The United States of Arugula (9 page)

Operation Torch was a success, opening up a second front for the Allies against the Nazis, who were pushing westward from Egypt. That November, off the coast of Morocco, the
Augusta
officers and crew celebrated with a shipboard Thanksgiving meal whose courses were jokingly gussied up
with French words and allusions to commanding officers and North African locales: Cream of Tomato Soup à la Casablanca, Baked Spiced Spam à la Capitaine de Vaisseau, Chantilly Potatoes à la Patton. But Claiborne, who was scheduled to return to America on the
Augusta
, itched to go ashore and explore Casablanca, whose parapets and domes he could see through binoculars from the deck. In an uncharacteristically brazen move, he asked the vessel’s admiral, John Leslie Hall, if he could join the command group that was staying behind in North Africa, perhaps as a secretary to the admiral himself. Hall agreed, and the elated Claiborne proceeded to undertake his own little gustatory tour of Casablanca, eating Moroccan couscous for the first time—“with sweet dried fruits and that best of all hot sauces, harissa, a fiery blend of chilies and coriander,” as he later recalled—and also enjoying his first real French cooking, at a bistro called La Comédie whose mom-and-pop proprietors invited him to their home for roast chicken and omelets.

The motives behind Claiborne’s long, multi-stint naval career were not wholly cynical—“To die in [World War II] for the cause of humanity and justice was to elevate your soul to God, and I would have willingly given my life,” he said—but he certainly knew how to manipulate the navy bureaucracy’s apparently boundless need for warm bodies to his advantage. His Operation Torch experience and college degree somehow made him a plausible candidate for officer training—even though, as a communications specialist, he never did any shooting—and so, after being accepted into a training program in 1943, he enrolled at Notre Dame University, from which he emerged the following year as Ensign Claiborne. “In all of Navy history there has probably never been a more incompetent navigator or communications expert than I,” Claiborne later admitted. But being Ensign Claiborne allowed him to fulfill his boundless curiosity about other cultures—which would later serve him in good stead as a journalist—and afforded him the opportunity to keep his distance from Miss Kathleen, who nevertheless tormented him with bagfuls of letters that he characterized as “a giant-sized umbilical cord wrapped unceremoniously and noose-like around my neck.” (In one characteristic missive, she wrote, “I harbor but one single wish in this
life, that you may know that there is no perfect love except that of a mother.”) The veteran naval officers, for their part, seemed not to mind the eccentric, ingratiating kid with the mush-mouth Mississippi accent and courtly “If ah do say so” locutions. Claiborne simply loved navy life—he exulted in the cushy officers’ barracks, worshipped his superiors, and harbored secret crushes on a number of them, including the
Augusta’s
Admiral Hall, whom he admired as “one of the most … handsome men I have ever encountered.”

Shrewd enough, barely, to bluff his way through naval maneuvers—when given the command of a submarine chaser at war’s end in Okinawa, he relied on his underlings’ navigational expertise and God’s graces to get the boat safely back home to Hawaii—Claiborne turned again and again to the navy for salvation when civilian life grew drab. Marooned in the late forties in an unfulfilling job in the advertising department of the
Chicago Daily News
, Claiborne cashed in on the GI Bill in early 1950 to enroll at the Alliance Française in Paris, purportedly to learn French, but more realistically to goof around France as so many other Americans were doing. “If I could have named my one major dream in life since I learned to reason, it was to visit and live in France,” he later said. “It is not to exaggerate to say that all my life I had felt an alien in America … It is a bit mawkish, I know, but the moment the taxi turned the corner on the Champs Élysées, driving toward l’Étoile, I was possessed with the most extraordinary feeling of coming home after years and perhaps centuries of absence, and I started to cry.”

In Paris, Claiborne ordered a simple meal of scrambled eggs with fresh tarragon, then an unknown quantity in the United States, and reveled in its “heavenly” qualities. He went to an upscale suburban restaurant called Le Pavillon Henry IV (no relation to Henri Soulé’s Le Pavillon) and rapturously received his baptism in béarnaise, enjoying the tarragon-infused sauce atop tournedos of beef. He splurged daily on fruit tarts and pastries from Paris’s numerous patisseries. His transformative moment, though, came on the ship back to New York, when he was flat broke, and, with some money borrowed from a friend, managed one last great meal:
turbotin à l’infante
, slowcooked
young turbot in a white-wine and fish-stock reduction, garnished with a puff-pastry crescent. “Somewhere out there, and I don’t know where,” he thought to himself, “there are secrets to be learned.” He asked for, and got, the recipe from the chef.

Compelled by a lack of funds to return to Chicago, where he grudgingly worked as a copywriter for a public relations firm, the thirty-year-old Claiborne was one of the few Americans who registered delight at the news of the Korean conflict, as the nascent “proxy war” to the Cold War was called in the summer of 1950. He again volunteered for overseas duty with the navy, again somehow avoided anything resembling the dirty business of warfare (and exasperated the commander of a British battleship, who shouted “Render honors!” as his vessel sailed past Claiborne’s, to which the perplexed Claiborne responded, “Do
whut
?
”)
, and again hoarded his pay and counted on a GI Bill scholarship to get him back to Europe. Indeed, it was while ostensibly doing his duties as the “operations officer” on a destroyer escort during the Korean War that Claiborne, his mind wandering, put two and two together: he liked writing; he liked food—perhaps he could make a living writing about food.

But how to receive the proper credentials for such a career? After admitting to his increasingly loathed mother that he was contemplating enrolling at Paris’s famed Le Cordon Bleu cooking school, Claiborne was surprised when Miss Kathleen countered with a genuinely constructive suggestion: that he apply to a Swiss hotel school she had heard good things about, L’École Hôtelière, L’École Professionnelle de la Société Suisse des Hôteliers, the Professional School of the Swiss Hotel Keepers Association. The school, in Lausanne, was a training ground for people who hoped to become managers of luxury hotels—not exactly what Claiborne had in mind for himself, but he was happy to be accepted, and he matriculated there in 1953. One of the few other Americans in his class was James Nassikas, a New Hampshire kid who later became well-known in food circles as the owner of the Stanford Court hotel in San Francisco, Jim Beard’s de facto West Coast home and the site of many of his cooking classes in the seventies. “I said to
Craig, ‘Gee, what kind of hotel do you want?’ and he said, ‘I don’t want to be in the hotel business,’” Nassikas says. “I remember that he proudly showed me a letter he’d written to the editor of the
Chicago Tribune
where he was commenting on a recipe for filet of sole marguery, a real classic French preparation. He was so proud they printed it. I was just puzzled—I didn’t understand.”

While the navy had been an effective means to an end, L’École Hôtelière was the first place Claiborne felt he belonged. In his eighteen-month program, he learned the ins and outs of proper table service, using the summertime break to
stage
(pronounced “stahj”), or get on-the-job training, as a waiter at a Swiss mountain resort. Even more exhilarating was the cooking curriculum, which called for Claiborne to learn the fundamental methodologies of an Escoffier-style kitchen. A world away from Miss Kathleen’s country cookin’, Claiborne, under the tutelage of tubby elders in toques, made puff pastry, quiches (“wholly unknown to Americans at the time”), hollandaise sauce, consommé, pâtés, quenelles, roasts, and soufflés. In 1954, Claiborne graduated eighth in his class, with the conviction that if he was going to make it as a food writer, he would have to move to New York. His native Mississippi had no place for a food-loving sissy boy, but in Manhattan, he would find a way to fit in.

JULIA MCWILLIAMS WAS
as eager as Claiborne and Beard to do her part for the war effort in the early 1940s, but, ironically, in light of her future fame, she was the least hell-bent on getting to France. In Pasadena, she’d divided her time between volunteer work for the Red Cross and socializing within her family’s wealthy circle, even rejecting a 1941 marriage proposal from Harrison Chandler, of the prominent family that owned the
Los Angeles Times.
For a six-foot-two woman pushing thirty, in a social milieu in which there was intense pressure to “marry well,” this was a risky move, but McWilliams knew she wasn’t in love with the amiable but stiff Chandler, and, like Claiborne, she desperately craved a life change. In 1942, she left Pasadena for
Washington, where she first worked in the typing pool at the State Department, and then, not long thereafter, at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency.

McWilliams fit the profile of the plumy, blue-blood OSS: from a good family, educated at a fine East Coast school, and wealthy enough not to care about a salary. She worked in the office of the OSS director, FDR crony William “Wild Bill” Donovan, who cherished employees of her pedigree on the grounds that they were free thinkers, unburdened by lockstep military thinking, and unbribable to boot. Not that McWilliams was spying on anyone—in D.C., she was an administrative assistant. Eager for adventure, she leaped at the OSS’s solicitation of volunteers to go to India in 1944, and wound up working on a tea plantation in Kandy, a resort city in Ceylon that the OSS had commandeered as its base of operations from which to plot attacks on the Japanese.

Even late in her life, Julia Child remained circumspect about the specifics of her OSS duties, but it’s known that, as Julia McWilliams, she had a high security clearance and was, at the very least, responsible for processing classified papers about the OSS’s various espionage and sabotage schemes in the war’s Southeast Asia theater. Off duty, McWilliams found that Ceylon, with its lush flora and encampments of ginned-up British and American officers, provided a seductive backdrop for the sort of drunken frolics with sophisticates that she had enjoyed as a party girl in Pasadena. The men she met in Kandy, though, were of an altogether more worldly breed, especially Paul Child, ten years her senior, a Bostonian by birth, an artist by training, and a cartographer for the OSS.

Prematurely bald and a good six inches shorter than McWilliams, Child nevertheless exuded a bohemian charisma—he’d lived in Paris in the twenties, loved to cook and dine out, and was a black belt in jujitsu. McWilliams fell hard for Child, but the feeling was not mutual at first—he adored the gangly, bawdy Julia as a drinking buddy and fellow adventurer, but as an older man with lots of affairs in his past, he thought her too sexually naïve and, initially, not especially attractive. As time went on, though, and both
McWilliams and Child were relocated by the OSS to Kunming, in southern China, Child realized that he, too, was falling in love. His long letters to his twin brother, Charlie, provide a chronicle of his softening stance toward “Julie,” as he called her. By the end of the war, as he headed home from China, Paul was eager for Charlie to meet this girl, even with the caveat that—as every PBS viewer would know in twenty years—she talked kind of funny. “You will appreciate her warmth,” Paul wrote to Charlie late in 1945, “and you can quickly learn, as I have, to discount the slightly hysterical overtones of her manner of talking.”

It was in Kunming, in the last stages of the war, that Paul Child effectively “switched on” his future wife’s palate, taking her to Chinese restaurants where, for the first time, she became alive to flavor—the hams and slurpy noodles of the Yunnan Province (of which Kunming is the capital), the chilies of Szechuan, the sweet-and-sour soups and sauces of Peking-style cooking. “That is when I became interested in food,” Julia later said. And as Paul baptized Julia in the ways of various Chinese cuisines, he regaled her with tales of the great French meals he’d eaten in Paris two decades earlier, when he’d moved in the same circles as Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Alice B. Toklas.

McWilliams came to the realization that if she wanted this man, it was in her best interests to learn how to cook. During a short reacclimation period after the war, when she and Child were living on opposite coasts—she staying with her father in Pasadena temporarily, he working for the State Department in Washington—Julia, not yet sure that marrying Paul was a foregone conclusion, took a cooking class in Beverly Hills. She recounted her halting progress to her beau in letters—and it
was
halting, with runny omelets and a duck that exploded in the oven—but Paul was pleased and, from the sound of it, aroused by her efforts. “Why don’t you come to Washington and be my cook?” he wrote. “We can eat each other.”

Julia McWilliams married Paul Child on September 1, 1946, in a civil ceremony at a family friend’s home in New Jersey, with a reception across the Delaware River in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. They went ahead with the
wedding even though they’d been in a serious car accident the day before, while driving from Charlie Child’s home in Pennsylvania to New York City, where the McWilliams family was to host a wedding-eve cocktail party. The wedding photos show Julia beaming with a huge wad of gauze held fast above her left eye with white adhesive tape, and Paul leaning on a cane—a suitable beginning, somehow, to their eccentric but abiding, rollicking union.

In October of 1948, the Childs boarded the SS
America
en route to Paul’s new State Department appointment as an exhibits officer for the United States Information Service (USIS) in Paris—essentially, he was to serve as a benign propagandist for the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe. Paul’s USIS duties would keep them abroad for eleven of the next thirteen years, with stints in Marseilles, the German town of Bad Godesberg, and the Norwegian capital, Oslo. But it was the Paris stint, the Childs’ first and longest, stretching into early 1953, that catalyzed Julia’s transformation from mere wife-hostess and good-time gal to TV’s future
French Chef.