Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (43 page)

They set an incredible pace the first year of taping by working twelve-hour days and finishing thirty-four shows during the first half of the year. “I like working with men,” Julia often said. “Russ,” who was not yet thirty, “was the boss!” In 1994 he said, “By today’s standards the schedule was heroic.” “It’s the hardest work I’ve ever done,” Julia informed Helen Evans Brown, who wrote from Pasadena that she heard Julia’s programs “are terrific…. It takes a certain very definite personality to come over the air and you have it. Poor Jim [Beard] doesn’t, which is a pity as he is 7/8th ham!” (By October the Pasadena station was airing
The French Chef.)
Beard, with whom Julia hoped to collaborate, invited her down whenever there was a break in her filming to teach several classes at his cooking school. Her letters reveal that Julia intended to present other cooks, both professional and talented amateurs, on her television program, but while she was waiting until the program was professionalized enough to invite Beard to appear, she became the only performer the audience expected and wanted to see each week.

In addition to this back-aching schedule, Julia managed to correct the page proofs of the British edition of
Mastering
, tape promotion ads for WGBH fund-raisers, teach classes for Beard, give special demonstrations at the Women’s City Club, the Boston Club, and Newburyport’s Smith Club, as well as sit for interviews with the press in Boston and New York City. That summer she and Paul missed Bread Loaf, but took two and a half months in the fall to visit Norway (sailing on the
Oslofjord
for Oslo on August 22), France, and England. Julia saw for the first time France’s only television cook, Raymond Oliver, who appeared every two weeks and “took five minutes to peel the peppers,” she wrote Avis DeVoto. But the most important result of these weeks in the south of France was to plan with Simca for a second volume of
Mastering
. They also discussed the possibility of building a small house for Julia and Paul on Jean Fischbacher’s family land in Provence.

Julia also met Elizabeth David, England’s doyenne of cookery writing. Their meeting was preceded by several important moves: advance buildup by DeVoto and Beard, a mailing of
Mastering
to David (who responded on May 10, 1963, that it was “marvelous” and “meticulous”), and the publication of the British edition of
Mastering
by Cassell, for which David wrote a review. Formerly an actress, David now shunned the public spotlight and wrote enduring culinary literature
(French Provincial Cooking
, her penultimate book, was published in 1960); indeed, her first books did not even list ingredients. “Her recipes were the reverse of Julia’s,” says Alice Waters, her most ardent American disciple, “she begins at the market and then makes the recipe.” Julia, overlooking her anti-American reputation, found her “nice, quiet, shy,” and when she read David’s review (“the first one from a real pro”) she was ecstatic: David drew a lengthy and exalted comparison of Julia with her “predecessors” Eliza Acton and Madame Saint-Ange—all three had “quiet persistence … style … and heart.” As happy as Julia was with the review, she shuddered at the “translation” into English by someone who was not a cook.

Julia returned to Boston for immediate resumption of filming
The French Chef
in the first week of December 1963. One-third of the recipes for the program came from
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
, but most were slightly revised because time constraints necessitated cutting a few steps. She learned to bring in one prechopped onion and one on which she would demonstrate the chopping technique before showing the viewer what the fully chopped onion was to look like. Some of the recipes would be used later in
Mastering II
. “How am I going to squeeze in another book?” she wondered. “That is the big question.”

One of the most imaginative aspects of the programs concerned the invention of titles. Ruth Lockwood remembers laughing uproariously at the Childs’ kitchen table as they created the titles for later programs: “Waiting for Gigot,” “Introducing Charlotte Malakoff,” “Lest We Forget Broccoli,” and “A French Cape.” “We were so proud of our titles, but no one paid attention to the titles,” said Mrs. Lockwood ruefully.

In 1964 she taped thirty-one more programs, filming every Wednesday and Friday for six weeks, then resuming after a month off and repeating the process in the spring (in November and December they made one program a week). They also initiated formal rehearsal time and used more unpaid assistants to help in preparation and washing up. Rosemary Manell came up from Washington, DC, to work for the spring shoot as Julia’s unpaid assistant and food arranger. They had cooked together in Marseilles, Georgetown, and Brussels (when the Childs were in Bonn). Rehearsal time and other factors increased the cost of the production.

Julia continued to teach at Beard’s cooking school and sat for an important interview with Craig Claiborne. His article featured her kitchen and
batterie de cuisine
on half a page of the March 5 issue of the
New York Times
. Except for sold-out demonstrations at Wellesley for the Smith alumnae scholarship fund (she raised more than $2,000), Julia had to turn down most requests for her time. She avoided public speaking, but would ad-lib through a cooking demonstration. Her first public speech (on cookbooks) was in a small library in Massachusetts and was a chore, even with Paul’s assistance. When the second shooting of the TV series was finished in the late spring, she spent a week in Lumberville for the publication of Charlie’s book on the building of their Maine cabin,
Roots in the Rock
, edited for the Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown by Peter Davison, who spent repeated summers on Mount Desert Island and knew it well.

T
HE
BOSTON GLOBE
AUDIENCE

Julia was eager to add the written word to her television teaching. Before the first television program was shown on Monday, February 11, 1963, at 8
P.M.
(and rebroadcast, as always, on Wednesday at 3
P.M
.), Julia wrote an article about her first program for the
Boston Globe
. On Sunday, February 10, she was on the cover of
Boston Globe TV Week
, a pullout section of the Sunday magazine, sitting behind a large wooden bowl of almonds and holding a two-handled rocker knife. “Mrs. Child does actual cooking on camera in a delightful, easy and informal manner,” the paper announced. During 1963 and 1964, Julia offered forty-five short essays and recipes to the newspaper free of charge, with the stipulation that they not be bound. “40 Cloves of Garlic May Not Be Enough” was an essay about a visit from James Beard in which they cooked together, making
poulet aux quarante gousses d’ail
. From Grasse she submitted “Caves Age Roquefort Cheese to Perfection,” an essay with no recipes, but suggestions for using the cheese in dishes such as
omelette au Roquefort
. In another essay, she described her visit with Elizabeth David.

This fifty-year-old housewife—the profession she then listed on her passport—became a local celebrity. “Dear Skinny” letters came from her former Smith classmates still living in New England. She received 200 cards and letters during the first twenty days of the television program. (Ruth Lockwood served as her business manager and personal producer when they were in Europe that first fall.) Her renown grew as her program was aired elsewhere. By the fall of 1964, when
The French Chef
was added by seventeen more stations, from New York City to Los Angeles, Julia would be sending recipes and photographs all over the country. Her face and voice were reviewed almost on a weekly basis. That fall she was invited to address the Newspaper Food Editors Conference at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City. As usual, she donated her $500 fee to WGBH. “As long as I can get clothes, and have a decent car, I’m not really interested in the money end of it,” she said to
The Nation’s Business
.

Even her butcher on Kirkland Street became a celebrity. Jack Savenor and his wife, Betty, became close friends and their picture appeared in the paper dining with Julia and Paul. Twenty years later, the man who would say, “Hello, Julia, baby,” when she answered his telephone calls—“Hello, Big Jack,” she always replied—testified that she taught him much about the food business. She later established a strong bond with her fishmonger, George Berkowitz of Legal Sea Foods. But it was Savenor’s friendship with Julia that was the longest and strongest, and is typical of the respect she earned among her purveyors and associates in greater Boston.

A careful study of the press coverage of these first few years reveals that Julia’s audience was broad, including both high and low culture, “from professors to policemen,” according to
TV Guide
. A group of avant-garde painters and musicians in Greenwich Village gathered every week to view her, believing initially that she was doing a parody of the traditional cooking program, but staying on as faithful watchers after learning otherwise. They especially enjoyed repeating the opening lines of the artichoke program. The
San Francisco News Call Bulletin
said in 1965 that she drew “more men than women viewers” to their Channel 9. The great American fear of being outré and gauche was diminished by this patrician lady who was not afraid of mistakes and did not talk down to her audience. With the Kennedys in the White House boosting the snob appeal of French dining and associating it with ruffles and truffles, Julia was making it accessible to everyone. Some, of course, would try to acquire culture merely by cooking a French dish, skipping the travel and study and suffering.

In later years when she was asked about her audience, Julia denied that she was talking to what people thought of as “the stupid housewife.” “My audience is not
la ménagère
, but anyone interested in cooking, no matter the sex or age or profession. I want to show that there ain’t no mystery. Those who mystify are aggrandizing themselves.”

In a profile in
The Saturday Evening Post
(with the Beatles on the cover), Lewis Lapham admired the fact that she “possesses none of the pretentious mannerisms so often associated with practitioners of
haute cuisine.”
Terrence O’Flaherty, in his
San Francisco Chronicle
column, called her “television’s most reliable female discovery since Lassie.” The
Globe
said, “She’s like a fairy godmother … she makes me a child again.” She “looks like someone’s older sister—the one who teaches high school gym class.” Such warm and fuzzy familiarity was not contradicted by the numerous references to her strength (implied in the gym teacher allusion). Even her assistant producer thought “she looked like the kind of person who should be out showing dogs or racing horses, not doing French cooking.” Another reviewer said she looked like she was off to play eighteen holes of golf because of that towel tucked into her belt. And the verbs used to describe her movements were strong ones, such as “crunch” and “bash.”

Publicity doubled, tripled, and quadrupled as new stations aired the program around the country.
Newsweek
(July 15, 1963) said her program was helping “to turn Boston, the home of the bean and the cod, into the home of the
Brie
and the
Coq
as well.” She had to compose form letters to answer frequently repeated questions or comments. Most of the letters she received were full of praise, though some were filed in the “Julia Is Dirty” folder. The latter included complaints about her failure to wash her hands and her habit of touching food (“I just can’t stand those oversanitary people,” she responded). “You are quite a revolting chef the way you snap bones and play with raw meats,” one viewer wrote. Another: “I have turned off your program before today, when you seem bent on wine drinking, but this is the last time.”

The most serious criticism emerged later when a French cooking teacher moved to Massachusetts and openly remarked that the star of
The French Chef
was neither French nor a chef. Even before this, Julia realized there was a problem with the title, but those who defended Julia pointed out that even if she was not a French chef, she was a damn fine home cook who knew French and French cooking techniques. Apart from the title of the program, Julia only referred to herself as a home cook. Never, even for playful skits or posing with French chefs, would she ever agree to don the traditional tall white toque.

By August, less than a year since publication,
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
had sold 100,000 copies at $10 each and was in its fifth printing. Growing royalty checks, together with her third of her father’s $300,000 invested estate (probated in March 1964), allowed her to remain faithful to the world of public education. “Fortunately,” Paul wrote Charlie, “we are in a position where we don’t
have
to snap at the bait [of commercial temptations].” Now she was receiving 400 letters a week and hired temporary secretarial help to answer her mail. Ruth Lockwood took care of the requests for appearances and interviews when Julia and Paul left for two weeks in Maine and then five days at Bread Loaf in Vermont.

But not before Julia attended her thirtieth reunion in Northampton. The celebration of the Class of ’34 provided the atmosphere for which all longtime graduates long: recognition and nostalgia. Mary Chase and many of her Hubbard Hall girlfriends were there, and everyone had read or seen Julia. She presented an improvised skit at the last minute with Charlotte Snyder Turgeon, daughter of a leading meat distributor in Boston, cookbook author, editor of the English translation of
Larousse Gastronomique
, and wife of King Turgeon, chairman of the French department at Amherst College. Charlotte and Julia stirred a big pot into which they threw various objects, including an old tennis shoe, and kept up a running commentary that made everyone laugh until they cried.