Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (56 page)

With the assistance of Rosemary Manell, who flew in from San Francisco, and Elizabeth Bishop, an “associate cook” from the TV series, helping her on all of her demonstration trips, Julia’s routine was more professional and her teaching more advanced. Julia learned, she said, that “I need my own persons—Rosie Manell and Elizabeth Bishop—to travel around with me; you need somebody who knows your style.” According to Paul: “The team of Rosie, Liz, Julia and Paul works marvelously well together.” Yet with her performance skills, familiar assistants, and Paul’s talents (he was no longer washing dishes in rest-room sinks), her planning and schedules were still grueling experiences, as his detailed letters to his brother reveal, even with limousines and good hotels.

Now that she was broadcast in color, she seemed closer to her audience, who crowded her every appearance to touch her and have her autograph her book. Paul described the hourlong lines as “waves of love.” Frequently he was included in local television interviews. “She always had him sit beside her,” says Jane Friedman. “Paulski, as she called him, was always most important for her. It was charming to see them hold hands and kiss, to talk playfully of food and sex.”

Paul called fans “JW’s” or “Julie-watchers with cameras” when they traveled and were approached by American tourists in Oslo, Provence, or Paris. The Dehillerin brothers found that when they hung her picture on the wall of their French kitchen equipment store, the customers would exclaim, “Oh, Joooooolia!” The Boston JW’s spotted her at the market or movies, the symphony or a Red Sox game (Julia loved sports, but Paul thought the game “more interesting anthropologically than sportively”). Her neighbors often noticed her car: a large tin spoon was attached to the antenna.

To raise money for public television and keep her image before the public, Julia undertook another demonstration tour of the country in March and April 1973, just after her BBC failure. This time she also took along Ruth Lockwood. For these appearances, they sent ahead a detailed list of the equipment illustrated in
Mastering II
. Nevertheless, Julia transported eight pieces of luggage, including a two-burner stove. At each stop she would, as in Boston, write and record local pitches for public stations. Some stops were for book signings and media appearances only. Demonstration stops were for a particular charity (Chicago was for Smith College alumnae) and a fee was paid to WGBH. She was emotionally, intellectually, and financially tied to public television.

Paul believed that one was “a kind of Public Property in this epoch’s culture, if one’s name and face are well known.” In Brooklyn the police helped keep the book-hugging mob in a neat line, but in Chicago there was nearly a riot. Paul felt Julia had “created a speaking style and method that is first class.” (When she gave a lecture at the Harvard Law School, they had “the biggest audience [they] had ever had!” Even when the fuses blew, she kept on talking.) Her audiences responded immediately to her relaxed manner and spontaneous humor. She often began by reading some of the letters of complaint, and the audience roared. Her demonstration skills transferred from her television appearances and vice versa. She always wanted as many people as possible to see the demos, yet talked as if no one could see: “cut it on the shoulder, where the upper arm joins,” she said instead of “cut it here.” She pretended a blind person was in the audience.

Julia and Paul chose to keep up their heavy schedule. We “love it,” Paul told Charlie, it keeps “our juices flowing,” and “we are not wondering what to do in our retirement.” Michael Field died in May 1971 because he drove himself to overwork, Julia believed, but she did not feel she was overworking. She chose her focus—a book or a television series—and then gave it her total commitment. She told Elizabeth David about her television work: “We’ve brought this rush on ourselves, since we’d rather get it all done in a series of 2 lumps than let it drag all year.” Though Paul suffered from occasional serious insomnia and was beginning to be aged by the schedule, Julia seemed to thrive on activity and the contact with people.

Phila Cousins, then completing her education at Radcliffe and graduating magna cum laude in social psychology, was an important ingredient in Julia’s life during this time. Paul initially acted as a father-mentor figure, correcting and educating her (“first class mind but sloppy thinker,” he pronounced). “We McWilliams women had to be molded Pygmalion style,” Phila said. When she met and set up housekeeping with Bart Alexander, Paul believed she was in good hands and relaxed and enjoyed her growth and beauty. The two young people were frequently at the Childs’ or entertaining them at their apartment. When they married on July 14, 1974, in Sausalito, Julia and Paul were tied up completing a book in Provence; but they planned to celebrate Christmas at La Pitchoune while the young people spent a year of study in London.

Both Julia and Paul deliberately cultivated youth, both to keep themselves young and to avoid becoming fixed in their views and habits. Living near Harvard helped, for they had Phila and the numerous children of their friends and acquaintances, among them the children of David Brinkley and of Wendy Beck, whom they invited to a large party for young people in December 1973. “It was quite charming for me as a young person,” said Jane Friedman, “watching these older people who really liked each other. They liked my youth.” Julia also went to Pittsburgh to fulfill a promise to Mister Rogers, who had a long-running children’s program on television. For his vast audience of three- to six-year-olds, she demonstrated the making of spaghetti to be eaten with chopsticks. Unknown to the television world, children were avid watchers of “Julia.”

But Julia was most at home with her WGBH staff and her neighbors. In 1973, she was thrilled to be free of “our television maelstrom,” as she put it (Paul said, “Julie is going crazy from her new freedom, combined with a sudden release of her long-backed-up desire for social life”). They joined in the neighborhood traditions, according to Jean deSola Pool, their next-door neighbor, which were Christmas caroling in the neighborhood (“We were Jews and Moynihans are Catholic, and Julia and Paul were anti-religious, as were the people whose home we went to after the caroling,” Mrs. Pool says) and the John Kenneth Galbraiths’ June commencement party (“Oh, everyone went. They are still doing it”). Paul always called him “moose-tall” Galbraith and liked to talk economics and the oil crisis with him.

S
OLIDARITY FOR THE FOOD WORLD

Julia’s career and personal life were inexorably connected to the food world of chefs, cookbook writers, and cooking teachers. She believed in showing what she called “solidarity for our friends in the food world.” She attended their book signings and lectures (Paul thought that Claiborne’s lecture at Boston University was formless and embarrassing), wrote letters of support (to White House chef Henri Haller, whom Claiborne publicly criticized), bought equipment from Elizabeth David’s cookware store in London, and visited new restaurants. For their twenty-seventh wedding anniversary, after going to see the French film comedy
Le Sex Shop
, Julia and Paul dined at Maison Robert, an excellent new restaurant in the old Boston city hall building. She took an interest in the young chef Lydia Shire, transferring her loyalty to The Harvest and then to Shire’s own Biba, overlooking Boston Common.

Julia particularly enjoyed Chinese restaurants in Boston, or the upscale La Grenouille and Le Cygne in New York City, but she wrote Simca, “Food is getting too much publicity, and is becoming too much of a status symbol and ‘in’ business, and the fancy restaurant types are getting too commercial—all with their own wines for sale everywhere.” Later, after hearing for the third time that an American food person played tennis with the Troisgros brothers in France, she told Anne Willan (then at the
Washington Star
, one of the few non-“home economist” food editors), “I find I’m getting tired of all this foodie one-upmanship.”

When President Ford made dismaying comments on his food preferences in 1974, Julia wrote to chef Henri Haller with her regrets and sympathy. They could share private criticism about various Presidents’ bad taste in food: Nixon’s preference for catsup on cottage cheese and Ford’s remarks about eating being a “waste of time” and his preference for instant coffee, instant tea, and instant oatmeal (“I happen to be the nation’s first instant Vice President”).

After Beard met Graham Kerr, who had just moved to the United States, he called Julia for a long conversation about his seriousness. Julia suggested that he not leave his television program,
The Galloping Gourmet
, as he planned, because he had “a good TV personality.” What he needed, she told Beard, was “the right kind of program, and not a silly one,” because he could be “good and useful for the good cause of
la bonne cuisine.”

Julia supported the development of several cooking schools, particularly La Varenne. When it looked like Madame Brassart was going to retire and sell her Cordon Bleu, Julia and several friends decided to see if they could influence the sale to ensure a strong school for teaching French cooking to English speakers in Paris. Several were involved in the summer of 1972, including Odette Kahn, editor-in-chief of
Vins de France
and
Cuisine et Vins de France
, Marie Blanche (Princesse de Broglie), and Anne Willan with her husband, Mark Cherniavsky, whom Julia had met in Cambridge earlier that year. The Cherniavskys (Mark was at the World Bank) wished to move to Europe, where he had earlier lived for twenty years with his cellist father. Because Anne, who was a British food journalist and author, had studied at the Cordon Bleu in Paris and taught at the Cordon Bleu in London, they wished to own a cooking school, either by buying the Cordon Bleu (which turned out to be too expensive) or by founding their own. Julia and Paul saw their own partnership echoed in the marriage of this “civilized and charming” couple and kept involved over the years in the planning for their school (La Varenne). “Julia was very much responsible for the germ of the idea and for keeping us on track,” says Anne Willan.

On January 2, 1974, Paul and Jim Beard accompanied Julia past klieg lights and cameras to a celebrated dinner at the Four Seasons restaurant in New York, but the men stayed at the bar and drank wine, waiting for morsels of the meal to be brought to them. This was a dinner for women only, indeed for twelve leading women, a meal cooked by notorious male chauvinist Paul Bocuse and his fellow Frenchmen Jean Troisgros and Gaston Lenôtre “in response to criticism that no women had been invited to [an earlier] Bocuse dinner.” Gael Greene of
New York
magazine planned the promotion for these three French chefs and the press was crawling about hoping to taste samples along with Paul and Jim. Julia did not think the food was exceptionally good, and she seemed to resent the fact that the men tried to bring
all
the ingredients with them (some, including the foie gras, were confiscated at immigration). But she was excited to meet the other guests, who included Lillian Hellman, Pauline Trigère, Bess Myerson, Naomi Barry, Sally Quinn, and Louise Nevelson. Nevelson told a friend she attended just so she could meet Julia Child. Kay Graham, publisher of the
Washington Post
, had to back out at the last minute. Lillian Hellman, Julia told Simca (who had had
le lifting)
, had a “wonderfully raddled face (no
saquépage!).”
Julia thought it was soon boring without men and, she told Simca, these women had “nothing whatsoever to do with serious gastronomy.” She “wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” however. Paul concluded that this “Dinner of the Century” was a “vulgar affair,” but an amusing “publicity stunt.”

In the spring, the “magnificent quadrumvir,” as Paul called “Rosie and Lizzie” and themselves, gave thirteen demonstrations for local charities in Seattle, San Francisco, and Honolulu, netting an additional $10,000 for WGBH. At the Kabuki Theater in San Francisco, Julia’s trouble with a caramel cage to cover a dessert was one she would talk about for years. “It was during the Patty Hearst kidnapping in San Francisco and everyone was nervous and thinking about killers walking the streets. I was doing a dessert in a caramel cage in which I had to get the caramel just right and dribble it over a bowl to harden. I buttered the stainless-steel bowl, but the cage broke. It broke again during the evening demonstration. It was not pretty. Why am I doing this? I thought.” She later figured out that the caramel was too hot, thus melting the butter and sticking to the pan. “We learn so much through mistakes!”

Calvin Tomkins had joined them in San Francisco to write a profile of Julia for
The New Yorker
, which was published at the end of the year. He described her “unique blend of … earthy humor and European sophistication” and quoted Beard (“She has the kind of bigness that all great artists have. Singers especially … she just sweeps everyone up and carries them away”) and Merce Cunningham (“She moves like a dancer. Everything is direct and clear”). Another journalist remarked on her “sense of control, a feeling that everything has been organized.”

Two weeks later they flew to Provence (for the first time, her passport read “television and writer”) to spend as many months as they needed to complete the manuscript for her book based on the color version of
The French Chef
. Julia set her deadline for September 1. This second book on her own, again to be published by Knopf, was handled by her lawyer, Bob Johnson, who took over her account in 1969 after the death of Brooks Beck and suggested that Knopf was taking Julia’s books for granted.

A tough but dapper man of only thirty years who escorted various grand ladies to the Childs’ house and to official functions, Bob Johnson was gay but chose to keep his sexual preferences to himself. Because he came from a humble background and worked at a Brahmin firm, he had what one colleague called a “grandiosity and manner that could be [mis]interpreted as arrogant.” He was soon caught up in Julia’s business and celebrity.