The French Chef in America

by Alex Prud'Homme

  With the veal, the chef would serve rice croquettes and broccoli. The croquettes—compact balls of rice (cooked in veal stock) with ham and parsley—were chilled, then made into panées à noblesse, and rolled into sausage-shape rolls. These were dredged in flour, coated with egg, and rolled in bread crumbs, then deep-fried.

  The sous-chef, Hans Raffert, made little “baskets” of interwoven strands of noodle dough, which were glazed with egg and baked in the oven. Each basket contained a croquette of rice.

  For a side dish, Chef Haller peeled and blanched his broccoli and served it with a sauce Mornay—a hollandaise sauce combined with a cheese-flavored velouté, and lightened with whipped cream—then sprinkled with grated Parmesan cheese and broiled golden brown. “A very, very fine dish,” Julia declared.

  The meal would be rounded out with a fresh garden salad and a selection of Trappist cheeses.

  “I’m not at all nervous about this [dinner], but there are too many people in a little kitchen,” Haller grumbled, his hand shaking slightly as he downed five glasses of water in twenty minutes.

  For dessert, the pastry chef, Heinz Bender, had created fluted bombes of vanilla custard with fresh pale golden peaches spiked with brandy, and surrounded by fresh raspberries, whipped cream rosettes, and green “leaves” made of marzipan. “Very pretty,” Julia judged. “Nothing sensational, but a really good kind of American cooking.”

  As he passed a plate of petits fours, lemon wafers, sugar cookies, and macaroons, Bender observed, “Washington is not a cookie town. There’s too much humidity and they get soggy. I have to bake them fresh every day.”

  “They don’t taste at all like soap to me,” joked Raffert.

  “How would you know about taste?” Bender grinned. “You are a painter who only cooks when he gets mad.”

  Chef Haller was Swiss, and Bender and Raffert were German; Bender was married to one of the housekeepers. They had been hired by the Johnsons a decade earlier. At the prompting of Mimi Sheraton, of The New York Times, the chefs reminisced about presidential food preferences. “Nixon didn’t eat many things. He didn’t like lamb or calves’ liver or a lot of things, and it was hard to make up an interesting menu,” Haller said. “The Fords like almost everything—even liver and red cabbage cooked with wine, the French way.”

  Bender recalled that “the Nixons liked plain sponge cake with lemon filling and coconut meringue. Real plain. President Johnson—now he really had a sweet tooth but had to watch his weight, so I made everything with Sucaryl [sodium cyclamate, an artificial sweetner].”

  Upstairs, the producer Martin Clancy checked a four-page schedule, in which every minute of the dinner had been precisely choreographed. At 8:02 p.m., the queen and prince would leave the official guest accommodations at Blair House and drive by limousine to the Rose Garden, where they would arrive at 8:06. They were allotted twelve minutes to visit the first family’s private residence upstairs, where they would enjoy a quick cocktail and exchange gifts. At 8:18, they would descend and walk out to the white tent in the Rose Garden for dinner.

  Among the constraints that night was that “one does not show the queen eating,” Julia noted, nor does one show the president eating, for that matter. She decided not to mention this on air, as it would “only disappoint the audience.” The White House would concede to one or two TV cameras taking general footage of the crowd entering and being seated in the tent, but once the first course was served, no further filming would be allowed.

  The dinner was scheduled to last for ninety minutes. To fill that time on air, Clancy would use pretaped segments, such as a profile of Queen Elizabeth, an interview with Prince Philip, scenes of the royal couple arriving at the White House, and a series of vignettes showing Julia’s visit to Chef Haller’s kitchen and a tour of the White House.

  Ruthie Lockwood had blocked out Julia’s segments as best she could. She allotted six minutes to show the first course, the lobster; five minutes for the veal entrée; and another four or five minutes for Chef Bender’s ice cream bombe and cookies. But much would be left to on-the-spot decision making, improvisation, and luck.

  —

  AT 5:00 THAT EVENING the sky over Washington, D.C., turned dark gray, winds whipped off the Potomac, thunder boomed, lightning crackled, and the city was drenched in a violent, torrential downpour. The cloudburst nearly washed the white tent out of the Rose Garden, and Julia was soaked to the bone. She rushed back to the hotel, re-dressed, fixed her makeup, and had her hair redone.

  The storm knocked out six of eleven television cameras and the audio link between the presenters and the remote truck, where the program’s director and crew sat. Without audio, Julia and the other announcers didn’t know the extent of the damage.

  While technicians scrambled to fix the cameras and audio link, Robin MacNeil, the anchor, had to carry the show by himself. A steady hand, MacNeil was armed with a stack of three-by-five cards filled with facts about the White House, the queen, the bicentennial, and the like. “I hope that the viewers didn’t turn it off at that point,” Julia said. MacNeil “is very attractive, but half an hour of just talk when you are told that you are going to see the queen of England doesn’t go off very well.”

  Martin Clancy’s neat schedule was in shambles. It was thrown even further off when the queen and Prince Philip inexplicably loitered in the first family’s private quarters for an extra twenty minutes. (Perhaps they were fearful of more rain, or were just in need of a relaxing cocktail before the festivities, Julia surmised.) The delay allowed the technicians to shift cameras around, but the talent had gone missing. Finally, Jean Marsh and Frank Gillard were discovered mingling with guests on the lawn.

  The announcing team was reunited in the East reception room, where they shared one small black-and-white monitor, in which they could dimly see Lady Bird Johnson and Cary Grant entering the party, English nationals curtsying before their queen, and a beehive of activity inside the white tent. Viewers at home with large color TV sets saw far more than the announcers did.

  The 224 guests were seated in groups of 8 or 10 at tables covered with mist-gray cotton tablecloths printed with sprigs of daisies and bands of pink ribbon. Each table had a centerpiece made of summer flowers, “adding a soft impressionistic touch to the garden setting, as will, undoubtedly, the women guests in their long summer dresses,” the Times noted.

  Guests at the head table included Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, President and Mrs. Ford, Vice President and Mrs. Rockefeller, Secretary of State and Mrs. Kissinger, and British foreign secretary and Mrs. Anthony Crosland. Other guests included Lady Bird Johnson, Willie Mays, Ella Fitzgerald, Julie Harris, Helen Hayes, Barbara Walters, Dorothy Hamill, Bill Blass, Alistair Cooke, Yehudi Menuhin, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Assistant to the President Dick Cheney.

  The announcers had hoped for a sandwich, at the very least, to keep them fueled during the broadcast. Instead, they were left to squint at their little monitor from 7:45 until 11 p.m., trying to sound upbeat while their stomachs growled. “That was not very well planned out,” Julia objected. “We were treated like trained animals.”

  Queen Elizabeth and President Ford at the White House bicentennial reception

  To add insult to injury, she was unable to show, or taste, a final version of Chef Haller’s magnificent veal roast. Indeed, she was unable to taste any of Haller’s food. The closest she got was in talking to a woman leaving early who said it was “an absolutely superb dinner, and everything was absolutely scrumptious.” With that, Julia sighed. “She seemed like a very intelligent woman, so I believe that they did have a marvelous meal.”

  Nor was there much to drink. Julia had specifically asked to taste one of the wines being consumed by the chosen few in the presidential tent. This, she thought, “would bring a note of gaiety and relaxation” to the proceedings. Jean Marsh also pined for “just one glass.” But it was not to be. (For the record, the Fords served a Sterling Chenin Blanc, 1972; a Beaulieu Vineya
rd Cabernet Sauvignon, 1968; and a Schramsberg Blanc de Blancs, 1973.)

  “For some reason, they thought there would be public criticism of seeing us drink wine—‘Oh, you are wasting the taxpayers’ money!’—so we never got a taste, and I have no idea if it was any good or not. That was a silly and spineless point of view.” Julia fumed. “Bureaucrats are terribly afraid of any kind of criticism at all. And if they really had convictions about things, they would brush the criticism aside and do what they felt proper.”

  The party was forty minutes behind schedule when the toasts began. Julia found them “dull” and “full of platitudes.” While Queen Elizabeth’s speech was “rather stilted and careful,” Julia detected glimpses of humor. “I found her delivery quite a bit easier than the other times I have heard her, when her voice was rather high and girlish. But as Frank Gillard pointed out, she has been queen for twenty-five years and had matured in the role.”

  The evening ended with entertainment and dancing in the White House. “The Queen was easy to deal with,” Mrs. Ford recalled. “She was very definite about what she wanted and what she didn’t want. She loves Bob Hope and Telly Savalas, so we invited Bob Hope and Telly Savalas. Both came, and if I hadn’t kept mixing up Your Highness and Your Majesty (he’s His Highness, she’s Her Majesty), I’d give myself four stars for the way that visit went off.”

  In contrast to the lupine Tony Bennett, who prowled the stage as he crooned at the Johnson White House in 1967, Ford chose the pop duo Captain & Tennille as the musical act for 1976. The Captain was Daryl Dragon, who had sung backup for the Beach Boys (and was known then as Captain Keyboards), and Tennille was Toni Tennille, also a onetime backup singer. They were thirty-three years old and married. They played a number of their bubbly hit songs, including “Love Will Keep Us Together,” and ended the night with “Muskrat Love,” a treacly tune about amorous rodents.

  Prince Philip tapped his feet to the song, Nancy Kissinger yawned, and Lady Keith (an American once married to a British knight) sniped that the song’s sexual overtones were “not suitable for the Queen.”

  “Only a person with a dirty mind would see something wrong,” Tennille responded later. “It’s a gentle Disneyesque kind of song.”

  Julia was unimpressed. “I don’t know why they picked something like that,” she told McCall’s. “It didn’t seem to be that it came up to the glamorous occasion of the Queen of England having dinner at the White House. I would like to have seen a marvelous musical comedy, or a bit of ballet, or Beverly Sills. ‘Muskrat Love’ just didn’t seem to be the kind of music that fitted into that kind of an evening…[Maybe] because it is an election year, the president decided that he had to show that he wasn’t highbrow—not that anyone has ever accused him of being highbrow. But I just do not care for that very jarring sort of cheap note in the otherwise quite elegant evening.”

  She repeated the criticism on television, and it gained almost as much attention as the official proceedings. “I agree with Mrs. Child,” wrote several fans. Asked years later if she felt slighted, Tennille replied, “I laughed through the whole thing. We were told to turn the music volume down. In front of us were the Kissingers, and the look on his face! Queen Elizabeth was sleeping, and the Fords were lovely. I see them in Palm Springs, and all they remember is I sang a song about mice. The whole thing is ridiculous. Why would you ever hate a song?”

  At the tail end of the evening, the United States Marine Band struck up a Rodgers and Hart medley in the State Dining Room. President Ford danced with the queen, who wore a yellow dress, a blue sash around her shoulder, and a sparkling diamond tiara on her head. (Upon reviewing the PBS tape, the Marines noticed that the queen and the president were dancing to the tune “The Lady Is a Tramp.” The band cut the medley from their repertoire.)

  When the camera swung to show the first lady, in a pale green dress, dancing with the tall, tuxedoed Prince Philip, Julia purred: “I thought it was about time they showed him because he’s such a handsome fellow.” Gillard noted that Prince Philip always managed to hide in plain sight: “He is there but then he isn’t there, unless somebody really seeks him out.” Julia decided to seek him out, and was greatly satisfied to meet the handsome prince.

  At the end of the night, Julia and her colleagues were given limp tuna fish sandwiches and soggy hamburgers with fried onions. “I just wish someone would give me a tiny glass of wine,” Jean Marsh croaked. “It would be so nice…” Instead, they sipped warm Coca-Cola.

  Despite the inclement weather, bureaucratic bumbling, political conventioneering, “Muskrat” melodies, and lack of food and wine, Julia told McCall’s that it had all been “a great deal of fun.” To take part in a big, historically meaningful celebration like that “is the kind of thing that I love to do. I feel extremely lucky to have had a part in something that is a real event. Ruthie Lockwood and I just felt that we were two lucky girls to join in a dinner for the Queen of England at the White House.”

  II. STARSKY AND HUTCH

  The press was not so kind, and generally lambasted the “Quaint Spectacle” of the broadcast. “It Wasn’t Much for White House TV,” brayed a Washington Post headline. And then the letters began pouring in to WGBH. A few people enjoyed “the wonderful coverage” of the bicentennial, though even those fans wondered why Jean Marsh couldn’t find her glasses and was therefore unable to comment incisively about the ladies’ dresses.

  Many more watchers, like April Oray, wrote to say, “Dear Channel 2, your program…was a fair imitation of ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’ (in fact we were sure it was MPFC), but as a 3 hour…effort it was pitiful…You all looked so uncomfortable, unprepared, unprofessional we nearly wept for you.” Archibald Murphy wrote: “Your coverage of the State Dinner for Queen Elizabeth has raised the presentation of Starsky and Hutch to the level of creative programming.”

  Julia generally fared well, with Mrs. Eugene Klein noting that “Julia Child…was the one bright spot in the otherwise dreadful telecast.”

  In a postmortem on July 8, the White House Press Office lamented an opening shot obscured by a tree limb, the misnaming of important guests, Bob Hope’s unfunny jokes, the Muskrat-themed music, the fact that Julia was not allowed to taste the wine, and the general chaos wreaked by the rainstorm: “It appeared the White House didn’t know what was going on.”

  “I simply cannot understand why we went to the effort to arrange this live coverage and then have it turn out in such a way that the President could be described as ‘lumbering through a clumsy toast’ and other similar observations,” a senior White House official wrote to Robert Mead, the television adviser to the president. “I want…an explanation of why your office…screwed up.”

  Mead vigorously defended himself and the telecast. But by the end of the day he had submitted his resignation.

  III. A THOROUGHLY AMERICAN DINNER

  In her mostly approving article about Chef Haller’s bicentennial menu for the queen, The New York Times food writer Mimi Sheraton included a strongly worded caveat: “Through it all, one could not help wondering if a really imaginative, thoroughly American dinner might not have been more interesting and appropriate to the occasion than this menu which, though elegant and appetizing, was all-purpose international.”

  Julia rose to the defense of Haller and Mrs. Ford’s choices in an article for The New York Times Magazine the following January:

  There was a lot of public caterwauling at the time of the Queen Elizabeth menu…why could it not have been an American dinner? Isn’t American cooking grand enough? Does it need to be rejected as too homey? And so on and so forth. Why not have pineapple upside down cake, apple Betty, sweet potatoes, beaten biscuits, sourdough bread, pie à la mode, three-bean salad, turkey and so forth? Well, why not? To some extent, it’s just a matter of packaging and public relations. All you have to do is change the names of the dishes from international French to national American, and everyone is happy.

  Sheraton was playing to the galler
y, Julia felt, and promoting a false controversy over what was “French” versus “American.” After all, Julia had pointed out many times that “boeuf bourguignon is just beef stew with a French name.” It drove her mad when people said, “Oh, I can’t make boeuf bourguignon, it’s too heavy and complicated.” To that she’d reply, “Balderdash!”

  She illustrated her point with a bicultural menu, in which a French quiche aux crevettes becomes an American “open-faced tart of Louisiana shrimp,” a filet de boeuf becomes “a prime tenderloin of Texas steer,” and truffles and foie gras are replaced by homemade liver pâté and wine-flavored duxelles. “You can take almost anything in the French repertoire and turn it into plain old American, and vice versa,” Julia explained.

  She translated the bicentennial dinner like this:

  FRENCH AMERICAN

  Homard en Belle Vue Cold Boiled Lobster from the Coast of Northern Maine—in Fancy Dress

  Macédoine de Légumes A Salad of Fresh Vegetables from Maryland Gardens

  Sauce Rémoulade The White House’s Own Green Mayonnaise

  Selle de Veau Farcie et Braisée Stuffed Boned Saddle of New Hampshire Veal

  Brocoli Mornay Fresh Blue Mountain Broccoli Sauced the Wisconsin Way

  Croquettes de Riz Arkansas Rice Croquettes

  Salade Native Salad

  Fromages des Trappistes Trappist Cheese

  Glace Crème aux Pêches Fresh Georgia Peach Ice Cream

  Sauce aux Framboises Rose Garden Raspberry Sauce

  By the time Julia’s article about the bicentennial dinner ran in The New York Times Magazine, the Democratic governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, had defeated the Republican Gerald Ford in the 1976 presidential election. Julia used the changing of the guard to address the myth that food at the White House was “dreary.” Not only was Haller “a splendid chef,” she wrote, but “ultimately, it is the First Lady who is responsible for the nation’s gastronomic image.”