A Covert Affair (37 page)

From then on, their life revolved around food. Julia spent her mornings in class and her afternoons “home-practicing” what she learned on poor Paul, who suffered through countless failed soufflés, galantines, and fondues. Weekends were devoted to scouring the local markets for the freshest fish, mouthwatering cheeses, baskets of mushrooms, and armloads of fragrant leeks. When she was not cooking, she was collating recipes,
tapping them out
, according to Paul, “like a determined woodpecker.” He jokingly referred to himself as a
“Cordon Bleu widower,”
but was unstinting in his praise of his wife's much-improved skills.

After a year of intensive training, Julia had felt ready to take the exam that was a prerequisite to receiving the legendary Cordon Bleu diploma. She was indignant on the subject of her trials and tribulations at the hands of Madame Elisabeth Brassart, the school's impossibly arrogant
directrice
, who had taken against her as a jumped-up American amateur and attempted to bar her from taking the final. It was only after Julia sent a letter containing dark threats that the American Embassy might take exception to the maltreatment of one of its own that she was grudgingly allowed to sit for the exam. Even then, Madame Brassart issued her only a certificate (not the real McCoy), since Julia had not technically completed the course. It took another year of letter writing and veiled threats before she extracted a signed diploma from the dreadful woman.

When she first arrived, Julia had only very halting, schoolgirl French. Discovering that after seventeen years of French classes she could neither speak nor understand the language, she had immediately enrolled in a Berlitz course. Before long, she was babbling away about pâtés and mousses and was proficient enough to continue perfecting her technique under Bugnard, as well as other leading Cordon Bleu chefs. She also joined Le Cercle des Gourmettes, a women's cooking club dedicated to haute cuisine. This was something of a rebel league in France, where the elite dining clubs and three-star restaurants were still the exclusive preserve of men, who staged magnificent feasts and preened in the company of their fellow culinary kings.

It was at Le Cercle that Julia befriended Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, two Frenchwomen who were excellent cooks and who shared her obsession with the craft—researching and codifying recipes, carefully recording the exact ingredients and precise steps that went into preparing the very best quiche lorraine,
canard à l'orange
, or
turbot farci braisé au champagne
. The two women had completed the manuscript of a collection of French recipes tailored for Americans and were looking forward to their next venture. Impressed with Julia's personality and resourcefulness, to say nothing of her Cordon Bleu pedigree, they invited her to be a partner in their own small cooking school. L'école des Trois Gourmandes opened for business in January 1952,
initially operating out of Julia's ancient kitchen and teaching a handful of unknowing wealthy American women the basics of French cuisine. Paul moonlighted as their resident wine expert and kept the finances straight so that their tiny
“l'école”
cleared a profit. Inspired by their success, the partners decided to publish a teaching manual. Originally, their plan was to rework Beck and Bertholle's modest collection of recipes, but after reviewing the recipes and the confusing instructions, Julia persuaded them to embark on a much more ambitious French cookbook that would reflect her teaching style and a more informal
“human approach.”

Jane was vastly amused by the idea of the tall, white-aproned Professeur Julia lecturing a bunch of bored embassy wives on the proper way to prepare coq au vin. She admitted to rarely darkening the door of her own minuscule kitchen, adding that she and her husband were habitués of a bar/restaurant in their
quartier
called La Grignotière (The Nibblery). Waving away any suggestion she had intentionally distanced herself from her old pals, she said airily,
“Oh well, I never write letters, you know—gave that up long ago.”

She told them about her own unexpected marriage to George (they'd known each other
“a long time”
) and their move in March 1947 to Austria, where he served with the U.S. Army of Occupation. He worked for
“so-called Military Intelligence”
as a liaison officer, mainly interviewing refugees—Hungarians, Ukrainians, Balts, and people of other Soviet nationalities—who had collaborated with the Germans during the war and were housed in temporary camps. Jane had landed a job with the information services branch of the army, where she had managed to parlay her propaganda experience in OSS into a senior position as head of the Austrian radio station in Salzburg, with considerable editorial influence and a staff of ninety-five. She explained how difficult she had found it in the beginning to work with her Austrian subordinates, the majority of whom had
“all been Nazis”
and had worked for the German
Rundfunk
(broadcasting system) during the war. In time her attitude had softened, as she saw the toll of defeat and desperate poverty in their faces. Her proudest moment was broadcasting the first postwar Salzburg Festival in 1947, which was transmitted by the Vienna station
throughout Western Europe. She made Julia and Paul laugh with tales about how her rusty German got her in trouble, like the night she scandalized her staff and listeners alike by mispronouncing the name of Mozart's “Eine kleine Nachtmusik” (A Little Night Music), instead saying “Eine kleine Nacktmusik,” which translated roughly as “A Little Naked Music.”

She and George had spent a year together in Austria, squandering her salary on frequent weekends in Paris. It was formidably expensive because rationing was still on, but then she had always lived beyond her means. Her favorite motto was and always would be
“Give me the luxuries of life and I'll do without the necessities!”
Whenever they could, she and George hopped the Orient Express or Arlberg Express. They would take the night train after work on Fridays, arrive at Gare de l'Est in Paris first thing Saturday morning, live it up for thirty-six hours, and then sleep it off on the return trip to Salzburg on Sunday. At the end of 1947, George was sent to Fort Belvoir, in Virginia, before being demobilized. They had planned to reunite in Paris, but their four-month separation stretched to more than eighteen months when George landed a job in New York with an engineering consulting firm and decided to stay in the States and try to earn some money. What exactly went on during this period was unclear, but she implied that there had been some trouble in the marriage. Jane remained in Salzburg, where she had planned to meet up with her parents in June and accompany them on a three-month holiday in Europe.

When her parents returned to San Francisco at the end of the summer, Jane went to Paris and after much searching found a tiny garret she and George could just afford. George was finally able to join her in August 1949. He went back to school, courtesy of the GI Bill, completing a degree at the Faculté des Lettres, and was earning an “inadequate” salary working part-time for UNESCO writing a French-German-English glossary of engineering terms. Unable to obtain a work permit—all the available jobs went to French nationals—he had to settle for freelance jobs. Fortunately, she still had her two-hundred-dollar allowance from her father, which he sent by American Express each month. It was enough to get by on.
“Poor George is full of neuroses,”
she said of her
contentious, petulant spouse, suggesting he was not always the easiest to live with, “but he's a very nice guy, and he's learning to relax little by little.”

For her part, Jane was taking art classes at the University of Paris and had received a commission from the French government to design some tapestries. She dismissed the latter as just a sideline, as her main interest continued to be her painting. Paul was green with envy at the mention of her small studio at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and Jane insisted that he and Julia come by and see it. After lunch, Paul hesitantly showed her the large study of Paris that he had labored over for many painful weeks. (He knew Jane could produce a picture in a day.) Although he always protested that he painted
“just to please himself,”
he privately worried that his work was too old-fashioned and illustrative, and totally out of step with the times. Jane's genuine enthusiasm took him by surprise.
“Don't touch anything,”
she said, “Leave it the way it is. It's wonderful!” As Paul reflected later,
“She was unusually discerning and appreciative of my painting, which draws me to her in spite of the fact that she's almost a pure type of ‘the instinctive woman'—a race I tend to rear away from out of self-protective cowardice.”
The years had not changed Jane a bit. She was “the same
Grand Naturelle
,” as earthy and impulsive as always. Her habits were as undisciplined and unregulated as they had been during the war. There was no telling what time she might drag herself out of bed. It was always best to phone after noon.

The following Saturday they dined “
chez
Jane” in her fourth-floor apartment in a crumbling seventeenth-century building overlooking the baronial splendor of the Bibliothèque Mazarine, the oldest public library in France. Jane lived in Vieux Paris, in the heart of the art district, almost directly across the Seine from the Louvre Museum. Around the corner on Quai Voltaire was Sennelier, the legendary art shop where Cézanne and Picasso bought their custom-made pigments. Her father had lent her the money to buy the two-bedroom apartment, and Jane had fixed the place up charmingly, stuffing the rooms with bibelots and shabby antiques salvaged from the Marché aux Puces (flea market). Blue denim draperies framed the windows overlooking the narrow streets
below, and the stark white walls blazed with her brilliantly colored abstract paintings. As always, she had various animals about the place, including a black-and-white alley cat and a French poodle.

She introduced her husband, who struck Julia as
“a small, short, funny fellow.”
Paul found George
“shy and brainy”
and felt he was completely in thrall to his charismatic wife. George let Jane do “all the talking” and just sat back and listened, though he managed to laugh at the appropriate places. “She has him completely mastered through the surging rush of her personality,” Paul mused later. “He's helpless under its tumult. We think they've worked out a successful system of living together, though either Julie or I would recoil from it.”

That night, they drank a lot of wine and stayed up late talking about old times. Julia and Paul told of seeing Cora DuBois and Jeanne Taylor, as well as Rosie Frame and her husband, Thibaut de Saint Phalle. Jane and George had dined with Betty MacDonald and Dick Heppner on their recent visit to Paris. They began reminiscing about their days in Kandy. Paul recounted the famous chipmunk-chasing escapade that had ended with Jane shimmying down the drainpipe after her runaway pet and being confronted by a
“naked blimpish British colonel”
spluttering with embarrassment. “The war was funnier than I thought at the time,” wrote Paul, “and as we went back over it we damn near knocked ourselves out laughing.”

After that, Julia and Paul saw Jane and George for dinner every few weeks. On several occasions, the Childs entertained at their own place and Julia cooked up a storm. Paul groused to his diary that he hardly felt it was worth
“feeding them with finesse,”
given the pedestrian fare they dished up at their place. “They do a lot of cooking out of cans (the way most Europeans think most Americans do) because it's easier,” he observed with distaste. “Jane really doesn't want to bother to prepare anything. George does most of the cooking and cleaning up anyway—seems like. Our first dinner at their place was lamb chops, boughten French fries, and canned peas. It ended with French pastries. Not too hard to prepare!” However, Paul chalked it up to “laziness rather than esthetic insensibility” and was inclined to be generous as Jane had such extraordinary taste in painting and photography, and her husband, though untrained, was not far behind her.

Paul and Jane had agreed to swap pictures, and he looked forward to having an original Foster on his wall. He was giving her a cubistic design he had done of Paris rooftops and chimney pots that she said she loved.
“She is almost psychic in her appreciation of what one has done,”
he marveled to Charles. “She rushes up to a painting and puts her nose close to the surface—her face as eager as a child's, her eyes dancing—and begins to explore its surface like a quartering bird-dog, talking sense every minute. It rather takes my breath away.” Unfortunately, one could not expect this affinity to extend to all fields. “They don't take food anywhere nearly as seriously as we do,” he concluded, “though they like it so appreciate it.”

One subject both couples took seriously was politics. Whenever they got together, they would work themselves up into a state about the anti-Communist hysteria gripping American domestic politics and the divisive 1952 elections, dominated by McCarthy's outrageous scapegoating and Richard M. Nixon's Red-baiting. America, they agreed, was going to the dogs. It was far better to be in Paris. Julia and Jane swapped stories about their fathers, both
“congenital Republicans,”
as Julia put it, and stalwart supporters of McCarthy and Nixon.

Julia had been shocked but not surprised by a
Herald Tribune
article that September detailing Nixon's secret campaign slush fund that mentioned her father as one of the generous contributors. She had laughed aloud at the sight of his name on the front page—
“John McWilliams, Pasadena rancher”
—but it had been a mirthless laugh all the same. After Julia's father had provoked her into mounting a vigorous defense of Charlie Chaplin—whom McCarthy had accused of being involved with left-wing causes in the 1930s and ordered Immigration Services to “hold for hearings” if he tried to return to the United States—her brother had written asking her to cease and desist. It just upset the old man. Her stepmother, Phila, seconded the motion. Julia did as they asked but remained mutinous. As she later fumed to Charles and Freddie,
“I'll bet I would have been a Communist at that period, too, if I had been an intellectual instead of a fairly well-to-do butterfly. Who knows.”