Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child

by Bob Spitz

  In the meantime, Julia tried to get a purchase on the sum total of their meal. They had started it with a half-dozen oysters on the half-shell—portugaises from the southwest Iberian peninsula that tasted fruity and yet “very strong of the sea.” Their texture alone took Julia by surprise; they were smooth and swimming in a pool of delicious natural nectar that Paul encouraged her to drink as a chaser. Julia was already feeling the effects of a lightly chilled Chablis, whose inclusion at lunch she found wildly extravagant. “I had never drunk much wine other than some $1.19 California Burgundy,” she recalled, “and certainly not in the middle of the day.” But it amazed her how well the wine paired with the oysters—how well the wine paired with everything: a humble green salad after the fish, followed by a cheese course, dessert, and coffee.

  What a revelation that meal was to Julia. It was like somebody had showed her what it really meant to eat, not simply to fill her stomach with food, but—to eat, to savor each glorious mouthful with gusto. She had enjoyed food all her life, but this was enjoyment of a different kind. This was food that had been prepared with real understanding of how combining the most flavorful, highest-quality ingredients with great care and respect produced a pleasure that was sensual as well as gratifying. “I was quite overwhelmed,” Julia recalled of the experience, which was certainly no exaggeration. She was shocked and awed by the food at that table, to say nothing of the ceremony Paul attached to the meal. Each course was presented like a work of culinary art, each dish eaten at a leisurely, respectful pace. All of it made a life-changing impression on Julia. If there was one incident that led to her future distinction, “that lunch in Rouen,” as she often referred to it, was the culprit. Plainly put: “It was the most exciting meal of my life.”

  The next days in Paris were no less impressionable. “That city took my breath away,” Julia recalled almost fifty years later. They arrived at dusk, as the last whisper of daylight cast a glow behind the silhouette of mansard rooftops, framing the skyline in a dramatic crimson blush. In the distance, she spotted the Eiffel Tower, so familiar a symbol that it seemed almost preposterous just standing there in the middle of town. “I couldn’t get over how gorgeous everything looked, the beauty of the buildings and the Seine and the bridges and the monuments—the majesty of it all. And the people—so chic, yet unusual, so … so indescribably French. I couldn’t understand anything anyone said to me, but the way they said it was so musical and enchanting.” The embassy had found them temporary accommodations, in the Hôtel Pont-Royal on rue Montalembert, just off the boulevard Saint-Germain. Paul stashed their car in a nearby garage, and came back with the news that, quite marvelously, Harry Truman had defeated Thomas Dewey in an upset election-night victory. Interpreting that as a good omen, they descended on Paris with open arms.

  New to Europe, unable to communicate, a fish out of water, Julia spent that first week alternately agitated and exhilarated. Paul’s new job at the embassy demanded all of his time, so Julia was left to chip away at the mountain of official paperwork required of foreign diplomats—presenting their business cards to every American functionary as a means of introduction, and filing forms in triplicate for their ration books, travel vouchers, leave sheets, cartes d’identité, and enough bureaucratic rigamarole to satisfy the French compulsion for efficiency. In her pidgin French, she arranged with a real estate agency to find them a flat on the Left Bank. She barnstormed boutiques for something à la mode to wear to Ambassador Jefferson Caffery’s reception for Secretary of State Marshall, choosing an eye-catching green-feathered hat that Paul felt made her look “divinely tall and svelte.” And she began making herself at home in a city in which, after two or three days, she “already considered [herself] a native.”

  Paris was catnip for Julia. It had everything she craved: gorgeous architecture, dynamic style, vivacious people, ubiquitous culture, an intellectual temperament, and a distinct recipe for living that seethed with passion. Nothing was ever done in a routine or halfhearted way; every gesture, no matter how trivial, seemed to necessitate great drama. A greeting—“oui, monsieur, oui, madame”—was delivered with exquisite panache. Discovery was as simple as waking, breathing, looking: around every corner, down each street, lay a new adventure. “History on your doorstep,” Julia enthused like a lovestruck schoolgirl. A self-proclaimed “swallow-life-in-big-gulps kind of person,” she embraced it all—and all at once—scouring Paris, end to end, in bold, giant steps.

  Paul was her eager tour guide. As soon as each weekend arrived, he charted a two-day exploration through a designated section of the city, stopping at every memorable landmark from his last, lingering visit: his mother’s flat on place Saint-Sulpice, the building on rue de Vaugirard where Charlie and Freddie had lived, the American Church on the quai d’orsay, whose stained-glass windows he’d helped to install. They had breakfast, croissants and coffee, on the terrace at Deux Magots; perused the bouquinistes, the quayside booksellers, along the river; crossed the Seine, walked through the Tuileries, visited the Louvre, Palais Royal, and Sainte-Chapelle; ascended Montmartre to Sacré Coeur, then out to Versailles. And that was just the first weekend.

  They became flâneurs, “aimless strollers in a town ideal for aimless strolling.” Paul, eager as a schoolboy, his camera flapping around his neck, flew along the crowded sidewalks, narrating at Mach speed, with Julia two steps behind, goggle-eyed and openmouthed. It was a whirlwind immersion. And everywhere they strolled, evidence of “the convulsions of the war” confronted them. Four years of occupation had taken its grinding toll. By the fall of 1948, the recovery of Paris was only partially under way; it was still a city wounded and brought low. They could see it in the rubble-strewn lots blighting the streets in each arrondissement; in the long, endless queues of downcast French who stood for hours awaiting ration coupons for milk, bread, butter, cheese, eggs, sugar, and coffee; in the half-empty restaurants or cafés closed for lack of clients. The remnants of Gay Paree—where “good Americans go when they die,” according to Oscar Wilde—had all but vanished. Instead, it was “restless, anxious, cantankerous, and convalescent.”

  Paris was the City of Light, Paul insisted, because the brightest people were drawn to it. They saw beyond the despair, the smell “of rotting food, burned wood, sewage, old plaster, and human sweat,” even adapted to the “incomprehensible contradictions” of it all. They proclaimed themselves—like Nietzsche, Hemingway, Picasso, Cather, Gertrude Stein, and countless others in the insatiable pursuit of enlightenment—citizens of Paris and assumed the status of gratified émigrés. It was a city, wrote Ernest Hemingway, that would stay with you wherever you went, “for all of Paris is a moveable feast.”

  And no one craved a feast more than Julia Child.

  BUT THE FOOD scene in Paris was still largely foreign to Julia. Intimidated by the devilishly perplexing menus, as well as the solemn table etiquette, she stuck with her go-to option: sole meunière, sole meunière, sole meunière. For a few days, that was all she ate. “I just couldn’t get over how good it was,” she recalled. The shock of that lunch in Rouen wouldn’t wear off, and Julia gorged herself on sole as though she feared the world supply might dry up. Paul let her taste from his plate of rognons, sautéed kidneys, one evening and suddenly her food world expanded to two dishes. A day or so later a bowl of pale, plump mussels marinière in a luscious broth of lemon-infused white wine, with shallots, garlic, thyme, and parsley led her to believe that maybe the French were onto something, maybe something spiritual.

  French food intoxicated Julia, who awaited the daily mealtimes with anticipation akin to addiction. “I found it hard to control myself,” she recalled. “It was an awfully astonishing learning experience for me. We’d take ourselves into another lovely place, and I’d have something new and absolutely delicious to eat. I had to learn that this was the norm, not the exception, to slow down, to appreciate everything.” Occasionally, however, she went overboard and paid dearly for her indulgence. Recounting an eating binge to her sis
ter-in-law Freddie, Julia succumbed to “such a gorge of food. Lunch: sole meunière, ris de veau à la crème. Dinner: escargots, rognons flambés. Every day for four days, with a half bottle of wine at least with every meal, cognac after, aperitifs and cocktails.”

  The food was a gift from the gods for Julia, but the food and Paris—that was an unbeatable combination. Paul couldn’t get over his wife’s rapid conversion. “Julia wants to spend the rest of her life right here,” he wrote to Charlie, “eating sole, rognons, drinking wine and looking at Paris.”

  It was true. She was digging in with a mole’s determination. By December 1948, she had found a flat at the foot of rue de l’Université, in the Seventh Arrondissement, for the whopping sum of eighty dollars a month. It was a two-story five-room apartment in “the heart of Paris,” about a hundred yards from the Assemblée Nationale and the Ministry of Defense, and within shouting distance of the Seine. Part of what had once been an elegant town house, the Childs’ accommodations had been “carved out of another place.” With its warren of odd, asymmetrically shaped rooms, fun-house hallways, and wobbly staircase into the alcove kitchen, it was a place that only an artist could love.

  “You came up to it in one of those creaky cage elevators,” recalls Rachel Child, “and then once inside there was a vast foyer that looked as if Charles Addams had drawn it.” She called the motif “tawdry-elegant,” which was no exaggeration, although Julia thought it had “Frenchy old charm.” The walls were covered in faded etched leather that buckled with age and the curtains were of a heavy brocade, “old and dirty, peeling.” Behind it, the salon was only a modest improvement, with its “faintly ridiculous” décor: garish gold moldings, water-stained inset wall panels (including a marble relief of a Knight of Malta over the fireplace), a tapestry out of the Dark Ages, and “shredded draperies—very dingy and ornate.” The furniture was hideous, musty, on its last legs. There were enough hanging bibelots and tchotchkes to endow a small museum, most of which Julia banished to an attic room that she and Paul nicknamed the oubliette, or “forgettery.” The upstairs kitchen—la cuisine—however, was a matter of some “remembery.” Julia recalled it being “large and airy,” but frequent visitors insist it was “absolutely tiny, less than a galley,” difficult for two people to stand in at the same time. In either case, there was an entire wall of windows, which bathed the supremely drab kitchen in daylong sunlight, and a “monster” stove that “seemed ten feet long.” (What in the world was she going to do with that?) From behind the soapstone counter, Julia could look out over the rooftops toward the place de la Concorde or down into the gardens of the Ministry of Defense. Regrettably, there was no hot water for the sink. There was electricity, at least, and occasional running water, but no central heating, which did not bode well for the winter months ahead.

  And, yet, despite it all, the place was loaded with charm. There was something typically French, something je ne sais quoi that radiated from the flat. “Julia loved that old apartment,” says her niece, Erica. To her, it was “our little old bit of Versailles.” She would stand at the windows for hours, gazing at the stricken Parisian sprawl as neighborhoods slowly rebuilt the streets that had been torn away by war. In the distance, she could see children playing soccer in front of the green-steepled Basilique Sainte-Clotilde, whose plangent bells tolled every half hour. Or reflect on the comings and goings via the interior courtyard to their rue de l’Université building, which Julia called “Roo de Loo” for short.

  Heartened by a nest to snuggle in with Paul and the joyous discovery of Paris, Julia began what was, probably, the happiest year of her life. She loved walking from neighborhood to neighborhood, poking into every interesting shop. She could sit for hours at a congenial outdoor café, nursing a coffee or petit blanc, enjoying the endless pedestrian parade that never failed to entertain. The baffling quirks that plagued disgruntled Parisians—the daily power failures, crazy traffic jams, the antiquated phone system, the infuriating bureaucracy—charmed her. The French themselves, not known for their warm and fuzzy nature, eased their way into Julia’s heart. Not one to seclude herself in a social vacuum, she quickly made friends—a diverse group that included her landlady’s daughter and husband, a Lithuanian art historian and his wife, columnist Art Buchwald and his wife, Ann, and the Mowrers, Paul and Hadley, whose former husband, Ernest Hemingway, had befriended Paul in Paris twenty years earlier.

  It was at the Mowrers’ Thanksgiving party a few weeks after they’d arrived that Julia decided it was time to go native. A self-described “talker,” she was forced to stand by silently, confounded, as pockets of French-speaking guests around her “strung words together with machine-gun rapidity.” The same thing happened in her forays around Paris. She was unable to express herself in the most fundamental situations. Paul recalled how all that finishing-school French eluded her once they hit town. “She couldn’t even hail a cab and give him an address or understand if he said anything” in response, he said. How preposterous: Julia was a participant, not an observer, damn it. It made her feel helpless and ultimately angry that she couldn’t speak the language. That was the last straw. Later that evening, she threw down the gauntlet. “I’ve had it!” she announced. “I’m going to learn to speak this language come hell or high water.”

  At the outset, it seemed as if she’d need a pitchfork and a raft. Determined to master the tongue once and for all, Julia enrolled in an intensive course at Berlitz, but French, for Julia, was “a swamp of abstractions and ambiguities.” Her tongue just refused to get around those unutterable phonemes and diphthongs. Her trademark warble, a curse to even the most gifted linguist, strangled any hope of developing a decent accent. And those tenses—mon dieu! There were scads of them: present, past, future, conditional, subjunctive, perfect, the more-than-perfect, the imperfect of the subjunctive … How could anyone expect to speak this unfathomable tongue twister of a language? Julia could more than sympathize with Mark Twain who had said: “In Paris they simply stared at me when I spoke to them in French. I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.”

  Julia Child wasn’t so easily deterred. Those idiots, as Twain called them, rallied to her stubborn endeavors to speak only French in her dealings with them. Along with her new friend, Hélène Baltrusaitis, Julia spent many afternoons engaging shop merchants in an ongoing dialogue to explain their daily lives. They weren’t rude or disdainful when she insisted they speak en français while selling her oysters or wine or olive oil, or when she tripped over verb tenses or murdered the language in her thick, poky delivery. Even though, according to Hélène, “Julia spoke very poor French” at the outset, the effort she put in was heroic. Practice became second nature to her—speaking, reading, conjugating those damn verbs. She read Baudelaire and Balzac in their native tongue. Paul put her through the paces at home, with tricky linguistic exercises, correcting, correcting, always correcting her “gauche accent.” Slang came easily to a gal like Julia, and Hélène gave her an arsenal of expressions to assist her on the street. “I worked on my French diligently, and was able to read better and say a little more every day,” she recalled.

  It wasn’t long—not more than a few months, in fact—before Julia felt comfortable enough to use her French conversationally with everyone she met. There was no more corrupt, garbled dialect, no more Où est les toilettes, mon-soor? It was smooth, colloquial: Ou se trouve les toilettes, m’sieur? The locals, who would just as soon insult Americans as listen to their pidgin, gave her credit in spades; remarkably, they embraced her as one of them. It was an impressive turnaround by someone only months removed from ineptitude, and Julia felt the gratefulness of a woman made welcome. “I never dreamed I would find the French so sympathique, so warm, so polite, so utterly pleasurable to be with,” she said with a conviction that would no doubt give her father apoplexy.

  As a gesture of Julia’s progress, Hélène loaned her a well-thumbed copy of her bible: Gastronomie pratique: études culinaires (Encyc
lopedia of Practical Gastronomy), published in 1906 under the pseudonym Ali-Bab. It was a treasure trove of kitchen lore, the author’s “attempt to put the entire history of food culture, cooking and eating all over the world into a single volume.” It was a doorstop of a book, as thick as the New York telephone directory, and it was legendary. Every French housewife had a copy on her bookshelf. Chefs kept one close to their stoves, knew each of the recipes by heart. And Julia devoured it as she might a morning croissant. She took to her bed, running through the chapters “with the passionate devotion of a fourteen-year-old boy to True Detective stories.”

  Nowadays, hors-d’oeuvres are served at the beginning of a luncheon and after the soup at dinner. It is a preface, an introduction, a curtain-raiser, an operatic overture, a flirt, a bit of sentimentality, a passing love affair.

  Priceless! In fact, the book was the work of Henri Babinski, a widely traveled mining engineer from the same French family credited with the Babinski reflex. On his business trips around the globe, Babinski collected recipes for his friends and conveyed them in a gruff, no-nonsense style meant to impress and amuse. Julia loved Babinski’s snooty irreverence (those who arrive habitually late for dinner, he said, should “end up by staying home, and nobody would be sorry”), marveled at his exhaustive index—there were more than five thousand recipes, considering the variations of variations he included. Truites au Bleu, Truffled Beef Tenderloin, Braised Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb with Madeira, Wild Duck with Anchovy-Stuffed Olives, Seafood Torte, omelets and soufflés a dozen ways! It was Julia’s earliest brush with food porn. But, most of all, she developed a curiosity about food that went beyond the confines of simply satisfying her hunger. Food preparation—now, there was a subject that intrigued Julia in new ways.