Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (49 page)

Their neighbors on both sides, the deSola Pools and the Browns, remember that summer when many loaves of warm bread were passed over the fence to them. Even old friends (“They fit us like a pair of old shoes,” Paul would say) whom the Childs would visit—the Pratts in their summer home and the Mowrers in New Hampshire—remember the bread baking at their houses. One host discovered a rising loaf hanging from one of the guest room’s drawers. The Child nieces recall the summer bread baking at Lopaus Point (where Julia also visited a factory to learn about professional cracking of crabs). These family and friends, incidentally, were not intimidated by inviting Julia to a meal; she reassured them, “Nonsense, it is only I who am expected to prepare a perfect meal.”

In 1968, when they spent months in France making croissants every day—feeding every visitor, guest, and family member croissants until they settled every nuance of preparation and procedure—young Jean-François Thibault, Simca’s nephew, thought, “They must be terrible bakers because they have to keep making these croissants.”

W
ORKING WITH SIMCA

Writing Volume II was similar in many ways to writing the first. Julia was in charge of writing all the copy (both the blah-blah and the recipe directions), which she would send to Simca, who read and tested the recipes. Julia was the authority on how American produce and ingredients worked with French techniques and recipes. “I hope you will accept my findings,” she wrote Simca, “I am the one here in the USA who gets blamed if our recipes don’t work.” In turn, after Simca tested each recipe, she reported her findings and had the final say on all the French names and terminology.

Simca was the major supplier of recipes. In fact she could not stop sending recipes, even after they constructed their final outline. “Simca is a great improvisationalist,” wrote her student and assistant Michael James. Peter Kump claimed her recipes, like her stories, “changed slightly every time.” Julia told Mary Frances in both admiration and complaint, “She is a fountain of ideas.” She wrote Avis, who insisted upon being a part of the second volume: “I cannot trust Simca’s recipes at all, except as great idea fountains, so every single one will have to go through the chocolate-cake type of testing. I’m just not going to have anything in this book that doesn’t work well—we have 3 in Vol. I which are far too tricky, and which gall me every time I think of them. Vol. II has to be
better
than Vol. I, and I ain’t going to be rushed over it.” Finally Julia placated Simca with a line about saving a particular recipe for Volume III (though she never seriously considered a third). Back and forth, Julia in English, Simca in French, they would comment in detail on each experiment and on the other’s comments on every experiment. Today the thousands of onionskin pages are brown with food stains and age. As before, Julia reminded Simca they had to keep their recipes and discoveries secret from both colleagues and students.

The initial differences in writing this new book were several and went far beyond the fact that they no longer sent a carbon of their work to Louisette. Julia, who always did all the typing, had Gladys, her secretary, who could type up the final double-spaced recipes in the form already worked out in the first volume. They also had a book to work against; even basic techniques were already explained in the first volume. Now, however, there was the bread recipe and more desserts, which were Simca’s specialty.

Julia was frustrated earlier in Plascassier when she was not satisfied with the chocolate cake recipe Simca chose. Julia had brought the chocolate from the States, but Simca did not test it fully, she believed. In Cambridge, Julia invited a chemist from Nestle to come for lunch and talk about the chemical composition, cocoa butter content, and melting methods of their chocolate. Americans made the mistake of melting chocolate in a pan with boiling (not simmering) water under it. She worked and reworked the directions herself. She also hated the pound cake
(le quatre quarts)
, “a heavy horrid cake and not my idea of good French cooking.”

The temperamental and philosophical differences between Julia and Simca both aided their joint work and created frequent friction. Julia’s approach was evident in a letter she wrote to Simca: “I shall also take notes on every method of
pâté-en-croûte
making that I run into—I am sure this drives you crazy, but it is the only way I can work—I want to know everything, and why, and what’s no good and why, so then when our master recipe is done there are no unsolved questions.” Simca, Paul told Charlie, “seldom subjects anything to operational proof [and] lives in a totally verbal world.” Earlier he wrote that she “roars through life like a hurricane, smashing her way toward her goals.” Of course, he added, that is the quality that got her house renovated, her trees planted, her cooking school up and running. In a contrasting view, Jane Owen Molard, who worked with Simca in the 1980s, says, “Julia and Simca were much alike. They both had busy exteriors but calm centers.”

In the lengthy report Avis DeVoto wrote to William Koshland the previous Christmas season in Provence, she made the following observations about the culinary “sisters”: “Simca is a creative genius … [but] also inaccurate, illogical, hard to pin down, and stubborn as a mule. Julia is also very creative and is becoming more so. But the two women think differently. Julia is deeply logical, orderly, accurate, painstaking, patient, determined to get all this knowledge clearly on paper. And she can be just as stubborn as Simca is, and will plug away trying to convince Simca until suddenly Simca changes her position, and from then on she will talk as if it were her own idea all along.”

Paul did not like Simca’s bossy, know-it-all attitude; it “drives me up the wall,” he confided to Charlie. But Julia would not countenance anyone criticizing Simca. Angry one day, Paul wrote the following indictment: “Simca pays no attention to anything Julia tells her about all the researches she’s done, the findings of the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, or the careful scientific comparison she’s made between the various commercial starches based on corn, rice, potatoes, etc. She drives me nuts.” At Julia’s insistence, he added at the bottom of the letter: “An impurely personal opinion, resented by Julia, who asked me to change it. I can’t; but she has
tremendous
value, is a
real half
of the combination which I may not have made clear.”

If Paul and Simca sometimes got along just for the sake of Julia, probably the same could be said of Paul and Jean. The hearty French chemist would immediately put on his blue work coveralls and boots when he came to Bramafam and putter around the property, in sharp contrast to the well-dressed Paul, who was preoccupied by his painting and photography. The Fischbachers and Thibaults thought Paul could be moody and distant. He in turn thought they sometimes treated foreigners disdainfully.

Julia and Simca were loyal to each other out of respect and love. Like sisters, they argued and made up. Julia believed Simca distrusted the scientific approach, in part because she lacked formal higher education and was ruled by her emotions and instinct. When Julia was testing for the perfect crust for their
pâté en croûte
, she informed Avis she did not think Simca was the least interested in her research. “I don’t think she believes in it.” Paul said she was “a mountain of unscientific instinctiveness.” He had even harsher words in other letters to Charlie. In several of Julia’s letters to Simca it is clear that Julia is urging her to experiment, to visit local bakers. Many years later, Julia would be more frank about the dogmatism of Simca, imitating Simca’s loud “
non, non, non”
at the top of her voice.

When Simca reported that in a brief visit to the master bread maker Calvel he let his dough rise only once, Julia wrote back that in his book he specifies twice. All her experiments proved that the dough must rise twice: “Kneading by the usual system forces the gluten molecules to stick together so that the starch and yeast molecules will be dispersed intimately among them, and then the yeast forms little pockets of gas which push up the gluten network; a pushing down and second rise disperses the yeast into new starch pockets, and these in turn make the gluten network more fine.” And so on. Simca was probably asleep by that point.

T
HE LOUISETTE PURCHASE

Originally Julia and Simca assumed that Louisette’s name would be on Volume II. Though she was not involved at any point in the book, she was still a part of L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes, though she did little teaching at the Paris school with Simca anymore. She and her new husband, Henri, were now settling permanently in Vouzeron, in the center of France. Beyond initiating the first book, she did next to nothing; including her name on the second would have been giving credit and money where it was not due. Moreover, she no longer got along with Simca.

Julia and Paul decided earlier they needed to create a will protecting their growing assets from television and publishing and to set up a system by which Julia herself would not have to send the royalty checks to her partners. Julia also realized, after talking with Bill Koshland at Knopf and the lawyers of WGBH, that she had to determine the ownership of recipes, which were mixed up between television, newspapers, and books. She was facing the complications of two new contracts. Typically, Julia and Paul wanted “absolute order” in their financial affairs. They hired Brooks Beck the same week Paul boasted he made his twenty-first batch of bread.

Beck, of the Hill & Barlow law firm in Boston, was no Wall Street lawyer type, but a handsome man of great culture and humor, a real character with a bit of an acid tongue. Not incidentally, he was a member of their Cambridge circle of respected associates. They had met, after all, at a DeVoto party, and his wife, Wendy, was an editor at the Atlantic Monthly Press. Julia was particularly impressed that Beck represented two of their neighbors, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and John Kenneth Galbraith.

Beck’s first response was that he thought the two women should buy out Louisette Bertholle (an offer of even $25,000 would be a lot of money for someone who was doing nothing), and that Julia should no longer act as comptroller. He warned about the tax consequences in both countries, but untangling the issues would take months. Their next royalty payment was held up until this issue could be resolved, and in the interim Simca and Louisette eventually got their own lawyers. Julia warned her partners about the tax implications and was relieved when she learned Simca was declaring something to the French authorities.

When Julia casually mentioned to Louisette the idea of buying out her share of the partnership (the book was copyrighted, but they were never able to copyright the cooking school), Louisette sounded interested. But no official offer was made because they believed she would demand too much money (she mentioned to Julia she was thinking of about $45,000). She had already earned $33,000 in royalties for
Mastering I
, and any buyout of her 18 percent would come out of the advance for the second volume. Thus, they held up signing any contract with Knopf for their second volume until the question of Louisette could be resolved. Brooks Beck suggested they hold up making any offer to Louisette, who by December informed Simca she would sell all rights for $30,000.

Neither Jean Fischbacher nor Paul Child wanted to damage the trust between Simca and Julia, so they let their lawyers handle everything. Julia and Paul were anxious to settle their estate, which was to be left to their nieces and nephews. The only matter remaining to be cleared up—and this involved Louisette—was the issue of copyright to the book and partnership. By February 1968 the papers were signed.

In the matter of royalties for Julia’s book of television recipes,
The French Chef Cookbook
, she initially spoke about sharing the royalties, but her lawyer must have thought otherwise. Simca agreed (though her lawyer initially held out) that Julia should have the copyright and all royalties on that book because, though some recipes were taken (and changed) from their first book, Julia’s television and promotion made an appreciable difference in the sales of
Mastering I
, which doubled, then tripled, after the television program began, and leapt after the
Time
cover. On the television work she perhaps broke even; thus her only compensation for seven-day workweeks came from book sales. (The first and only time Julia mentioned this issue to Simca was in a letter dated October 18, 1967.) There was no question that the difference between the 1,000 books they sold the first month and the 3,000 books they were selling every month now, was Julia Child.

Finally, by the spring of 1968 the contract between the lawyers for Simca and Julia was settled and signed. Two complications were involved. Julia wanted her payments from Knopf to be set at a low enough figure to make her tax bracket more reasonable, and Julia and Simca had to work out the complications of their disproportionate expenditures of time and money (Julia did all the typing, proofreading, arrangements for drawings, and appearances). Finally, Julia bought sole rights to the first volume from Simca, and they shared the second volume, with Julia as the agent who kept track of expenses. By March 1969,
Mastering
had sold 600,000 copies, with Simca and Julia already making back half of what Julia called their “Louisette Purchase.”

The pressure of time involved in Julia’s numerous appearances led to Paul’s decision to take to the air. He had always broken into cold sweats and relived memories of treacherous flying in China when faced with the idea of plane flight, but he determinedly conquered his vertigo by applying the practical sense and the logic he always lived by. No more transatlantic voyages on the
Queen Mary
.

D
INING AND DIPLOMACY:
FILMING AT THE WHITE HOUSE