CHAPTER 11
AMERICAN CHEESE
1953–1954
HELEN EVANS BROWN HAD the jangly peasant style of some middle-aged permanent resident at a California arts colony. She liked loop earrings and handmade Mexican sandals, capri pants, and loose tunic tops of coarse-weave Japanese cotton. She wore a bracelet of silver charms—milagros—that made her wrist tinkle. She had bright, scrubbed skin usually free of makeup, and chestnut eyes that stretched to the outer edges of her face like Ava Gardner’s. Helen’s dark, wavy hair was short enough not to stray into her eyes whenever she lowered her head to work at the chunky wooden table her husband, Philip, built in their Pasadena kitchen, beneath a dangling welter of whisks, ladles, mesh strainers, and Chinese wire spiders.
She was born in Brooklyn in 1904. Her family then moved to Montreal, and as a young woman she spent two years at Yale, studying art. Afterward, she launched a catering business in New Haven with a friend, got married, moved to Long Island, and had two children, but the marriage ended in divorce. She met Philip S. Brown, an aspiring screenwriter. He was balding, with a thin face and a graphite-streak mustache like David Niven’s. Philip’s conversation was full of movie-patter wit.
In 1936, they married and moved to Southern California, where Philip found unsteady work in the rewrite and research departments at Warner Brothers and Universal Pictures. They bought an old craftsman bungalow on a double lot on Armada Drive in Pasadena. On the empty lot, they created a sunken garden and a brick patio. It had a screen of native oaks, and a canyon below, across which you could glimpse the Rose Bowl stadium.
Armada Drive was steep and wooded; during daylight, there was constant chatter from house finches, scrub-jays, and mourning doves. Helen planted a loquat tree and had another child. She cooked constantly, attuned to the bounty of California’s fruits and vegetables, the riches of its Chinese and Mexican markets, and its wealth of wines and cheeses.
She filled the kitchen with old enamelware and new French sautoirs; cast-iron popover molds and tin Pullman pans; olive-wood spoons and spatulas, an antique spice rack and a copper fish poacher, bamboo steamers, earthenware poêlons—anything shapely or adventurous or that evoked some cuisine Helen was interested to learn. Philip, who presided over grilling on the patio, honed his skills with meat and charcoal.
The Browns loved old cookbooks. The house was beginning to fill with them, picked up at flea markets and auctions: Pierre Blot’s Hand-Book of Practical Cookery from 1868, Urbain Dubois’ Nouvelle Cuisine Bourgeoise from 1870, and stacks more, including rare early West Coast ones, charity cookbooks, and settlers’ recipe manuscripts. Philip began dealing them on the side.
They found a circle of smart, creative friends with roots in the old Arroyo Seco bohemian collective of Northeast Los Angeles: small-press publishers, commercial artists, screenplay writers, Hollywood set designers. Drinking was a group hobby, and when Helen was cooking, with Philip grilling on the patio, it seemed there was no better food and ambiance in all of California.
In 1940, to supplement Philip’s unsteady income and find an outlet for her passion for cooking, Helen began writing radio scripts and recipes for Robert Balzer, a local wine expert and champion of California vintners. Balzer inherited the family grocery business in Hollywood and turned it into a high-end emporium, where assistants to celebrities like Alfred Hitchcock and Marlene Dietrich regularly phoned for deliveries of Almaden White Grenache Rosé and Camembert. After a few years, Helen began writing Balzer’s weekly advertising bulletin, which included recipes, and decorating the store’s windows. She became food editor for a Los Angeles fashion and lifestyle magazine, The Californian, and authored a monthly column, “California Cooks.” In 1948, the magazine collected her columns (plus twenty new recipes) in a book, also called California Cooks.
In the summer of 1949, Ned Bradford of Little, Brown wrote to Helen, whom he didn’t know, on a hunch. He said he’d seen California Cooks, “which several of us here in Boston have now had a chance to look at, and which we all agree is just the sort of thing, in style and content, we would like to see in a larger, more comprehensive book that you might write.” This was the seed that sprouted into Helen Brown’s West Coast Cook Book.
James was the first outside of Little, Brown to recognize its brilliance, though he wasn’t the last. M. F. K. Fisher lauded it; even Elizabeth David, never shy about rendering fierce judgments or calling out fools, expressed her admiration in The Spectator. It stood apart, she said, from the dreary recipes of American home economists, with their cake mixes and canned peas, their imbecilic shortcuts and ludicrously precise measurements for variable seasonings like ground black pepper.
Despite the praise of influential food writers, however, Helen’s book was a flop.
Before Bradford first wrote to Helen, there had been internal debate at Little, Brown about the viability of a West Coast book for a national audience: cooks in Buffalo, Cincinnati, and Baltimore who couldn’t find a kumquat or a tortilla or a geoduck even if they knew what such things looked like. And while Little, Brown was lousy at marketing cookbooks, at the elevated price of four dollars, Helen’s book was an expensive curiosity, not a practical collection of recipes. Even for James, so much of the pleasure of Helen Brown’s West Coast Cook Book was as a source of Pacific Coast nostalgia.
For Ward Ritchie, a Pasadena friend and craft printer, Helen wrote a pair of short, small-format recipe books with good design, six inches square. She did one in 1950 on chafing dish cooking, another a year later on patio cooking. By the summer of 1952—just about the time she received her first miserable royalty statement from Little, Brown—Helen knew she needed more than brilliance, small-press books, and a head whirling with ideas to make a living. She needed a partner, someone to help her build a national profile for selling books. Who better than James Beard? His books did well at Balzer’s, especially Fireside—she told James it sold “like bananas in England.” Privately, she told Ned Bradford she found Fireside “too darned attractive to ever become a kitchen bible. . . . The illustrations, though enchanting, are distracting.”
Still, though: James’s dust-jacket endorsement of the West Coast book had been a boost for Helen’s credibility, nationally. Suppose their names somehow became linked?
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SINCE NEARLY EVERY MAGAZINE editor and publishing house of any importance was in the Northeast, Helen needed an agent on the appropriate coast. In 1948, she became the first client of John V. Schaffner, of the Schaffner Literary Agency of New York City. His office was where he lived: 312 East Fifty-Third Street, an 1860s wood-frame townhouse, all creaky floors and knickerbocker charm.
Schaffner, thirty-five, had been a high school English teacher, a fiction editor at Good Housekeeping and Collier’s, and finally the assistant to a literary agent in Boston, Frank Meador. Schaffner had the look of a boyish gentleman academic at an Ivy League school: a long, intelligent face and poindexter glasses; short hair gone prematurely white (making his age difficult to peg); a seersucker sense of ease and correctness.
Two years later, in 1950, he’d marry Perdita Macpherson, heir to an unconventional kind of literary royal family. Her blood mother was the Imagist poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle); her adopted one was H. D.’s lover, the English novelist Annie Winifred Ellerman, known as Bryher—Schaffner called them Perdita’s “mummies.” H. D. and Bryher were close to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, so when Perdita was a girl, she’d visit the famous couple annually at their country house in Bilignin, France, sixty miles east of Lyon. Basket—Stein and Toklas’s adored succession of poodles, all with the same name—would be Perdita’s summer companion. During the war, Perdita worked for the OSS in London.
Schaffner was nurturing and kind, a devoted husband and, eventually, father to four. He loved holidays and entertaining; he did most of the cooking. As an agent, he was old-fashioned, a confidant to his clients, going far beyond writing letters and forwarding royalty statements. He and Perdita had an understanding: Schaffner would lead a rich and rambunctious family life in plain sight, and a quiet gay one in private. Perdita had grown up in an unusual way, with iconoclastic parents in complicated romantic arrangements. She understood the need for partners to arrange their lives, at least privately, around certain truths, and perhaps yearned for a marriage that, given the social orthodoxy of the 1950s, looked simple only from the outside.
She and John kept separate bedrooms. Guests at the Schaffners’ parties would include close male friends of John’s, men who smelled of cologne and roughhoused with the growing brood of little Schaffners; men who celebrated Thanksgivings and birthdays with Perdita and the children. Schaffner kept late hours. After dinner with the family he’d ascend again to his office, composing letters into the Dictaphone for his assistant, Hubert Creekmore, to type in the morning. (A Mississippi-born poet related by marriage to Eudora Welty, Creekmore—likewise closeted—was Schaffner’s lover.) Some nights, after the letters were done, Schaffner would go out to be with other queer men.
The summer when Schaffner and Perdita wandered into Lucky Pierre on Nantucket, to meet James, taste his coffee, and eat the lemon tart from one of Helen’s recipes, it was no mere accident. Schaffner had been working with Helen for nearly five years. He very much wanted to meet James, to be his agent. Helen told him to look up James on Steamship Wharf.
One Sunday that August of 1953, James took a bus to Siasconset, the easternmost cluster of gray-weathered houses on the island, to take up the Schaffners’ invitation for martinis in their summer rental. The three of them got along beautifully: stories of Helen, of Gertrude and Alice, and of Perdita’s work in London during the war. Perdita didn’t warm to everyone, but she liked James, who must have sensed at once the sort of arrangement the Schaffners had. And on a handshake, James acquired an agent and an important new confidant.
Afterward, Schaffner dashed off a note to Helen. “I’m only writing this to say that I want to thank you for letting me know about Jim. He promises to be a most entertaining friend.”
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JAMES AND HELEN HAD much to talk about. In letters shuttled between New York and Pasadena, they spoke of recipes they were working on and the atrocities being perpetrated in the food pages of the national magazines (House & Garden, Ladies’ Home Journal). James had been to a promotional lunch at which every dish featured bananas. It was nauseating. Helen was judging a recipe contest for Western Family, a magazine she’d begun writing for, and the entries were ghastly, straight from the home-economics school of cooking. “Your banana lunch sounds very much like the stuff Philip and I have been retching over for the last three weeks,” she told James. The things home economists and the food industry were shoving into Americans’ gullets were sad and disgusting, and nobody—certainly not magazine editors—had the fortitude to call it out.
Both despised Gourmet. James referred to it as “an esoteric sheet with no sense as regards food and drink.” Helen found it smug and supercilious, with articles about “quaint and eccentric characters rather than cooking.”
At forty-seven, Helen was struggling. She had stories in local magazines and her work for Balzer, but she wasn’t breaking through nationally. Schaffner wasn’t finding New York editors who liked her story pitches. Her mind spun with original ideas. Magazines wanted conventional service pieces that instructed housewives how to make dinner fast, with plenty of shortcuts calling for cans, mixes, and freezer fare.
She hated the heat and smogs that seized California every spring (which almost always arrived in February, sometimes earlier). Gut pains and canker sores were troubling her, and she was having paralyzing dizzy spells. The doctor couldn’t figure out why.
Her second title for Little, Brown, released in the fall of 1952, was Helen Brown’s Holiday Cook Book. M. F. K. Fisher, who’d last-minute bailed on contributing one for Helen’s West Coast book, did the foreword. (“She believes passionately,” Fisher wrote, “in the mystic importance of the feasting.”) Besides recipes for obvious occasions such as Thanksgiving and Easter, Helen folded in as much eclecticism as mainstream publishing would allow, via recipes for Twelfth Night, Chinese New Year, Shrove Tuesday (Pancake Day, the eve of Ash Wednesday), Bastille Day, and the multiday Mexican Christmas celebration of Las Posadas. Los Angeles artist Harry O. Diamond, a friend of the Browns, contributed illustrations with mod personality and a playfully fluid sense of line. (Two years later, James would tap him to illustrate his fish book in a similar style.)
The holiday book sold just as poorly as the West Coast one. Helen’s next proposal to Ned Bradford was for a book about cooking vegetables—in a decade of canned and frozen convenience, when the dearest aspiration for most Americans was a grilled T-bone, vegetables were an impossible sell.
“I have no doubt that she could write such a specialty book with unusual skill and imagination,” Bradford told Schaffner, “but I can’t help taking an extremely dim view of the sales potentialities of it. Vegetables are the least interesting item on the menu; in their cooked form at least I suspect they’re the most marginal food for most people.”
Helen’s career was sputtering. “I don’t know quite where to turn next to see if I can locate a publisher for you,” Schaffner wrote. Her energy and originality somehow made publications suspicious. Besides, Little, Brown’s sales numbers were making her an untouchable. Word from Boston was she was prickly and temperamental. Editors in New York thought of Helen as a regional author of limited appeal.
As Schaffner was scraping the lower reaches of the editor pool, he sent Helen’s story pitches to Geraldine Rhoads of Today’s Family magazine.
“In some respects,” Rhoads noted with her rejection, “Helen Evans Brown has come to us with too many ideas.”
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AT THE END OF APRIL 1953, Schaffner received a long, giddy letter from Helen. James was in Pasadena for several days, making his first visit to Armada Drive.
“Jim Beard (James A., cook book author extraordinary) is out here and has spent a great deal of time with us. He is a nice guy—no typewriter cook, he—and I think we have both gained from the experience. I had an idea the other day and he thinks it’s wonderful but it will be up to you to sell it if you think it has merit.”
Their notion was to do a Beard–Brown collaboration in the form of an epistolary conversation, an ongoing discussion of food and cooking (with recipes), ricocheting between New York and California.
“The idea is that we have a cook’s [sic] controversy by mail,” Helen wrote, “and have the letters published in a series. We want, of course!!!, to sell it to some magazine that would pay very well. What do you think of this idea? And do you think we could retain publication rights and do a book of it afterwards?”
They’d plan to have friendly arguments—discuss dinner parties they’d mounted or were planning, cooking experiments that rose or sank—talking directly to one another (and the reader), and thereby eliminating the intervention of editors who dumbed down their work and erased their true voices. “A West Coaster transplanted to the East, he would have the European, Eastern male point of view,” Helen explained to Schaffner. “I, an Easterner now wedded to the West would have the more informal outlook.” Their cooks’ controversy would be as original, personal, and opinionated as June Platt and Sophie Kerr’s The Best I Ever Ate. It would have freshness and bite.
Though he’d been writing to Helen for a year, James and the Browns met for the first time one week before Helen sent her breathless letter to Schaffner. Their first dinner together was in the sunken patio on Armada Drive, with martinis followed by carnitas and chiles rellenos, recipes Helen had learned from Mexican cookbook author Elena Zelayeta. James felt he’d known the Browns forever. He and Helen were allies, mates in battle against a hostile field of editors and publishers.
“You and I know what we are doing,” James told Helen, excoriating editors who grasped almost nothing about cooking for flavor. “We know the background—we can cook and we can produce—and then we are trampled over by a lot of phonies who can barely heat a frozen chicken pie without spoiling it.”
They all got a tremendous kick out of one another, James and the Browns: liked to drink; loved to eat. In a week, they almost never stopped cooking. James felt he’d found family, the happy kind his birth had denied him. It felt right to be in Helen’s kitchen, with its magical clutter and generosity of inspiration. His mother’s had been as large and well equipped. But Helen’s had an air of playfulness, the certainty of forgiveness if one messed up: a permeating grace.
Back home in New York, James was still feeling the glow. “I have returned here with my ideas in my head,” he wrote to Helen. James was happier than he’d been since, well—since he could remember.
“The wonderful times we all had during the days I was there are something I shan’t forget for a long time,” he wrote. He longed to collaborate with Helen. “I am convinced that we should be and will be a team,” he told her, “and if there is any chance of becoming tops in this field I think we can do it if we get a few breaks.”
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TWO WEEKS INTO THE new year of 1954, New York City became impassable. Ten inches of snow clogged the streets, stalling buses and slowing taxis to crawls on the major avenues. The temperature dipped to 15 degrees Fahrenheit. James’s party seemed ruined.
He’d planned a dinner, elegant yet lively, in his cramped Twelfth Street place for acquaintances with important connections in Paris. The Formé-Becharats were friends of Henry de Vilmorin, the New York–based publicity man for Maxim’s, and were members of the influential French gourmet society Club des Cents. The snow, however, stranded them on Long Island, after James had splurged: filet of beef, hothouse tomatoes (good ones, despite the season), cucumbers, and fresh peas.
To salvage his investment, he called his closest friends for backup. Cecily Brownstone, food editor of the Associated Press, trudged through the snow from her house on Jane Street. Helen McCully of McCall’s magazine lugged over a fruitcake left from Christmas. Wendell Palmer, his old editor from Paris Cuisine, happened to be down from Boston, where he now lived. They ate onions belle aurore and got drunk on Italian wine, Pommard, and Champagne. Sam and Florence Aaron showed up late. So did James’s neighbors, the couple Alvin Kerr and Peter Carhartt, along with friends they’d had to dinner at their apartment.
As everyone sipped liqueurs and coffee late into the night, James wedged open his hall door to keep from suffocating in the heat of so many bodies. When he awoke at six the next morning, he was alone: sunk in a chair, still with his clothes on and the lights blazing, dirty glasses scattered on every table, and the front door gaping. New York was a crowded and convivial place, but sooner or later friends scattered. James could never escape his feelings of loneliness for long.
The same depression he felt on Nantucket during his Lucky Pierre summer wouldn’t let him go these past weeks. Blacking out in his chair provided a rare bit of rest. “I haven’t slept enough lately to count,” he wrote Helen Evans Brown. Six months after turning fifty, James was swallowed deeper into a kind of slow-creeping panic. He’d gained back all the weight he lost in Nantucket and then some. James was even finding it uncomfortable to move.
Money weighed on him; he grabbed at anything that looked like it might pay. He asked John Schaffner to pitch publishers of a French restaurant book, the Guide Gastronomique de la France, to hire him to do an English translation—they could pay him in francs. How about a collaboration with Ruth Norman on a travel guide for all of Europe outside the Iron Curtain? Schaffner dutifully wrote to publishing house after publishing house with James’s pitches. Nobody bit.
It seemed there was no idea too kooky for James to entertain, as long as it promised money. Joseph Leon, a stage manager and sometime actor in Flushing, approached James with a scheme called Data-Guide: twenty-five typewritten pages of cooking information and recipes shrunk down to fit on a single see-through plastic sheet. “They pay a royalty of 10 per cent on the wholesale price,” he wrote to Helen, “which is about 3.7 cents each, and they sell for 69 cents, and they estimate each one to sell a million copies in the outlets they have. . . .” But James’s Data-Guide sheet never materialized.
A publicity woman for Crosley freezers pitched James a story to try and sell to a magazine: a family hauls around an unplugged chest freezer packed with food for a fishing trip in the back of their Studebaker Conestoga station wagon (assuming there’d be electricity at their campsite, and the food wouldn’t have thawed by the time they arrived). It was a ridiculous premise. Schaffner peddled it anyway—to Esquire, Holiday, the Saturday Evening Post, even Argosy. Nobody wanted it. (James scored a Crosley freezer for trying, though. He plugged it in next to the toilet, the only place in his apartment it would fit.)
“I am about to go into a nervous breakdown,” he wrote to Helen. “Of that I am certain.”
The Browns invited James to join them out West for a monthlong road trip in their Dodge Coronet convertible. Helen had long wanted to write a story on the wines and cheeses of the Western states. Philip and Helen would drive up to San Francisco to meet James. Together, they’d drive north to Oregon and Washington, over to Idaho and a corner of Wyoming, into Utah and south through Nevada, ending in Pasadena. Philip had worked out an intricate itinerary, with stops to see dozens of vintners and cheesemakers. They’d start the first week of April.
James hadn’t seen Helen since she visited New York briefly the previous November. Though it would be a lightning trip, he’d be able to see old friends in Portland and Seattle and show Gearhart and Astoria to the Browns. James could keep up with his magazine commitments with Isabel via letters, using the portable typewriter Helen was bringing. He was better off clearing out of New York for a while. He needed to look at the Pacific and feel sand under his shoes.
“This is the last gasp,” he wrote to Helen just before leaving. “I am pooped, bitched, bushed, buggered and completely at sea with ennui and bewilderment. But off we go.”
And with any luck, and if they didn’t drink too much gin at night after each day’s ride, they’d be able to work on their book.
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AMERICAN COOKS IN THE EARLY 1950S were in the grip of frenzy. Shiny new grills and rotisserie gadgets, advertised like cars, loaded with the latest features, were everywhere. Outdoor equipment and appliance manufacturers rushed to market with portable backyard barbecues and plug-in kitchen roasters, meant to give Americans everywhere—even dwellers in tight city apartments—an approximate taste of grilled patio meat.
Postwar technology and American manufacturing prowess propelled infrared broilers such as the Cal Dek and the Broil-Quik. An Air Force officer, Brigadier General Harold A. Bartron, retired to Southern California in 1948 and spent his time in tactical study of a proprietary rotisserie with a self-balancing spit. He named it the Bartron Grill.
There was the Smokadero stove and Big Boy barbecue. There were enclosed vertical grills with radiant heat, hibachis from post-occupation Japan, and the Skotch Grill, a portable barbecue with a red tartan design that looked like an ice bucket.
In New York City, the high-end adventure outfitter Abercrombie and Fitch and the kitchen emporiums of big department stores did a bustling business in these new symbols of postwar meat consumption. There was even an Upper East Side shop solely dedicated to them, Smoke Cookery, Inc. on East Fiftieth Street. The only trouble was that many buyers of these shiny new grown-up toys had no clue how to cook in them.
For weeks in the spring of 1953, Helen tested electric broiler recipes, an assignment from Hildegarde Popper, food editor of House & Garden magazine, for a story called “Everyday Broils.” A few broiler and rotisserie manufacturers sent their new models to Armada Drive for Helen to try.
“The subject turns out to be a huge one,” Helen wrote Popper; she had enough material to break the story into two parts. “Jim Beard, of cook book fame, was here when my rotisserie arrived,” she told Popper, “and he was a great help to me.”
Word got around the New York editor pool. Suddenly, Helen and James seemed the ideal collaborators, storywise, to cover the new subject of grill and rotisserie cooking: West Coast and East, female and male, California suburban patio cook and Manhattan bachelor gourmet.
Meanwhile, cookbook publishing was surging. Doubleday became the first house to hire a fulltime editor, Clara Claasen, to fill its stable with cookery authors.
Schaffner took Claasen to lunch to discuss how he might be able to help. “She is very much interested in the idea of an outdoors cookbook,” he wrote to Helen afterward. “This would combine barbecue, picnic, sandwich, campfire and every other aspect of outdoor eating.” Schaffner and Claasen lunched again. James and Helen’s “cooks’ controversy” idea had run out of gas (Schaffner hated the idea anyway, especially after reading first drafts of a few Beard–Brown “letters”), so Schaffner managed to steer Claasen toward a different kind of collaboration for his two clients.
In November 1953, Helen flew to New York. She and Schaffner met with Claasen at the Doubleday offices. On a handshake, in the absence of James (who only the day before had returned from France on the Queen Elizabeth), they decided on a collaboration: an outdoor cookery book to be authored by Helen Evans Brown and James A. Beard.
Everyone was happy: Schaffner for nailing a deal for two clients at once; Claasen for bringing new talent to Doubleday. Helen was getting what she needed: a book with a major publisher. James was getting what he wanted: a reason to get even closer to Helen. Perhaps this was only the first in a long future of collaborations; they might one day even open a kitchen shop together and sell a line of their own jams and condiments. The possibilities were endless.
Claasen was eager to draw up a formal contract. All she needed from Helen and James was an outline.
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UNDER THE GLOWING CABIN LIGHTS of a westbound red-eye flight on April 3, 1954, James found himself eerily alone. TWA’s Super Constellation was an enormous propliner with seats for nearly a hundred passengers; that night, James was one of only four. He planned to rendezvous with the Browns in San Francisco later that week, but only after he took five days on his own in the city he’d loved as a boy. From there, the three of them would embark on a weeks-long research trip in the Browns’ Coronet convertible, stopping at wineries and cheese factories throughout Northern California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Helen needed to do research for a magazine article she’d long wanted to write. She and Philip had asked James to join them five months earlier, in December 1953.
Nearly a decade after the end of the war, San Francisco was a place of resuscitated glamour, with much of the shimmer and confidence James had known in the city of his youth, when he and Elizabeth would ride the trains of the Shasta Route south.
His plane landed in drizzling rain. For his first luncheon of the trip, James chose a place of old comfort: the dim, wood-paneled Fly Trap on Sutter Street. He wore a suit of windowpane-check tweed (the jacket button straining above his stomach, his thin bow tie slightly askew), eating cold, cracked Dungeness and sautéed sand dabs. The stationery in his room at the Palace had an engraving across the top, an illustration of pioneers trudging next to oxen pulling a Conestoga wagon. Above them floated an apparition: the hotel’s neoclassical façade rising from the fog. “At the end of the trail,” it read, “stands the Palace Hotel.” James imagined himself the son of the pioneer he’d fancied his father to be. Was he now at the end of something or the beginning?
He spent his days and nights eating: A luncheon of poulet sauté with Dr. A. L. Van Meter of the San Francisco branch of the Wine and Food Society (they had met on the French wine junket in 1949); dinner at the Pacific Heights home of Frank Timberlake, vice president of Guittard Chocolate; a trip to San Jose to tour the Almaden Winery and meet its owner, Louis Benoist, over a marvelous lunch of pâté, asparagus mousseline, and an omelet. James dined at the Mark Hopkins with Bess Whitcomb, his abiding mentor from the old Portland Civic Theatre days—she lived in Berkeley now and taught drama at a small college. She wore her silver hair in a short crop; her gaze was warm and deep as ever.
Helen and Philip arrived on Sunday, and on Monday the tour began with a day trip. Philip drove the Coronet across the Golden Gate Bridge north to the Napa Valley, with Helen riding shotgun and James colonizing the bench seat in back. The afternoon temperature crested in the mid-seventies and the hills were still green from winter rain. Masses of yellow wild-mustard flowers filled the vineyards. They tasted at the big four—Inglenook, Beaulieu, Charles Krug, and Louis Martini—and lunched with a winery publicist on ravioli, chicken with mushrooms, and small, sweet spring peas. James kept a detailed record of their meals in his datebook. Elena Zelayeta, the San Francisco cookbook author and radio personality, cooked them enchiladas suizas and chiffon cake.
Next day they crossed the bridge again but swung west from Highway 101 to visit the farm town of Tomales, not much more than a main street of stores and a filling station. Among the rise of green hills dotted with cows, at the farm and creamery of Louis Bononci, James had his first taste of Teleme, a washed-rind cheese with a subtly elastic texture and milky tang. Within its thin crust dusted with rice flour, James recognized the richness and polish of an old French cheese, crafted in an American setting of rusted pickups and ranchers perched on stools at diner counters. It stirred his senses and revived his love for green meadows with the cool, damp feel of Pacific fog lurking somewhere off the coast.
Philip drove west to the shore of fingerlike Tomales Bay, where they lunched on abalone and a smorgasbord that included the local Jack cheese and even more Teleme.
The road stretched north along the coast: to Langlois, Oregon, with its green, tree-flocked hills converging in a shallow valley, where they stopped at Hans Hansen’s experimental Star Ranch. Born in Denmark, Hansen spent decades making Cheddar. In 1939, with scientists at Iowa State University and Oregon State College, Hansen had begun experimenting with what would be known as Langlois Blue Vein Cheese, a homogenized cows’-milk blue inoculated with Roquefort mold spores. (Production would eventually move to Iowa, where the cheese would be known as Maytag Blue.)
They hit Reedsport, Coquille, Coos Bay, Newport, Cloverdale, Bandon, and Tillamook. They stopped at cheese factories, candy shops, butchers’ counters, produce stands, and markets. Already stuffed with suitcases, the Coronet’s trunk became jammed with wine bottles and jars of honey and preserves; packets of sausage, dried fruit, nuts, and candy. The backseat around James filled up with bottles that rolled and clinked together on turns, with apples, tangerines, filberts, pears, and butcher-paper packets of sliced cured meat, smoked oysters, and hunks of Cheddar. The car had become a mad ark of food. James hauled anything regional and precious on board, as if later it would all prove to have been a myth if he didn’t carry some away as proof that it existed.
In Tualatin, south of Portland, they dropped in on James’s old friends from theater days, Mabelle and Ralph Jeffcott. To a crowd that included Mary Hamblet and her ailing mother, Grammie, Mabelle served baked shad and jellied salad, apple crisp, and the homemade graham bread—molasses-sweet and impossibly light—that was famous among her friends.
They lunched on fried razor clams and coleslaw at the Crab Broiler in Astoria and had martinis, kippered tuna, salmon cheeks, and Indian pudding at the Seaside cottage of James’s beloved friend Harvey Welch.
In Gearhart, James trudged out to Strawberry Knoll, walked across the dunes and onto the beach. He regarded Tillamook Head, just as he did as a boy at the start of summers. He felt a weird convergence of past and present: the sting of sand whipping his face and the smell of charred driftwood lingering in the rock-circled dugout pits of ancient cookouts.
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FOR JAMES, the Northwest displayed a delightfully slouchy elegance he’d almost forgotten about in New York. It had taste without snobbery. At the Pancake House in Portland, they brunched on Swedish pancakes with glasses of buttermilk and French 75 cocktails—the sort of high–low mix he had aimed for at Lucky Pierre. Why did Easterners have so much trouble grasping the idea?
Before a meal of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, they sipped a simple pheasant broth that, dolled up with half a dozen gaudy garnishes and called Consommé Louis-Philippe, would have been the jewel of Jack and Charlie’s “21” in New York. Food here had honesty. It declared what it was. Like James, it was anti-“gourmet.” Its purity was the ultimate elegance.
Thus far, James had fumbled at articulating a true American cooking. He’d taken rustic French dishes, called them by English names, and substituted American ingredients. There was something crude about such an approach. This trip had showed him American food made on French models—Gamay grapes and Roquefort spores and cheeses modeled on Camembert and Emmenthaler that tasted wonderful and were reaching for unique expressions, not just impersonating European originals. It had given James a clearer vision of American food taking root in the places it grew.
As a boy, he had glimpsed this with Chinese cooking, how a relative of the Kan family, a rural missionary, adapted her cooking to the ingredients at hand in the Oregon countryside. How her Chinese dishes took root there, blossomed into something new; how they became American.
They trekked to Seattle, where the Browns went to a hotel and James stayed with John Conway, his theater-director friend from the Carnegie Institute days. John’s wife, Dorothy, was a photographer. She shot formal portraits of James and Helen in the Conways’ kitchen—maybe Doubleday would use one as the author photo for the outdoor cookbook. They took an aerial tour of oyster beds and wandered Pike’s Place Market.
Philip then steered the Coronet eastward across Washington, through the town of Cashmere in the foothills of the Cascades, where they stopped at a diner for cube steak, cottage cheese, and pie that James noted as “wonderful” in his datebook. In Idaho, at a place called Templin’s Grill near Coeur d’Alene, they found excellent steak and hash browns. There was a Basque place along the way that made jellied beef sausage, and a diner in Idaho Falls with “fabulous” fried chicken and, as James scribbled in his daybook, “biscuits light as a feather.” The fried hearts and giblets were so delicious they bought a five-pound sack to stuff in the hotel fridge and eat in the car next day for lunch.
The squat, industrial-looking Star Valley Swiss Cheese Factory in Thayne, Wyoming, with a backdrop of snow on the Wellsville Mountains, produced what James thought was the best Emmenthaler-style cheese he’d tasted outside of France, but this was American cheese. They had delicious planked steak and rhubarb tart in Salt Lake City, but bad fried chicken and awful pie in Winnemucca, Nevada, was the beginning of a sad coda to their journey.
Soon they were in Virginia City, home of Lucius Beebe—brilliant, bitchy, rich, alcoholic Lucius Beebe, dear friend to Jeanne Owen and the Browns and dismissive of James from the minute they met in New York City fifteen years back.
Lucius enjoyed the life of a magnifico in the nabob splendor of the Comstock Lode, among the graceful wooden neo-Renaissance mansions, peeling in the searing Nevada sun, built by nineteenth-century silver barons. His husband in all respects, save the marriage license and church wedding, was Chuck Clegg. Chuck was quarterback-handsome and courtly, in contrast to bloated, prickly Lucius. Helen and Philip were fond of them. They wanted to linger for a few days, which turned into four days of heavy drinking and blasting wit, much of it at James’s expense.
“Drinks, Steaks, Drinks!” James wrote in his daybook. He disliked Virginia City, with its steep hills one couldn’t climb without wheezing. One day, they all had a picnic on the scrubby flank of a hill, under a brutal sun. Chuck and Lucius brought a Victorian hamper filled with fine china plates, Austrian crystal, silver, and antique damask napkins. They ate cold boned leg of lamb and beans cooked with port. They lingered so long, over so many bottles of Champagne, that James’s head became badly sunburned. Back at the motel, Philip, drunk, tried splashing James’s head with gin, hoping it would bring cooling relief. Everyone cackled at his plight.
Finally, twenty-five days after they set out from San Francisco, Philip steered the Coronet home to Pasadena.
“The trip is one of the most happy and valuable memories of my life,” he wrote to Schaffner from Pasadena. “I garnered a great deal of material, had a most nostalgic time in parts of the west most familiar to me and saw much I had never seen before. It was splendid, gastronomically speaking, to be able to see that there is hope in American cooking.”
The best and most interesting food in America was inseparable from the landscapes that produced it. It was all right there, in country diners and small-town grocers’ shops; in roadside dinner houses and bakeries. All you needed to do was look.
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AFTER JAMES LEFT THE WEST, heading back to New York after a quick stopover in Chicago, Helen wrote to Schaffner. She fretted about James’s state of mind.
“I suppose you might just as well know what a complex guy Jim is,” she wrote. “Poor Jim—he is a lonely guy and an insecure one. Philip and I, talking about his craze for money, suddenly realized what it is. He knows he is not young and hasn’t saved a cent. What’s more he has no one to take care of him should he become ill. He’s much too generous, too, and loves to live like a wealthy man.”
He was, she told Schaffner, “one energetic[,] bright[,] sensitive[,] untidy, bossy man.” His habits and working style drove her mad. Still, she and Philip loved him. “We . . . worry about him. Build up his ego when and if you can.”