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Dinner and Diplomacy

I never forget that I live in a house owned by all the American people.

—FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT

I. WHITE HOUSE RED CARPET

The sun shone brightly as three flags—the American, Japanese, and District of Columbia—riffled in a breeze. As the camera panned across the Washington, D.C., cityscape, four howitzers boomed a nineteen-gun salute on the South Lawn. It was Tuesday, November 14, 1967, and Julia Child was taking her audience somewhere they had never been before.

“Welcome to Washington. I’m Julia Child, out here in front of the East Gate of the White House, where every day thousands of visitors go through this historic mansion. And today, something very special is going on,” she said in her distinctly breathy, high-low warble. Hundreds of tourists streamed through the White House, also known as the People’s House, clogging the halls and gawking at the formal dining rooms just hours before an important state dinner.

“These visits are terribly important. And also terribly complicated to handle. It’s really fascinating to see how the White House manages one of them,” Julia narrated. “And that’s exactly what we’re going to see. Not only what goes on in front, but what goes on backstage, and backstairs. We’re going to see everything, inside and out, from the start—the official greeting right on through to the White House dinner.”

Thus began a public television special called White House Red Carpet. Produced by WGBH, Julia’s home public television station in Boston, it was the first time that a TV crew had been allowed to document a state dinner. It also marked the first time in more than two years that Julia had appeared on the tube with fresh material. Season One of her cooking show, The French Chef, aired from February 1963 through July 1966, when Julia took a break and the show went into reruns. By then she had firmly established herself as “the kitchen magician,” as The Boston Globe called her. With more than a million viewers a week, Julia encouraged her audience to cook boldly and take risks without fear of failure. “Eat heartily!” she declared, and, “Never apologize!” Her fans referred to her simply as “Julia,” as if they knew her personally.

Julia had taken a sabbatical for two reasons: she had been hard at work with her French colleague Simone “Simca” Beck, on a follow-up to their cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking; and she was waiting for color television to become a reality. By November 1967, the book was coming together and WGBH had received its first color cameras. With White House Red Carpet, Julia was making a dramatic return to the national spotlight.

A robust fifty-five years old, Julia stood more than six feet two inches tall, had a long face with a rounded jaw, frizzy brown hair, lively blue eyes, strong hands, and usually dressed in pearls, a blue apron, and size-twelve sneakers. At the White House she wore a stylish black-and-white checked coat, a shoulder-length brown wig with a flip curl (for convenience: constant hairdos during a multiday TV shoot were a burden), and an impish grin.

The idea for a White House TV special was sparked in 1966—“the year that everyone seems to be cooking in the kitchen with Julia,” noted Time magazine—when the Public Broadcasting Laboratory (PBL) asked if she would like to do a thirty-minute special about “What’s Happening Now.” Avid news watchers, Julia and Paul drew up a list of potential ideas.

Paul’s voice was important. He was an equal partner in their joint venture: Julia’s mentor, editor, manager, confidant, bodyguard, staff photographer, sommelier, and culinary “guinea pig.” He avoided the limelight and described himself as “a part of the iceberg that doesn’t show.” While she was a blast of sound and a ray of sunlight, he was more internalized, with a quieter, moodier demeanor and a sometimes prickly intellect. Julia and Paul were “a team,” they said, “two sides of a coin,” and they often signed their joint letters “JP” or “Pulia.”

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 President 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.

II. HOW FORTUNATE WE ARE

La Pitchoune overlooked a green valley and the town of Plascassier, just north of Cannes, and a few miles from the Mediterranean. It was a simple one-story building, with tan stucco walls and a red tile roof. It had a large living-dining room, a narrow kitchen, modest bedrooms, and a terrace overhung by a trellis coiled with green vines.

The house was built in 1965, in a former potato field on a gently sloping hill. Julia referred to it as “the house the book built,” because she had paid for it with proceeds from Mastering. She also called it “the house built on friendship,” because it was situated on a corner of Bramafam (“the cry of hunger”), the property owned by Simca Beck and her husband, Jean Fischbacher. They had invited the Childs to lease the property and build on it, on the condition that once they were finished using the house it would revert to the Fischbacher family. This was a very un-French and un-American arrangement; but it suited the four friends just fine, and it was sealed with a handshake.

Enveloped by soft warm breezes from the Mediterranean, and perfumed by the scents of wood smoke, manure, mimosa, jasmine, and lavender, La Peetch seemed to exist out of time. The arid gray-brown earth was festooned with low scrub bushes, red and yellow wildflowers, dark green olive trees, and tall, swaying cypresses. The quiet was punctuated by birds chirping, bleating goats, and a chugging tractor. In the distance behind Plascassier, the Alpes-Maritimes rose in a succession of green foothills and blue mountains that appeared to recede into infinity. Southern France is famously laid-back, and the people who lived nearby didn’t know, or care, who Julia Child–the-American-TV-star was.

Julia and Paul had flown there right after taping the diplomatic dinner at the Johnson White House, and quickly fell into a contemplative rhythm. Over the course of December and January, Paul painted landscapes, photographed Julia’s cookery, and tested bread recipes. Julia corrected proofs for The Cooking of Provincial France, a Time Life book on which she was a consultant, and tested recipes with Simca for Volume II of Mastering. On a visit to Paris in December, the Childs dove into the chaos of Les Halles one last time, to buy three foie gras and truffles for their holiday celebrations. “God, it was great!” Julia enthused of the market. “Ten thousand smells, sounds, and faces! I kept thinking what a movie we could have made if that plan of ours hadn’t fallen through.”

Back in Provence, they were invited to watch the slaughter of a three-hundred-pound pig in a traditional ceremony. This was the kind of local, ritualized moment that fascinated Julia. She was inquisitive and not squeamish, and felt it was important to know “all of the hows and whys” of where food comes from.

As Julia kneaded, chopped, and stirred in the kitchen at Christmas, Paul—who affectionately referred to her as “the Mad Woman of La Pitchoune”—found himself “smelling all these breads, chickens, pâtés, dorados, cooking, and hearing my tender little wifelet crashing around in the kitchen, scolding the pussy for meowing, whacking something metallic with something else metallic, like a Peking street vendor. A very jolly house.” He wrote his twin, Charlie Child: “How fortunate we are at this moment in our lives! Each doing what he most wants, in a marvelously adapted place, close to each other, superbly fed and housed, with excellent health, and few interruptions.”

In early February 1968, Paul and Julia flew home to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a quick visit. Having rented out their rambling Victorian house, they stayed with Avis DeVoto, the literary scout who had sent Mastering to Knopf in 1959, and was the wife of essayist Bernard DeVoto. They planned to catch up with friends and review some paperwork; Julia would record the voice-over for the White House TV special, have a small lump in her left breast examined—“It is a very simple matter,” she said—and they would return to France, where work on Volume II of Mastering would resume.

Julia was riding high. White House Red Carpet had gone extremely well, planning was under way for Season Two of The French Chef, and Knopf was about to publish a compilation of recipes called The French Chef Cookbook. And so it came as a rude shock when a doctor at New England Sinai Hospital in Boston said that the small lump in her breast was a cancerous tumor, “the size of a lima bean.” Julia had been a casual smoker, but was otherwise robust and healthy.

Faced with the unexpected diagnosis, she characteristically instructed the surgeon, “If the tumor is malignant, lop the breast off. I want to get it over with.”

Following the standard procedure of the day, the oncologists performed a radical mastectomy, removing the entire breast and the lymph nodes on her left side, to forestall further spread of the disease. (Such invasive surgery would not be used on a small tumor today.)

“Left breast off,” Julia wrote in her diary on February 18. She was not given chemotherapy, and at the time breast reconstruction was not widely available. “They just sewed me up and I went home,” she recalled. In fact, it wasn’t quite that simple. Julia spent ten days recuperating at the hospital. Returning to Avis’s house, she sank into a warm bath and allowed herself to cry over her “lost bubby.”

With such highs followed by such lows, Julia could have been forgiven for dropping into a funk. But she remained stoic, hardly complained, and dismissed the operation as “a nuisance.” In letters to friends, Julia emphasized how fortunate she’d been that the surgery had been on her left side, and not on her dominant right. Friends sympathized, saying, “That’s too bad,” but didn’t dwell on her condition. “No one took it as a terrible crisis,” Julia recalled, not because they were insensitive, but because at the time mastectomy was considered a difficult, extremely personal subject to talk about. Julia did not mention her breast cancer in public for years, and when she finally did, she kept a stiff upper lip: “No radium, no chemotherapy, no caterwauling. I didn’t want to be whiny.”

Paul suffered on her behalf. Though he was a black belt in judo, he was a worrier bedeviled by existential dread, and was subject to a string of coughs, stomach flus, and eye inflammations in a way that his twin, Charlie, never was. Though Paul put on a brave face, Julia’s mastectomy gripped him with fear. “Death and degeneration sat on my chest like twin ghouls, and I had a white night in spite of a double dose of sleeping pills,” he wrote. Berating himself for such “damn-fool emotions,” Paul imagined the worst: “Planning the funeral, the disposition of La Pitchoune and of our house in Cambridge…the problems of whether [Julia’s] ashes would better be buried in the Plascassier cemetery, in Pasadena, in Cambridge, or simply scattered somewhere.”

Despite his fears, Julia recovered, and willed herself upward and outward into “the world of the living.” She began to take short walks around Cambridge, did physical therapy, and, though she wasn’t sleeping well, slowly regained her strength. The loss of her breast “didn’t really bother me, for I wasn’t flapping my breasts around anyway,” Julia said. Besides, Paul “made me feel like he loved me.”

Years later, in 1975, she appeared on a PBS show called “What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You,” part of a Dick Cavett series to promote breast cancer awareness. “The leading expert on a woman’s body is the woman herself,” Julia said. “And the best instruments for the detection of possible breast cancer are a woman’s own two hands.” When the show aired in New York, the station received more than two thousand calls from viewers wanting to know more. “It’s dreadful to lose a breast,” Julia told Cavett. “I was in my fifties and married. How would I have felt had I been thirty and hopeful?”

—

BY MID-MAY 1968, Julia was in the midst of recuperating from her mastectomy when she and Paul plastered smiles on their faces to attend a special screening of White House Red Carpet for the WGBH crew in Boston. Driving to the station Julia lit a cigarette, inhaled, and felt nauseated. She flicked the butt out the window and never smoked again.

Everyone has his or her own remedy for trouble. Julia had always turned to work as a salve, and so it was now. The enormous challenge of envisioning Mastering, Volume II, testing and retesting recipes, writing them up, and consulting with their editor at Alfred A. Knopf, Judith Jones, gave Julia a goal, structured her time, and nourished her in every way. And, for better and for worse, the process brought her closer to her “French sister” and longtime collaborator, Simca Beck.

When Julia, Simca, and Louisette Bertholle wrote Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the fifties, they had to leave aside many recipes that wouldn’t fit into the already-crowded 684-page tome. Upon the book’s publication in 1961, they vowed that if it sold well they would include the forsaken dishes in a second volume. Judith Jones encouraged this idea.

Jones was an accidental cookbook editor. “The idea had never even occurred to me” before Mastering landed on her desk in 1959, she recalled. She had been hired by Knopf as a fiction editor, and to work on translations of Camus and Sartre. But, Jones explained in a series of conversations over many months, she understood the cookbook intuitively. She had lived in Paris at the same time the Childs did, had developed her palate by eating in cafés and brasseries, and had learned to cook with friends and by asking for recipes as she shopped in the outdoor markets. Given the manuscript for Mastering in New York, Jones was charmed by the book, and convinced of its potential when she cooked from it at home. “I thought, ‘Well, if I like it then others will, too!,’ ” she said.

Mastering was the first cookbook Jones edited, and she would go on to introduce other chefs with distinct voices and culinary expertise to America—including Marion Cunningham (sophisticated home cooking), Lidia Bastianich (Italian food), Claudia Roden (Middle Eastern), Edna Lewis (the American South), Madhur Jaffrey (Indian), and Irene Kuo (Chinese).

When Mastering successfully fulfilled its promise and Julia became a TV star in the early sixties, it was logical for the publisher to follow up with a sequel. In 1965, Julia and Simca began to work on Mastering, Volume II. (By that point, Louisette Bertholle had dropped out of the collaboration.) Jones set a deadline of December 31, 1967, for the first draft. But that date came and went, with no sign of Volume II.

“It will be ready when it’s ready,” Julia said. Writing to Simca, she added: “Too bad, but it is a thing we can’t hurry, if it is to be the super book we expect.”

A year later, she and Simca had produced only three of fourteen planned chapters. Jones was growing concerned—in part because the authors gave the appearance that “they could keep going well into the next century,” and in part because she noticed that the Child-Beck collaboration was starting to buckle and crack under pressure.

III. MADE FOR EACH OTHER

The air was chilly and the sky was overcast and portending rain until the late afternoon, when the sun sent shafts of light through the gloom and warmed up their little corner of Provence. It was December 27, 1968. The Childs were at La Pitchoune for Christmas, the Fischbachers were next door at Bramafam, and Julia and Simca were knuckling down to “cookery bookery.” They had spent the afternoon in front of a tiny black-and-white TV, watching NASA’s Apollo 8 capsule—the first manned spaceflight to orbit the moon—reenter the atmosphere from space and splash down into the Pacific. They were “dazed and thrilled” by the sight, Paul wrote. “Its courage, its perfection, and its imagination are almost beyond belief. What a triumph for human beings.”

That afternoon, the American journalist Mary Roblee Henry drove up the rutted driveway to chronicle the making of Volume II for Vogue. “Tonight you are our guinea pigs!” Julia greeted Henry and the French photographer Marc Riboud enthusiastically. “We’re going to cook up a storm, testing two tremendously secret recipes from the new book.”

Julia heaved a weighty black stone mortar onto the worktable in her La Pitchoune kitchen, and used the pestle to mash crawfish shells together with butter. “It takes strong hands to be a good cook,” she said, with a zealous gleam in her eye. “You have to be rough and tough.” With hard strokes she squeezed the pink butter through a sieve into a bowl. “This flexes the muscles, and the butter gets far better mixing than in a blender…The crawfish go into the sauce, the shells into the butter, and the rest into the soup!”

Simca Beck watched impatiently. She was a tall, pale-skinned, sharp-featured, headstrong blond Frenchwoman who was just as obsessed with la cuisine bourgeoise as Julia was. They called each other ma belle soeur, which can mean either “my dear sister” or “sister-in-law.” Like blood sisters, they loved each other most of the time and clashed spectacularly some of the time.

Simca dipped a finger into the crawfish mousse and scowled. “I find that very buttery.”

“Zut alors, more shells!” said Julia, who seemed to relish the work. “This is only the sixth time we’ve done this dish. We tried it out on Sam Chamberlain [the American artist and writer], but so far it hasn’t even a name.”

As Madame Henry took notes on a yellow legal pad, Riboud snapped pictures. Paul acted as sous-chef and dishwasher, and quietly observed the proceedings.

As far as Henry and Riboud could tell, Julia and Simca were working in perfect harmony. It was an impression the authors encouraged. “Some people don’t want others around because they don’t know what they’re doing,” Julia said. “I know what I’m doing so I don’t mind company. One of the great pleasures is working with Simca.”

“We were made for each other.” Simca nodded.

As the cooks finished and the sun set, drinks were served in front of the fireplace in the open living-dining room. The floor at La Peetch was lined with red tile, the white stucco walls were decorated with Paul’s paintings, and a vase of fresh mimosas graced the round dining table.

Dinner began with a sole mousse accompanied by the hard-won crawfish butter sauce. Paul poured a cool Alsatian Sporen 1964, which they sipped from distinctive amber-colored, handblown wineglasses bought in neighboring Biot. Conversation was light and convivial. As they ate, Riboud focused his cameras on Julia, creating a series of images of her tasting food at the stove and laughing as she poked the fish mousse with a fork. He didn’t take many pictures of Simca.

The entrée was a duck that had been poached, boned, molded with foie gras, and chilled in a port wine aspic. It was served on glazed pottery plates that were a house gift from the eminent American chef James Beard. Paul uncorked bottles of Château Lynch-Bages 1959 and cut “thighs” of a peasant loaf that Julia had baked. Simca’s husband, Jean Fischbacher, turned the salad leaves in their dressing eighty times. Julia served ripe cheeses bought in Cannes, and Simca brought out her signature dessert, an apple tarte normande.

The meal was sublime, “one of the most unforgettable dinners ever cooked by Julia Child,” Henry declared in her Vogue article, which appeared six months later. Julia had thoroughly enjoyed herself, and understood that a story about the making of their book in a high-profile magazine would provide fantastic publicity. Now she was eager to finish work on Volume II.

Paul wasn’t convinced the evening had gone so well. “The concentration of both Mary Henry and Marc was on Julia,” he observed, “which may have hurt Simca’s feelings.”

Out of respect for her colleague, Julia did not discuss her success in the States, or the media apparatus that had helped make it possible. Simca rarely watched television and knew little about The French Chef; she did not appreciate why Julia’s portrait on the cover of Time in 1966 was groundbreaking, or how a feature in Vogue would publicize their book. As far as Simca was concerned, nothing had changed since they worked on the original Mastering in the fifties: she and Julia were equal partners in teaching and writing, and Simca considered herself the better cook.

But when it dawned on her, as Paul wrote, that “Julia has so sedulously protected her (against my urgings) from knowing how popular, how beloved and well known, what a household word Julia has become,” Simca grew quietly resentful. How was it that her old friend had become such a major celebrity in America?