red, and black flag of the German Republic snapped in the wind above the government building where Chancellor Konrad Adenauer presided (White in 1949 had called him “a wrinkled mummy breaking into voice”). Compared with Berlin, this city was tranquil and placid, which is why Julia and Paul would have preferred to live there rather than in Plittersdorf had they the choice.

  Among the hard-drinking Americans and what White called the “dull, dreary, plodding men of Germany,” Paul found few kindred spirits. One of Paul’s assistants, a German national named Freifrau Dorothea von Stetten, remembers Paul’s “gentle personality, his fairness and his quest for excellence.” He was “very sincere and totally unbureaucratic,” she adds, and when events at the office became difficult, he would take her home for Julia’s dinner and a dose of “the sincerity and warmth which surrounded me in their home.” She eagerly read each copy of The New Yorker when they finished it (they continued a subscription in her name when they left the country).

  THANK HEAVENS FOR THE BOOK

  “Thank heavens for the book,” Julia would say later about their years in Germany. At the end of the second week in Plittersdorf, they returned to Paris to see about their furniture and to work with Julia’s collaborators. On their way to Bonn, they had stopped in Paris and dined with the Fischbachers and Bertholles. This time they began with breakfast at Deux Magots, lunch at Le Grand Véfour, cocktails with the Walter Lippmanns, and dinner at La Grille. Just like old times. Julia attended one of their school’s cooking classes, conducted by Thillmont, and spent the entire next day with Simca in Neuilly, working on the organization of the book and discussing the letter to Louisette that Julia drafted and Simca approved. “We must be cold-blooded,” Julia told Simca, “… I shall love her more once we get this settled.”

  “Dear Louisette,” Julia wrote, explaining that after months of working together and seeing “how we actually do function,” and after hearing from her that she “cannot put in the 40-hours a week that Simca and I can,” they wished to reassign duties and designations. Because the book would take another year and a half at least, and the “major responsibility for the book rests on Simca and me,” they wished to be known hereafter as “Co-Authors.” For her editorial criticism, ideas, and public relations, Louisette would be called “Consultant.” These titles, they said, in fact described how they were collaborating. Louisette’s responsibilities were clearly listed and amounted to three hours in the cooking school and six hours on research and kitchen work a week. The letter, postmarked November 19, 1954, praised Louisette’s gifts and her contribution.

  Julia and Simca listed their own responsibilities, suggesting that the book be entitled “French Cooking in the American Kitchen by Simone Beck and Julia Child with Louisette Bertholle,” and stating a “fair split” of 10 percent for Louisette and 45 percent each for Simca and Julia. They long knew that Louisette had, in Julia’s words, “gotten mixed up in a type of Magnum Opus” that was not to her taste. By mid-December, Julia informed her lawyer and nephew Paul Sheeline that they were probably stuck with the three authors’ names as listed in the Houghton Mifflin contract, but confided to Simca that “it is bad for the book for her to present herself as Author, as she really does not cook well enough, or know enough, and it is not good publicity.” The final arrangement on the cookbook came sometime later, and was a distribution of royalties with Louisette receiving 18 percent and Simca and Julia each 41 percent. This agreement was clear and mutually agreed to years before the publication of the book, which carried all three of their names in alphabetical order. As far as the world knew, they were equal authors. Their private royalty agreement reflected the reality.

  Snow-covered blocks of ice were floating down the Rhine in early spring when Julia moved into high gear on the poultry chapter (including some recipes that Simca had done two years before). It was a chapter Julia would work on all year. The chapters on soups, sauces, and eggs were finished. They thought they were almost done with the fish chapter, but would still be working on it in 1956. Simca was writing up the meats and sending them to Julia. Because Avis asked about pommes de terre duchesse, Julia spent one week cooking a different recipe each day (this pureed and molded potato dish would not appear until their second book). In January, Julia made chicken casserole several ways and poulet farci au gros sel (they finally chose a chicken stuffed with mushrooms); in February poulet grillé à la diabolique (broiled chicken with mustard, herbs, and bread crumbs); and in Marc
h several others of the more than two hundred possible chicken recipes Larousse Gastronomique listed.

  They chose recipes for several reasons, primarily because a recipe was a traditional French dish. But they also considered its usability in the United States (where some ingredients were not available, and no one had a duck press), and its flexibility, meaning its potential for using several other ingredients to make another dish. In other words, they attempted to have a recipe for each method. For example, for sautéed chicken they included crisp, simmered, and fricasseed.

  Julia and Simca took nothing for granted, checking every detail themselves. They consulted Carême, Larousse, Ali-Bab, Madame Saint-Ange, and lesser known great French cookbook authors—all of whom present their classical dishes in more or less summary fashion. “Mme Saint-Ange,” Julia said, “is an inspiration.” She thought Good Housekeeping “dull” whenever she looked at it, and Gourmet inaccurate: “I prefer Mrs. Joy [The Joy of Cooking] … and I love Saint-Ange. Ours must be the best of all!” For the availability and measurement of produce in the United States, Julia wrote to organizations such as the National Turkey Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

  For this cooking Julia had to use electric burners, which she loathed because the heat was so hard to control (“but I am learning its problems”). Each chicken dish and several meat dishes appeared at the dinners Julia and Paul held for new friends. Julia and Simca wrote each other about every detail of ingredient and language. They already knew each other’s quirks, such as Julia’s dislike of tomato sauce, especially with beef or chicken, and Simca’s hatred of turnips, which Julia loved.