Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (41 page)

Most important,
Mastering
became a landmark in food history. M. F. K. Fisher praised the volume, though on one occasion said its explanations were “so complicated.” Food people as diverse as Gregory Usher, who until his death in 1994 headed the Ritz Escoffier Cooking School in Paris, Barbara Wheaton, and Mimi Sheraton, author and longtime ruling restaurant critic (after Claiborne retired) of the
New York Times
, say that this volume is among their favorite books and the best of Julia Child’s work. Wheaton is on her second copy. Sheraton’s book falls open to food-stained pages of
boeuf à la catalane
(page 321),
pouding alsacien
(page 626), and
pêches cardinal
(page 630).

Several other important food books were published the same year as
Mastering
, including Crown’s English translation of
Larousse Gastronomique
, edited by Julia’s Smith pal, Charlotte Snyder Turgeon. Craig Claiborne’s
The New York Times Cook Book
appeared the same year he generously reviewed Julia and Simca’s efforts. Unlike the effusive responses of Beard and Claiborne, Field’s first words to his editor were: “Oh my, is this going to ruin the sales of my book?”

T
ELEVISION PILOT

On January 3, Paul drove Julia to Beth Israel Hospital for her operation, and laboratory tests determined that her tumor was benign. During her convalescence in Cambridge, Julia began testing recipes from Lady Bird Johnson, Jacqueline Kennedy, Mrs. Stewart Alsop, and others for José Wilson’s series on Washington hostesses, which would run all year in
House & Garden
. At the end of February, Julia had an offer to be interviewed on educational television in Boston and, because there was little promotion for the book in the Boston area, she accepted. The opportunity began when they invited Beatrice Braude for dinner, a friend fired in 1953 from the USIA Paris office who had also been caught up in the McCarthy witch hunt. Bibi came to Boston to work as a writer and researcher for Henry Morgenthau, who was producing Eleanor Roosevelt’s
Prospects of Mankind
for WGBH. She urged Julia to publicize her book by appearing on Professor Albert Duhamel’s interview program entitled
I’ve Been Reading
. Though Duhamel had never interviewed the author of a book so “trivial,” or practical, before, he yielded.

When Julia called the station to talk to Duhamel, Russell (Russ) Morash, a young producer in his twenties, answered the telephone. “I heard this strange voice which sounded like a smoker’s pack-a-day-combined-with-asthma voice who asked if the station had a hot plate. I said I doubt it.” He thought she was “very eccentric.”

Julia and Paul appeared with copper bowl, whip, apron, and a dozen eggs for her interview. “It was my idea to bring on the whisk and bowl and hot plate. Educational television was just talking heads, and I did not know what we could talk about for that long, so I brought the eggs,” said Julia. The interview and demonstration were not taped, as usual, because of the expense of tape ($220 to $300) and the difficulty of storing it. The response to the February interview was positive, and she received many requests for classes, briefly entertaining the idea of opening a cooking school in Boston. The station had other plans. Though several people have suggested that the station telephones “rang off the hook” and the station received “hundreds” of letters, they received twenty-seven letters, which they considered overwhelming support, says Morash. “A remarkable response,” adds WGBH’s president, Henry Becton, in 1996, “given that station management occasionally wondered if 27 viewers were tuned in to the modest program.” Julia later told a Smith College interviewer, “Most of the letters didn’t mention the book. They said, ‘Get that woman back. We want to see some more cooking.’ That gave them the idea.” The station manager, Bob Larson, and program director, David Davis, decided that young Morash would put together three pilot programs of Mrs. Child cooking.

Amid their preparations, Julia was suddenly called back to Pasadena (she had spent a week there in March). Her father died on May 16 at eighty-two years of age. The public funeral included his business associates and members of the California Club, as well as friends such as Andy Devine, the actor. The three children discovered after the funeral that their father had kept the urns with ashes of their mother and grandparents in his study. A chapter of Julia’s life, a chapter she walked away from years before, was finally closed. If there were any regrets, she would never acknowledge them. “Eh bien,” she wrote Dort, “it is hard to believe that old Eagle Beak is no longer around. Thank heaven his last 15 years were so happy, and that the actual death was so quick.” (Dorothy and Phila Cousins would remember in later years Julia’s eyes tearing up when they spoke of Pop.) Now she needed a new will, converting her assets to a Living Trust, and she and Dorothy turned over the monthly management of the family estate to brother John.

It took nearly three months to find the sponsors, but by June WGBH was ready to tape the pilots with a minimum budget of only a few hundred dollars. Not enough money to pay for rehearsals, but enough to buy tape. Educational television was largely a volunteer effort, with Boston University students running the cameras. Paul’s retirement and her $15,000-a-year family estate income allowed her to do her teaching on educational television, then as always a nonprofit venture.

“Russ, Ruthie, and I worked on the name,” Julia says of their program. They considered and rejected “The Gourmet Kitchen,” “French Cuisine at Home,” “Cuisine Magic,” “The Gourmet Arts,” “The Chef at Home,” “Cuisine Mastery,” “Kitchen à la Française,” and “Table d’Hôte.” “We called it
The French Chef
because it had to be brief enough to fit into the newspaper’s television guide.” Ruth Lockwood, who was working on the Eleanor Roosevelt program, remembers acting as associate producer, and planning the three programs while sitting around the Norwegian-built table with Julia and Paul. Everything was written out ahead of time. Ruth, who had both a graduate degree in communications (with a concentration in television) and experience at the Fannie Farmer Cooking School in Boston, drew the layouts.

Because the station burned down in 1961 (the first copy of
Mastering
that Bibi gave to Ruth Lockwood burned with it), they filmed in the auditorium of the Boston Gas Company just off Park Square. Morash worked out of a huge Trailways bus (“with seven million miles on it”) and long cables running from the generator into the building and across the terrazzo floor. Morash remembers that someone built a simple set and borrowed the appliances from architect Ben Thompson’s firm, Design Research; Julia recalled that “Ruth dug around somewhere and came up with the anonymous but sprightly musical theme song.” Lockwood remembers taking a red-checked tablecloth from her mother and cutting it up to make the curtains for the set and helping Julia with her makeup.

Julia and Paul arrived with all their pots and pans and eggs, piling them inside the lobby of the Boston Gas Company. While Paul parked the car, she waited for him and for a dolly to move the heavy equipment. “Hey, get that stuff out of this lobby!” said the uniformed elevator operator, as office staff and executives in business suits rushed by with disapproving looks. They finally found a janitor and got everything moved to the basement auditorium. When the crew arrived, Ruth was setting up the dining room for the final scene (she believed the “third act” should show the finished dish), Julia was arranging her detailed notes (“Simmering water in large alum. pan, upper R. burner”) and to the side Paul was arranging his notes (“When J. starts buttering, remove stack molds”). Every detail was scripted, dialogue on the right, what was to be pictured on the left. “Let’s shoot it!” called Russ.

We used 16 or 35 millimeter black-and-white film which ran continuously during the taping [says Morash]. There was no editing, no cutting in, and the only way to edit videotape was to literally cut the tape with a razor and tape it. We used two cameras, each the size of a coffee table, four only for the Boston Symphony, and when Julia moved from the stove to the refrigerator it was a very big deal that took careful planning.

The first pilot, “The French Omelet,” was set up and filmed on June 18, 1962. The second two, “Coq au Vin” and “Onion Soup,” were both filmed on June 25. The tapes were reused, as was the station’s practice, and ultimately disappeared from history. But on the typed script it is clearly shown that at the last minute they added the two words that would become her signature sign-off: “This is Julia Child. Thank you,
bon appétit.”

At 8:30 on July 28, after a big steak dinner, Paul pulled out the television they purchased and kept in an unused fireplace and watched the first program. Julia was shocked to see herself for the first time: “There was Mrs. C swooping about the work surface and panting heavily. I had put too much into the program. The second would be much better. Perhaps if I did twenty more,” she told James Beard, “I’d get on to the technique a bit better.” What the audience enjoyed in part was the
lack
of studied technique, the natural enthusiasm of Mrs. C.

I “careened around the stove, and WGBH-TV lurched into educational television’s first cooking program,” Julia wrote six years later. At the time, Morash says, “I did not think that this was going to be momentous. This was an extremely disposable medium, and I was doing important stuff like science and language. I was on data overload in those days.” He would later produce
The Victory Garden
and
This Old House
. Yet the timing was significant, for the January before
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
was published, President John F. Kennedy and his Francophile wife, Jacqueline, had moved into the White House and in April hired a French chef named René Verdon. French cooking was trendy and chic but seemingly unattainable, its techniques mysterious, the words unpronounceable.

Television was a relatively new medium, with the station signing on at four in the afternoon. Julia’s programs ran in what is now called prime time, precisely because it was educational and family-oriented. The introduction of French cooking attracted educational television’s usual audience of university and privileged people. “These pilots would not have worked in Bayonne, New Jersey,” says Morash. “It had to have happened in Boston. Julia was a child of academe, well connected to Harvard people.”

B
READ LOAF AND
THE CAMBRIDGE CIRCLE

For the second year, before the Child family holiday in Maine, Julia and Paul went to Bread Loaf, this time for the full term of the writers’ conference, from August 14 through August 29 (the third in her pilot series aired while she was in Vermont). The day after her arrival they celebrated her fiftieth birthday. For the fun of being with Avis and sitting in on the lectures and readings, Julia worked as “assistant deputy typist” to Mary Moore Molony, managing editor of
The American Scholar
and secretary in the summers at Bread Loaf (it was she who typed the Houghton Mifflin draft of Julia and Simca’s first, rejected version of the cookbook). Paul was official photographer, “the Photographic Consort,” as assistant director Paul Cubeta called him, the man who captured Robert Frost against the clear Vermont sky. “Julia is an absolute dreamboat,” he added in a letter that year. In recompense for their work they paid no room and board. Julia loved the classes: “I learn so much from the lectures, even the poets,” she told James Beard without apparent irony.

The Bread Loaf environment was both intellectually heady and physically relaxing. The writers’ conference, founded in 1926 and directed by John Farrar (then at Doubleday), was a summer camp for professors and writers, with the lure of drinking and fishing. Even the waiters were writers, unpublished but “highly promising.” Isolated and peaceful on acres of tranquil green grass, Bread Loaf offered only intellectual stimulation, and that was dulled nightly by alcohol. In truth, it had the reputation for alcoholic and sexual stimulation, earning the name Bed Loaf among insiders. The summer literary colony was also, at that time, “exclusively New England,” says Peter Davison. Julia and Paul became friends of poets Richard Yates, David McCord, John and Judith Ciardi, John Nims, Robert Frost, who lived just down the road, and Carlos Baker (Hemingway’s future biographer). They all gathered in the soft evening air, laughter emanating through the bushes of Treman House, which Avis oversaw. Here was the scene of the late afternoon alcoholic socials, much like Bernard DeVoto’s Sunday evening “hours” in Cambridge. Indeed, many of the people at Bread Loaf were connected to Cambridge circles.

Ciardi was the director, though Paul Cubeta made all the arrangements. The great poet was called “Big Daddy” behind his back, and his national reputation and hauteur kept him from being questioned about any decision. Frost, who was considered the unofficial poet laureate of the country, especially since his reading at the Kennedy inauguration the year before, was always the guiding light of the writers’ conference. Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Louis Untermeyer attended in past years, as did Wallace Stegner (Stegner and DeVoto had been boys together in Utah). Bernard DeVoto taught at Bread Loaf for decades before his death, after which Houghton Mifflin endowed a fellowship in his name. DeVoto insisted on teaching fiction, though David H. Bain, whose history of Bread Loaf is called
Whose Woods These Are
, claims rightly that DeVoto was a terrible novelist but a brilliant historian. Avis continued to work after her husband’s death and was paid a modest salary to put some order in the Bread Loaf house party.

“Treman House, a cream-colored cottage at the edge of the writers’ conference area, was dedicated to the generous drinking habits (Bloody Marys before lunch, cocktails before dinner, other drinks or beer after the evening lecture or reading). Treman was open to leaders, fellows, and visitors like me,” says poet Peter Davison, but “it was off limits to ordinary students.” There was a large veranda under two of the upstairs rooms. Davison remembers that the summer before, when the sun was setting on the downhill side of the mountain at the cocktail hour, Avis introduced him to Fletcher Pratt, William Sloane, and Julia (“a tall woman, robust, genial and smiling, with a remarkable voice”). Julia reminisced: