The French Chef in America

by Alex Prud'Homme

  In answering PBL’s request, the Childs proposed a documentary film about President Charles de Gaulle’s decision to relocate the Les Halles food market—dubbed “the belly of Paris” by Émile Zola—from the city center to a suburb near Orly airport to make room for a modern, American-style shopping complex. The move was controversial, and loaded with the symbolism of France leaving behind the darkness of two World Wars, the Suez Crisis, and Vietnam in favor of a shiny, bright, space-age future. The Childs were horrified by the decision. While living in Paris, they had spent countless hours shopping at Les Halles, and loved its teeming Old World alleys, wrought-iron arcades, hollering shopkeeps, bins of varicolored flowers, stacks of raw vegetables, piles of copper pots, racks of knives, bottles of olive oil, barrels of wine, and the like. They wanted to document the lively, odiferous, chaotic marketplace before it was replaced by a smooth concrete, smoked glass, and blandly efficient shopping mall.

  PBL accepted their plan to document Les Halles, then rejected it as too expensive. The Childs were disappointed, if not entirely surprised: the lack of funding and clear editorial vision were familiar hurdles in public television. They cast about for a new subject, a food story with “visual drama” located closer to their home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  It is likely that Paul—a former diplomat, who understood the symbolic and practical aspects of state dinners—suggested a documentary about the White House. And Julia knew that President Johnson employed Henry Haller, a highly regarded Swiss-born, French-trained chef. They both understood that the president could use a positive boost in the media. The year 1967 had been tumultuous: the Vietnam War was grinding painfully on, and race relations were tense at home; Johnson was under attack from both the left and right and had shrunk from public appearances. This dark state of affairs presented public television with an opportunity, Paul thought: “Why not show a side of the People’s House that most of the People have never seen?”

  The old Les Halles market in Paris before its demolition…

  …and after

  The Childs pitched PBL a documentary about what happens behind the scenes at a state dinner. It was a long shot, they knew. But under the circumstances, Julia Child was one of the few people who could have convinced the presidential staff to allow television cameras to poke around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—from its elegant public hallways to the first family’s private quarters and down into the cramped, quirky kitchen in the basement—during a high-profile event. As Paul explained in a letter to the columnist Herb Caen, a state dinner “isn’t about spending the tax payers’ money on striped pants and pink champagne. It’s a function of diplomacy, and only the culminating, externally visible part of a complex series of discussions, decisions, studies, meetings and agreements involving many parts of government.”

  PBL withdrew from the Childs’ project in order to pursue a civil rights program. But National Educational Television (NET)—the main broadcaster of educational TV at the time—picked up the White House special. It took four months of intensive work behind the scenes to turn the seemingly straightforward idea into an actual telecast.

  Julia and her staff at WGBH issued reams of letters, telegrams, and phone messages to convince the White House of the value of such a show (an outspoken Democrat, Julia promised to remain strictly apolitical); stacks of memos to public television brass explaining exactly what they would be getting, and at what cost; and binders of research about the historical, diplomatic, and culinary significance of a state dinner. In a letter to Lady Bird Johnson, the producer Ruth Lockwood explained:

  Everyone is fascinated by the White House and our first family. Millions of us have visited the public rooms, and more millions have toured parts of The White House on television. So far we have seen it only as a shrine with empty rooms. Now we would like to go behind the splendid façade and show how you and your staff make it run so well as an official residence with a home-like atmosphere…The American public-at-large has little conception of diplomatic life…[and] the tremendous importance that the reception plays in our international affairs.

  The Johnsons hesitated. Rock ‘n’ roll, feminism, environmentalism, racial conflicts, and antiwar protests were roiling America. Moreover, the guest of honor at the diplomatic dinner that November was to be Japanese prime minister Eisaku Satō. Japan was an especially important and sensitive ally: despite lingering resentments from the Second World War, Japan was America’s leading partner in Asia, and the United States was Japan’s biggest customer. Johnson was attempting to manage the optics of his presidency carefully, if not particularly successfully, and was doubtless concerned that Julia and her cameras would get in the way of important negotiations. Yet the first family eventually agreed to invite the Childs and a small TV crew to observe the diplomatic dinner.

  Over four days WGBH filmed scenic shots of Julia in Washington, interviewing key presidential staff members (though not the first couple, per White House etiquette), and exploring the grand dining rooms and narrow stairwells of the People’s House. Then it was time for the main event.

  —

  IT HAD BEEN 167 years since John Adams hosted the first diplomatic party at the White House. After touring the building, which was built in the 1790s by George Washington, Paul wrote that it remained “essentially an 18th-century gentleman’s mansion in its original conception.” In fact, President Harry S. Truman had completely renovated the rickety building in 1952, after he took a bath, felt the floor tremble, and nearly crashed through it onto his wife, Bess, and a group from the Daughters of the American Revolution. Truman insisted on a nearly exact replica of the old rooms, including what seemed to be miles of winding passageways, creaky stairs, and mysterious nooks and crannies.

  The state dinner would fill two dining rooms, which were decorated with great crystal chandeliers, tall and heavily draped windows, and round tables graced by flowers, crystal goblets, candles, and gold-and-white plates ornamented with the presidential seal. A floor below, in the basement, the kitchen was tiny, about eighteen feet square, with shiny white walls, gray linoleum floors, roaring ventilation fans, stainless-steel counters, and hanging pots and spoons, all lit by fluorescent lights.

  The cramped space, Paul noted, made “the back-of-the-stage operations humanly difficult, so potentially interesting to the American public if the PR people don’t insist on a shiny, no-trouble image.”

  As WGBH’s cameras panned down bustling hallways on the afternoon of November 14, the last tourists were being ushered out and the chief housekeper, Mrs. Mary Kaltman, who oversaw “everything from lightbulbs to lobsters,” checked that each of the nineteen tables had a flower bouquet and place cards. Mrs. Carpenter, Lady Bird’s press secretary, said of the library: “I love this room, but in the days of Abigail Adams, it’s where she kept her milk cows, and so we laughingly say, ‘We’ve moved from moos to news.’ ”

  Until the Eisenhowers hired the first White House chef, food at the People’s House was prepared by navy stewards. In 1961, the Kennedys hired René Verdon, a highly regarded French chef from the Carlyle Hotel in New York. Verdon prepared a lamb luncheon for Princess Grace of Monaco, and trout Chablis for the British prime minister Harold Macmillan. After President Kennedy’s assassination, Verdon stayed on with the Johnsons. But he resigned in 1965, protesting LBJ’s insistence on serving garbanzo bean purée, the use of canned and frozen vegetables (to keep costs down), and other creative differences. “You do not serve barbecued spareribs at a banquet with ladies in white gloves!” huffed Verdon.

  The new executive chef, Henry Haller, led a team of four sous-chefs and a staff of many other, mostly African American, assistants. Haller—a confident, robust, hawk-faced man trained in classical French cuisine—had apprenticed in Davos, then immigrated to the United States after the Second Word War. He met his Brooklyn-born wife, Carol, on Martha’s Vineyard. When the job offer came from the White House, Haller was executive chef at the Hampshire House hotel in Manhattan, where then Vice Presiden
t Johnson had enjoyed his cooking.

  Haller’s workday began at 6:00 a.m. and ended after midnight, but he was paid far less than chefs of his caliber earned in top restaurants. Nevertheless, he declared, “there is no better job” than running the president’s kitchen. He was a phlegmatic sort who didn’t mind the pressure of the job. When the king of Saudi Arabia arrived with his own food stuffed into five briefcases and with a royal food taster as well, Haller smiled. Though the Johnsons employed Zephyr Wright, an African American woman, to cook Southern-style family meals, there were times when Haller was required to whip up lunch for foreign dignitaries from whatever he could find in the pantry—for which the president was eternally grateful.

  “Many Americans who dislike President Johnson half-believe that dinner at the White House is limited to such gustatory curiosities as Pedernales Chili and enchiladas,” Paul wrote in The Economist. “Alas for prejudice! The truth is that official food at the White House is delectable.”

  Julia with the White House executive chef Henry Haller, admiring the seafood vol-au-vent, 1967

  To prepare for 190 guests, Haller had been cooking for three days by the time that Julia and her camera crew arrived. Dressed in chef’s whites and a toque, he barked orders, cracked jokes, and prepared a sumptuous seafood vol-au-vent—lobster, bay scallops, tiny shrimp, and quenelles (fish dumplings) in a pastry crust, topped with a sauce américaine.

  “Hmmmm,” Julia murmured, as she craned her tall body over a steaming pot, closed her eyes, and inhaled the seafood aroma. “Can I have a little taste?”

  “Czertainly!” Haller replied.

  “Oh, it’s awfully good,” she cooed. “That’s lovely.”

  “Ze taste hasz to go wis ze prezentation.”

  “Everything in the kitchen is timed to the minute from now on,” Julia narrated, like a play-by-play announcer. “It’s all keyed to what’s going on upstairs.”

  By the front door under the North Portico, string instruments serenaded the guests, who wore black tie and exited limousines to a barrage of flashing bulbs. Vice President and Mrs. Hubert Humphrey made their way through the mob of reporters. Foreign ambassadors and deputy ministers led American governors and local pols, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, the chairman of U.S. Steel, Johnson backers from Waco and Cleveland and Alabama, a poet, a Rockefeller, the president of CBS, and the president of the International Union of Operating Engineers.

  Japanese prime minister Satō, a short man dressed in an impeccably tailored suit, and his diminutive wife, wearing glasses and a white kimono, bowed and smiled. Satō was known to be “intensely interested in baseball,” and so the commissioner of baseball, General William D. Eckert, and the St. Louis Cardinals’s pitcher Bob Gibson had been invited. Satō was also a jazz lover, and the White House had arranged for a special musical guest to entertain at the end of the evening.

  Julia and Ruth Lockwood working on a script

  The Johnsons and the Satōs repaired upstairs, to the Yellow Oval Room, the first family’s private reception area, to exchange gifts. Johnson offered Satō an elegant Tiffany desk set, while Satō presented Johnson with a bulky portable television camera and videotape recorder.

  “The Diplomatic Reception room is filling up with all kinds of people,” Julia chuckled, as the camera showed her in a flowered dress and Paul in a tuxedo entering the White House. “Business types, politicos, socialites, diplomats,” she said. As bejeweled socialites and the actors Kirk Douglas and Ida Lupino smiled, she added, “Plus a scattering of luminaries, to make the evening glitter.”

  The State Dining Room held fourteen tables that sat ten people apiece; next door, the smaller Blue Dining Room sat five tables of ten. Food was raised from the basement kitchen by two dumbwaiters and an elevator. It arrived in a narrow butler’s pantry and was staged on trestle tables. At a signal from the chief butler, a line of nineteen waiters swept into the dining rooms bearing silver platters.

  First came the seafood vol-au-vent. “The puff pastry was exceptionally flaky and tender, made only with butter and not the ‘other spread,’ ” Julia said, referring to margarine, which she loathed.

  The entrée was a sautéed noisette (filet) of lamb, so perfectly cooked that the meat was a pale rose color inside. They were accompanied by artichoke bottoms filled with a sauce Choron. Each noisette was topped with a fluted mushroom cap, napped with a brown deglazed sauce, and asparagus. Then came a sprightly salad in a dressing that complemented the wines, an excellent selection of small-batch American wines unknown to the Japanese and most Europeans. With salad came nicely ripened cheeses and bunches of grapes. The dessert, prepared by pastry chef Ferdinand Loubat, was Bavarian cream mousse flavored with fresh strawberries.

  “This is an absolutely delicious dinner,” Julia declared with feeling. “The tables are elegant, beautiful, softly lighted by candles. The service is impeccable—that’s something you rarely see around anymore: perfect service. This is really one of the best dinners I’ve eaten anywhere. I’m delighted with it—particularly because it’s here. If I could do it for six people, I’d be proud indeed. But they’re doing it for one hundred ninety.”

  In a somber toast, President Johnson quoted Abraham Lincoln to explain why he felt he must stand firm in Vietnam: “ ‘I am here; I must do the best I can and bear the responsibility of taking the course which I feel I ought to take.’ ” Looking owlish, the president peered from the lectern into the shadowy audience (the film crew was not allowed to use extra lights) and intoned with a deep drawl: “It took time and a great deal of patience but Lincoln won peace at home and saved the Union…All men must know what it is to be emancipated: to be emancipated from hunger, from sickness, from want, and from fear of aggression…We must look beyond the dangers that we all face in Asia now, to the day when our…common sense of responsibility to all humankind…will finally open the road to peace, to stability, and to prosperity for all humanity.”

  At the end of the carefully choreographed night, it was time to shift the mood and loosen up. The choice of White House entertainer is determined by the guest of honor: for Haile Selassie’s visit, it was grand opera; for the shah of Iran, ballet; for the president of Mexico, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. To cap this evening, Tony Bennett and his band, including a female harpist, performed in the East Room.

  Lean and dapper, Bennett grinned wolfishly from the stage. He loosened his bow tie, flung off his jacket, and let his voice rip: “When I come home to you, Saaaan Fraaaanciscoooo—your golden sun will shiine for meeeeeeeee!”

  The audience broke into wide smiles and applauded enthusiastically. “Tony Bennett sang himself right out of his jacket during the final number,” Julia quipped. “And is struggling it on again as the presidential party thanks him.”

  Observing the president and prime minister, she judged, “They really seem relaxed, friendly, and happy together—and that’s the point of this whole affair.”

  Newspaper coverage of the evening played up the diplomatic tension surrounding the president. A story in the Washington, D.C., Evening Star was headlined JOHNSON’S SATO TOAST ANSWERS CRITICISM. It noted that “well known New Yorker, Hugh Bullock…talked with Rep. Wayne Hays of Ohio about the failure of any New York newspapers to present the administration’s point of view. Hays called the campaign of the media against Johnson ‘the assassination of Lyndon Johnson.’ ” The paper added that “Johnson, who has done very little of this [entertaining] of late, retired to his night reading of reports at 11:40. He was a calmly smiling and gracious host, but the words of his dinner toast revealed how deeply the broadscale criticism prevalent today has cut into him.”

  Paul Child struck a more bemused tone in The Economist: “For visitors to the United States who may ask, ‘Is there any place out there where one can eat truly excellent food in a beautiful room, with perfect service?’ you can answer, ‘Yes, there is one. In fact it’s quite agreeable, if you can get a table, but it tends to be a bit crowded.’ ”


  The four days’ worth of filming were whittled down to a tight, forty-eight-minute-long TV special, and White House Red Carpet was scheduled to air nationwide in April 1968. Even before it was televised, in-house reviews of the special were positive, and Julia’s golden touch appeared intact.

  Buoyed by this, she and Paul began to strategize about ways to change and strengthen The French Chef, to keep her audience, and herself, interested when they resumed taping in 1968. Inspired by their failed Les Halles special, the Childs proposed taking Julia out of the studio and into the real world, perhaps to her original inspiration: la belle France. It wouldn’t be easy. In May 1968, strikes broke out across France, as a million students and factory workers marched in Paris to protest de Gaulle’s conservative government and the lack of work. In the United States, President Johnson had asked Americans not to travel, in order to spend their money at home, as a patriotic act. He was particularly annoyed with the French, who had opened relations with the Soviet Union and demanded that all foreign military personnel leave French soil. “With world conditions as they are…it is the wrong time to consider doing part of our series in France,” the producer Ruthie Lockwood advised Julia.

  Tony Bennett rehearses at the White House.

  The Childs were ardent patriots, but they were also stubbornly independent-minded. Julia considered France her “spiritual home,” and would not be kept away. So, rather than stay at home to watch the White House Red Carpet telecast, the Childs flew to La Pitchoune, their little house in Provence, in the spring of 1968. The plan was to lie low there for several months, resting, reading, cooking, and eating. Julia and her co-author, Simca Beck, had much work to do on Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume II, which they were behind on. And it all went according to plan, until their idyll was rudely interrupted.