by John Baxter
Two years ago, a press release for the latest Litscheriade arrived in the mail. His subject this time was close to my area of expertise.
With Garbo in the Grigioni Canton, with Hans Peter Litscher. Exhibition, guided tours & performances in Chur, Klosters, and Samedan.
What could have moved a breathtakingly beautiful Hollywood icon to put an abrupt end to her movie career at the age of thirty-seven, and thenceforth spend her summers at the far end of the Prättigau valley in Graubünden?
Staying in unassuming hotels at first and in a rented apartment later, Greta Garbo spent her days taking walks and practicing yoga until she passed away on April 15, 1990, at age eighty-five.
Hans Peter Litscher was intrigued precisely by the many blanks surrounding the mystery guest of Klosters. He embarked upon a quest to find the traces that Garbo left behind in Graubünden and to reassemble the mosaic of her life there, stone by stone. In Klosters, he found x-rays of Garbo’s feet, the cane, shoes, and clothes she wore, and innumerable objects Garbo used there at the end of her life.
Foremost among these treasures is the discovery of the estate of local shoe salesman and foot fetishist Chasper Caflisch (1947–1990). Mesmerized by Garbo’s body language, he followed the diva’s every step during her long visits here, stalked her, and recorded her life in minutest detail.
Shortly before his suicide on the anniversary of her death, Caflisch assembled a veritable Garbo mausoleum in his mobile home. This “Taj Mahal on wheels” serves as the core of Hans Peter Litscher’s Garbo production.
“So now it’s Garbo,” I said next time we met.
“I thought you’d find that interesting.” He bit into an éclair. “I’ll let you know when we do it in France. You must come.”
“But there weren’t really x-rays of Garbo’s feet, were there?”
“Of course.” He looked offended. “Why not?”
“And this obsessive collector, Caflisch. He’s another of your creations, isn’t he? Like Duse’s kangaroo?”
“You don’t believe in the kangaroo? How sad. But of course it’s true about Garbo. Everyone knows she spent time at Klosters.”
“Well, yes, but . . .”
“And it’s common knowledge that she liked to walk.”
“I suppose . . .”
“So why so skeptical? Incidentally, did I tell you the town council is thinking of renaming her favorite hill Piz Garbo, Mount Garbo?” He leaned forward. “Is there any more tea in the pot?”
As I poured, I said, “A pity this Caflisch isn’t around to back up the story.”
“But there’s his documentation. You should see it. Maps, doctor’s reports . . . He made a film about her. And composed some music—a serenade for wind instruments—dedicated to her.”
“The score for which has since been lost, no doubt.”
Garbo and her feet.
Anonymous. Greta Garbo in Pajamas and Bare Feet. 1928. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
He shook his head sadly at such cynicism. “I see you will not let yourself be convinced.” He sighed. “Well, this has been most pleasant. Do you mind if I eat this last éclair?”
A few days later an anonymous email arrived, with a link to a posting on YouTube. Greta Garbo at the Foot of the Magic Mountain.
The film showed the stage in a small theater. Three musicians, a woman and two men, dressed in ethnic costumes, blew a lugubrious serenade on two-meter-long wooden alpenhorns, the native instrument of Switzerland. On the screen behind them, clips played from Garbo’s movies, all of them featuring her feet: in ballet slippers for Grand Hotel, long leather boots for Queen Christina, clumpy brogues for Anna Christie.
Caught again, dammit!
41
Eating In
The Benedictine abbey of Saint Peter, Hautvillers, Marne. About 1670. Dom Pérignon, the cellarist in charge of making wine from the grapes of the abbey’s vineyards, has been experimenting with a method of producing the naturally sparkling wine that will one day be known as Champagne. According to legend, he announces his breakthrough by calling to his fellow monks, “I am drinking stars!”
IT WAS YEARS SINCE I’D SPENT ANY TIME IN THE UNITED STATES, long enough to think of Manhattan as a foreign country. Mentally converting dollars to Euros became second nature, and the automatic “Have a nice day” of checkout ladies had me responding, to their confusion, “Thanks. You too.”
Some friends had lent me their apartment in Midtown. There’s a special satisfaction in the anonymity of a hotel room or someone else’s home, that sense of a neutral space that you are free to fill with whatever you please. For the period of your sequestration, you are whoever you choose to be. Leonard Cohen wrote about “laying low, and letting the hunt go by.” Something of that sense was the first pleasure of being back in New York.
“We’ve filled the fridge,” said my friends as they left. “No need to buy anything.”
But they were vegetarians (and I was anything but). The grains, greens, and soy products they’d left me were free of salt, preservatives, and, sadly, flavor.
Fortunately one is never more than a few blocks from one of those vast supermarkets that seem to occupy every second corner in American cities. Within thirty minutes I was standing just inside the entrance to such an establishment, speechless with admiration.
European markets have aisles; this one had avenues . . . boulevards . . . freeways of food. Fifty kinds of bread. Twenty kinds of muffins. Ten kinds of butter. Thirty varieties of milk. And the meats! Not just pork and beef but also buffalo and ostrich.
The produce department provided the greatest surprise. Dragon fruit, guavas, and rambutan were almost unknown in France, as were black potatoes, prickly pear, and tomatillos, but even more surprising were the familiar plants and fruits jumbled together with no respect for the seasons.
How could ears of sweet corn, traditionally available for only a few weeks in summer, be on sale next to forest mushrooms that grow only in the fall? Since this was high summer, one expected lettuces, but not white asparagus. And why were beige autumnal pears offered next to fat summery strawberries?
No merchant in Paris would offer this miscellany of produce at the same time of year. Timing was everything. Sicilian clementines arriving in December, each bearing a few green leaves, brought a tart, bright reminder of summer to the darkest of months and added a grace note to the rituals of Christmas. Passe-Crassanes, the juiciest of pears, identified by the blob of red wax on the end of each stem, were in season only for the same few weeks as unctuous Vacherin cheese, the taste of which they so perfectly complemented.
French markets used refrigeration too, but less promiscuously. Just because something could be done didn’t mean it should be done. Melons could be had in December, flown in from Israel or Africa, but the connoisseur saved that experience for the summer, since nothing compared to the taste of a juicy cantaloupe from Cavaillon eaten with paper-thin slices of jambon cru, wind-dried all winter under the rafters of a Provençal farmhouse.
Moreover, to eat summer fruit in the depth of winter was to miss the pleasure of desserts unique to the colder months—a tarte Tatin of caramelized apples, or pears à la Dijonnaise, simmered in spiced and sugared white wine.
Loading up my supermarket cart with some more obscure products of its shelves, I hauled my purchases back to the apartment.
I’d just closed the refrigerator when jet lag struck, and I fell into bed. As it was only about 8 p.m. local time, I woke, refreshed, at 3 a.m. Fighting one’s circadian rhythms is futile, so I brewed a pot of Outer Mongolian coffee, toasted a Transylvanian whole-grain muffin with Circassian date flakes, and settled down in front of the TV. After a few minutes staring in disbelief at evangelists promoting prayer handkerchiefs and cancer cures made from sacred buffalo tallow and consecrated water from the Jordan River, I took refuge in the all-movie channels.
We all enjoy doing something we know is not good for us, but it’s an additional pleasure to have no choice. Watching Down Arg
entine Way with Betty Grable, Don Ameche, and Carmen Miranda in that vivid 1940s Technicolor gave the same guilty satisfaction as eating peaches out of the can, and not caring that the syrup dripped off your chin.
Browsing the produce aisles of that supermarket had brought home to me how much I’d learned from living in France. It taught me that, in food as in most things, the essence of pleasure resides in timing. To delay satisfaction sharpens the experience. Anticipation stimulates the imagination, enriching both the expectation of gratification and the gratification itself.
To eat summer fruit in midwinter felt as sinful as watching movies at 3 a.m. Much as I admired the miracle of hydroponics that brought strawberries to unnatural ripeness out of season, I wasn’t tempted to try them. Somewhere in Charente or Languedoc, tiny fraises des bois were making their slow way to maturity. Soon they would arrive at the outdoor produce market on rue de Seine. I remembered their scent, almost like perfume, the subtle mixture of tart and sweet, the delicious crunch between tongue and palate.
I could wait.
42
A Man Made of Flowers
Cabris, Alpes-Maritimes. October 2014. 9 p.m. 18°C. A plaza paved in fieldstone ends abruptly at a cliff that plunges hundreds of meters to the verdant coastal strip, a patchwork of orchards and vineyards, veiled in woodsmoke as farmers burn off the debris of the harvest. Beyond, the Mediterranean is a seductive cerulean blue, deep enough to die in. In July 1944, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry plunged his P-38 Lightning into its embrace, his death, like his life, the embodiment of a belief that “perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
FRANÇOIS MITTERRAND WASN’T THE ONLY POLITICIAN TO LINK HIS career to the abundance of France’s fields and orchards.
A contrast to the sly, suave, devious Mitterrand, the burly six-foot-two-inch-tall Jacques Chirac, president from 1995 to 2007 following terms as prime minister and as mayor of Paris, was known as “the Bulldozer.” The name was conferred by his former boss, President Georges Pompidou, in recognition of his ability to get things done, never mind whom he crushed in the process.
In a distant echo of the Calendrier républicain, both Mitterrand and Chirac chose a fruit or flower as emblem of their time in office. It says something about their fundamental difference in style that Mitterrand selected the patrician rose, whereas Chirac opted for the more egalitarian apple.
Chirac’s enthusiasm for apples became public while he was still mayor of Paris. After he mentioned they were his favorite fruit, a journalist confronted him with some samples of different types and asked if he could identify them. A variation on the old trick of discrediting a self-styled Man of the People by asking him the price of a liter of milk, the device was too crude for the savvy Chirac, who blasted the man by affirming his relish for all apples, irrespective of variety, providing only that they were French.
Of these there was no shortage. In defiance of the EU’s attempt to position the bland Golden Delicious as a one-size-fits-all “Euro-apple,” French growers produced scores of varieties, from the hard, green Granny Smith to the wan and spotty Clochard, the yellow Chanticleer to the superjuicy Pink Lady, the red-brown Reinette to the tart Cox’s Orange Pippin, and dozens in between. Each excelled in its own way. Clochards, despite their unprepossessing appearance, were ideal for baking with meat. Norman farmers favored bittersweet apples like the Binet Rouge for making cider. Against such competition, the Golden Delicious scored poorly. It appealed mostly to shippers, since the vaguely hexagonal shape made it easier to pack.
Jacques Chirac and apples, 1991.
Anonymous. Jacques Chirac and Apples. Service photo, Mairie de Paris.
Chirac’s enthusiasm for apples played so well that he made it the motif of his political career. In 1991, he replaced his mayoral chain of office with an improvised necklace of apples to greet a deputation of farmers. When he ran for president in 1995, his campaign logo was a green tree with bright red apples. This delighted journalists, who described him as “sitting pretty beneath his apple tree,” “tending his orchard,” and “harvesting the fruit of his labors.” When the former president and onetime critic made conciliatory noises about Chirac, someone commented, “Giscard is eating apples.”
Food became a theme of the election. A restaurant patronized by both Chirac and his opponent, Édouard Balladur, listed the favorite meals of both and invited other clients to participate in an informal poll by ordering one of the two dishes. Many more preferred Chirac’s hearty country sausage than Balladur’s prissy herrings in oil, a result reflected in Chirac’s landslide victory.
In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, a man is praised for having confessed his sins before being hanged. “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it,” says the man who officiated at his execution. The line can sound respectful but works better if played with black humor, like Greta Garbo’s comment as the commissar in the film Ninotchka that “the last mass trials have been a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians.”
Nothing became Mitterrand’s life like the leaving it. In his fourteen years as president, he gained a reputation as someone who liked to eat. His private chef, Danièle Mazet-Delpeuch, the first woman to cook for a serving president, revealed that when he visited the kitchen at night in search of a snack, she made him the most luxurious of nibbles: toasted Poilâne wholemeal sourdough bread topped with thick slices of Périgord truffle at $3,000 a kilo.
When he could no longer disguise the progress of his final illness, the president chose to go out eating. On New Year’s Eve 1995 he invited thirty friends to his holiday home at Latche, in the southwestern region of Landes, part of ancient Gascony, for a dinner of oysters; foie gras; capons, those fattest of all chickens; and, as a starter, ortolans.
A famous delicacy, these tiny birds, no bigger than a man’s thumb, are trapped in mist nets, drowned in Armagnac, roasted in individual closed ceramic pots, and then eaten whole—bones, beak, and all. As each pot is opened, the diner drapes a napkin over his head—to conserve the aroma, but also, it’s said, to hide his sinful act from God.
“Bien sûr, m’sieur le Président,” said his chef after Mitterrand made his request. “However, I would be remiss in my duty if I did not point out that the ortolan is a protected species.”
“I am president of the Republic,” Mitterrand said wearily, “and have only a few weeks to live. What can they do to me?”
Accordingly, each diner, including the president, was served two ortolans. Eight days later he was dead, having ended his life as he lived it: on a full stomach.
43
Poets
Atelier Christian Dior, avenue Montaigne, Paris. February 12, 1947. Expecting a tentative collection reflecting postwar austerity, fashionistas are astonished by dresses containing, according to one report, “between fifteen and twenty-five yards of material, with tiny sashed waists in black broadcloth, tussore, and silk taffeta, each with a built-in corset that was itself a deeply disturbing work of art.” In a reminder of couture’s roots in nature and seasonality, Dior calls it “La Ligne corolle” (the Flower Line), but Carmel Snow, editor of Harper’s Bazaar, prefers “the New Look.”
WHILE BUSINESSMEN, BUREAUCRATS, PRIESTS, AND FARMERS breathed a collective sigh of relief at the demise of the Republican calendar, some poets, musicians, and artists regretted the return of the Gregorian model.
Many sympathized with Fabre’s attempt, however clumsy, to reimagine nature as a kind of poem. British novelist Thomas Hardy, who celebrated rural life in such novels as Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the d’Urbervilles, spoke for many when he wrote, “I feel that Nature is played out as a Beauty, but not as a Mystery. I don’t want to see landscapes. . . . I want to see the deeper reality underlying the scenic, the expression of what are sometimes called abstract imaginings.”
Lafitte’s paintings for the calendar revived his career, relaunching him as a decorator and designer. Widely circulat
ed and massively reproduced, the paintings became the calendar’s standard illustrations and most enduring monument.
His image for Messidor, the month of the grain harvest, may have inspired one of the greatest of all poets. Lafitte represents the harvest as a woman asleep against a sheaf of wheat, sickle by her side. Red flowers droop at the edges of the picture and lie on her lap, and the verse refers to “the day’s labor succeeded by a sweet sleep.”
Twenty years later John Keats, in “To Autumn,” would also compare the season to an exhausted harvester and employ almost identical imagery:
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers . . .
Messidor by Louis Lafitte.
Lafitte, Louis. Messidor. Author’s collection.
Poets, particularly those of the decadent movement that flourished in France during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, embraced the idea that nature could embody human emotions. Paul Verlaine’s “Chanson d’automne” (“Autumn Song”) became one of the most popular of all French poems:
The long sobs of autumn’s violins
Wound my heart with a monotonous languor.
Suffocating and pallid, when the clock strikes,
I remember the days long past and I weep.
And I set off in the rough wind that carries me
Hither and thither like a dead leaf.
