One day in October 1985, the year James Beard died, I had an urgent phone call from Clay Triplette, his loyal houseman. He had been ordered to clear Jim’s 12th Street apartment of every sign of human habitation so the house could be put up for sale. The contents had been auctioned off a few weeks before, financial records were in the hands of the executors, and the legendary kitchen was already a ghostly place, but there were bulging file cabinets in the basement destined for a Dumpster. After consulting one of the executors I went to the rescue. An hour later I carried away several shopping bags of files and assorted papers, which I stuffed under my bed, the only available storage space in my apartment. It was more than a year before I could sift through the cache, and when I did I struck gold. There in my hands in a tightly packed box of letters was James Beard’s love affair with food and with Helen Evans Brown.
In 1952, when they began to correspond, James Beard was stretching toward his full height as “a titan of the table art,” as the New York Times food editor had dubbed him, and Helen Evans Brown was the reigning authority on the West Coast. They had been introduced earlier by the food editor of McCall’s when Helen was in New York lining up magazine assignments, but she really didn’t catch Jim’s eye until publication of her West Coast Cook Book. Well-researched and charmingly written—Jim thought she was as good as M. F. K. Fisher—it collected and documented the best recipes of the Pacific states. Razor clams and salmon cheeks may have reminded him of boyhood summers at the beach in his native Oregon, but, more important, Helen was carrying the flag for American cuisine, an idea dear to Jim’s heart. The book would become a model twenty years later for his own opus, American Cookery. He wrote her a fan letter. She wrote him one back. All four of his cookbooks were waiting for autographs, she told him, and she was looking forward to his fifth, Paris Cuisine, to be published that year. “Thanks for the dope about the shrimp,” she went on to say. “I really knew they shouldn’t be cooked over three to five minutes but I didn’t have the guts to say so.” This is how their dialogue on food began, and it never stopped until Helen’s death, twelve years later.
Helen and her husband, Philip, an antiquarian bookseller and accomplished cook, lived in Pasadena; Jim was based in New York. He paid the Browns a first visit in the spring of 1953, escalating friendship into love. Thereafter he could be sure of an affectionate welcome and an extra-long, extra-wide mattress. He could sit on the patio in a kimono with his morning tea, bird-watching. The Browns were as close to family as anything he would have in the years ahead. He was crazy about both of them—a number of these letters are addressed to Philip or to “Dear Browns”—but it was Helen he adored.
She was attractive, smart, outspoken, one of a series of strong-minded women who played a part in Jim’s life, but the one for whom he felt the deepest attachment. Although they were born just a year apart, Helen filled the role of a chiding and protective older sister. She was unfailingly supportive and gave him backbone when he fretted about his next move, but she also scolded when he overworked or soaked up too much butter and cream. On two or three occasions she lashed out at him in justifiable anger. He didn’t accept criticism from many other people in his life. Helen’s unequivocal good sense was just what his wobbling psyche needed.
Like Jim, she had originated on one coast and migrated to the other. She spent her early years in Brooklyn and then studied at Connecticut College for Women and at Hunter College, in New York. It was during her first marriage, in New Haven, that she became interested in food; she ran a catering service, the Epicurean, with a friend and then a restaurant, named Brownstone House. She soon met Philip Brown, pulled up stakes, and moved to Los Angeles, by way of Reno. In 1940 she began writing a monthly mailing piece, “Balzer’s Bulletin,” for an upscale grocery store, and the following year, a food column for a new fashion magazine, The Californian. She published a small cookbook, Some Shrimp Recipes, in 1946 and a full-length cookbook, Chafing Dish Book, in 1950. By then she was writing for the West Coast magazine Sunset and for national magazines, including McCall’s and House and Garden. She was well known enough to be approached by a major publisher, Little, Brown, for her next book, West Coast Cook Book.
Jim also made his debut in the food profession through a catering service, after failed careers in singing and acting. While looking for theatre work in New York in the late thirties, he met a German-born brother and sister with as deep an interest in food as his own. Together they started Hors d’Oeuvre, Inc., as a way of revitalizing cocktail-party food. It came to an end with the onset of World War II and publication of Jim’s first cookbook, Hors d’Oeuvre and Canapés (still in print), in which he neglected to credit his partners. During the war, after stints as cryptographer and farmhand, he was hired by the United Seamen’s Service to manage service clubs in Rio de Janeiro, Panama, and Marseille. By the time he returned to New York, at the end of 1945, two more of his cookbooks, Cook It Outdoors and Fowl and Game Cookery, had been published, which led to his being hired by NBC for a weekly TV show sponsored by Borden. His food demonstrations were the first ever on network television and helped to promote his image as an outsize pinup for good eating. But it was his next book, The Fireside Cook Book (1949), energetically promoted by his publisher, that made him famous and extended the repertory of American kitchens. He spent most of the following year living in Paris, where he met Alexander Watt, a Scottish journalist. They collaborated in writing Paris Cuisine, the book Helen was waiting for when she and Jim started to correspond.
As two evangelic cooks in an age of convenience foods, they had a lot to say about the sorry state of American cooking. Among their frequent targets were writers of quick-and-easy cookbooks and home economists, many of whom worked for big food packagers and some of whom were good friends. The rigidly practical approach of “the home ec gals” often clashed with Jim’s and Helen’s sensuous philosophy of food. She wasn’t even allowed to call a dish “lovely,” Helen complained, and Jim got apoplectic in his bouts with a home ec mustard queen. Their recipes were routinely blue-penciled to eliminate anything that might strain the resources or wits of the average “homemaker.” (Men didn’t count; they cooked outdoors.) How could the level of cooking be improved, Jim argued, if you aimed for the lowest common denominator? He and Helen believed with all their hearts that American cooks could be led to a promised land beyond tuna casseroles.
They felt pretty much alone in their mission. The only food authority of any stature on the scene was Dione Lucas, British exponent of the Cordon Bleu creed, whom Jim sometimes criticized while acknowledging her technical virtuosity. The most influential food critics were Clementine Paddleford of the New York Herald Tribune, Jane Nickerson of the New York Times, and Sheila Hibben of The New Yorker. Craig Claiborne, with a culinary schooling at the École Hotelière in Lausanne, was about to bring a classic, Continental touch to the food columns of the Times. Julia Child and Simone Beck were ready to turn ordinary citizens into French chefs.
America’s world of food was young, and today’s gastronomic clichés were just appearing on the horizon. Spaghetti Carbonara had become the most exciting pasta discovery in Jim’s repertoire. His signature dishes were lobster à l’Américaine, Chicken with Forty Pieces of Garlic, and Choucroute Garnie. He was perfecting potatoes Anna and the soufflé. The Waring Blendor was a new toy in his kitchen, and the croissant, something of a mystery. The guru was learning, and each visit to the restaurants and vineyards of Europe made him a little wiser.
In the 1950s there was airmail service between the coasts, and overnight delivery was taken for granted. Jim and Helen wrote to each other two and three times a week, dating their letters simply “Tuesday” or “Friday.” Even during their trips abroad, they scarcely drew breath, and one of Helen’s letters from Pasadena reached Jim in Paris in three days flat.
He needed abalone recipes for his next book. She asked his advice on wines to serve with ham. Tamales flew east. Truffles flew west. He sent her utensils from the shops of Europe. She tracked down the Chinese bowls he couldn’t find in New York. They swapped views on dieting and better ways to make money. “I too am poor and fat,” Helen announced after a despairing letter from Jim.
He was often more concerned about his income than his weight and had a lifelong fear of going broke. It drove him to take on too many assignments and into consorting with the enemy—the producers of the cake mixes and boil-in-bag vegetables he once scorned. Critics continue to fulminate over his commercial ties—and a few vigilantes, who forget that food is business as well as art, would like to see him entirely discredited—but magazine articles and books didn’t even pay the grocery bills. Try as he might to hew to the gospel of honest cookery, he was forced to concede that maybe he and Helen would have to compromise a little about quick-and-easy recipes. Maybe their mission, after all, was to make convenience foods more palatable.
In a profession increasingly shaken by rivalries and squabbles, Jim’s and Helen’s partnership was without parallel. They could be envious of colleagues who grabbed lucrative assignments from under their noses, but they never fought with each other over territorial rights. Helen had the West Coast, with extensions into Mexico, the Southwest, and the Far East. Jim had the rest of the world. Only rarely did they find themselves on the same turf. “I do hope, Jim, that our cheese articles won’t conflict,” Helen once wrote sweetly. They donated recipes to each other’s articles and books, passed along assignments, sang each other’s praises in public and private. They agreed, without modesty, that they were the best in the business. She was a better writer. He knew more. Helen proclaimed that he was “the foremost authority on cooking in the country.”
Their efforts to team up produced a string of schemes. Helen suggested a syndicated column and a coast-to-coast radio conversation that would allow them to go on living as they were. Jim hoped to uproot the Browns and hug them closer. One favorite seduction plan was to run a restaurant together, a longing that grew after he managed a fast-food place on Nantucket in the summer of 1953. He may have been following in the footsteps of his mother, who ran a residence hotel with a good dining room in Portland, Oregon, before he was born. But he also saw it as an agreeable way to make money, with time off for travel. In January 1954 he wrote that they could have the services of the Maasdam’s head chef if they could get a restaurant going, and at the beginning of 1957 he came close to acquiring a Greenwich Village landmark, Grand Ticino. When there were no further prospects at home, he was ready to move to the West Coast, if Helen would join him in a restaurant somewhere near the ocean between Monterey and the Mexican border, with the enticing prophecy that “it could be the Pyramide of this country, with both of us.” In 1958 he thought he had found the perfect spot, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and with his friends Bettina and Henry McNulty considered buying a large Victorian house to turn into an inn and restaurant. Later in the year his pupil Clare Boothe Luce turned his gaze to New Mexico as a possible paradise. It all came to nothing, and he had to content himself with designing menus for other people’s restaurants—Chillingsworth Inn on Cape Cod, Helen Sigel Wilson’s restaurants in Philadelphia, and the spectacular series of restaurants under the aegis of Joe Baum and Restaurant Associates.
Jim had further ideas for Beard and Brown. In 1955 he and his friend Agnes White rented space on lower Fifth Avenue for a shop that would offer food specialties, antiques, and cookbooks. They hoped the Browns would move east so Philip could run the shop while Jim and Helen cooked up delicacies. When the Browns wisely declined, the lease for the shop was terminated and the inventory sold off.
The same year, Jim tried his hand at a cooking class, soon to become an important part of his career, and this opened another opportunity to woo Helen, either by having her as a guest teacher in New York or running a session with her each year on the West Coast. She taught one class in New York in the fall of 1962 but confessed she would rather create new dishes and write.
As it turned out, their only major collaboration was a cookbook, The Complete Book of Outdoor Cookery, published by Doubleday in 1955. Jim had already produced an outdoor book for Barrows in 1941, and, as Californians, the Browns had had years of experience over the grill. Philip was an expert on the subject and became a silent partner. The correspondence of 1953–1954 is dominated by reports of their food tests on various types of grills and smokers.
Before the book was finished, they were casting about for their next subject. Jim proposed “Historic Menus,” “Favorite Dishes,” “An Alphabet of Food,” “The Best of Beard and Brown,” “Short Cuts to Entertaining,” “Classic Recipes and Their Variations,” and “Recipes and Recollections”—a foretaste of his Delights and Prejudices. A last proposal came from Helen, in 1961, for a book on wine and cheese. It is a mystery why none of these ideas materialized. True, both authors had trouble enough meeting deadlines for their own assignments without doing another book together long-distance, but they may have been reticent for other reasons. Twice Helen had to reproach Jim for misusing material from their outdoor cookbook, which might have made her wary of further collaboration; and could Jim’s steady rise to Titanship have made him less eager to share the limelight? In any case, his next book was done with his Portland friend Isabel Callvert, while Helen worked with Philip.
Almost from the beginning of their friendship Jim and Helen talked of turning their letters into a book—a double autobiography with commentary on food—and they set about rewriting some of their recent letters as samples. “I am doing a letter which answers your questions on brioche, on French names, and on sugar peas,” Jim wrote. “Then I am criticizing Dione [Lucas]’s dinner.… I have spoken about a couple of books and may talk a little about a restaurant.” Their agent took the idea to Alfred and Blanche Knopf, who liked it and asked for a full proposal. Helen felt that such a book could not be hurried, too many other projects intervened, and the plan was put on the back burner, to be stirred from time to time. Ten years after it was first suggested, Jim gave it a final stir.
The chief benefit of keeping the scheme alive was preservation of both sets of letters. Helen might have saved Jim’s anyway, but Jim was not a keeper of scrapbooks or memorabilia, and he had a reputation for hurling photographs and anything else of interest to posterity into the garbage, from which they were sometimes retrieved by his staff. Despite Helen’s care, his letters to her twice came close to being destroyed—not only when Jim’s house was being spiffed up for the real estate market in 1985, but also five years earlier, when a fire at the Browns’ house consumed Helen’s journals and other documents.
Apart from what they reveal about his personal life and his relationship with Helen Evans Brown, James Beard’s letters are worth having for his passionate pursuit of good food, whether at home, aboard ship, or in the starriest restaurants of France. After rereading these letters a few months before he died, he summed them up succinctly for Philip Brown: “We sure ate a lot.” Their diets were doomed to fail.
It must have been shattering to Jim when his friend Helen died in December 1964. She was sixty. The rare kidney disease that first surfaced in 1961 had developed into cancer. She was too ill to work through most of her final year, and Philip took over her writing assignments. Jim’s last surviving letter to her was written in August from Provence. He was able to pay her a visit in November, two weeks before she died.
This volume is in part the book they often talked of doing. If Helen’s voice is largely absent, her presence can be felt on every page. “God, it’s been a long time since we had a good chat,” Jim wrote to her in his next-to-last letter. After twelve years, there was still a lot more to be said.
John Ferrone