Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  She and Simca now expected to spend two more years completing their book. They appear not to have taken notice of the appearance of The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, published in 1954 in London. A collection of memoirs and largely untested recipes by the charming seventy-seven-year-old companion of Gertrude Stein, it was not in their league. Alice was a Sunday and holiday cook, and her book had celebrity appeal (custard Josephine Baker) and recipes that called for canned soup. She was scandalized when she discovered one recipe submitted by a friend included hashish in the cookie dough and succeeded in having it eliminated from the American edition of her book.

  They took more seriously Sadie Summers’s American Cooking dans la Cuisine (1954), a book in two languages for the overseas American and her French cook, because it contained an equivalents chart; but they needn’t have worried, for its focus audience was narrow. Julia was concerned briefly the following March with a new series of grande cuisine dishes by Diat in Gourmet magazine. Another American who was working on a food book was Waverley Root, then living in The Hague and editing Fodor travel guides. His The Food of France, a regional history, would appear in 1958.

  Food for the American enclave in Plittersdorf was provided by a modern American grocery store, full of all the most recent canned and frozen food. Julia missed the regional markets, but consoled herself with the idea that she needed to know all these products to be aware of what American women were buying in supermarkets. Their cookbook would have to accommodate itself to the food available in the United States, just as Julia was cooking Simca’s recipes with frozen chicken from the commissary on her American electric stove. For this reason, Julia constructed a table of American poultry names and their French equivalent to open their chapter (a stewing chicken is a poule de l’année).

  Julia learned about meats while in Germany. When she later mentioned the food of Germany, she said, “We had venison and lots of potatoes.” Another time she said the food was “interesting, with wonderful lamb and pork and sausages.” She told Simca she was safest in ordering well-known dishes such as sauerkraut, sausage, smoked pork, and beer. And she delighted in buying the large, heavy mixers and grinders sold in Germany (for a cooking performance with Jacques Pépin in 1996, she brought out a huge potato ricer from Germany that was a hit with the audience). When May arrived it was asparagus time, thick white juicy asparagus. She was also taken with the mushrooms, and told Simca and Louisette about the girolles, cèpes, and morels growing in the German forests. What should they do about such mushrooms in the book, when Americans cannot find them in their markets?

  The Childs’ holiday celebrations this first winter were hardly worth mentioning, except for the frozen turkey from the PX, which Julia called a Turkey Fiasco Dinner for six people. There was a Wassail party on Christmas night, and a dull New Year’s Eve. “So many US army [are] depressing,” Julia wrote in her datebook for January 2. “But I got quite a bit of working and cooking in, so it was not wasted!” she told Simca. Julia planned weekend trips to distract Paul, including a brief one to Nuremberg on the first weekend of the year. Six months later, after many more German lessons, Julia informed Louisette:

  Although I continue to dislike Les Tristes Lieux de Plittersdorf, every time I get out of it to market, or something, I am quite happy. Paul just doesn’t like it here at all, and has a blockage against the language … il est trop français! I, as seems to be my habit, am “adapting” quite well, and can get around fairly decently with the language. But I wish we were in Munich or Berlin, where there was a bit of civilization…. I am not a country girl!

  As if to revolt against the German austerity and repression, Paul designed their Valentine’s card for 1955 with a naked man and woman (her nipples carefully dotted) pulling on each end of an arrow threaded through a heart with their names on it. It was a saucy and sophisticated scene amid floating hearts encircled by a continuous scroll of the word liebenswürdig (lovable). Many of their friends framed Paul’s annual work of art.

  They spent weeks painting the hearts red, as they did every year to add a splash of color, and the individual messages were upbeat. “We are struggling to learn the language, which just bristles with grammar,” Julia told her old Smith friend Ellie (and Basil Summers). To Hadley and Paul Mowrer she wrote, “We shall never be so comfortably housed. Everything works, all is clean and utterly convenient. Only thing we lack is Germans! But we are not glued here by any means and have already made quite a few trips.”

  Indeed, Paul and Julia explored the country, and “what a vigorous bustling country this is—we’d better keep it on our side!” Julia told Hadley. During their two years there they visited the cities along the castle-lined gorge of the Rhine: Düsseldorf and Cologne to the north of Bonn; Mainz to the south; and beyond Mainz, Heidelberg, Frankfurt (a two-and-a-half-hour drive), and Nuremberg. They also visited the large cities in the north of Germany: Bremen, Hamburg, and, on numerous occasions, Berlin (they found a good Chinese restaurant there). They went as far east as Dresden (in 1956) and as far south as Munich in Bavaria. Because they were in West Germany, which bordered the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, and Switzerland, they visited the major cities in each, most frequently Amsterdam, Antwerp (“fried potatoes everywhere—smell,” Julia wrote in her datebook), Brussels (once with Lee Fairley and his wife and several times to see Abe and Rosemary Manell), Strasbourg, Basel, and Geneva. Fairley remembered that Paul “kept meticulous notes on the wine.” The last city visit was for Paul’s exhibit on the peacetime uses of atomic energy, which President Eisenhower attended.

  Part of their explorations included studying German wine. They visited the winemaker of Niersteiner Domtal, one of Paul’s favorites. In 1976, Paul would proudly show off his collection of Rhine and Mosel wines to New York Times wine critic Frank J. Prial.

  Their tour of duty coincided with their desire to travel and explore. Paul, as Exhibits Officer of Germany, was visiting each of the Amerika Häuser, the U.S. cultural centers. Julia found most of the diplomatic dinners “boring,” but she loved walking through the cities with Paul, always checking out the local produce and cuisine. In her datebooks during these years, she listed restaurants, particularly in Brussels, Berlin, Düsseldorf, and Frankfurt, and wrote Ollie Noall, an early friend of Paul, “We spent the entire two years looking for a good French restaurant.”

  Julia’s favorite trip was back to Paris and work with Simca. “Simca [is] an incarnate French driver,” Julia wrote in her datebook during a second visit to Paris. They were visiting Curnonsky, shopping at Dehillerin for pots and pans, and cooking together. While Julia was there, Louisette signed their new agreement.

  KAFKA MEETS MCCARTHY

  When Paul was suddenly called back to Washington, DC, he and Julia assumed that after years of working at foreign service rank four (sometimes without diplomatic status), he was being promoted at last. Paul did not like the people he was working with in Germany, in part because of the military environment (the diplomatic corps always looked down on the military) and in part because one of the heads of the outfit and his wife were alcoholics. “It is terrible to be with people who are uninspired,” Julia later explained. “We did not admire them.” There were exceptions, of course, but morale was not high and Paul’s immediate boss was called “Woodenhead,” with his assistant known as “Woodenhead the Second.”

  Paul was informed on Thursday, April 7, 1955, to report to Washington the next Monday. Julia and the Manells, who had come from Brussels for a visit, drove Paul to the airport in Dusseldorf on Sunday. Julia was full of anticipation: “I was sure he was going to be made head of the department.” Next day she attended the reception for High Commissioner Conant with a sense of pride in her husband.

  “Situation confused,” Paul telegraphed from Washington, DC, his first day there. As if in a modern reenactment of Kafka’s novel The Trial, Paul sat outside one office after another waiting for various people to return. No one he talked to knew anything of why he was there. Each person
with whom he discussed his situation (and he had friends in high places) suggested several possible reasons for his return, most of which involved new assignments or promotions (he eventually compiled a list of ten possibilities). He wrote to Julia suggesting she put off her trip to Paris because she might need to come home. When a man named Parker May told him he was “not allowed to” say anything, but the wait “was in [Paul’s] own interest,” he telegraphed Julia: “situation here like Kafka story I believe I am to [be] in same situation as [Rennie] Leonard.” Suddenly, Julia understood. “Paul is being investigated!” she wrote in her datebook on April 13, terrified of everything from Paul’s being fired to his being arrested. Immediately she consulted their trusted friends, talking that very night to foreign service officer James McDonald until four in the morning.

  Paul was called into the Office of Security for the USIA and relentlessly interrogated the rest of the day and evening by Special Agents Sullivan and Sanders, “McLeod’s Boys,” he called them. R. W. (Scott) McLeod, whose mentor was J. Edgar Hoover, was a former FBI official whom Hoover had placed in the Department of State when Eisenhower became President in 1953. McLeod headed the Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs and essentially took over Personnel through his appointment of Ruth Shipley as head of Passports. Neither Eisenhower nor his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, could or would curtail the reign of terror that ensued. Shipley proudly confiscated or denied passports to any left-winger who criticized the government, from Howard Fast (novelist and biographer of Thomas Jefferson) and Paul Robeson to Dulles’s sister Eleanor. In one year more than three hundred passports were taken or denied.

  Sitting before McLeod’s Boys that day was a foot-high dossier on Paul Child. First they grilled him for hours as to what he knew about Jane Foster, then they asked about Morris Llewelyn Cooks, an old-time liberal whose name Paul once gave as a reference. Guilt by association. They asked him “a type of question particularly embarrassing to them.” In his dossier was a charge he was homosexual: “How about it?” Paul burst out laughing. “Drop your pants,” they insisted. Paul got angry and refused. “Homosexuals often have wives and children,” they explained. “As I have a wife but no children perhaps that gets me off the hook,” Paul responded. Except for the bitterness of his humor, he kept cool and rational. They soon veered off to Jane Foster again, apparently judging by his response that he was not a homosexual. Because the records were “routinely destroyed” in 1986, there is no way of knowing if an informant interpreted Paul’s European refinement as fey, but during McCarthy’s reign, communists were frequently linked with homosexuals and aliens. McLeod was fond of saying, “I hate drunks, perverts, and commies!” But Paul called their bluff with his rhetorical logic. Eventually he charged his tormentors with handling the entire business “in an amateurish and preposterous fashion,” and left believing he was cleared, “a monument of innocence.”

  “Investigation concluded successfully for me,” he telegraphed Julia, writing her to give copies of his detailed letters to two friends and colleagues, including Joe Phillips, the Director of Public Affairs for Germany. When he demanded a written clearance, they mentioned a thirty-day period of investigation. Paul went directly to the top security official in the USIA and demanded clearance, which he received, telegraphing the news to Julia. Staying in Washington, he threw himself into securing Edward Steichen’s “Family of Man” exhibit for Berlin, going to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (where Steichen took him on a two-hour private tour). The exhibit (and the universally popular book that would follow) included five hundred photographs of faces from twenty-six countries. Paul’s calm and professionalism were betrayed by a series of physical ailments and insomnia that plagued him all month. The only solace and balance he had were the letters from the woman he called “my beloved wifelet,” and the knowledge that she was driving to Paris, their city, where he would eventually join her. “I can’t get over how good I feel about your being in Paris! And I love to think of you and Bugnard working together. And you and Simca.”

  It was ironic that during the time Paul was suffering under accusations of treason, he was being entertained with a party honoring him in Washington by Marie Bissell, the mother of Richard Bissell, his friend and a leader in the CIA. Of course, Bissell was considered “a liberal.” Hoover’s witch hunt always focused on the Department of State, and recent history has uncovered the antagonism that Hoover and the FBI had for the OSS/CIA, a “secret war” that claimed a number of former OSS people as its victims. “The FBI happily assisted in the purge of CIA officers,” says historian Harris Smith.

  Julia, who thought the “investigation inexplicably weird,” sent special delivery letters and telegrams to Paul and called on the telephone. “You are finer, better, more lovable, more attractive, deeper, nicer, nobler, cleverer, stronger and more wonderful [than other men] … and I am so damned lucky even to know you, much less (or more) to be married to you,” she assured him. “Your lovely long letter came in this morning,” he wrote back April 26, 1955, “in which you made a two-line list of superlative adjectives about your husband, which he lapped up like a cat lapping up cream, shame on the old bastard.” Not only his wife was smiling on him: Paul finally received clearance for the “Family of Man” exhibit for Germany (its first European showing) and was asked by the government to go to Brussels on his way home to negotiate with the Commissioner-General for a noncommercial American exhibit in a World’s Fair planned for 1958.

  Though Julia and Paul would never forget the injustice of the charges leveled against Paul, the Jane Foster affair was not over. In August, when they were again in Paris sunning themselves at the Deux Magots, they encountered Jane’s husband, George Zlatovsky, who told them that when Jane went to see her dying mother in San Francisco she was caught there, her passport confiscated by Ruth Shipley. Julia and Paul decided to write a letter defending their friend: “We cannot with decency turn our back on a former colleague,” Julia wrote in a letter to warn her father that they might be thrown out of the government. They did not send the letter to Pop, but did write to Jane in New York City: “We really don’t know anything about your political affiliations … but consider you our friend. And we are terribly sorry you are in this predicament.” Two years before, Julia had written to Avis DeVoto wondering what she could do to fight McCarthyism: this letter was her stand. She wrote it believing they would pay the consequences. (Some of their friends, for example Budd Schulberg, who named fifteen people, did not stand by their friends and appeared as friendly witnesses before House Un-American Activities Committee.)

  Jane, who suffered an emotional breakdown and was hospitalized, eventually found a good lawyer and regained her passport. She immediately sent a telegram on August 27 to the Childs saying she was safely in Paris with her husband. She followed through with a lengthy letter to “Julie and Paul” thanking them for their support and detailing her travails. Jane and George were safely in Paris in 1957 when they were indicted on five counts of spying. The United States and France did not have an extradition treaty related to espionage, so Jane held off the press behind locked doors in Paris until the charges were dropped. Julia and Paul stood by a friend they believed innocent (while holding doubts about her husband); Julia was surprised and disappointed when Jane gave up her citizenship for a French passport.

  Finally, on October 25, 1955, six months after his interrogation, Paul received a letter from the Chief of the Office of Security at the USIA (Charles M. Noone) informing him that his “case had been considered … and a favorable decision reached.” His “case” was over, but the hysteria lingered on, ensnaring other former OSS personal friends, including Duncan Lee, George Jenson, and John Paton Davies, Jr. Davies, born in China of American missionaries, was transferred to an obscure post in Peru the same month as Paul’s investigation. Indeed, in his 1995 memoir, Robert McNamara charges that the “ignorance” about Southeast Asia that led up to the war in Vietnam “existed largely because the top East Asian an
d China experts in the State Department—John Paton Davies Jr., John Stewart Service, and John Carter Vincent—had been purged during the McCarthy hysteria of the 1950s. Without men like these to provide sophisticated, nuanced insights, we—certainly I—badly misread China’s objectives and mistook its bellicose rhetoric to imply a drive for regional hegemony. We also totally underestimated the nationalist aspect of Ho Chi Minh’s movement. We saw him first as a Communist and only second as a Vietnamese nationalist.”

  Despite Paul’s exoneration, he was to witness the continuing threat of McCarthyism when exhibits were suddenly canceled because some U.S. senator objected to something trivial such as “the brother of one of the artists who once subscribed to the New Masses” journal. He was angry that Eisenhower did not stand up to McCarthy and was dismayed the following year when Ike, after a heart attack, announced he would run for a second term. He and Julia preferred, as they had four years before, Adlai Stevenson.

  ESCAPING TO PARIS

  AND POULTRY

  Loading their car with her files and a food-stained manuscript, Julia drove to Paris for a three-week working session as soon as she realized that Paul would be in Washington for a while. Their best friends were in Paris, and they supported her, as Paul’s friends (including Charlie and Freddie) supported him through his ordeal in Washington. Julia expressed her anger, talking over l’affaire and McCarthyism with Paul’s former colleague Bob Littell. She also attended the Gourmettes luncheon and the Trois Gourmandes cooking classes, cooked twice with Bugnard, and dined with the Bertholles and Fischbachers, and worked diligently with Simca in choosing, cooking, and composing the introductions and recipes for their book. Paul urged that they keep their introductions lighthearted.