I ate escargots, caviar, and lobster and even drank a bit. The Englishman told me everything I was to see and do in London, enjoying introducing me to the world. I was deliriously happy. I didn’t even have to pay for dinner, which was delicious.
When we arrived, he insisted on my sharing his taxi, and took me on a tour of London before shaking my hand and dropping me off at the YWCA, where I had a clean and bright sunny room with a thick and puffy quilt to tuck me in. I went to Harrod’s Department Store, with its incredible food hall. I was freezing in my sleeveless dress, realizing that June in England was not necessarily hot as it was in DC, and purchased a pink wool dress and jacket on the fifth floor. I then went down to the Food Hall, where I shopped and ate. I’ve never lost my love for England and Englishmen, returning in a few years to live happily for two years and study at the London Cordon Bleu.
But France, ah, France. France enveloped me with passion for food and romance. Never had I been so overcome with either. I was captivated by the country’s sensuality by the end of my first day there.
Chester and a couple of his other houseguests met me at the airport in Nice. We drove up to lunch at La Colombe d’Or in Saint-Paul de Vence. I was enchanted and overwhelmed. Saint-Paul de Vence has a breathless view of a valley that plummets down through thickets of trees and wildlife. The Colombe d’Or’s vast collection of paintings on its walls were by some of the most famous of the Impressionists who had lived nearby, eaten there, and traded their paintings for meals. Small wonder, a meal there was the cost of an oil painting.
My first meal in France consisted of crudités (my first experience with fresh French produce, lovingly picked and presented), grebe (a tiny bird) pâté, and crusty French bread. We asked for butter, and it was sweeter than cream.
It was from Chester’s cook in his Cap d’Antibes home that I learned the marvels of French home cooking. After I ate my first omelet I rushed into the kitchen to learn how to make one. I pestered the cook until she showed me, breaking the fresh eggs into a bowl, whisking them with drops of water and pouring them into sizzling butter in an omelet pan. She poured it around the pan, made a little motion to move the runny part under the cooked part, seasoned it with salt and pepper, and within minutes it was done and flipped, folded, into the dish. I ate it, too, just to taste it again.
Following the second omelet, I sat down to meet French lettuce, tender, leafy, with no crunch but enormous flavor, each leaf barely coated with vinaigrette, for the first time, sitting outside under a grape arbor, a few blocks from the Riviera. I was in heaven, not France. Every pore in my tongue seemed alive, ready to savor every taste of food.
When we went to the beach club we were served another astounding combination, tiny grape-size tomatoes mixed with tiny black Niçoise olives. Who knew that tomatoes and olives could be like that, the saltiness better than Cheese-Its. And so it went, every day a revelation. We went to see Giacomettis and Chagalls, in museums small and large. When it came time for me to leave for Paris, Chester told me he had arranged a hotel room for me rather than my staying in his apartment. I was a little uncomfortable with that and couldn’t figure out why the plans had changed. It was years later that I found out he was living with a good friend of mine from San Francisco, Judy, and didn’t want me to see her picture and things in his apartment. (He always was a charming cad, as you will see.)
I arrived in Paris midday, in June 1966, tanned and happy after a week in Juan-les-Pins, sunning, eating, and learning to make my first omelet. My hotel was a shock. Its tiny entrance was manned by an aging woman behind a scarred wooden counter. The hallway was darkened. There was no one to help me lug my suitcases up the narrow twisting stairs with faded fleur-de-lis patterns on the wallpaper. I was sure I had wound up in a dump.
When I opened the door to my room I gave myself over to Paris, as if to a new lover. It was large and airy, the view, of a park with a few beautiful old homes overlooking it, enhanced by the geraniums on the balcony.
The wallpaper, too, was faded, but of flowers and birds. When the window was opened, the light curtains ruffled. I hardly spent any time in that room, but it was, and is, part of Paris to me. Charming, old, graceful, clean, tastefully furnished, and mine. Looking back, I wonder if I had ever stayed in a hotel room by myself before, in any country, before that trip.
There was a giant bathtub and a bidet in the bathroom. The only time I’d heard about bidets was from a friend who had soaked his socks in one, stopped up the bidet, and the resulting water on the floor had caused such a problem his parents had wound up paying a huge bill to the hotel. I hadn’t quite understood what the use of the bidet was, but
