Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child

by Bob Spitz

  The highest good in cooking, the French food critic Curnonsky argued, was above all simplicity—“the simplicity of art, the purity and the spontaneity of the effect justifying any means.” But while Freddie Child could prepare a meal relying on the “purity” and “spontaneity” of her imagination, projecting from the outset how it would eventually turn out, Julia’s process was still wildly chaotic. Recipes demanded too much of her. The various steps came at her too quickly, the ingredients never seemed to do what she expected, the results were unlike those promised by pictures in the magazines. Often, a dish she was preparing would transform in the pot from whisk to whisk, altering its consistency as a result of nothing but heat and sometimes falling apart altogether, forcing Julia to start over, from scratch. A college friend, who visited at the Georgetown house, remembers Julia’s frustration. “She made a chowder with cod that had dissolved into mush. The fish just disintegrated from overstirring and overcooking. It was obvious she didn’t know what she was doing.” Although Julia had incited any number of ugly kitchen upheavals that year, she wasn’t about to admit defeat. Granted, her mechanics were clumsy, her creative instincts more suited to filing than filleting. Any “purity” and “spontaneity” were still lightyears away. But the challenge was ordained. Confidence, Freddie assured her, would develop in time. She wasn’t yet comfortable with cooking, but she was excited by it.

  Julia was much more at ease with the entertaining aspect of her marriage. Washington was brimful of friends that she and Paul had made and their house on Wisconsin Avenue became the hub for social gatherings. “Paul loved brilliant talk,” Julia noted, and he filled their evenings with a revolving-door cast of distinguished conversationalists, mixing Washington intellectuals and artists in a fascinating nightly salon. Every type of character passed through their house, politicos—like Sherman Kent, the so-called father of intelligence analysis, and master international strategist Paul Nitze—and those in the arts, like Archibald MacLeish, John Ford, Stewart Alsop, Budd Schulberg, and Eero Saarinen. Plenty of Julia’s Smith classmates also joined the get-togethers, as did Charlie and Freddie’s academic acquaintances. “You’d hear the most amazing discussions in our house,” Julia said. “Every night was an education for me.”

  For Paul, that education was a cornerstone of marriage. He craved the type of stimulation that Edith had provided, and his need for another “intellectual equal” became a dogged preoccupation. Julia, alas, was still a work-in-progress. “She was completely unmolded,” according to Pat Pratt, a Smith alumna, who became close to the Childs in the ensuing years. “Paul was determined to create an adult Julia, to turn her into a more worldly and sophisticated person.” Although he was ten years older than Julia and all-knowing in her eyes, when it came to his wife Paul did not condescend. “He always suggested ways she could improve herself, ideas she could embrace and adapt.” By listening to Nitze, for instance, she could learn how Europe’s post-war reconstruction affected America’s financial stability; from Saarinen, an impression on reshaping our own mutable future. Julia’s personal development became a fixation of Paul’s. But as he well knew, there was plenty to build on. He loved her unbridled exuberance, her robust sense of humor, the no-bullshit way she said what was on her mind, but told her that he didn’t like “the slight atmosphere of hysteria” that was an aspect of her persona. She confessed that she hadn’t read much of the philosophers or great essayists; he gave her a reading list. The same with poetry; he read aloud to her, in a quiet, expressive voice, from well-worn collections of Millay and Sarton.

  The remaining months of 1947 had passed in a blur of enchantment, as Julia and Paul strengthened the roots of their new marriage. Julia embraced her new role as a social hostess—and as a wife. She put finishing touches on the house, hanging curtains and laying rugs; white flowers were ever-present in a vase on the music console. In a moment of inspiration, Julia decorated the front staircase with a gallery of Paul’s best photographs—whatever she could do to enhance their pleasure. Dinner was always an occasion, a ceremony, always served elegantly on a dining room table Paul had built, always with a bottle of wine she collected from his well-stocked cellar. In the evenings, after dinner, while Julia read, Paul would spend an hour or so painting in a special area she’d cleared next to the spice cabinet in the kitchen.

  Finally, they had a place that felt like home, someplace comfortable and permanent and unmistakably their own. It gave them great satisfaction.

  But the satisfaction was short-lived. In early February 1948, after a long night of merrymaking in the dining room, drinking Chilean wine and making valentines for their friends (a ritual they would celebrate annually), the house burned down. Julia and Paul had been asleep in the upstairs bedroom and were awakened around four o’clock by “the creaking of flames downstairs” that sounded like “someone smashing wood-work.” They sat bolt upright in bed, thinking, “But this just can’t be happening!” The lights were dead and so was the phone. In the increasingly smoke-filled dark, they spent a few minutes pitching whatever belongings they could lay their hands on into the street below. Should they jump? It was tempting, but too great of a plunge. There was nothing to break their fall. Instead, they decided to try to make it to the living room windows, which gave out onto a lower roof. “The belly-crawl in the dark, through hot smoke, knocking into furniture, and fighting with the window lock was the worst,” Paul recalled. It was touch and go for a few hair-raising minutes. Flames shot up from between the old wood floorboards, thick smoke began to wreak havoc with their lungs. At last, they fought their way outside into a wintry, twelve-degree night, wearing nothing but thin cotton robes.

  The house was uninhabitable, a complete disaster. The fire had burned entirely through the lower two floors, and firemen had “chopped through the walls” in an attempt to contain the spread of flames. The lovingly decorated rooms lay in charred, waterlogged ruins. Fortunately, Julia and Paul could stay at Charlie’s while repairs were made, but it was hardly the cozy family affair one might expect. While Charlie and Freddie were obliging hosts, there were unresolved tensions between the twin brothers that had been accumulating over the years. The prospect of depending on Charlie’s kindness really agitated Paul. He became more prickly and taciturn than usual. Compounding this vicissitude was news that on March 15, Paul and Charlie would be squeezed out of their respective State Department jobs. Homelessness and joblessness delivered a cruel one-two punch.

  Julia did all she could to minister to his distress. Nothing surpassed her devotion to Paul. She was his greatest cheerleader—an indispensable cheerleader—especially while he grappled with moodiness and bouts of insecurity. She knew how much he had hated his job—hated it. He was stuck in the bureaucratic ooze as a desk monkey for a superficial government agency that refused to take advantage of his tremendous talents. It was a tedious, banal, soul-sucking job. Everyone felt he deserved more, better, something impressive, or at least to be free and clear of the “average men with average minds” who tormented him all day long. For a while, he’d toyed with starting his own firm, Paul Child Inc., to “do visual presentation graphics for big business.” But that was a dream, just a big dream that he never pursued. “If you could find your niche, I think you could find your life,” Julia had once assured him. Now seemed like the perfect time to break his dependency on Uncle Sam.

  Julia secretly hoped that Paul could support himself by painting. She encouraged him to rely on his artistic talent, what he called his “not-yet-realized capacities,” instead of looking for work in the public sector. His brother had already taken the plunge. The gregarious Charlie decided he was through with government desk jobs and was determined, from now on, to paint professionally full-time. Soon after their jobs at State had ended, Charlie announced that he and his family were headed back to Lumberville, permanently, where he would pursue portrait painting and illustration. But if this was meant to inspire Paul, it only served to fuel his “various anxieties and fears.” All the old j
ealousies he felt bubbled up anew, and he began to resent Charlie for “marrying a girl with a good income, leading what seemed to be a protected life of ease and world travel, while [he, Paul,] floundered from one piddling job to another.” It didn’t seem fair that things didn’t come to him as easily as they did to Charlie. Yet without Charlie, Paul sank back into restless self-doubt, and before the snows had thawed he was looking for government work again.

  In the interim, Julia found a more presentable house in Georgetown, on Olive Street, in the shadow of the new parkway, less than a mile from their old place. They moved in at the end of May, with plans to paint and decorate, but within days they were on the road again—first to Boston, for the wedding of Paul’s nephew, then to Lopaus Point, in Maine, where they dug in for a month of rest and relaxation. It was clear they needed a change of scenery, while Paul contemplated his uncertain future. He had gotten a verbal commitment from the newly formed United States Information Service (USIS), a propaganda arm of the State Department authorized to develop programs to broaden the cultural dialogue between American institutions and their counterparts abroad. It was a good position, with somewhat of an intellectual accent, but for a forty-four-year-old man with a lifelong need to express himself, it doomed Paul Child to a mundane desk job. He’d be “back sucking at the govt. tit,” he lamented—another functionary in a crowded field of functionaries. Still, there was an upside: he managed to extract a promise from those in charge of a posting somewhere overseas. Julia was game for more foreign intrigue. Her own plans were hopelessly vague. To see a new part of the world with a man like Paul—that was something she could get behind.

  From what they knew, foreign postings were discretionary; there was no telling where they’d eventually wind up. While Paul waited for FBI clearance, he and Julia studied the map, fantasizing about the places and experiences they would share. Because of their war résumés, India was a distinct possibility. So were Germany and Austria, where, courtesy of the Marshall Plan, reconstruction was in full swing. There were also opportunities in the Benelux countries, where American embassies were operating at full tilt. When Paul’s assignment finally came through it almost knocked them off their feet. Paris! Was it really possible? Had they really landed such a plum posting, the one place in the world where everyone wanted to be? Paris! It was Paul’s favorite place on earth, and now it would be Julia’s, as well. They were going to Paris, of all places! Julia was positively beside herself.

  By early September 1948, just weeks before their departure, Paul’s job title was clarified. He was officially a Class 4 Foreign Reserve officer—a mid-level diplomat, an attaché in embassy-speak—in charge of exhibits designed “to inform the French people by graphic means about the aspects of American life that the government deems important.” As a matter of policy, it seemed expedient to spread American goodwill, but the agency’s underlying objective was to counter the influence of communism. Since the end of the war, Russia had been on the move, consolidating its power, ideological and otherwise, in Eastern Europe and parts of Asia. Mainland China was on the verge of its own seismic shift to communism. Lines had been drawn: the bucks stopped fear. American embassies across the world were pouring considerable resources into battling the Red menace, and emissaries like Paul were being positioned to lead the charge.

  In Paris! Julia and Paul were giddy with anticipation. They couldn’t pack fast enough. They rented their house, gave away their cat, put their furniture into storage, and shipped their belongings overseas in a container marked as “household goods”—a bulky wardrobe consisting of fourteen suitcases and seven trunks. In addition, they were taking “the Blue Flash,” a brand-new 1947 Buick that had been a wedding present from Julia’s father, along with a gas refrigerator as a hedge against French iceboxes. After a year living like campers in Ceylon and China, they felt entitled to a few creature comforts.

  Finally, on October 28, 1948, they sailed from New York City to Le Havre aboard the SS America. It was a brutal five-day crossing, through squalls that produced waves the size of skyscrapers and endless cloudbanks of fog, confining most of the battered passengers to their staterooms for the duration. As the America lumbered toward shore on the morning of November 3, the Childs, restless and bleary-eyed, dragged themselves to the porthole for a bird’s-eye preview of Mother France. Water sluiced along the glass thanks to a deliberate drizzle. Dawn had not yet broken, and a backsplash of lights twinkled like fireflies in the windows of the wartorn city. They could just about make out the outline of the stubbled horizon. Beyond the harbor, where “giant cranes, piles of brick … and rusting half-sunk hulks” blighted the landscape, the last ripples of urban gloom evolved into the great Norman countryside. Julia stared out at the scenery with a feeling of presentiment. She had no idea what to expect, aside from what Paul had told her—and the garbled aspersions cast like mud pies by her father. From all that she’d heard, France was almost exclusively a man’s domain. She had no work, she couldn’t speak the language. But a break with the past, after all, was a chance to forge a new beginning. For Julia Child, who was now thirty-six and still adrift, the land outside that window might hold something better for her.

  THE ROUTE TO Paris revealed evidence of the wartime scars left on France. Julia could see from the road the scorched remains of bombed-out châteaux, many of them several centuries old, where Rommel’s panzer divisions had rolled over entire villages in an effort to stave off the Allied invasion forces. From her vantage in the Blue Flash, looking across the wobbly meadow lanes, she could survey the lush Seine-Maritime valley, from Balbec to Yvetot to Barentin, cratered from repeated assault and draped in skeins of barbed wire that bit into the trampled earth. Further still, the land suddenly leveled off and the vast countryside stretched into meticulously furrowed fields. Everywhere she looked, cabbages cropped up and flax plants flaunted their pale blue crowns. Rows of neatly flanked plane trees—called allées or avenues—stood like territorial sentries along the boundaries of neighboring farms. However much the view scrambled Julia’s impressions of France, she had little time for them to register. There was “so much to see, so much to absorb” that each kilometer they traveled offered another revelation. Paul barely had time to explain one unusual feature, before the next was upon them—and the next and the next.

  Before Julia knew it they had crossed into Rouen, the historic capital of Normandy, where Paul had decided to stop for lunch. Over the twisty cobbled approach into the centre-ville, Julia recognized from newsreels the remains of a neighborhood near the Seine where the city was burned in 1940, the damaged Notre Dame Cathedral from Monet’s dusky studies, and the fabled Gros Horloge, the astronomical clock with its sun and moon phases in exquisite detail. Paul’s destination was the place du Vieux-Marché, the medieval town square where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in 1431. Nearly a century earlier, the Restaurant La Couronne had opened in a half-timbered house just opposite a stretch of tiny shops. According to the Guide Michelin it was the oldest restaurant in France, a detail that had no doubt attracted Paul’s attention. The food earned a respectable “three forks-and-spoons” rating. What better place to introduce Julia to Old World charm?

  In retrospect, La Couronne was the kind of conventional restaurant one found in every city in France—a rather drab, nondescript room in the street level of a rather drab, nondescript hotel, with an unfussy white-tablecloth décor, an older clientele, attentive, though humorless, waiters, and a straightforward traditional menu. While Paul schmoozed in French with the maître d’, Julia perused the carte—a sepia-toned bill of fare adorned with an Elizabethan-style etching of the restaurant, showing servant girls in mirthful stages of hospitality, an animal roasting in the fireplace, and haunches of meat hanging from the rafters. She was tired and starving, and the blast of fragrances fulminating from the nearby kitchen made her stomach do somersaults. A selection of daily entrées had been typed to the right of the etching—not that they made a whole lot of sense to Julia. After years
of practical French lessons, from grade school through college, she was no better equipped to read the menu than was, say, her father or her cat. No matter: Paul, to the rescue, did the honors.

  In Rouen, he explained, duck was often the specialty of the house, just not at this house; oddly enough, there wasn’t any duck on the menu that day. Chicken … perhaps … there was a roast chicken brochette … hmmm … no. The grilled steak and potato soufflé … too heavy for lunch. Fish—they’d have fish, he decided. The Sole Normande-Maison sounded good, but maybe too much of a production. The ship’s food, barely edible, had done a number on their stomachs. All the windowdressing that came with Sole Normande—the garnish of oysters, mushrooms, and crayfish—might work as a depth-charge on their intestines. Endeavoring to keep it simple, Paul chose the Sole Meunière.

  It was a stroke of genius. Sole as God meant it to be: practically naked, its flesh young and supple, cooked like an omelet in nothing but a bath of clarified butter. Then—more butter, brown butter as a finishing touch spooned decadently over the tender filets to bring out the toastiness, and a discreet splash of lemon and dusting of parsley. Perfect! Julia had never experienced anything like it. The sole was “so very fresh, with its delicate yet definite texture,” she recalled, firm and yielding and succulent at the same time, not like the sheetrock her mother had made in Pasadena. This was—fish! It tasted like the sea. Juicy—my God!—it fairly oozed a geyser of juices. And the butter! It was sweet and creamy, loaded with butterfat, and caressed her tongue with a slick, silky richness. She’d eaten butter all her life, but this defied all her previous conceptions.

  Much later, of course, she would learn that the butter was churned by hand from the finest, thickest Norman cream, unpasteurized and unprocessed, and produced with the kind of care you’d give to plutonium enrichment. And the sole was honest-to-God sole, Dover sole, as opposed to the flounder sold as sole in the States that dried out and flaked apart at the slightest contact with heat.