Secret Ingredients (19 page)

The Childs had known Rosemary Manell since 1949, when they were all together in France. Paul Child and Abram Manell, Rosemary’s husband, were both with the Foreign Service then, and the two couples, who shared an interest in good food, which in Julia’s case was becoming something more than an interest, used to dine together regularly in the Childs’ apartment, on the Rue de l’Université, or the Manells’, on the Île St.-Louis. Rosie, as the Childs and their friends (but no one else) call her, now lives in Belvedere, just across the bay from San Francisco. She is a talented painter and potter, an expert tailor, a first-class cook; she wears Scandinavian-blond hair in a thick braid down her back, and is nearly as tall as Julia.

Elizabeth Bishop, a Bostonian with close-cropped dark hair and a sense of humor that has often relieved tension at difficult moments, was one of the volunteers who came to work for
The French Chef
at WGBH. When the show started, Paul did all the behind-scenes washing up—and a good deal of the chopping, grating, mincing, and precooking as well. He had only recently resigned from the Foreign Service, after nearly twenty years, but because he has always adapted easily to changed circumstances, and suffers from no apparent insecurities of the male ego, he took, from the outset, an active and supportive part in Julia’s new career. “I’m here,” Paul used to say. “I’ll do anything.” But as the program developed, it soon became evident that more backstage help was needed, and, with no difficulty whatsoever, a crew of half a dozen volunteers was formed. Several of the women were married and had small children at home; they hired babysitters or housekeepers to come and do the dishes there while they went to the WGBH studio in Cambridge and spent the day doing the dishes for Julia. Actually, they did much of the precooking and testing for the show. Julia sometimes introduces them on the air. “Meet my associate cooks,” she says. “Mary O’Brien, Liz Bishop, Bess Hopkins, Edith Seltzer, Rita Rains, Bess Coughlin, and Gladys Christopherson. It’s always more fun cooking with friends, don’t you think?” Mrs. Bishop lives in Cohasset, Massachusetts, with her husband and their three children, and when
The French Chef
was in production she often did not get home until one or two o’clock in the morning. Now that the Childs are taking a year off from television and the show is being seen only in reruns, she is delighted to be able to travel with them on their demonstration tours. “Cooking is the least of it,” she told a friend in San Francisco. “You know, in a funny way I feel closer to Julia than I do to anyone. Of course I’m
closer
to Jack and the children, but there are things I could say to her that I couldn’t say to anyone else.”

Julia Child was born Julia Carolyn McWilliams in Pasadena, California, in 1912. The oldest of three children in a moderately well-to-do family—her father, John McWilliams, managed some family farming land in Arkansas and Southern California—she was entered in Smith College the day she was born. “My mother was in the Class of 1900 there,” she said recently, “and there was just never any doubt that I would go. In those days, people were very enthusiastic about their college.” As a member of Smith’s Class of 1934, Julia was planning to be a Great Woman Novelist. “They laughed when I sat down at the typewriter,” she told an interviewer in San Francisco. “And they were right, too, because nothing much ever came of the plan. I wrote for the Smith College
Tatler,
and after I graduated I went home for a while, and then I went to New York and tried to get a job with
The New Yorker,
but they turned me down. The woman-novelist idea was very vague and unformed. I just thought it would develop at some time or other.”

After three years in New York, working in the advertising department of W. & J. Sloane and living with two Smith classmates in an apartment under the Queensboro Bridge, she went back home and spent another two years in Pasadena. “I had a very good time doing virtually nothing,” she said. “There was always lots of fun and laughter.” Then the war came, and on the advice of her friend Janie McBaine (who subsequently married Marquis Childs) she went to Washington and got what she describes as “a dreadful typing job” with a government information agency whose nickname was Mellett’s Madhouse. After six months, she left and joined the Office of Strategic Services. At one point, there was a call for volunteers for overseas duty, and Julia McWilliams, reasoning that she would probably be going to Europe after the war in any case, put in for Far Eastern duty. With an oddly assorted group that included the anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Cora Du Bois and a congeries of explosives experts, forgers who had done time in federal prisons, and some missionaries who had been born in the Far East, she traveled by troop train across the United States and then by boat to Australia and on to Bombay, arriving the same day that two ammunition ships caught fire and blew up a large part of the Bombay docks. From Bombay, some of them went by train across the Indian subcontinent to Madras, and from there to Ceylon. It was at the OSS headquarters in Ceylon that she met Paul Child.

Child, who got to Ceylon a few months after Julia, was in charge of Visual Presentation for the OSS there. That meant, for the most part, setting up and maintaining a war room for the general staff, with maps and charts to show the areas, topographies, troop concentrations, and other factors on which military planning depended. (He had recently come from New Delhi, where he had set up a war room for Lord Louis Mountbatten and General Wedemeyer.) Julia was placed in charge of the Registry, a document center for messages to and from OSS agents in the field. She noticed the Visual Presentation officer because he seemed, on the whole, to be more civilized than anyone else there. Paul was ten years older than Julia, and he had seen a lot of the world. He had been a lumberman in Maine and a waiter in Hollywood, and he was a self-taught artist. During the twenties, he had knocked about Europe, spending several years in Paris, where he got to know Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and other expatriates; that supposedly golden decade had been a rather penurious one for Child, who had made a marginal living by selling his own woodcuts and making copies of the antique furniture in the Cluny Museum. After that, he had become a schoolteacher, first in France and later at the Shady Hill School, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and at the Avon Old Farms School, near Hartford, Connecticut, where he taught art and French. He was, in addition, an accomplished engraver and photographer, a black belt in judo, a master of several languages, and a man who could converse interestingly and amusingly on almost any subject. Although a more or less confirmed bachelor by this time, Child also noticed Julia McWilliams. “She seemed like a pretty great woman to me,” he recalled recently. “She was completely competent, unflappable—just the way she is now—and running a very complicated operation with great skill.”

At this stage of the war, late in 1943, the Americans and the British were planning an operation to cut off the Japanese garrison in Singapore by making a surprise landing behind enemy lines on the Malay Peninsula. This plan was abandoned when it became evident that the required naval support was not available—everything was going into the approaching invasion of Normandy. Child was sent to help set up other war rooms on the Chinese mainland, at Chungking, and then at Kunming. Julia McWilliams was also assigned to Kunming, and the friendship begun in Ceylon developed into something more serious. Kunming, which had never been in Japanese hands, was full of refugees from all parts of China. There was enough food available, and Paul and Julia were able to sample and become enthusiastic about many different Chinese cuisines. They were in Kunming when the Japanese surrendered. Soon afterward, Paul made his way home by way of Peking. Julia’s detachment was scheduled to go to Shanghai, but, with the war over, the unit’s morale was not what it had been. “I felt we’d lost the purity of our purpose,” Julia said recently. “You can see I’m a Victorian woman at heart. Anyway, I decided to go home. They flew me over the hump to Calcutta and loaded me onto a troopship, from which I disembarked, weeks later, smelling, as somebody said, like a cattle boat.”

A reunion took place several months later in Washington. “We had decided that we should look each other over in civilian clothes, and that we should meet each other’s families,” Julia recalls. That done, they were married in the fall of 1946. Julia was thirty-four, Paul forty-four. For the first year and a half, they lived in Washington. The Office of Strategic Services had been discontinued, but OSS people who had been in Visual Presentation were automatically absorbed into the State Department, and Paul was now doing graphic work for the government. Early in 1948, by a happy official stroke, he was assigned to the United States Information Service office in Paris.

France was not at all the way Julia had imagined it. “I’d never met any French people before,” she said not long ago, “and I thought they’d be—you know, snippy, the way they always seemed in
Harper’s Bazaar
or
Vogue.
I was just amazed to get off the boat at Le Havre and see all those great big beefy people. We drove to Rouen and had lunch there at the Couronne, and I was euphoric. I was practically in hysterics from the time we landed. Of course, I didn’t realize how difficult it was going to be for me to learn the language. It was two years, really, before I could get along in it, and four years before I was fluent. But from the beginning I just fell in love with everything I saw. It took me a long time to get over my infatuation—now they can’t fool me so easily.”

The Childs found a comfortable third-floor apartment on the Rue de l’Université, behind the Chambre des Députés. Paul could walk across the Pont de la Concorde to his office, on the Faubourg du St. Honoré. At first, Julia spent most of her time at Berlitz, struggling with the language. Both the Childs readily concede that at this point her cooking left a good deal to be desired. Paul knew and appreciated good food, but Julia, like many American women of her background, had never really learned to cook at home, and until she married Paul she had never been interested in learning. In the fall of 1949, though, she was sufficiently interested to enroll in a special early-morning course at the Cordon Bleu cooking school, where she found herself the only woman student—the twelve others were ex-GIs, learning cooking on the GI Bill of Rights. “I would leave home at seven in the morning, cook all morning with the GIs, and then rush home to make lunch for Paul,” Julia remembers. “I’d give him the béarnaise or the hollandaise sauce I’d just learned, or something equally rich. In about a week we both got terribly bilious.”

The Cordon Bleu, founded in the nineteenth century, once served as a cooking school for orphans, to help them make their way in life. By the 1930s, it had become a place where well-to-do housewives (many of them Americans) sent their servants to learn the techniques of the classic cuisine. In modern times, it has not been a professional school—to become a professional chef in France one has to serve as an apprentice for years in a restaurant or hotel kitchen, and that training is often supplemented by attendance at a government-sponsored technical institution. But the Cordon Bleu hired professional chefs as teachers, and when Julia enrolled, in 1949, the teaching was excellent. Two of the three chefs whom Julia had as teachers were in their seventies: Max Bugnard, who had owned his own restaurant in Brussels before the war, and Claude Thillmont, for many years the pastry chef at the Café de Paris. The third was a younger man—Pierre Mangelatte, who was the chef at an excellent small restaurant in Montmartre, the Restaurant des Artistes.

“Bugnard was a marvelous meat cook, a marvelous sauce maker, wonderful with stocks and vegetables, although not so much with desserts,” Julia recalls. “As a young man, he had known Escoffier. Chef Thillmont had worked in the twenties with Mme. Saint-Ange on her great cookbook,
Le Livre de Cuisine de Mme. Saint-Ange,
now unfortunately out of print. Those two men knew just about everything there was to know. And in the afternoons we would have demonstration classes by Mangelatte, who was a brilliant technician.” Julia had just enough French by this time to keep up with the instruction. Her interest in the subject, she found, was limitless. “Until I got into cooking,” she once said, “I was never
really
interested in anything.”

Marie-Antoine Carême (1784–1833), celebrated gastronome, personal chef (successively) to Talleyrand, Czar Alexander I, George IV, and Baron Rothschild, author of five classic books on food, is generally considered the founder of
la grande cuisine.
On the Sunday evening before the cooking demonstrations began at the Kabuki Theatre, the Chefs Association of the Pacific Coast presented its Carême Medal to Julia Child, at a dinner given in her honor in a private dining room at the Jack Tar Hotel. The dinner began, surprisingly, with matzo-ball soup, continued with a seafood
coquille,
paused for sherbet, forged onward with beef Wellington, a potato basket, and cucumber salad, and concluded with a chocolate bombe and petits fours. In draping the Carême Medal around Julia’s neck, the president of the association spoke of her as “the person who brought classic cooking into American homes” and “the one chef in the country who has the recognition that we are all striving for.” A few of the chefs at the long table seemed to harbor reservations about the award’s going, for the first time, to a woman—Joe Rivas, the principal chef for the Pam Pam chain of restaurants in San Francisco, said firmly that women would never make it as chefs in major restaurants, because they were not strong enough physically—but virtually every one of them, including Rivas, wanted to meet Julia and shake her hand.

There was a good deal of talk at the dinner about the shortage of qualified chefs in this country and the absence of professional cooking schools. The Pacific Coast chefs, most of whom seemed to be European-born and in their late fifties or sixties, bemoaned the fact that so few younger men were coming up to take their places. Julia said that unfortunately the same thing was now true in France. Fewer and fewer people wanted to put in the long hours that a first-class restaurant, or even a humble village bakery, demanded. Convenience foods were taking over in restaurants as well as in private households. There were some great young chefs at work, to be sure—Julia mentioned in particular Roger Vergé, whose Hostellerie Moulin de Mougins, near Cannes, had just received its third star in the
Guide Michelin.
But, as Paul Child pointed out, men like Vergé and Paul Bocuse and the Troisgros brothers did not write down what they had learned or invented, and their discoveries would probably die with them. “Nowadays, everybody likes to run down Escoffier,” Julia said, “but nobody’s doing what he did to preserve the great traditions.”