Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (53 page)

Julia was in Cambridge and Mary Frances in the Napa Valley, but they were indeed still a part of the food world. Julia was in deep with the Time-Life project, thoroughly enjoying wining and dining with editor-in-chief Dick Williams and his wife, Mary. She enjoyed their company, but did not need a job with Time-Life. More important, Julia’s natural instincts still served her well: her immediate reaction was always to be frank and honest. She never developed a hard edge, like those whose “backgrounds geared them to competitiveness and Big Time urban living,” as she put it. “In a world of megalomaniacs,” says Russ Morash, “it is refreshing that Julia Child is always so self-critical.” The self-criticism came, her neighbor Jean deSola Pool claimed, because “Julia has self-esteem and extraordinary intelligence.” She is “a focused and centered lady,” adds cooking colleague Lynne Rossetto Kasper, “one who knows who she is, her desired place in the world, and is fulfilled by it.”

In 1968–69, a spate of articles exposed the close business connections among publishers, food writers, and the manufacturers of food and cooking equipment. Pointing out that there were twice as many cookbooks published in 1969 as in the year before, writers charged the food authors with a cynical approach to the intelligence of their audience. Too many recipes were untested, stolen from others, or taken verbatim from recipes developed by food manufacturers. There were no standards or certification procedures in this “profession.”

“It’s a world of self-generating hysteria,” Nika Hazelton told Nora Ephron, whose article began with Time-Life’s book-launching party being disrupted by Claiborne’s review that morning. Ephron chronicled the sellouts: “French’s mustard people turned to Beard. The can-opener people turned to Poppy Cannon. Pan American Airways turned to Myra Waldo. The Potato Council turned to Helen McCully….” Then she described the “mortal combat” between the home economists and writers concerned with the “needs of the average housewife” and the “purists or traditionalists” who tout primarily French
haute cuisine
, lumping Julia among the “Big Four” of this latter group. “Julia Child has managed thus far to remain above the internecine struggles of the food world” less because of her “charming personality” than because she lives in Cambridge. Ephron’s last volley was against the food fakery and “the influence of color photography on food.” It all made for delicious gossip.

Julia may have seen herself as a moderating factor among her bickering colleagues, because when Simca told her about French rivalries and backstabbing, Julia suggested she act the role of James Beard and bring the French cooks together. “All he has done in the USA is to bring food types together—that’s what you might be able to do in Paris.” Part of Beard’s generosity flowed from his eagerness to recruit acolytes. A difference between James and Julia, said their mutual friend Clark Wolf, was that “Julia was more attracted to accomplished success, she likes more complete people, whereas James likes people unformed; James had proteges, Julia never did.”

Julia clearly favored James Beard and Samuel and Narcissa (Bisquit) Chamberlain, the latter now retired in Marblehead (his
Clémentine in the Kitchen
was published first pseudonymously in 1943). She thoroughly enjoyed their company. Beard called himself the “biggest whore” in the food business, but Julia believed in his generosity. The names of Julia and Jim, who frequently cooked together in Julia’s kitchen or onstage, were almost pronounced together by their friends, sounding like “GiGi.” “Julia is essentially a con-able woman,” Paul told a reporter. “She’s naive in the
nicest
possible way. She just can’t believe people have bad motives, when it’s a palpable fact.”

Dione Lucas, wracked by a double mastectomy and a collapsed lung, was fading slowly from her influential place in the cooking world. Stepping from the wings in 1969 was a young man from Australia named Graham Kerr, who called himself “The Galloping Gourmet.” Ruth Lockwood told Julia to watch his noontime program, and her New York friends (including Beard and Field) telephoned to say they “hate it.” Julia disliked both his cute and funny way of making semisexual remarks and his apparent lack of seriousness about his cooking. They were horrified by his behavior and his cooking techniques, as he himself would be two decades later when, after burning himself out, he soberly transformed himself and his cooking. Unrefined though his first programs were, he had then what only Julia had, a warmth and rapport with the television audience.

Julia tried to keep out of the backbiting and bitchery that occasionally marred the cookbook scene, a world characterized by what Paul called “snatch-grabbing.” Michael Field had taken Simca and Julia’s recipes and reworded them for his Time-Life book on France, and
Gourmet
pirated their garlic mashed potatoes. But when the subject came up in correspondence with Mary Frances, she said there was “no such thing as an original recipe,” shrugging at the common practice of lifting from others’ work.

Though Karen and John Hess’s food criticism was directed at most of the food world, including Julia, there was one voice that singled her out for particular vituperation: Madeleine Kamman, a French woman (married to an American) who had worked in her aunt’s restaurant in France and studied briefly with Simca. Julia met Kamman during the busy final months of preparing her
Mastering II
manuscript, but invited her into her home and was in turn invited to a dinner at the Kammans’. The Childs found her cooking “outstanding” and her intentions “ambitious,” according to Paul.

Kamman opened a cooking school and then a restaurant nearby in Newton and published
The Making of a Cook
in 1971. One of her students wrote a signed letter telling Julia to beware: Kamman demanded her students destroy their copies of
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
and not watch
The French Chef
because it was not “authentic.” (Yet Kamman’s résumé boasted of her L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes certificate.) “Mrs. Child was neither French nor a chef,” she informed everyone who would listen. Mrs. Kamman’s unhappiness and anger would alienate many beginning students, but she eventually did become a fine teacher of advanced cooks. Though she will no longer speak on the record about Julia Child, the quotes from her newspaper interviews and her letters to Julia tell the story. Kamman, the letters reveal, began by seeking out a relationship with Julia and then moved to condescending innuendo and veiled attacks, referring to Julia’s surgeries and to her not being a mother.

One of Julia’s letters to Simca, dated November 10, 1969, suggested the “feud” was a one-sided affair:

Madeleine Kamman and her husband came to dinner several weeks ago…. She is, obviously, very ambitious, and someone said that she intended to push us off the map! How long did she have lessons with you? Well, good for her, is all I can say, and I hope she is as good as she thinks she is, as we do need more professionally trained people in the business.

A year later Julia wrote a letter asking the food editor of the
Boston Globe
to take favorable note of Kamman’s cooking school. Julia’s seeming aplomb in handling what would eventually become twenty years of personal antagonism on the part of Kamman, reveals an aspect of her character that Ithiel and Jean deSola Pool, her professorial neighbors, have best articulated: “Julia has a strong ego and knows who she is and likes herself,” declares Mrs. deSola Pool.

Julia only once gave away her hurt and anger, as well as her humor, when she answered a question from Harvard’s Institute for Learning in Retirement in 1985: “How do you feel about criticism?” After a reasoned discussion of the question and an example of the criticism of “one woman” in her life, whose “put-downs and belittlements … I remember them all” had accumulated over the years, she adds, with a wink, that if the woman comes close, “I shall grab her by the short hairs (wearing gloves, of course), and I will grind her alive, piece by piece, in my food processor.”

There was also little time to fret about the feuds while celebrating the many positive reinforcements, including new young cooks who needed encouragement and help. Indeed, for Julia the conviviality and warm friendships far outweighed the petty words and thievery. A greater challenge came with the rising food consciousness first triggered in 1962 by Rachel Carson’s
The Silent Spring
(warning about DDT and malathion), then by nutritionists Adelle Davis and Euell Gibbons, which led to the brown rice, bean sprouts, and tofu wave of healthy eating as well as to what Harvey Levenstein called (and so well documented) “nutritional terrorism.”

Julia and Paul flew through a snowstorm to attend a dinner for 1,800 in New York honoring the French President in the Waldorf-Astoria’s biggest ballroom. She left the final chapter of her manuscript (eight months before publication date) to attend this state dinner with Presidents Pompidou and Nixon. The bejeweled and beribboned sat at tables for twelve, filling balconies and boxes and corridors, with the decibel level wiping out every note the musicians offered. Julia sat at one of the two tables for people in the food world, a table sponsored by Foods From France, a French government organization that would help with the WGBH filming in France, scheduled for later in the year. Beard sat at their table, which held magnums of Meursault, Beaune, and champagne. Julia loved the social whirl and glamour, and Paul (despite being distressed by the presence of Nixon) thought his wife was “smashing” in an
aou dai
of Siamese silk, wine-dark, sea-blue pants with a long, flowing turquoise overshift—“made in Bangkok, though inspired in Vietnam.”

Color and noise served as prelude to a new stage in her very public professional life.

Chapter 21
R
IDING THE
S
ECOND
W
AVE
(1970 – 1974)

“We must come in with a bang and not
go out with the Hoover.”

RUTH LOCKWOOD

A
S EDUCATIONAL
television executives watched the black-and-white demonstration tape on the monitors at WGBH, they saw the camera focus on the French tart Julia was preparing, then zoom in on the strawberries. Suddenly the picture burst into color: the strawberries were red! “Everyone stood up and applauded,” remembers Ruth Lockwood. It was the first time they had seen color and the contrast between the strawberry and the white
crème pâtissière
was breathtaking.” Paul remarked, “Christ may be risen, but I am nearly flattened.”

Five years later, those hopes for a color television in every home and a
French Chef in
living color were realized. Now the technology was available at WGBH (the 1965 demonstration had taken a dozen technicians from New York City to arrange) and Julia had completed the second
Mastering
volume. Next, on October 6, 1970, the New England press and media reporters were given a demonstration of the first program, on bouillabaisse, to air the next day.

T
HE FRENCH CHEF
IN COLOR

In the spring of 1970, WGBH had began filming with a grant from Polaroid. Producer Ruth Lockwood had no trouble getting a large block of money from the company because
The French Chef
, even after four years of black-and-white reruns, still had Nielsen ratings equal to its highest. The money covered filming both the typical demonstration programs as well as scenes taped in France. Three technicians in direction, filming, sound, and lighting, with handheld cameras, would accompany Julia and Paul on a film tour of France. The budget also included a makeup specialist, 35 millimeter movie footage and equipment, payment to Paul for still photography, and travel and hotels for the group in France. Even the theme music was to change, to what Paul called a “bouncing cancan” tune.

While Harvard students and townies rioted in Harvard Square against Nixon’s Cambodian incursion, Julia and her crew filmed for several days in early spring in the markets of Boston’s North End in order to work out the color implications and teamwork. After a full dress rehearsal (a “walkthrough” with real food), the team filmed two programs a week for three weeks in the studio. Finally technicians spliced scene footage into the demos: Julia’s buying capers and garlic at the North End street market was edited into the niçoise salad show. By the end of April, Julia and Paul were in France awaiting the arrival of the crew and correcting the proofs for her
Mastering II
.

The French Chef and her crew filmed olive pressing in Opio (near Plascassier), the fish market in Marseilles (eighteen years after her posting there), baking fish at Les Oliviers (outside St.-Paul-de-Vence), cheese at Chez Androuet in Paris, kitchen equipment at Dehillerin, the preparation of frog’s legs at Prunier’s, and duck pressing in Rouen (they shot between midnight and 5
A.M
. at La Couronne, where Julia had eaten her first French meal in 1948). On a hot day, in a tiny basement in the rue du Cherche-Midi in Paris, they filmed Lionel Poilane making bread. Calvel, who had taught Julia the final secrets of bread making, was also filmed in his school. Julia stressed in several letters to friends that they were collecting historical, rare footage of artisanal skills rapidly disappearing in France. They also filmed a modern French supermarket, thanks to Jacques Delécluse, husband of Paul’s former embassy assistant.

Back in Boston, they spent July editing and preparing voice-overs, and September and November filming new programs (including two on breads). In a studio of her own for the first time, at 125 Western Avenue, Julia and the
French Chef
crew filmed twice a week, each day preceded by a rehearsal day. The stakes were higher than during those first years when the black-and-white film had to be kept running. Now 134 stations nationwide would carry the show. As Ruth Lockwood frequently said: “We must come in with a bang and not go out with the Hoover.”

Julia was excited about the new series. Because she had not filmed during the four years she spent completing the book, she forgot (in her eagerness to get out of her isolated writing closet) how grueling and all-consuming filming was. It ate up twelve to sixteen hours in a day, especially when bread rose too fast or chocolate melted under the sixty-five floodlights. The procedure, in Ruth Lockwood’s words, was now “very sophisticated.” It was “a Persian Circus,” said Russ Morash, no longer on the series. “The committee got larger and larger.”

The thirty-five-person Boston crew included eight volunteer “associate cooks” (Julia honored people by giving them titles) who both watched the monitors for proper cooking angles and washed dishes. Paul took rolls of black-and-white photographs for newspaper publicity. The days she was not filming, Julia was writing, buying food, testing and preparing food, or rehearsing (to say nothing of the inevitable press interviews and her own correspondence). She and Paul chose this concentrated, exhausting film schedule to allow themselves blocks of time during the next two years to live in France. She prepared thirty-nine programs so she could have a regular slot on any station’s season program.

Jan Dietrichson sat in the audience “hypnotized—like a rabbit under the gaze of a cobra,” according to Paul. Dietrichson, their dear friend from the University of Oslo, was spending the winter semester at Harvard and staying in the Childs’ house. He was amazed by the daily crisis and chaos of shooting. Laughter was Julia’s release, and Paul remained her “balancing wheel,” noted Dietrichson.

The first week of October, WGBH used Julia’s
French Chef
set to host eighty press and media reporters from the area reached by WGBH. They were fed a catered lunch of recipes from
Mastering II
, then previewed the first show, “Bouillabaisse à la Marseillaise.” The
Boston Globe
reporter called the “lusty, peasant concoction” a fitting debut for Julia.

L
AUNCHING
MASTERING II

Almost the same week that radicals bombed the MIT offices of their next-door neighbor, Ithiel deSola Pool, Julia’s new book and new series appeared. The political turmoil almost encircled them as they launched this second wave of her culinary career.
Mastering the Art of French Cooking II
was published by Knopf on October 22, 1970, nine years after the release of the first volume. It had a first printing of 100,000 copies (matching the advance).

Twelve days after the official publication date, the new series of her weekly
French Chef
began on PBS with “Bouillabaisse” on October 8 and “Napoleon’s Chicken” on the twelfth. The cooking series launched the book. According to Julia’s introduction, the second volume was a “continuation” of the first and would “bring the reader to a higher level of master[y]” and “add to the repertoire.” Its principal feature was French bread: “the first authentic, successful recipe ever devised for making real French bread—the long, crunchy, yeasty, golden loaf that is like no other bread in texture and flavor—with American all-purpose flour, in an American home oven.” She gave proper credit to Professor Calvel as well as to Paul, who added a large tile of asbestos cement, pan of water, and red-hot brick to the oven-baking process. According to letters to Julia, many people (at least half of them men) took the nineteen-page recipe (with its thirty-four drawings) through to its conclusion.

The book was dedicated to Alfred Knopf and included in its 555 pages were seven sections: soup (much enlarged), baking, meats, chicken, charcuterie (new), vegetables, and desserts. She identified her culinary context as
la cuisine bourgeoise
(“meaning expert French home-style cooking”). Certainly the charcuterie may have been French, but no French home cook made bread every day or flamed baked Alaska. The recipes in the vegetable chapter, for example, were both traditional
(pommes Anna)
and original. Her audience, as suggested by the wording of her introduction (“part of your training,” “stepping out of the kindergarten,” “start you off in a whirl of success”) and the detail of her recipes, was the relative amateur; but the difficulty of many of the recipes, including the one for bread, assumed a more sophisticated or advanced cook.

The number and quality of the illustrations also enhanced this volume. They included thirty-eight pages on the modern equipment made available since the first volume had appeared. Admitting to a “rather holy and Victorian feeling about the virtues of sweat and elbow grease” in their first volume, which “reflects France in the 1950’s,” they now “step into contemporary life” and “[take] full advantage of modern mechanical aids.” Only in the second edition, more than a decade later, were they to add the food processor for dough making. These illustrations, and a wealth of drawings on the recipes (twelve drawings for
pâté en croûte)
, were carefully integrated with the text. The most respected American cookbooks thereafter would be influenced by these 458 careful illustrations.

On September 27, 1970, in the Crystal Ballroom of the Plaza Hotel, PBS helped Knopf launch the volume, with Hartford Gunn, the president of PBS, as host. Two days later a press conference was held in the Royal Ballroom of the Americana Hotel, and on October 22, the official date of publication, the Ford Foundation (one of PBS’s sponsors) gave a party in its garden for Julia and Simca. The party naturally focused primarily on Julia, much to Julia’s distress; Paul assured her that this was inevitable because Mr. Ford “never heard of Mrs. Beck.” Such fanfare signaled the distance Julia had traveled since the first collaborative book when their own feeble promotion was all they had.

Gael Greene in
Life
magazine said that in her set of highly competitive New York City foodies, everyone was testing Julia’s bread. Noting as well the three-page bisque recipe and the thirty-eight pages of basic accessories for the kitchen cook, she added that if “Volume I was mud-pie stuff,” Volume II “is no longer Child’s play.” Greene’s nod to the bisque recipe was confirmed by Mimi Sheraton, in whose copy the pages on shrimp bisque were still stuck together with food stains some twenty-five years later.

There were two negative responses to the book. In the
New York Times
, Nika Hazelton said the volume was “heralded like the second coming,” praised the “elegance and accuracy” of the book, then snipped about its excessive detail, saying an ideal reader needed to have the kind of mind “that people [do] who learn to drive a car by having the workings of the internal combustion engine explained to them in full detail.” She suggested rewriting a recipe before using it. For example, the three-page roast suckling pig in
The French Chef Cookbook
had swollen to five and a half pages in this new book. A second criticism came later, when Karen Hess said that Mrs. Child included too many dishes
en croûte
. Indeed, the
French Chef’s
“Operation Chicken” recipe became transformed into
poularde en croûte
, and joined
filet de boeuf en croûte, gigot farci en croûte
, and
jambon farci en croûte
. Not surprising, considering how many years they had been caught up in making bread, brioches, puff pastry, and the like.

In 1970 the level of cookbook criticism was still amateurish and the food world small enough so that few were qualified to analyze new books with any depth or candor. Julia’s stature loomed large in this world: at fifty-eight, she was a beloved television personality with her first volume already a classic, its techniques and recipes “adopted” in numerous magazines and cookbooks. An exception to the amateur’s level of reviewing was Sokolov’s review in
Newsweek
, which declared it a “daunting book. It leaves Volume I behind in a shower of spun sugar and makes that honorable world of the trout mousse and cassoulet seem in retrospect as naive as Spam…. It is hard to conceive of a cookbook to follow this one. It is without rival, the finest gourmet cookbook for the non-chef in the history of American stomachs.”

For her French bread recipe, Julia was honored by the Confrérie de Cérès in France. Public response was vigorous and sustained. Julia was delighted by the number of men who were cooking. When readers complained about a problem that was clearly of their own making, Julia was privately critical; when their difficulties were based on her own error or lack of clarity, she wrote back in detail and took steps to make minor changes. She answered all questions. As with the voluminous television mail, she created form letters for common queries concerning her published work.