Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (42 page)

We went because of Avis, who was in charge of the bar. I went to a lot of the lectures and learned about writing and how vivid it should be. Our house had a lot of fun, and Treman was where everyone drank a lot, screaming and yelling. Once when I went back to our house, I could hear the screaming from there. Ran into my old friend Joe Sloane who had lived in Pasadena, and we made many longtime friends.

Though Julia and Paul lived in Maple House this and later summers, they worked and hung out at Treman Cottage, which Avis ran “on a strict system, like a military social club where, before equality came in, they welcomed only the anointed few,” according to a later assistant director. Edward (Sandy) Martin, professor of English at Middlebury, said, “It was a social center of the colony and only the staff were welcome for drinks. They drank until just before dinner and then walked into dinner almost late and all sat at the ‘high table,’ a long table at the rear near the window where it was cooler. Since they were not paid well, Ciardi felt they should have privileges.”

“The social tides of Cambridge washed us up on the same beaches as the Childs quite frequently,” said Peter Davison, then a thirty-one-year-old editor at the Atlantic Monthly Press. After meeting Julia and Paul the previous summer at Bread Loaf, he and his wife, Jane Truslow Davison (a distinguished writer in her own right), dined with the Childs at the home of Theodore and Kay Morrison—he taught at Harvard and was longtime director of Bread Loaf before Ciardi took over. At Avis’s book party for Julia, the Childs met two other Atlantic Monthly Press colleagues, including Wendy Morison Beck and her husband, H. Brooks Beck of Hill & Barlow, who eventually became the Childs’ first lawyer. Julia was partial to Jane Davison because she was witty and literate, a Smith sister (housemate and graduate with Sylvia Plath in 1955), and unafraid to invite the Childs for dinner. These were what Davison calls “the days of ambitious dinner parties given by underemployed literary housewives.”

Through the late Davis Pratt, Paul’s former student and prodigy at Avon Old Farms School and a curator of photography, they met Davis’s twin brother, Herb, and his wife, Pat, lifelong residents of Cambridge. The Herb Pratts became very close to the Childs, traveling back to Europe in coming years, and Pat would become one of a host of volunteers on Julia’s television shows.

If Boston, with all its educational institutions, was “an academic tribal reservation,” as one of its journalists claimed, “the reservation was centered in Cambridge.” In addition to their OSS colleague Cora DuBois at Harvard, Paul had a childhood friend, the distinguished composer Randall Thompson, head of the music department. Harvard was “a carbuncle of cabals and cliques,” wrote novelist Wallace Stegner in his biography of Bernard DeVoto, but the Childs’ faculty neighbors all became lifelong friends, especially those who were part of Bernard DeVoto’s
The Hour
(his mock-heroic hymn to alcohol published anonymously in 1951) and whom Julia and Paul met in November 1959: Marion Schlesinger, then married to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Kitty Galbraith, wife of John Kenneth. Both were off serving the Kennedy administration when Julia and Paul moved to Cambridge. Schlesinger, who like his father before him was a history professor at Harvard, was serving as special assistant to the President. Catherine (Kitty) Atwater, Julia’s Smith classmate, was then living in India, where Galbraith was serving as U.S. ambassador. The Galbraiths would return in 1963 to Harvard and Francis Street, behind the Child house. Kitty told Julia she gave
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
as a wedding gift in India. Galbraith admired the intelligence Julia brought to her profession and her height: “We encountered each other as people whose heads were always above the crowd.” The nearly seven-foot Galbraith believed that “if she had been a foot shorter, she would have had a much more difficult time. The only form of discrimination that is still allowed in the world is in favor of tall people and it’s a very subtle matter.” Marion Schlesinger called Galbraith and Child the “benign storks” of her neighborhood.

Literary Boston of the late 1950s would be portrayed by Peter Davison in
The Fading Smile
. The center of this literary world, and the subject of Davison’s longest chapter, was Robert Lowell, whose “For the Union Dead” young Davison published in
The Atlantic Monthly
, where he was poetry editor. His literary memoir is a group portrait not only of Davison himself and Lowell but also of Robert Frost, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Richard Wilbur, W. S. Merwin, Donald Hall, Maxine Kumin, Adrienne Rich, and Stanley Kunitz. Julia and Paul moved to Cambridge just as Boston was beginning to lose its attraction as the central watering hole, to use Richard Eder’s image, of American poetry in this century. None in this tweedy or seersucker (depending on the season) Boston knew that the voice that would become the most famous in their city (after Kennedy) had just moved into the Josiah Royce house on Irving Street.

These overlapping circles of WGBH, Harvard, Shady Hill, and the Atlantic Monthly Press groups washed together through the years. Many of their friends became regular habitués of Lopaus Point in Maine in the summers, where they all met Walter and Helen Lippmann over cocktails. Also on Mount Desert Island with the Charlie Childs was the summer home of the great Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison (Wendy Beck’s father).

“We live in a lovely town because everyone is doing something,” Julia was fond of saying. That they belonged in the intellectual circles of Cambridge and Boston was clear in the minds of their friends. Paul was a learned conversationalist whose interests and knowledge ranged widely. Julia had a New England dignity everyone respected and she remained clearly noncommercial, never endorsing a product. She could become a television personality without loss of stature because she was on educational television. “Julia was a scholar,” said Morash, “because she eats and breathes her subject, researches every detail, can take a set of directions and understand what the result will be, is totally comfortable with her subject, and is a recognized authority.”

As early as August 23, Julia informed Beard that there was a plan for a series of television cooking classes with guest chefs such as Stöckli of the Four Seasons and there was a good chance New York City’s Channel 13 would buy the series. She saw the television classes as an extension of her teaching, not as a career in itself. In her world, television occupied no major space, and indeed it was suspect. They did turn it on to see Richard Nixon’s farewell to the press (“I hope this is the last we shall see of him publicly,” she said, having just read Teddy White’s
The Making of the President)
.

She went to New York City in October and November to teach classes at James Beard’s cooking school, hoping to team up with Beard and Helen Evans Brown for joint lessons and demonstrations. Julia and James Beard were drawn to each other for many reasons. Both were Westerners (from California and Oregon), companionable, generous, and big. They loved the theater of the kitchen and hated pretension. Beard, who became her news line to the New York food world, was a jovial and natural man who folded his egg whites with his hands. They would be “brother and sister,” wrote his first biographer, Evan Jones.

While Julia was in New York, Beard arranged for her to demonstrate the making of
pâte feuilletée
at the Four Seasons. (“Don’t know why they want me to do them, when all those fancy types are in NY,” she wrote to Dort.) She also took every opportunity to teach small groups in private homes in her neighborhood:

As a way to earn money and get a class going I gave cooking lessons at a friend’s house for her friends [she told food writer Barbara Sims-Bell]. I would give them a great lunch, such as poached egg on mushroom and leek salad, a little pastry thing with béarnaise sauce, and chocolate cake. I did not have to worry about buying the food or getting the friends; I only charged $50 dollars; sometimes I would buy the food and give them the bill. They provided the wine. Then I would leave them with the dishes. I would leave with $200. I would not have made money in my own home. For all that work, you should make some money.

The last months of 1962, before they left for Christmas in San Francisco with Dorothy, were devoted to preparations for the January filming of thirteen (of a projected twenty-six) half-hour programs of
The French Chef
, produced by Russ Morash. Associate producer Ruth Lockwood, Paul, and Julia planned and named each segment. Life would never be the same again.

Chapter 17
L
ET
T
HEM
E
AT
Q
UICHE:
T
HE
F
RENCH
C
HEF
(1963 – 1964)

“I’m a teacher and I’ll stay with the educators.”

JULIA CHILD

As
THE CAMERA
moved in toward the steaming pot, Julia leaned down with her kitchen pinchers and lifted the cheesecloth cover to peer inside, then looked up into the camera and said, “What do we have here? The big, bad artichoke. Some people are afraid of the big, bad artichoke!” The music swelled and the title
The French Chef
filled the screen. “Welcome to
The French Chef
I’m Julia Child.”

She stood behind the counter on another day, with a large knife held high over a row of naked chickens, each resting upright on its tail, or what was traditionally called (she would later point out to a few angry viewers) the “pope’s nose.” As she moved from her left to her right, the smallest chicken to the largest, she tapped each chicken as if knighting them and announced dramatically, “Miss Broiler, Miss Fryer, Miss Roaster …” The music announced
The French Chef
and Julia introduced herself last.

On another occasion, after making a potato pancake that did not properly brown on one side, she demonstrated how to flip it over in the pan. “You have to have the courage of your convictions,” she said, giving the pan a short, fast jerk forward and back. She succeeded only partially and had to pick a piece of the potato mixture off the stovetop. “But you can always pick it up. If you are alone in the kitchen, whooooooo is going to see?” she sang with confidence.

At the end of each program, even one in which she was moist with stove heat and exhausted by chopping, she carried her dish to the demonstration “dining table,” lighted the candles, poured the wine, and tasted the dish with obvious relish and triumph, almost with an air of surprise. Once again, “the forces of art and reason,” as Lewis Lapham put it, had “triumphed over primeval chaos.”
“Bon appétit!”
she called out, lifting her glass of wine. Brought to you by Hills Bros. Coffee and Polaroid.

Theater, as Aristotle pointed out two thousand years ago, is both spectacle and a well-turned plot with beginning, middle, and end. To Ruth Lockwood’s credit, Julia’s half-hour programs were mini-dramas beginning with the presentation of the characters (chorus line of chickens, steaming artichokes), then the plot (the challenge of creating a dish called
poulet en cocotte bonne femme)
, the rising tension (deboning, stirring, mixing), the climax (cooked chicken drawn from the oven), and the resolution (nibbles from a beautifully presented dish). Each program had about it, one critic noted, “the uncertainty of a reckless adventure.” Drama and resolution.

Julia’s sense of timing and her dramatic skills were an integral ingredient in the success of
The French Chef
. The gangly girl who staged plays in her mother’s attic with her brother John and the Hall children, who acted in plays for the Katharine Branson School, Smith College, and the Junior League, had long prepared herself for performing in front of an audience. Even when she and Simca were creating their book, she urged her partner to think in terms of an audience and “clean up” any bad habits.

Julia understood the value of the visual presentation, whether it was lining up naked chickens according to size or holding up two baguettes to the camera, watching one fall slowly and limply until it formed a circle, then tossing it over her shoulder with disdain, saying, “Terrible, terrible bread!” Or holding up two lobsters and explaining how to tell the boy lobster from the girl. Julia credits Lockwood and later Morash with some of her great openings and closings. Later she named a suckling pig John Barrymore because of his beautiful profile. “She is a natural clown,” Paul pointed out to the numerous journalists who in the years to come would visit the tapings. Many reporters commented on the ease of her performance. One reporter mistakenly called it “an ad-libbed show,” and a magazine termed her approach “muddleheaded nonchalance.” The best dramatic talents make their work look “easy.” As her friend Betty Kubler, a founder of the Longwharf Theater in New Haven, said of Julia’s acting genius, “Well, she’s got it! It is something you have or don’t have … a presence, timing, instinct for what’s funny, the ability to carry through with a gag or prop, it’s instinct.” Food writer Jeffrey Steingarten adds: “It is her personality. She didn’t invent herself for the show.”

M
AKING
THE
FRENCH
CHEF

Behind the scenes, as few in the audience would know, were many people, hours of preparation, four to six versions of the same dish at various stages of preparation, numerous notes and lists, and—as it is in legitimate theater—a lot of mess and fakery: though she appeared alone, there were several technicians and a hardworking husband behind the camera. The “wine” in the bottle was really Gravy Master (a darkening mixture) diluted with water. One false behind-the-scenes story that took on mythical proportions had assistants crouched under the table to take away dirty bowls. That scene was staged as a skit for a WGBH fund-raiser.

The first program of
The French Chef
was filmed on January 23, 1963. WGBH began with a series of thirteen episodes, then added thirteen more—never knowing there would eventually be 119 half-hour programs. Each program lasted 28 minutes and 52 seconds. Julia began with
boeuf bourguignon
and French onion soup, and ended with lobster
à l’américaine
and
crêpes suzette:
“Ruth, Paul, and I decided to start out with a few audience catchers, dishes that were famous [Russ called them her old chestnuts], like
boeuf bourguignon
, and then gradually work into the subject.”

When the Boston Gas Company dismantled their original kitchen, Russ Morash found a demonstration kitchen which would accommodate his outdoor bus at the Cambridge Electric Company on Blackstone Street. It was on the second floor of “a warehousey-looking building behind the smokestacks that line the Charles River.” Citizens paid their electric bills elsewhere in the building, but the kitchen, used for home economics demonstrations, “was a real
Leave It to Beaver
kind of kitchen with chintz curtains looking out on a fake background with sink and countertop, refrigerator, and built-in oven. We built an island for the stove and the cutting and chopping area.” Design Research again sent over the dining-room set to be used in the final scene of each program.

Paul, who arrived early and shoveled the snow off the fire escape steps above the parking lot, was porter and unpacker, even dishwasher. “Paul was the entire physical part of it,” said Ruth Lockwood. “He was there from the planning to the wash-up.” Julia and Ruth arranged the equipment Paul brought up the fire escape and, while Ruth called out each item on a long list, Julia said “check.” Julia arranged simple idiot cards (“put butter here,” “turn on burner #3”), and Ruth held a loose-leaf notebook and stopwatch as well as cards that said “stop gasping” and “wipe face.” Marian Morash, married to Julia’s producer, Russ, describes Julia as “an incredibly organized person who would come to the location with everything organized. I loved the no-nonsense care when working with food, and [her] spontaneous gaiety and sense of humor that surrounded the business at hand.” They began doing four programs a week, then cut back to three, eventually two, and at the end of two years finally one. Russ Morash believes that as the idiot cards got more detailed and numerous, the program became “less spontaneous” (though more professional). “The best programs were the first ones we made, which are no longer available.” Avis also thought these were “the best of the lot” because they “had a sort of purity to them.” In the introduction to her next book, Julia explained why they became more structured: she had no sense of whether one or five minutes had passed, and making onion soup one day she thought she had too many techniques to demonstrate—cutting, softening, browning the onions,
crouton-making
, gratinéing:

I rushed through that program like a madwoman but I got everything in, only to find that when I carried the onion soup to the dining room I had gone so fast we still had 8 minutes left. Agony. I had to sit there and talk for all that time. Russ erased the tape back to about the 15-minute point, but after it happened again, Ruth devised the plan of breaking up the recipe into blocks of time. I could go as fast or slow as I wanted in the allotted time block, but I could not go into the next step until I got the signal.

For the first series Julia spent the weekend planning and writing the program, spent Monday shopping with Paul, preparing the food and rehearsing at home. On Tuesday, they moved everything over to the studio and taped the program. On Wednesday, Julia began the process again while Morash filmed
The Science Reporter
, and on Thursday they set up and taped another one or two programs. For the next series they taped on Wednesdays and Fridays, putting the program together live, meaning they taped without stopping the film. Julia had to come prepared with a raw goose, a partially cooked goose, the cooked goose, and a spare.

The purpose of the programs, as in all her teaching, was to present French techniques, such as wielding a knife, boning a carcass, cleaning a leek, whipping or folding egg whites. “The idea was to take the bugaboo out of French cooking, to demonstrate that it is not merely good cooking but that it follows definite rules. The simplicity of a velouté sauce, for instance, is butter, flour, and seasoned liquid, but the rule is that the flour is cooked in the butter before the liquid is added. If you don’t cook [in this sequence] your sauce will have the horrid pasty taste of uncooked flour.” Julia the teacher spent nineteen hours preparing for
each half hour
of teaching: a fraction of the time taken for a recipe in their book, yet a disproportionately long amount of time for “classroom” preparation; but her ephemeral art was being made permanent on film and her audience was a thousand times greater than an average demonstration class. “Mrs. Child,” said Lewis Lapham, “thinks of herself as a missionary instructing a noble but savage race in a civilized art.” When the news went around that “commercial networks are begging her to come aboard,” she informed one paper that “I’m a teacher and I’ll stay with the educators.”

Russ operated on a shoestring, and he believes that his ability to keep down expenses was “one reason for the lengthy success” of the program. He called it “guerrilla television,” for operating with huge machinery under an urgent sense of time was like going to war. At first the studio paid $50 per episode to Julia and Paul, who did all the shopping. By 1966 she received $200 plus expenses per program.

Educational television (now called public television) began in Boston as an outgrowth of lectures at the Lowell Institute. It got its money from government grants and industry donations but did not operate for a profit, and was especially blessed in Boston, which granted it a low number (Channel 2). Because lower frequencies are easier to tune in, most big cities gave their lower numbers to commercial stations such as ABC, NBC, and CBS (a commercial exploitation that held back educational television a generation, says Morash). The efforts of Boston banker Ralph Lowell and the power of the city’s educational and cultural institutions—WGBH is licensed by the FCC to MIT, Boston University, Harvard, the Boston Symphony, the Boston Museum, and Boston College, among others—resulted in getting the lowest number for their educational channel. But, as Morash points out, “we did not have the money to buy a transmitter big enough to get the signal up to New Hampshire then. It was like putting the signal out with a fifty-watt bulb and a guy pedaling.” Nevertheless, Julia was there at the beginning; indeed, she helped to build what would be one of the most influential educational stations in the country.

When the taping was over, the crew usually ate the edible food, though sometimes they refused to eat produce such as asparagus, which was unfamiliar. Slowly, they became more adventuresome and ate asparagus, mushrooms, and chicken livers. “The best free lunch in town,” said one grip. Julia sent the raw or partially cooked version home with Russ, with detailed instructions for its cooking. Marian, his wife, prepared the dish as if she were taking at-home classes with Julia. Her burgeoning talent for cooking eventually won out over her shyness and she came onto the set of a 1970s series as a regular assistant to Julia.