The United States of Arugula (8 page)

Le Pavillon was important in and of itself, but it became even more so as the decades advanced and its employees opened their own places. Directly or indirectly, Soulé’s palace begat the “Le” and “La” restaurants that reestablished New York as a major gastronomic city in the mid-twentieth century: La Caravelle, Le Périgord, La Côte Basque, La Grenouille, Le Cygne, and Le Mistral, to name but a few. (Charles Masson, who opened La Grenouille, the only direct descendant of Le Pavillon still in operation at the time of this book’s publication, was part of the original ‘39 World’s Fair crew.) As New York’s contingent of sophisticated diners grew, the phrase “He worked under Soulé” became a tipster’s catchphrase, the mark of a place worth checking out.

For a quarter of a century, until his death in 1966, Soulé was the undisputed godhead of American fine dining, and even Fernand Point conceded that Soulé had gotten it right—in a gesture of acknowledgment, Point, in 1949, let Soulé in on a share of his supply of a rare first-growth Burgundy. Though New York never lacked for flamboyant restaurateurs, Soulé was a new breed of food figure, an object of obsession, curiosity, and sycophancy among his wealthy clients and the press. The
New York
magazine restaurant critic Gael Greene, who endeared herself to Soulé late in his life, described the proprietor as “a flirtatious five-foot-five cube of amiability” (to
her
, anyway) who was also a “showman, snob, perfectionist, martinet, con man,
wooer, and wooed master of haute cuisine.” Le Pavillon itself, she wrote, smelled “buttery, with hints of rum from the sauce anglaise and vague whiffs of almond.”
*

The New York rich had never encountered a character quite like Soulé, a man of peculiar prejudices and ceremonies—Franey remembered him always beginning the dinner service by “raising both of his arms above his head and vibrating them the way a minstrel singer might,” evidently so that the sleeves of his shirt would jut out of his tuxedo just so, revealing the gold cuff links given to him by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Despite being comically
pingouin-like
in appearance, Soulé glided rather than waddled, and showered favored guests with his peculiar brand of obsequiousness, which, utterly devoid of warmth, put
them
on point, obligating them to try the special
plat du jour
whose last portions he had reserved, he insisted, just for them. The VIPs, like the Windsors and the Kennedys, were seated by Soulé in the front of the restaurant, in the section that came to be known as the
royale
, while lessers were seated farther back, and nobodies were seated in an alcove off to the side, out of view of the
royale.
Here, the very American notion of a “power table” was born.
†

His clientele reveled in exchanging tales about Soulé. There was the time that a customer, dispassionately informed by the proprietor that no table would be available for at least an hour, flew into a rage and slapped Soulé smack on his bald pate. With one right uppercut, Soulé knocked the man unconscious and had his busboys collect the interloper and carry him out to
the curb. In another instance, some Pavillon regulars, vacationing one summer in Soulé’s native Basque country, made a rare spotting of the chubby restaurateur out of context, strolling his old stomping grounds in Saubrigues, near Bayonne in southwest France, dressed in baggy shorts and a white cap. Asked by the tourists if he was indeed who they thought he was, Soulé brusquely said, “You must be mistaken,” and moved on.

Willfully remote, Soulé resisted even his most famous customers’ incursions into his personal life and was repulsed by any physical displays of familiarity, including attempts by his female guests to kiss him. Nevertheless, everyone in New York society knew of his peculiar arrangement: that there was a mysterious, never-seen Mrs. Soulé who lived back in France, and that Le Pavillon’s coatroom lady, Henriette Spalter, known to all as Madame Henriette, was his mistress.

THAT A RESTAURANT
such as Le Pavillon could storm out of the gates during wartime, with a full reservation book and adoring press write-ups, while rationing was in effect and the Depression still cast a pall over the economy, speaks volumes about the esteem in which educated Americans held French culture and French cuisine. Among the upper classes, Francophilia had held sway for some time, and it was de rigueur for society mothers to hire French governesses for their children. (“I spoke French before I spoke English!” boasts Dinah Lord, the smart-alecky kid sister of Tracy Lord, Katharine Hepburn’s heiress character, in the 1940 film
The Philadelphia Story.) Gourmet
, in its early incarnation as an unabashedly clubby, elitist publication, leaned heavily on the talents of charter contributor Samuel Chamberlain, a wellborn Boston artist even better versed in
la vie française
than the magazine’s founder, Earle MacAusland. Chamberlain and his wife, Narcissa, had lived in Burgundy for a dozen years before World War II. Under the pseudonym Phineas Beck, Samuel wrote a serialized narrative for the magazine called “Clémentine in the Kitchen,” a somewhat fictionalized, rather precious account of his family’s bumpy readaptation to life in Yankee Massachusetts, to
which it fled as the war geared up. The rosy-cheeked Clémentine of the title, putatively the “Beck” family’s imported country-girl cook, forever befuddled by the plastic-wrap ways of
les américains
, was not a real person but a composite of the French cooks the Chamberlains had employed. Not that this bit of artifice mattered to the readers—“Clémentine in the Kitchen” was
Gourmet’s
most popular feature in its first year of publication.
*

But the war unleashed a tide of pro-French sentiment well beyond the provinces of the wealthy and well-traveled. Though it was this very war, and the collaborationist Vichy regime specifically, that later engendered the “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” epithet popular among twenty-first-century American Francophobes,
†
the truth is that World War II and the decade that followed it represented a high-water mark in Franco-American goodwill. The GIs who fought in France became besotted with the country they were liberating; the French reciprocated, expressing their love of America. “I’d always wanted to go to America, since I don’t know how long,” says the chef Roger Fessaguet, who remembers being smitten with Sonja Henie, the va-va-voomish Norwegian-born figure skater who’d turned pro in the United States in the 1930s. (Fessaguet, later the founding chef of La Caravelle, got to realize his dream in 1948, when he was seventeen, crossing the Atlantic to join the staff of Le Pavillon.)

Pierre Franey, returning to his homeland as a U.S. infantryman, discovered firsthand the high regard in which the French held the United States. The kid of Le Pavillon’s staff, he’d been conscripted into the U.S. Army and uprooted from the kitchen for three years, participating in the Allies’ taking of Normandy. In 1945, in the war’s closing months, while his unit was
bivouacking near his hometown of St. Vinnemer, Franey sought and received his commander’s permission to ride with another GI into the village so that he could see his family for the first time in five years. As his Jeep rumbled through the countryside, word spread among the excited French locals that the liberators, the Americans, were coming. By the time the Jeep rolled into St. Vinnemer, Franey, still unrecognized beneath his U.S.-issue helmet, saw a throng of cheering villagers gathered in the town center, one of whom, waving a homemade American flag, was his mother.

As more and more Americans voyaged to France in the postwar era, abetted by the dollar’s strength against the weak franc and the advent of jet travel, they came to understand France as the home not only of swank Parisians eating Escoffier food but of bistros and auberges that served
la cuisine de bonne femme
, the cookery of women, of comfort, of the home: potatoleek soup, pot-au-feu, omelets. “The magic that France had at the time was felt by so many of us,” says Chuck Williams, a Florida native, who, after completing his wartime duty in the air force, built himself a house in the undiscovered hinterlands of Sonoma County, California. “It was roaming on the side streets of Paris and eating in the small mom-and-pop restaurants where you might be sitting next to a charming dog or cat,” he says. “It was the haunting music and songs sung by Edith Piaf that I heard everywhere. It was the wonderful pastry and chocolate shops in every block, the butcher shops, the crepe and waffle stands, the standup bars where you stopped for an espresso, a café au lait, or a cognac.”

So taken was Williams with Parisian culture that he eventually put aside his career as a building contractor and, in 1956, opened a kitchenwares store that he called Williams-Sonoma. “I wanted to capture the magic of Paris in my shop, and I think I achieved it by making it completely French,” he says. “Imagine a wall of every mold and baking tin in every size, a display of all the French tools, wooden spoons, knives, and spatulas. Another wall of heavy copper and aluminum pots and pans. A display of fish poachers and couscous cookers in every size. Even the roll-down awning for the front of the shop was the French flag.”

Judith Jones, later Julia Child’s editor at Knopf, was another young
American who chose to live the Parisian expat life after the war. “It was all so heady,” she says. “Cooking at home had all been sort of boring and traditional and English. You weren’t supposed to say, ‘Mmm, wasn’t that yummy?’ It was like sex—you just didn’t talk about such a thing. We had a maid who cooked, and my mother was always closing the kitchen door, ‘cause she didn’t want the smells to come out. We weren’t allowed to have onions in the house. And garlic! That was really beyond the pale. So you can imagine how excited I was by France. I loved the way people shopped, the care they took. It was right after the war, and people would stand in line at the charcuterie, with their toes sticking out of worn-out carpet slippers, and spend four times what I spent. They’d spend their last penny for something good.”

THOUGH JIM BEARD
had been steadily making a name for himself as cookery’s Mr. U.S. of A. when the war broke out, and though 1944 saw the publication of his latest volume of culinary Americana,
Fowl and Game Cookery
, he, too, was caught up in the era’s Francophilia. Beard had been to France in the 1920s, when, having been sent by his mother to London to study with a renowned voice coach, he was unable to resist an extended side trip to the spiritual home of gastronomy. Even on his student budget, Beard ate well at the sorts of homey Paris bistros that A. J. Liebling would later romanticize in his backward-looking
New Yorker
pieces of the fifties: places where “the food was good bourgeois fare and exceedingly cheap,” Beard remembered. “We ate good
pot-au-feu
, calf’s feet
poulette, blanquettes
and
boeuf à la bourguignonne
, with an occasional roast chicken or bit of game.” An intrepid market-goer, Beard became a regular at Paris’s enormous central market, Les Halles, which made his beloved Yamhill Market in Portland look like a roadside farm stand. To cap off these wonderments, Beard found himself, for once, able to enjoy sexual freedom, and had a brief fling with a young man named Hans.

In 1942, despite being thirty-nine and in no shape to fight, Beard tried
to enlist in the armed forces, partly out of a genuine sense of national duty, and partly out of a desire to once again travel to France. Beard’s weight didn’t make him an attractive prospect to the United States Army, but by 1943, he found a place where he was welcome: the United Seamans Service (USS), which was responsible for providing food, shelter, and recreation to sailors in the merchant marine. It was a cushy post—he essentially managed the officers’ clubs and devised comfort-food menus for the wounded and homesick sailors—but Beard applied himself well. It took him a couple of years and three stints in the Western Hemisphere—in Puerto Rico, Brazil, and Panama—before he got to France, but finally, in 1945, the USS sent him to the bustling Provençal port city of Marseilles, where he explored southern France for the first time and soaked in its garlic- and olive-oil-suffused cookery. When his USS duty was up, Beard spent a few days in liberated Paris, where he took advantage of the city’s depressed economy to load up on steeply marked-down copper pots and pans to take back to New York.

AS UNLIKELY A MAN
in uniform as Beard was, he had some competition in the navy’s Craig Claiborne, yeoman, third class. Claiborne was a troubled soul, a queer, squinty-eyed kid from Indianola, Mississippi, with a set of psychosexual complexes worthy of a Tennessee Williams character. Born to a proper Southern family just as it was experiencing a reversal in fortune—his father, Luke, had some investments go sour and abruptly lost his considerable landholdings—Claiborne, as a small boy, saw his home transformed into a boardinghouse. Young Craig was forced to share a bed with his father, a melancholy, devout soul who was given to uttering the gloomy, baffling phrase: “This world and one more and then the fireworks.” One night, as he later revealed in his squeamishly received confessional memoir,
A Feast Made for Laughter
, Claiborne ran his arm along his sleeping father’s, down to the hand, to discover his father’s fingers “enfolded around the throttle of his lust.” It was a transformative moment for the pubescent boy, who, for the rest of his life, would prefer the company of older men, and who proceeded to
“begin an exploration of his [father’s] body” every night once Dad had (apparently) drifted off to sleep. Neither father nor son ever acknowledged these “explorations” in conversation.

Slight, unathletic, and hopeless at fitting in with the other Mississippi boys, most of whom played football and baseball, Claiborne found solace in the kitchen, where his mother, Miss Kathleen, and her retinue of black servants whipped up an amazing assortment of dishes for the boarders in a variety of idioms: Creole, soul food, down-home, Fannie Farmer. Like Beard, Claiborne had an adventurous palate at a young age and reveled in everything from chitterlings (pig’s small intestines) to oyster gumbo to barbecue to homemade coconut cake. Unlike Beard, Claiborne was more aggravated by than devoted to his mother, whose grandeur in the face of the family’s debts he found mortifying, and whose efforts to lend direction to his directionless life he found smothering.
*
As unsuited to the military as he seemed, the unhappy Claiborne, who had bounced from Mississippi State University to the University of Missouri, decided that the navy was his ticket out of Miss Kathleen’s stifling embrace. A month after graduating from Missouri with a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1942, he was doing clerical work for the navy’s intelligence division in Chicago. By autumn, Claiborne was aboard the naval cruiser the USS
Augusta
, charging across the Atlantic to participate in Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa, overseen by Rear Admiral H. K. Hewitt of the navy and General George S. Patton of the army.