That Time James Beard Made Lunch for Marilyn Monroe

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In the spring and summer of 1955, James Beard and Marilyn Monroe were moving in opposite directions. They collided gently on a terrace in New Canaan, Connecticut, over cold lamb and hot piperade.

The year 1955 was one of change for Marilyn. In L.A., she’d divorced Joe DiMaggio the previous fall, and as the calendar flipped to 1955, she packed up her books and moved to New York City. Marilyn was frustrated with her roles under contract at 20^th Century Fox, variations on Lorelei Lee, the carnal naif and sugar-daddy hunter from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Together with her friend and frequent photographer Milton Greene, she formed a film company in 1954: Marilyn Monroe Productions. They hoped to make pictures that showcased Marilyn’s dramatic skills, her actor’s ambition. Still, audiences in the summer of 1955 saw Marilyn in The Seven Year Itch, playing a fantasy projection known simply as “The Girl,” in that gardenia-white pleated halter dress, skirt ballooning in the whoosh of air from a soundstage subway grate. But by then the real Marilyn had spent months at New York’s Actors Studio under the formidable Lee Strasberg, immersed in the Method

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As Marilyn was stepping back from the rush of public attention, James Beard was hustling toward it.

At 52, James had at last reached the national spotlight, after years of general obscurity. The New York Times had started tagging him “the dean of American cookery,” and he used that to strive harder than ever. His eighth cookbook was just out, The Complete Book of Outdoor Cookery, a collaboration with Helen Evans Brown, his bestie in Pasadena, California. In 1955, James said yes to almost anything that paid. He consulted for the London Chop House in Detroit and a rich industrialist’s vanity steakhouse in Mexico City. He was in Italy to consult on drink recipes for a vermouth company, and to Houston, Kansas City, Cleveland, and Cincinnati to promote French Cognac. He met Alice B. Toklas in Paris for a P.R. stunt for French Champagne and in Beverly Hills, grinned for the flashbulbs at the celebrity opening of the Beverly Hilton, at which Vice President Richard Nixon raised the American flag. James was in near-constant motion.

Naturally, if you were queer in the U.S. in 1955 it could be easier to stay in motion, far from America’s moral panic. During that Mexico City jaunt, James visited a bathhouse twice. He dined with gay friends in Paris that year, and in Italy dated men an expat friend in Europe, William Templeton Veach, set him up with. (“The mysteries of Pino!” James wrote in his diary, apparently rapturously, after one such encounter at the Hotel Dei Cavalieri in Milan.)

Back home, there was one place where James always found it easy to be himself: Eastham, the weekend house in New Canaan, Connecticut, belonging to his old friends Cheryl Crawford and Ruth Norman. It was there, on the stone terrace, where James and Marilyn converged in the summer of 1955.

James met Cheryl in 1940, most likely, when he was a caterer and she was a guest at a party he was working. She was a theatrical producer and director, the founder, with Strasberg and Harold Clurman, of The Group Theatre. In 1947, she co-founded the Actors Studio. Cheryl commissioned and produced experimental theatrical works, as well as Broadway shows: Porgy and Bess in 1942, Brigadoon in ’47, and Paint Your Wagon and Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo in ’51. Oh, and she was a lesbian with an uncompromising public presentation for mid-century America: no makeup, hair cut short, tailored suits with trousers.

Cheryl’s lifelong partner, Ruth Norman, an uncredited contributor to James’s early cookbooks. She’d go on to be the director of the James Beard Cooking School—a fancy title for admin and demo assistant. It was at Eastham where Ruth helped test some recipes for James’s The Fireside Cook Book of 1949.

Mostly, Eastham was a place for actors, playwrights, composers, and other theatre folk to get away from the city for weekends. In her 1977 memoir One Naked Individual, Cheryl runs through a partial guest list: “Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Janet Flanner, Tallulah Bankhead, Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones, Kurt Weill, Fritz [Frederick] Loewe, Marc Blitzstein.” Mary Martin lived next door. I believe there was a kind of understanding, probably tacit, that James was welcome any time, if he cooked. After all, he’d wanted to be an actor, a singer. Eastham’s kitchen became a stage where James could perform for members of a theatrical colony that he’d longed to take his place in. Many (most) were lesbian, gay, or bi. They could unpin in the 13-acre grounds, away from cameras and the relentless gaze. Williams talks about swimming naked with his partner, the actor Frank Merlo, in the stone-lined pool that was far enough from the house to banish inhibitions.

“Marilyn Monroe came to swim,” Cheryl says in a seemingly offhand way in One Naked Individual. She and James met there twice in that late spring and summer of 1955.

The first was at the end of May. She came up to Eastham on Sunday with the actor Eli Wallach—they’d become friends at the Actors Studio. James was staying over that weekend, but was “in agony,” he reported to Helen Evans Brown. His edema flared up that year, made worse by his near-constant travel. His doctor told him to stay off his feet. Unable to cook, he “did a bit of supervising,” he told Helen. The actor Judith Anderson popped in. (She was en route to Paris to star as Medea at the Salute to France Festival, a sprawling series of events celebrating its cultural and artistic ties with the U.S.) James’s friend William Templeton Veach was there. As Cheryl describes him, he was “a monumental man with a Santa Claus belly.” She reports that Veach convinced Marilyn to dance with him on the patio, “allowing herself to be pushed around on his stomach.” James says Marilyn “even enchanted Bill Veach, and that is saying something”—the joke being that she could seduce even a committed queen like Veach. Still, Marilyn was demure, he told Helen, “So quiet and unassuming and little girl that I couldn’t believe it.” He left no record of what they ate.

Marilyn’s second encounter with James at Eastham was a Sunday in late August. For dinner on Saturday, James had spit-roasted a leg of young lamb he brought from a Greek butcher in the West Village; he served it with eggplant and beans. The lamb was crusty on the outside “and just pink on the inside,” he reported to Helen. He served it cold next day at lunch for Marilyn, “juicy and delicious.” The director and screenwriter Norman Foster was there, too, according to James’s diary.

Besides the lamb, James served piperade. I suspect he made a version of the “Pipérade Basquaise” recipe from his 1952 book (with Alexander Watt) Paris Cuisine. Green and red sweet peppers sweated with onion, with garlic, a fresh cayenne pepper, and tomatoes—a dish for deepest summer. In the original, you heat slices of ham in this mixture, though I think the Eastham version would have been ham free. In a separate pan you gently scramble eggs fortified with heavy cream, then fold them into the stewed vegetables and serve hot.

I imagine the juxtaposition of cold, pink lamb and hot piperade was lovely: disparate temperatures in fragile accord. #