Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (64 page)

In order to give Lila Jaeger a promissory note, the group needed to have a legal basis. Thus, on September 23, the American Institute of Wine and Food was founded, and purchased the Simon-Lowenstein collection. “Lila actually bought the collection herself with the understanding that she would hold it until we could pay her off,” says Graff. Because they needed bylaws, Graff’s lawyer handed him the Sierra Club’s bylaws as Graff was running out of the office. Segal catalogued the approximately 850 books and sent them to John Howells Books on Post Street in San Francisco to be stored.

Julia was in Cambridge at the time of the “founding,” and Graff wrote (October 9) to tell her they had chosen the name Wine and Food as “more accurate and straightforward” (Huttenback also thought that “Wine” had more cachet). Julia had provided the inspiration, but it was Graff who carried the ball. He wrote to leading members of the food and wine worlds in October, saying, “Together with Julia Child and Jeremiah Tower, I am writing to you to announce the formation of the American Institute of Wine and Food and to invite you to become a Founding Member … [and] to be on our Board of Advisors.” The location of the AIWF would be the Santa Barbara campus. Paul Levy, the American food writer in London, was upset that the organization would not have “International” in the title. Dick countered that the name London Institute of Tropical Medicines merely denotes the location of the organization. (Fifteen years later, the Paris chapter unsuccessfully revived the same Levy argument.)

As the university students walked by with their surfboards, the third meeting of the group was “hanging ten on their own indubitable wave—the unprecedented surge of interest in food and wine in this country, especially … in California,” wrote Charles Perry, a foodie friend of Waters and Tower from Berkeley. He called it “a gastronomic think tank … the first meeting of an organization without parallel in the world.” They could feel the crest that sunny December 2, and were full of hope, grand plans, and a lunch of cold Pacific lobster and salads prepared by Julia and Jeremiah in the Cliff House on the rustic west campus of UCSB. The group now included those who responded to Graff’s invitation, vintners, restaurateurs, and food writers. Already on the Board of Advisors were Julia Child, Robert Mondavi, James Beard, M. F. K. Fisher, Danny Kaye, and Michael McCarty (of Michael’s restaurant in Santa Monica), as well as Paul Levy and Alan Davidson of London and the Oxford Symposium on Food. The following January the UCSB administration approved the location of the site.

Alice Waters’s commitment to videotaping (and selling) food-making processes before they passed away was still on the agenda, as were a scholarly journal, a library of original books and reprints, and research fellowships. The group formally agreed to establish “a center for the advanced study of enology and gastronomy, a repository of knowledge, and a source of information for its members as well as for the public.” Their fund-raising goal was $3 to $5 million in the first year. Huttenback expected his faculty to vote approval of the use of the building and land, but he was already hearing dissension from some, including his good friend Professor Henry Dorra, a Frenchman upon whom he had assumed he could count. As John Ronsheim discovered at Antioch, traditional academic departments did not recognize gastronomy as an academic or worthy study.

“The person who really grabbed it and ran was Dick Graff,” says Huttenback. During the coming year, Graff worked diligently to raise funds for the center and for the purchase of the books, sometimes taking Julia and Paul with him to visit major donors, notably a group hosted by Martha Culbertson of the Fallbrook Winery near San Diego. They eventually enlisted most of the big-name vintners of California: Graff, Mondavi, Sanford, Phelps, Sebastiani, Sterling, Culbertson, Martini, Mirassou, and Du Pont “SilverStone.” They also had Fritz Maytag, the washing machine heir, better known as founder of Anchor Steam beer and Maytag Blue cheese. Graff’s office, at 655 Sutter Street in San Francisco, was the provisional headquarters of AIWF. “Dick is an extraordinary man, a Renaissance man. He travels extensively and has many interests and is a great winegrower. He is responsible for most things in writing from the AIWF,” said future chair of the board of the AIWF Dorothy Cann Hamilton.

By November of that year he began publishing a monthly newsletter, a folded paper of four pages, written by Jackie Mallorca (collaborator for Beard’s columns). In the first issue he announced that $50,000 in seed money had been raised by the ten founding members: Child, Graff, Mondavi, McCarty, Tower, Fritz Maytag, Joseph Phelps, D. Crosby Ross, Richard and Thekla Sanford, Audrey and Barry Sterling.

A group of the founding members dined together with Julia on January 15, 1983, planning for a giant fund-raising dinner in San Francisco for May of that year. Julia said she would be in the middle of filming a new television series for Russ Morash at that time, but she would be there without fail. It was imperative they have a home and pay for the book collection.

Santa Barbara organized the first local chapter of the organization and asked Mary Dorra, the wife of Professor Henry Dorra and a good cook and writer, to be on its board. The Childs and Dorras shared Francophilia and occasionally Thanksgivings in the 1980s, says Mary Dorra. “Because my husband is French and prefers the formal style,” cooking with Julia “helped loosen things up for me as a hostess. She taught me to relax.” One night after Julia experimented with a new way to cook lamb that left it quite raw, the four of them were silently pushing the lamb around on their plates when Paul said, “I fail to see why with all the cooking that goes on around here we have to eat raw meat!” Julia replied, “Well, that’s the way it is sometimes.”

Though UCSB would not become the culinary research center they envisioned in the early years of the 1980s, Julia’s presence had an impact on the town. “Food before she moved here tended toward fancied-up meat and potatoes,” said one local resident. “However, Julia Child occasionally showed up at these places. Overnight, somehow, they learned to cook—at least to cook better.” “She’s a landmark at Von’s market,” said a neighbor. There were other international figures who moved to town. In 1984, Page Rense, the editor of
Bon Appétit, Architectural Digest
, and
Geo
, bought a house, and Julia was invited to the unveiling of Opus One, the joint venture of Robert Mondavi and Baron Philippe de Rothschild, a frequent visitor to Santa Barbara. But it was chiefly Julia who “revolutionized restaurant eating in Santa Barbara,” the neighbor maintains.

Tower, Waters, and Perry were part of a growing food cult in the San Francisco Bay area. Perry, who would become a distinguished food writer at the
Los Angeles Times
, remembers it started with a group of architecture students from Cambridge, Massachusetts, who had cooked their way through Julia’s
Mastering
books and were now in San Francisco growing their own vegetables and holding bimonthly potlucks. “Two of the best cooks in the group were an architect named Jerry [Tower] and his friend Alice [Waters].” Twenty-five years after Alice opened her Chez Panisse in 1971, Laura Ochoa of the
Los Angeles Times
would call her “the earth mother of California cuisine,” and S. Irene Virbila could name “an entire generation of chefs” who trained with her. Though she was devoted to Elizabeth David’s books, and especially to Richard Olney’s recipes, she used Julia’s books as reference and her life as a model: “She paved the way for Chez Panisse because she was an unpretentious Francophile who taught the generation who became my customers to value good food.”

San Francisco’s many wealthy families and the vintners of Napa Valley also added to what one food writer called the “social ether” of San Francisco. For Julia, San Francisco was the home of Dorothy and Ivan, Rosie Manell and Gay Bradley Wright, as well as the Stanford Court, run by James Nassikas, where James Beard held cooking classes in the 1970s assisted by Marion Cunningham, his former student. San Francisco was also the location of a serious cooking school, founded in 1977, offering a sixteen-month diploma for professionals: the California Culinary Academy. In his
The Official Foodie Handbook
in 1985, Paul Levy named it one of only two seriously “foodie-approved” schools in the United States, meaning not for home cooking or catering.

Los Angeles was also fertile ground for the AIWF, where co-founder Michael McCarty had his restaurant in Santa Monica. “In the early 1980s, Los Angeles was the most exciting place to eat in America,” Ruth Reichl declared in the
New York Times
in 1997. Because of her close proximity to Los Angeles, Julia was familiar with the many French-trained chefs at Ma Maison, a restaurant founded by Patrick Terrail, nephew of the owner of Paris’s Tour d’Argent. Julia first noticed what she called the “Swiss-German Mafia” among the French chefs in Los Angeles, probably referring to Wolfgang Puck, who left Ma Maison on July 4, 1981 (“my independence day,” he calls it). Julia soon visited his Spago restaurant as well as St.-Germain, where the chef was Patrick Healy, grandson of her friend Harriet (who had studied at their Trois Gourmandes school in Paris). Healy had lived at La Pitchoune when he was apprenticing with Roger Vergé, and would later open Champagne, which he lost in a divorce from his French-born wife.

J
ULIA THE TEACHER

“We at last have time to give some live cooking classes, which are fun to do again,” Julia informed Louisette when she moved West. That August, on her sixty-ninth birthday, when her knees were hurting her, she informed Simca that “we survive because we stay active!” Indeed, her work with the AIWF, her support of a growing number of professional food organizations and schools, her charity demonstrations, and her live teaching at cooking schools would characterize this decade of her professional life. She was about the same age as chef Max Bugnard when she had studied with him at the Cordon Bleu.

For a woman with bad knees, Julia stood for too many hours behind the table and stove of many home cooking schools during 1981 and 1982. For each series of classes she prepared, sometimes using recipes she could adapt for national magazines or for
Good Morning America
, she worked in her Santa Barbara kitchen or typed in her office, looking out over the green meadow to the sea. She taught four-day weekend classes at the Stillwater Cove Ranch on the Sonoma coast in 1981, at Ma Maison in Los Angeles that December, and the following year in Phoenix and Longview, Texas.

Her most elegant experience was teaching for three years in the week-long “Great Chefs” series for the Mondavi vineyards. It was “the total gastro Rolls-Royce treatment,” she wrote to Mary Frances. Designer Billy Cross and chef Michael James (Simca’s student) conceived of the series, whose expense Mondavi now assumed, and everything about the week was first-class. In addition to fifteen Mondavi assistants, Julia had Rosemary Manell, whose pizzas were always the sensation of the Sunday lunch. A friend was visiting to assist Julia at Ma Maison, and Maggie Mah, a friend of Rosemary Manell and of Marion Cunningham in San Francisco, helped her in Northern California appearances. Julia loved the personal aspect of teaching classes and the absence of the time pressure she had on television.

She was a natural teacher. When the sauce curdled while she was talking to the students, she washed off the chicken, put the sauce in the blender and it was fine. “We always have to be ready to wing it. Know what you are doing so you don’t get flapped,” she declared. Martha Culbertson, who was in the class the first time with Julia, remembers Paul having trouble photographing Julia’s work. “Julia stopped her demonstration, went to his side, and helped him solve the problem. It made a statement about love and loyalty.”

Julia and the Mondavis became fast friends during these weeks in Oakville as a result of the series and their joint effort for AIWF. Julia admired couples who were partners in their work and confided to Simca that the “Mondavis seem happy together.” She expressed genuine fondness for Margrit Biever (Mondavi), who was in charge of all cultural events. Biever, in turn, admired Julia’s common sense and earthiness: “I can see her planting both feet on the floor in front of the class, her hands on the kitchen table, and speaking with total honesty to the students. ‘Hello,’ she would say, ‘I hear some of you don’t like butter!’” The fair, diminutive Swiss wife of Robert Mondavi saw her tall California friend as both strong and feminine: “She is not maternal, but she could have managed ten children…. Men react to her and she truly interacts with men.”

Julia also put her teaching skills to work doing charity demonstrations until the end of 1982. She spent two days in New Haven for a large fund-raising event for Betty Kubler’s Longwharf Theater (and would do it twice again in the 1990s), and cooked with her sister Dorothy for one of her and Ivan’s annual food fairs for charity in San Rafael (a picture of the two tall sisters in matching aprons was published in
People
magazine). But her favorite charity, for which she made three appearances in 1982, was Planned Parenthood. At a dinner for Planned Parenthood husbands at Ma Maison in Los Angeles on February 28, 1982, she sat next to chef Ken Frank (La Toque), who was babysitting his newborn, asleep in a baby harness on his chest. Though two generations separated Ken and Julia, they shared the experience of being born and reared in Pasadena and attending the Polytechnic School. Julia cooed over the Frank baby, wishing that all babies would be loved. Her next contribution was at a three-day fund-raising cooking class for the Planned Parenthood in Memphis, where she was confronted by demonstrators who picketed her every day. Upset, Julia wrote to syndicated columnist Dear Abby, who promptly published Julia’s letter, part of which says: “What are your plans [she asked the picketers] for these children once they are born? Are you going to help provide, for instance, for the child of a retarded 13-year-old daughter of a syphilitic prostitute? … If you insist on their birth, you must also assume responsibility for their lives.”