CHAPTER 16
COLD SICILIAN ROULADE WITH THE MASTER
1964–1969
HELEN EVANS BROWN was declining fast. For more than a decade, she had suffered from things her doctor had trouble finding causes for: bouts of dizziness, gastrointestinal ravages, canker sores. She worked hard and rarely took a break. It was stress, Dr. Maurer would say. She needed to learn how to take it easy.
In 1964, as Helen turned sixty, her maladies were intensifying. That spring, she and Philip went to Europe for a long-delayed grand tour, plus Helen’s daughter from her first marriage, Oakley, had moved to West Germany with her husband, Charles “Joe” Goodner, a physician assigned to a US military hospital. The Browns were starting in Paris before moving on to Spain and Italy, where they all planned to meet up in Rome before traveling together to Germany.
James was busy organizing cooking demonstrations for the 1964 New York World’s Fair. He hoped to be in St. Tropez when the Browns were in France; he suggested they rendezvous there. In February, he had a health scare of his own: heart palpitations, resulting in a stay at Doctors Hospital on the Upper East Side. His doctor put him on digitalis and forbade unnecessary travel. St. Tropez was out.
In Santander, Spain, not long after the Browns’ trip began, Helen suddenly crumpled, her whole body inexplicably weak. At their hotel, she had difficulty raising her head from the pillow. Reached by phone, Goodner surmised hypokalemia (low potassium). He recommended feeding Helen rich chicken broth—the hotel’s chef made a concentrated one from an entire chicken. It worked. Helen rallied enough to fly to West Germany to see Oakley and Goodner but had a relapse en route. She nearly died in the military hospital. Eventually, she was cleared to fly to Los Angeles, where she spent weeks in the hospital before feeling strong enough to return to Armada Drive.
“Certainly after all the months in the hospital,” James wrote to her, “you must feel to just look out in your garden is almost enough to make a whole day.”
But after a mild recovery, Helen worsened. Her heart weakened dangerously. James, who had gone to France after all, wrote her in August from Lou Barcarès, on an evening when the electricity happened to fail. “I understand the feeling when your legs get so tired and seem to give out,” he wrote her. As usual, he described the meals he’d been having and told her he thought the French food writer Robert Courtine was a son of a bitch. He said he had to sign off so he could finish some editing work for the Dell book before the sun set.
“Lights are still out and it’s getting dark,” he told her, “so I’ll send you love and kisses.”
Helen died that December. She was sixty. At her request, there was no funeral.
In grief, James was silent. But then, even before she died, James had insulated himself from his feelings for Helen. Sooner or later, James distanced himself from all of his closest relationships, as if he were doing his friends a favor, cutting them out before they could see just what an unworthy thing he was.
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JAMES BEARD’S MENUS FOR ENTERTAINING had been one long fight with Dell and its editor, Ross Claiborne, but by June 1965, James’s thirteenth book was all wrapped up—including the name. “I must say,” Schaffner wrote to James, “I am disappointed in the title they have put on the book, as I think more people are interested in the cookbook aspect than in menu-planning.” James didn’t seem to care.
Dell would publish Menus under its Delacorte Press imprint later that fall, but in June, more than six months after delivering Delights and Prejudices, James still felt drained. Getting Menus together had all been rather a chore, even though he’d only done the recipes and menus—and those he built on the skeleton of the aborted Schoonmaker collaboration. John Ferrone had done most of the writing for Menus, from scratch, without James’s customary stack of onionskin pages. He had a fine ear for James’s voice—but then, James’s voice was a Ferrone creation, starting with The James Beard Cookbook, which he edited from Isabel’s manuscript, and ending with his own extensive cut, paste, and rewrite job on James’s chaotic drafts for Delights.
But a messier fight was brewing: what to pay Ferrone. His freelance moonlighting had always been acts of friendship, partly, but James had come to expect more and more from Ferrone, as he had from Isabel. For ghost-authoring Menus, James had given him $1,000 as a down payment (James’s advance was $5,000), with an indefinite hold on talk about sharing royalties. But Schaffner didn’t expect many of those to accrue for this book, especially after a pretty sizable advance. They’d agreed Ferrone would not get a credit in the book, and because of that, he expected to see a bigger cut of the advance. James would have to work something out.
Menus for Entertaining is a book of practical recipes and party tips, set in the colorful mastic of James’s official persona, which by now had idiosyncrasies and an adorable aspect. Most of the book’s color photos show James in a tuxedo, grinning, amid his ornate objets in the house on West Tenth Street: slicing a ham in front of the copper lavabo, on a table packed with breadsticks and Minton crockery; decanting wine before a candle in his teaching kitchen. One of his six-foot terra-cotta “girls” stands guard over a large unmolded Bavarian cream dotted with candied violets, the table set with vermeil plates and glass Victorian wine rinsers.
James’s recipes stand in simple relief to the arcane grandeur of the visuals. They’re rustic and seasonal: oxtail ragout, anchovies with radishes, sliced tomatoes with basil, parsleyed new potatoes—the kind of things that would appear nine years later in Richard Olney’s Simple French Food. Even the ferocious Nika Hazelton purred her approval. “Like almost all great food,” she wrote in the New York Times, “[it] is simple, that is, concerned with the native goodness of the ingredients and no spurious disguises.”
A year after Delights and Prejudices painted James as a man with shadows, Menus for Entertaining showed him as a rather strange but harmless bachelor uncle, obsessed with food and antiques. Even in the text, in the introduction to “Dinners to Prepare in Advance,” Ferrone has us see James as an eccentric, a kind of lovable oddball. “I have a predilection,” the section begins, “for rising early, and when I am preparing for a dinner party, I enjoy rising at 5:00 or 5:30 and going straight from the bath to the kitchen. I call this ‘cooking in the nude.’ It is so cool and quiet in the early hours and before midmorning one can have a whole dinner ready except for the final bits of cooking and the garnishing.” The contrast between photos of the tuxedo-clad James, all jowls, a chin indistinguishable from his neck, and smiles, with the mental picture of a naked James, prepping ceviche in the morning stillness of his kitchen, is strange. But age and bachelorhood had made James sexless, in any popular reckoning. He was a eunuch, the soft, fleshy, and affable majordomo of the women’s quarters, with a peccadillo for naturism.
James’s asexuality would become a hook. In December 1965, Screen Gems took out a full-page ad in Variety to flog James’s new daily television program, The James Beard Show. An enormous closeup of James’s face takes up most of the page. Its lines are blurred, as if James were looking through shower glass fogged with steam. He doesn’t smile; his eyebrows arch. His expression is critical and demanding—he’s hard to please and impossible to fool. Below is a small, full-body image: James in one of his graphic bib aprons, arms akimbo, hands clutching a wooden tossing fork and spoon, in front of a table bearing a bowl of salad. The headline reads LADIES’ MAN—it’s a pun, since James’s show is for a daytime audience of housewives. But the joke carries a charge, since nothing about the supercilious man in the picture suggests any particular feeling for women.
In 1968, Time-Life Books paid James $250 to affix his signature to a letter it had written in his name soliciting subscribers to its Foods of the World book series. (James had been a consultant for the first volume, released that same year: American Cooking.) “Dear Reader,” it began, “It’s been said of me that I write about food the way some men write about women. Perhaps. But is there another way? Unless I can convey my love of well-prepared food to the reader (or TV viewer), why should she (or, increasingly, he) love it—or want to cook it?” The implication was clear: James’s only lust was for food.
James did like to cook naked in hot weather—he liked being nude generally, when it was muggy, but it could be more than that. “It is past midnight,” he once wrote to Helen, “and I should be putting the body to rest in a decent way. It’s hot and I’m sitting at the desk in the nude tearing off these little lines.”
James had built his public life around concealment. The act of revealing even a partial picture of his personal history, as he’d done in Delights and Prejudices, gave him an urge to reveal more. Describing his nakedness was a trial unburdening, a flag James waved. Would he still be lovable if everyone glimpsed the truth of who he was?
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IN 1965, James signed a contract with Little, Brown to write a cookbook on food from the South of France, called Flavor of Provence. It would be inspired by his time at Lou Barcarès, Madame Baudin’s farmhouse near Saint-Rémy. He needed to return there to do research. And something miraculous had happened since the end of 1964—his relationship with Gino had flowered again. James wanted to show him the Provence he’d fallen in love with.
James left for Paris. Gino would start his vacation from Harrison & Abramovitz later in the spring. He and James would meet in Nice at the end of May and travel together to Saint-Rémy, then on to Barcelona and Lisbon, and finally to London en route home. It would be their first time traveling together in Europe.
James met Gino at the airport in Nice. The next day, they traveled to Cannes and hired a car to navigate the nine miles north to Bramafam, Simone Beck and Jean Fischbacher’s property outside Plascassier, where they had a lovely three-story stone house. Julia and Paul Child were staying at Bramafam—they had plans to build a place of their own on Simca and Jean’s property. Well, good for the Childs. TV and the book deal combined had made Julia practically rich—and anyway she’d have Paul’s government pension to help grease the skids. They all had lunch together on Simca’s terrace.
“The trip has been a marvel to me,” James wrote to Schaffner. “I have had rest and relaxation for the first time in years.”
James and Gino traveled to Avignon and Nîmes and spent a night at Lou Barcarès, to see Madame Baudin. James sent a picture postcard to the Schaffners: two handsome, leather-faced cowboys of the Camargue on horseback. “Gino decides he prefers the Riviera to Provence,” he wrote, “but I’m still loyal! It has been three weeks of great and delicious activity—and I’m sure I feel better for it.”
They walked the streets of Barcelona like tourists. “Showed Gino his first Gaudí,” James recorded in his datebook. Amid the clutter and exuberant tiles of the restaurant Los Caracoles, they shared langoustine (James: “marvelous”), sole, and wild strawberries. They flew to Lisbon, where they met Ruth Norman and Cheryl Crawford, shopped for old tinware, and ate wonderful seafood salad, pasta al percebes (gooseneck barnacles), and fresh raspberries. In London, James saw Elizabeth David. She took him to a warehouse to look at stock for a kitchen shop she planned to open. He took Gino to a supper party at the restaurant Prunier. Gino seemed better in social situations. He was almost affable.
In October 1965, a month after he and Gino returned to New York, James had a momentous talk with Ned Bradford of Little, Brown.
James had been working as a consultant for Little, Brown, giving advice about what cookbooks to publish. He’d convinced Bradford to publish Bill Veach’s A Bon Vivant’s Cookbook, the last book for Veach’s collaborator, Helen Evans Brown, before she died. The book tanked. James had also persuaded Bradford to substantially revise The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, to which Little, Brown held the rights. That year, the Boston publishing house brought out the eleventh edition of Fannie Farmer, revised—completely modernized, really, like a Victorian house gutted and redone with shag carpet and a wet bar—by Wilma Lord Perkins (Fannie Merritt Farmer’s niece by marriage), who’d been overseeing smaller updates to Fannie since 1929. It gave Bradford a taste for something monumental from James. Over drinks, before James departed for the West Coast on a book tour for Menus, they agreed that James would write the greatest book of his career: a Stonehenge for the ages.
It would be a kind of mapping of all of James’s thoughts and experiences at the table, as sweeping as Fannie but with the flavor of James’s life and travels—no one in the world had a mind as encyclopedic as his when it came to food. Bradford’s understanding of it was fuzzy yet definite. It was to be a book that would mark the apex of James’s career. Schaffner called it simply “the comprehensive James Beard cookbook.” James figured maybe he’d think it through enough by February to be able to sign a contract. By December, Schaffner called the still-amorphous project James’s “big ultimate book.” Ned Bradford had begun to call it James’s “really comprehensive cookbook.”
By then, it had eclipsed all plans for James’s French books. Without telling James, Paris-based journalist and author Naomi Barry, borrowed some of the research she’d done for Cuisine of France—a planned collaboration with James on French chefs and their favorite recipes—to include in her column in Gourmet. It was poetic justice, considering James’s history of undermining his collaborators—and it gave him an excuse for walking away from the book, research for which had proved to be a grind.
As for the other, Schaffner suggested that James could incorporate that material in “the major James Beard book,” and rip up the contract for Flavor of Provence. Bradford agreed, and in March 1966, James signed a contract for his major opus, “to put down at last the essence—nay, the quintessence,” Schaffner wrote, “of all his accumulated knowledge into one great big James Beard book.” It came with a check for $7,500, the first half of an advance so large only Julia Child could expect anything like it.
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“I’M HUNGRY!” James delivered his line suddenly, in a deep roar, and it electrified the class.
In late winter 1966, the writer John Skow, on assignment from the Saturday Evening Post, shadowed James. He observed him at a wine tasting at The Four Seasons, paid a visit to West Tenth Street one morning for an interview, and sat in on a class of the James Beard Cooking School. James’s classes had captured the imagination of Manhattan’s professional class: male business executives who dabbled in cooking as a relaxing hobby away from the boardroom, and their wives, under pressure to host dinner parties for their husbands’ clients. Saying you’d learned the fondue Orientale or strawberry sorbet recipe from one of those expensive classes at Jim Beard’s down in the Village gave your dinner party a sense of sparkle, rich and worldly.
Since the untimely death in January 1966 of Henri Soulé, owner of Le Pavillon and La Côte Basque, “many knowledgeable restaurateurs,” Skow wrote, looked to James as the nation’s ranking food expert and as a personality with wide appeal. In a decade of teaching, James had honed his classes until they wheeled along like immersive theater. His roar—“I’m hungry!”—was the dramatic catalyst: the gunshot in Act I that marked the real start of the play. Nobody but James could pull that off.
The course ran for six evenings and cost $135 (adjusted for inflation, that’s the equivalent of about $1,000 today). “Eight or ten people, about half of them men, had gathered in Beard’s living room the night I visited the class,” Skow wrote. James would time his appearance for maximum effect. Skow catalogued the students, all of them affluent enough to afford the steep tuition: two export-import men, a CBS executive, a husband and wife who’d driven in from Connecticut, “and a woman who was a consultant to one of the big food corporations.” As they waited for James, they donned the aprons they’d been asked to bring. “It says something about the national uneasiness toward fine cooking,” Skow wrote, “that one man put on one of those Father’s Day aprons that say EAT AT YOUR OWN RISK.”
James walked downstairs into the salon in a green-striped butcher’s apron over his dress shirt and bow tie and, with crisp authority, took charge. “The pupils listened,” Skow wrote, “in attitudes of respect seldom seen in these days of student protest.” James described the dishes they’d cook that night and took questions. Yes, one could buy a good copper omelet pan at a shop he knew in the Village. (“The students,” Skow said, yelped in excitement.”) The dinner they’d sit down to after the class, James pointed out—the dishes they’d cook in the class—would probably be cold by the time they got to them. Then he stated with conviction that almost everything in the world of food is actually better cold. The students diligently took notes. Who could argue with James Beard?
“The chatter hushed,” Skow wrote, “and the class moved soberly into Beard’s kitchen. Modern kitchens often resemble operating rooms, but this one is pleasantly old-fashioned, with a minimum of plastic and porcelain.” James stood along the long wall, with the pineapple wallpaper like a stage backdrop. He was demonstrating how to make Sicilian-style veal roulade, a drop-dead first course for dinner parties on the Upper East Side.
With his enormous hands, James showed how to flatten a scaloppine with a brass meat pounder and handed it to a student to take over. He demonstrated how to lay out the slices in an overlapping geometry of pale-pink flesh, eventually forming “an elaborate jelly roll” of veal, salami, mortadella, and prosciutto, to be wrapped around hard-boiled eggs laid end-to-end down the center. “Then Beard held a piece of thinly sliced, larded sausage to the light as if it were a page of incunabula,” Skow observed, and then it happened: “Deep diagonal furrows appeared above his eyebrows as he looked slyly from one student to another and said, in a voice that echoed up from the cargo-carrying recesses of his hull, ‘I’m hungry.’ ”
He supervised the students as they rolled the meat into a huge cigar shape. It was missing one last layer before it could be placed carefully in an enormous sauté pan and seared. “Dr-r-r-r-ape it in bacon,” James bellowed, like Lear shouting at storm clouds on the heath. A lesson in omelet-making followed, with each student stationed around the grand piano at one of the electric burners, trying to get the hang of rolling and plating. After that came a twenty-minute intermission—everyone was back in the salon, sipping Americano cocktails. James called it a teaching device. “Students, who think of cooking as frantic and messy,” he told Skow, “see that it can be leisurely and civilized.”
Ruth Norman took over for the second act, a seafood stew méditerranée, with clams, lobster, and shrimp, but James was still in charge. “That will serve twelve,” Ruth said. Almost as though they’d rehearsed it, James interjected a correction: “I should say six or eight.” None of that rationing cherrystones for the guests: James was large and magnificent, and unafraid of pleasure or excess. Indeed, Skow noticed at The Four Seasons wine tasting how James’s physical size seemed to put people at ease. “In a way that is hard to analyze but easy to detect,” Skow wrote, “the size of the man makes people feel good.”
His bigness and exuberance gave James authority, Skow wrote, “and since he is an expert showman, it strikes in exactly the way he wants it to. He is fat, for instance, but fat in a way that makes thin people wistful. Most cooks are fatty, which is not the same thing; they are puffed and pounded from a lifelong battle with cream sauce. Beard’s great body is that of the rare athlete who is exactly sized for his specialty. He has a thick, powerful neck and small, pointed ears. He looks like a wrestler who has begun to melt, or a genie who has started to solidify.”
The class that night ended with eating food that was, just as James predicted, cold: the Sicilian roulade, seafood stew méditerranée, a salad, and a flaming baba au rhum, with everyone seated around the marble-topped table in the salon. There were glasses of a delightful white wine Skow failed to get the name of. Sessions at the James Beard Cooking School had seemed shockingly expensive, but after an evening of food, drinks, and being up close at a demonstration of James’s learning and flair, “the price,” Skow wrote, “seemed very small.”
The Times article felt like vindication for James, at a moment when his depression had returned. Delights and Prejudices was so far a commercial flop, but the Skow story was a boost. “Too bad it didn’t make the cover as they originally planned,” James wrote. Still, he was happy. Schaffner enlisted Alvin Kerr to help round up copies from newsstands on the Upper East Side to keep for James. They found only three.
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THAT THERE WERE so many men in James’s classes echoed a shift in the cultural life of the United States: Turning out the perfect rolled omelet had become a power leisure activity for executives. (James would tell Business Week in 1970 that the audience for his classes was “the great army of people who cook as a creative pursuit, just as there are people who paint on their days off.”) Six months before John Skow spent his evening on West Tenth Street, Nika Hazelton had noted the change in the New York Times. “Today,” she wrote, “the average man’s wish to be called a gourmet belongs with our quest for civilized living.” For Hazelton, this new passion marked the neutering of the American male.
“I don’t know why healthy, able-bodied men should want so badly to fix small, delicious morsels,” she wrote. “Is gourmet cooking a form of transvestitism nowadays, part of the same compulsion that makes women wear pants, since society still frowns on men in skirts, though not in aprons?” With an arch flourish, Hazelton gestured at New York’s open secret: That the city’s gourmet male establishment—James, Claiborne, the concert-pianist-turned-cooking-teacher Michael Field, who clung to a marriage of convenience—was a ring of fairies. Once the students of the James Beard Cooking School departed for the evening, and there were no reporters to entertain, Hazelton knew that the man at the very top of New York’s gourmet bachelor brotherhood behaved in ways that would have revolted readers of the Saturday Evening Post.
Once after a class on West Tenth, James shared an unexpected confidence with a student. Alfred Rosenthal had revealed he was president of a company that produced needlecraft kits: open-weave canvas printed with a pattern, packaged with the yarns needed to embroider it.
After class one night, James took Rosenthal aside and told him he had a secret. When the other students were gone, James led him upstairs to his bed-sitting room, where James had his collection: more than a dozen pillows James had designed and stitched himself. Most of the designs were bouquets of flowers, copied from magazine photographs. James confessed that he liked to do needlepoint on trains. It relaxed him. Rosenthal was astounded. He pledged to keep James in blank canvas and needlepoint yarns for the rest of his life.
Over the years, Rosenthal would take many classes from James. He never saw more than a couple of embroidered pillows scattered around the public salon off the kitchen. Meanwhile, just one floor up, a private world bloomed.
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THE TASK WAS MONUMENTAL and had no boundaries: to put down in writing everything James knew about food for the Little, Brown book. A tape recorder—that was the thing. James could free himself from typing (his fingers never fit that well on keyboards anyway, and lately it had become worse). He’d have Dick Tiernan transcribe his daily talk.
Ned Bradford, too, was struggling with the idea of capturing James’s mind on the page. He had Little, Brown’s art director, Martha Lehtola, reach out to Earl Thollander, the artist Atheneum used for Delights and Prejudices, to see whether he would work directly with James. “We are very excited at the prospect of publishing an elegant and elaborate cookbook by James Beard,” Lehtola wrote. But it was all so far in the future, this enormous, amorphous cookbook.
In July 1966, James flew to London to work on the book. He was staying in a rented flat in a Victorian red-brick-and-stucco row house at 25 De Vere Gardens, near Kensington Palace. He’d been writing to an old friend in Portland, sixty-four-year-old Cathrine “Katie” Laughton. Until recently, she had been the author of the Mary Cullen’s Cottage column in the Oregon Journal and of a 1946 book Mary Cullen’s Northwest Cook Book. They had an idea. “It seems now,” he wrote to Schaffner, “that the book is going to be a tome of American cookery with the various foreign backgrounds. As I see it now, it will cover material no one has done in one volume and with perhaps English, French and Spanish derivatives included should be a rather fascinating tome.” He and Laughton had been brainstorming. “[We] have a good deal of it already in hand outline wise.”
James’s comprehensive cookbook would be historical, then: a kind of family tree of American food, with the roots traced back to Europe. History weighed on James in London. He was sleeping on a street of ghosts (Henry James once lived across the street from James’s flat, and Browning died in the house next door). He went to the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden to hear Schoenberg’s 12-tone Moses and Aaron. “What a marvelous production,” James reported to Schaffner, “and how many nude bodies writhing and reeling.”
The burning bush and the pillar of fire might have been stylized props, but the Israelites’ orgy scene around the golden calf, with staging that called for “a naked youth,” “four naked virgins,” and a river of fake blood, looked convincing enough—certainly the bare asses. In the libretto, Moses calls God “einziger, ewiger, allgegenwärtiger, unsichtbarer, und unvorstellbarer” (“unique, eternal, omnipresent, imperceptible, and unrepresentable”). It could have been a description of James, as he looked back on the history of his life in food, unsure how to capture it, confused about where to start. Thank heaven Katie Laughton would impose order. But James wasn’t feeling particularly eternal. It had been an exhausting summer, one with a depressing revelation: Delights and Prejudices, James’s greatest book, was a commercial failure.
“I only wish I wrote popular cookbooks instead of Delights and Prejudices,” James wrote Schaffner from Philip Brown’s house in Pasadena—Helen’s house. “Maybe someday!” In late September, back from London, James was on the road again, this time to the West Coast for book promotions and paid appearances. He wrote to Schaffner on Helen’s old stationery, after crossing out her name on the letterhead: an apt remembrance. James had traveled more than five thousand miles, from London to California, only to find more ghosts.
“Isn’t it a shame that D and P doesn’t sell?” James was in Surf Pines on the Oregon coast, near Gearhart. He was staying at the beach cottage of an old friend, the interior decorator Harvey Welch, and his romantic partner, the architect Halsey Jones, who designed the cottage. “I realize, though, that it never had the right chance. People who read it buy another copy usually. The reports on it are fabulous. It just died aborning I guess.”
Mary Hamblet had come to the beach, and James’s gay Portland friends, “all of the fraternity.” John Ferrone had flown west to visit. They all drove south along the coast to the wide beach at Neahkahnie, with its brooding view of the ocean. They had a picnic on the sand, but something was different for James. “I can feel age for the first time in my life,” he told Schaffner.
Surf Pines was a gated community of low-rise houses with gray clapboard siding the color of washed-up driftwood, bleached by sun. Inside, Harvey and Halsey had given the place a quality of Nordic quiet: pale wood paneling and bleached floors, and furniture covered in varying blues, like indigos caught at different stages of fading. Tall windows looked out at the Pacific across a deep mat of beach grass, the shiny strands tossed by wind. To the south, you could see Tillamook Head, low and gray, floating on mist.
Harvey’s grumpy little Yorkie, Fergus, patrolled the deck outside, yapping at seabirds. Always a man of restrained good taste, Harvey wore a shirt with an open collar under a tweed jacket; Mary wore a shift dress in a sober fabric, with her short, white, tightly waved hair shrouded in a scarf tied at the chin. They ate simply. James, in a shirt of olive-colored plaid, with a green bow tie, presided over lunch: a salad of butter lettuce and tomatoes, cold cracked Dungeness crab, thick and shiny homemade mayonnaise, and chilled bottles of Muscadet. He was home, yet his mind was restless.
He had bought a camera to take snapshots of the house for Gino. One morning, three younger men, friends of Harvey’s from the antiques trade in Portland, drove out to spend the day. They laid out towels on the deck beyond the sliding-glass doors off the dining room and changed into bathing suits to bask in the sun. The sandy blond wore a tight red suit, the dark-haired boys wore almost matching white trunks with racing stripes down the side. They exuded sex. Ferrone lolled on the bench that ringed the deck, in long pants and a long-sleeved shirt, observing from behind sunglasses.
Surreptitiously, James snapped a few pictures through the window—souvenirs, to show Freddie and Alvin back home. But there was a new yearning in him. He felt tired—he looked pale and old when he caught his face in the glass—but time wasn’t stopping for James. Everything was changing. Boys were freer now, more open than his and Harvey’s generation could have ever imagined. They’d all had to walk a thin line, his generation. With his wealthy clients in Portland, Harvey was always polite, always correct in mixed company, never slipping into queeniness. But these boys sunning: They looked like they didn’t give a damn what anyone thought.
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IN MAY 1967, after James turned sixty-four, he intended to tackle the comprehensive American book with the vigor of a kid. He’d come to Provence, one of his favorite places in the world, to work. He was in Plascassier again, this time staying at Julia and Paul Child’s new house on Simca’s property, called La Pitchoune (“La Peeech,” Julia called it—“The Little Thing”). His collaborator Katie Laughton and her new husband, Philip Hindley, had rented a place about two and a half miles away—a cottage on the property of an English couple. Here on Julia and Paul’s stone terrace, under a gnarled old olive tree, looking across a kind of canyon at hills speckled with white villas, James knew he could really get something done.
“I’m fairly happy with the way the book has started off,” James reported to Schaffner. “For some unknown reason we started on lamb and I have been going through that meat like a fool. . . . Our darling little butcher in the village has really very nice things at this point . . . and I find I don’t have to tear down to Cannes or Nice when I want especially nice things.” Good thing, because the road to Cannes had become impossibly choked, as more and more tourists prowled the area.
Once a week, James and Julia went to the enormous Carrefour supermarket—dubbed hypermarché—in Nice. It took up a whole city block and had underground parking, complete with food vendors. “You wheel your little truck into the elevator and into the lower garage for your car and there are rotisseries going and lunch counters and everything but a pool!” A gallon of Johnnie Walker Scotch cost fifteen dollars—cheaper than in New York.
British writer Sybille Bedford was La Pitchoune’s neighbor, along with her American wife (also a writer), Eda Lord. Julia was trying to arrange an evening for them to come to dinner. “Sadly,” James wrote, “Elizabeth David and Renée Fedden arrived here the hour before we did and left so that we missed them completely. Liz is broken hearted as I am.” James would try to get her to come to New York.
All through May, James worked on the lamb and veal chapters, while Katie took on cakes and cookies. “She has an endless collection from her years on the paper,” James told Schaffner, “and she has done nothing else since we arrived.” Katie’s husband, previously managing editor of the San Francisco Examiner, helped out by editing the fresh drafts. The weather in Provence was freezing for May, and James’s leg swelled and throbbed. He walked with a cane. The book began to grind.
As impossible as the task seemed, he had to persevere. This book could vindicate James’s whole career—Julia and Paul had told him it would be the most important thing he’d ever done. It could get him back on TV, as Mastering the Art of French Cooking had done for Julia, and TV, combined with books, was where the money just rolled to you.
“It will consolidate your position as the American food authority,” Schaffner assured him.
When spring at last arrived—“glorious sun and air filled with the perfume of roses,” he told Schaffner—James’s optimism soared. He now realized it was merely life in New York that was making him feel low. “I’m quite sure, to tell you the truth, that certain people really gave me a true inferiority last winter and spring and that when I found myself released again, over here, I felt the determination to finish off and get things done. I can hardly bear the idea of getting back to New York again and cringe at the idea of having to spend too much time there.”
Only the day before, James had convinced himself to keep on with the book. “It is going to be long and I shall probably never get it done as I want it for it couldn’t take that much room. But it is exhaustive and I think interesting. At any event it has to be done and I know that now no matter what anyone says.”
James’s depression usually eased during travel. La Pitchoune was a lovely place of self-imposed exile. “I sit upon my little shelf with the remote world so far away that I am startled [to] think only of the world where I am,” he wrote to Schaffner one evening.
“I keep making a dachshund with a bushy tail out of the trees across the valley and make patterns of the lights of Grasse at night and love the solitude when I have it.”