Mastering the Art of Marriage

Nora Ephron's new movie recalls the morning Julia Child burned my breakfast toast.

In the 1970s, her husband Paul and I were in their Cambridge kitchen talking heatedly about politics while Julia sort of tended the broiler but was more interested in leaning over to hear what we were saying. When smoke started pouring from the oven, she pulled out a tray and dumped the charred contents into the sink.

"Ah, well," she said smiling and slicing more bread, just like the French Chef dropping a chicken on TV, brushing it off and telling viewers: "Don't forget, if you're alone in the kitchen, no one will know."

Now, Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci are reenacting their lifelong love story in "Julie and Julia," the kind of marriage new generations know from old black-and-white movies like "The Thin Man" mysteries, with a couple totally devoted to each other in a life of good food, good drink and good times with friends

In a decade as Julia's editor when she wrote for McCalls, I knew the childless Childs, although they didn't look like movie stars (she towered over him), as the real thing. They didn't solve murders as a sideline, like Myrna Loy and Wllliam Powell, but they had had an adventurous life, meeting during World War II while working for the precursor of the CIA, the OSS, he as a cartographer and she helping cook up a shark repellent for underwater explosives to keep them away from bombs meant to blow up German U-boats.

It's part of the Julia Child legend that she learned to cook to please him after they married when Paul was working in Paris for the State Department. She spent the rest of her life cooking and pleasing him.

Even our professional parting was involved with the closeness of their marriage. When Paul suffered the first of a series of strokes that would result in enormous medical bills until his death more than a dozen years later, Julia stopped writing columns for me after nine years to lend her name to a Sunday supplement offering a king's ransom for it.

When we met again in her last years, she was still the tireless, life-affirming Julia Child, but part of her heart was gone.

Outing Julia Child

Before there was a CIA, during World War II, there was the OSS and now more than half a century later the National Archives is releasing files on almost 24,000 Americans who worked for the agency, including Julia Child.

Although she will be mentioned in the same breath as Valerie Plame, there was nothing covert about Julia, with whom I worked for more than a decade and whose only secretive moment came on camera when she dropped food on the kitchen floor, picked it up and confided to viewers, "Don't forget. If you're alone in the kitchen, no one will know."

The OSS revelations won't come as news to anyone who knew her, since she reveled in telling about her most dramatic exploit, helping to cook up a shark repellent to coat underwater explosives and keep them away from devices meant to blow up German U-boats.

The newly released list is a reminder of that innocent time when secretly working for your country was a source of pride for people like historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who later worked in JFK's White House as well as two sons of Theodore Roosevelt and Sterling Hayden, the actor now immortalized as Al Pacino's first murder victim in "The Godfather."

Nobody had to worry about the likes of Scooter Libby blabbing their names.

Memo to Meryl Streep, Re: Julia Child

The news from Hollywood is that Meryl Streep will be playing Julia Child in a new movie to be written and directed by Nora Ephron, which seems fair enough since Streep played Ephron in "Heartburn," an autobiographical account of a food writer's disastrous marriage.

I can horn in on this inbred arrangement with advice to Streep and Ephron, who wrote for me when we were both magazine people, about my decade of working with the woman who lifted American cooking above burgers and fries: Play her big but modest.

One morning in the 1970s, Julia burned my breakfast toast. Her husband Paul and I were in their Cambridge kitchen talking politics while she tended the broiler, leaning over to hear what we are saying. When smoke started pouring from the oven, she pulled out a tray and dumped the charred contents into a sink. "Ah, well," she said smiling, just like the French Chef dropping a chicken on TV, brushing it off and grinning at her viewers: "Don't forget, if you're alone in the kitchen, no one will know."

Eating out with Julia was like being in Restaurant Heaven--no scowling maitre d's, no long waits to be seated, no sloppy service or mediocre food at high prices. In Boston, a restaurateur came to the table, imploring her to taste his latest creations. As a stream of plates went by, he studied her face as she took a bite from each. At the end of the meal, the check for what we actually ordered was less than if we had gone to Burger King.

At one of New York's snootier French restaurants, it was like turning up with God as your dinner companion. She told the hovering captain "the remoulade was quite good," and a parade of beaming people came out of the kitchen, from the head chef to the apprentice who chopped the celeriac, to hear her repeat the compliment.

Julia Child was the antithesis of the magazine editor diva Streep played in "The Devil Wears Prada," but I'm sure America's most honored actress and Ephron will do her justice.