Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (55 page)

Julia lent La Pitchoune to family, including Dorothy and Ivan Cousins and their family, and she rented to friends from the OSS and their diplomatic world, including Janou and Charles Walcutt. Others in the food world, such as Gael Greene and Peter Kump, visited or rented La Pitchoune. Kump, a native of California and student of Simca, who remembers the Childs attending Simca’s weekly cocktail parties, would open a professional cooking school in New York City under his own name in 1974. Kump in 1994 told me that four people changed American cooking: “Beard, Henri Soulé [Le Pavillon], and Claiborne created this big bonfire and Julia came along with the match.”

The Walcutts, in turn, lent Julia and Paul their Paris apartment for April 1972. At 81, rue de Longchamps, in Neuilly, Julia lived again in her beloved Paris and tested restaurants, including Drouant, Chez Les Anges, Prunier-Duphot, Chez Garin, La Truite, and Tour d’Argent. She wrote detailed reports of her dining to Beard and to Waverley Root
(The Food of France
, 1958), whom she invited to dinner so they could meet. He had stayed two nights at La Pitchoune when Michael Field was renting it and wrote to inform Julia that he “admired” her kitchen. But he was suffering from a slipped disk and their meeting did not occur until February 1973.

Her month in Paris studying restaurant cooking coincided with the emergence of what Henry Gault and Christian Millau (in their
Nouveau Guide)
would later call “nouvelle cuisine,” a term first used in 1742 but which now referred to a group of young chef-entrepreneurs who owned their own restaurants and valued originality, simplicity, and lighter sauces. Paul Bocuse, the Troisgros brothers, Michel Guérard, Alain Chapel, and Roger Vergé were the stars, and all of them were influenced by Fernand Point (as well as by André Pic and Alexandre Dumaine). Nouvelle cuisine was characterized by the aesthetic presentation of the dish, or, as Julia quipped about American nouvelle cuisine (in a phrase that would be repeated for twenty years), “the food is so beautifully arranged on the plate—you know someone’s fingers have been all over it.”

Julia described for James Beard their collapse at La Pitchoune with post-work fatigue and colds, followed by a revival of holiday celebration. Olney came for Christmas dinner. On New Year’s Eve the Childs and Kublers dined with chef Roger Vergé at Le Moulin de Mougins, then joined a crowded party at Simca’s home. Paul detested Simca’s parties and described this one in detail to Charlie—the blaring television and record player turned to high, the crowd of giggling people, the forced conviviality. An artificial note in their harmonious natural world. He also described their reluctance to leave Provence: “I walk around, look at the olive trees, smell the lavender, bend my ear to the nightingales, taste the dorade, the loup, the pastis, but in a few days, after the tidal wave of Boston-Cambridge has rolled over me, these living vital impressions will be glimmering, evanescent, dream-like, vanishing.”

They returned from Europe after each visit with written programs ready for the intense filming schedule of more
French Chef
programs in color. For a few months it appeared they would not be able to continue the series when Polaroid, assuming another company would pick up
The French Chef
moved on to support another program. They had been underwriting her program since 1965. No company stepped in to assume sponsorship, undoubtedly because PBS did not allow commercials. When news got out, the public response inundated Polaroid, who quickly resumed their $80,000 grants.

Julia was both happy to be renewed and reluctant to continue the demanding work of filming. When she received a letter from Madeleine Kamman about rumors of her retirement, she hastened to inform her she intended never to retire.
The French Chef
which now featured themes such as “Open House” and “Sudden Company,” moved to 9
P.M
. on Sundays, with a rebroadcast at 5
P.M
. the following Saturday. Because the letters and press inquiries never let up, Avis DeVoto was hired to write Julia-replies to letters that came into WGBH.

The tapings continued despite various anniversaries, including their silver wedding anniversary on September 1, 1971, and Paul’s seventieth birthday the following January. They had to wait to celebrate the birthday of Paul and Charlie until August 1972, when the Child family also celebrated Julia’s sixtieth birthday in Maine. She would later tell
The New Yorker
, “One of the good things about getting to be sixty is that you make up your mind not to drink any more rotgut wine.” For her birthday, Paul penned another poem to his “birthday queen” and to the “Recognition that the years don’t count” because her “leaves are ever green.”

Salute, O Queen! We never thought to eat
So well before your reign.
“Bone appetite!”

By December of that year, they taped the final program of
The French Chef
and headed back to Provence. Julia believed she had presented all the important recipes she wanted to teach.

T
HE PRESS AND THE BBC

Again the press invaded the Childs’ privacy at La Pitchoune. Reporters from
Vogue, McCall’s
, the
New York Times
, and others came for interviews, photographs, and tapings. Suzanne Patterson, an American in Paris writing articles for
Réalités
, came down to interview Julia and met Simca, with whom she would later cooperate on a memoir. But none betrayed Julia’s precise location in print until a former Paris colleague of Paul’s gave step-by-step, turn-by-turn, directions to La Pitchoune in an article entitled “On the Trail of Julia Child.” On their next visit, a camper filled with Americans drove in to see The French Chef’s house. Julia and Paul were gracious, but Paul reprimanded his former colleague.

There was hardly a newspaper or magazine in the country that did not cover Julia. Terrence O’Flaherty of the
San Francisco Chronicle
proclaimed: “A Big Child Shall Lead Us.” He found her “more convincing than Walter Cronkite.” “Even the lowliest thaw-and-serve sloth has felt the vibrations of Julia’s cult,” declared Gael Greene in
Life
, “the lady unleashed our gastronomic repressions.” That year
Newsweek
called her the “Queen of Chefs”—though she never called herself a chef, and Craig Claiborne, in an essay entitled “Changes in the Sixties,” called her a major phenomenon of that decade.

Reviewers continued to mention her awkwardness, but always with a loving tone: “Julia breathes hard and loves food. She is human. She is plump. She can be messy, a bit clumsy … she can drop a duck on her foot without coming apart at the seams.” One newspaper columnist described her “glid[ing] around her oversized studio kitchen like a herniated ostrich, tossing off one-liners.” Another reviewer perceptively noted the dramatic action and violence of her manner, saying he hated to miss her program as much as he did Monday night football: “Perhaps for the same reason—all that programmed and controlled violence is a vicarious purging of the juices.”

Money
magazine picked up on a little-mentioned aspect of Julia’s professional success: Paul was her full partner.
Money
featured her inclusion of Paul in her career (“our books” and “our show”) in an article about successful women and their business careers. She and Helen Gurley Brown were “extreme exceptions” in their financial success and partnership with their husbands. Indeed, Paul at seventy was keeping up an occasionally grueling pace of television and press. Julia still did the taxes and handled the finances (as did Freddie Child for Charlie), but Paul was her business partner in planning the career and working alongside her. His refrain in letters to his brother—“to keep Julie before the public as a vivid and viable personality”—explains the new series and books as well as the public appearances and press interviews. Though she was pulled into his diplomatic current during the first decade of their marriage, he told his brother in a September 19, 1973, letter, “I am still, in a sense, an accessory-after-the-fact of Julie’s rhythms,” part of that unseen iceberg.

Julia Child was a household name, as exhibited in the avenues of popular culture. The cartoon strip “Beetle Bailey,” distributed in seventy-three countries through the
International Herald Tribune
, carried a strip showing Beetle’s General, sitting under a picture of George Washington, explaining that he was inspired by the portrait of George Washington over his military desk: “I try to live as he did.” In the final scene, Beetle is shown sitting under the photograph of a woman in a chef’s toque, and to a private’s question about who it is, responding with a satisfied “Julia Child.” In 1970 her name appeared in the
New York Times
crossword puzzle under “noted cook, 34 across” in April and again as “Chef for the French [sic], 10 across” in August.

Time
magazine planned a cover story on McDonald’s (the nation’s largest dispenser of meals) and wanted a quote from Julia. She insisted she had never been to the golden arches and was not interested. They persisted (Paul described it as begging on bended knees), and Julia’s curiosity worked in their favor. After they promised that her opinion would not constitute an endorsement (and informed her that other food critics such as Beard and Claiborne gave their judgment), she and Paul went to Davis Square in Somerville and ordered one of everything. She delivered her opinion: “nothing but calories,” not a balanced meal, bread soft and too much of it, cheap—“But the French fries are surprisingly good.” Seven years later, John and Karen Hess in their
Taste of America
would claim she tried very hard “to find something positive to say without losing the gourmet franchise.” In truth, she did like the fries. They had taste because they were fried in lard, she later learned when they switched to vegetable oil. Julia was judging taste alone; a nutritionist at Harvard, however, documented that “McDonald’s is good fare nutritionally, but could be improved by tossing in some coleslaw and the fruit of the season.”

Scores of newspaper features on Julia during the first half of the 1970s appeared in papers around the country, repeating the outlines of her life in repetitive detail. Many quoted her themes during this period: her insistence that anyone can eat well if they are willing to learn to cook, that American meats are better than the meats in France, and that fast food and airline food are terrible (she and Paul carried their own food on their flights).

Coverage during the early 1970s emphasized her media role (CBS did a half hour on the making of
The French Chef
, and the
Christian Science Monitor
covered the film tour of France), her private life (Barbara Walters interviewed her on
Not For Women Only)
, and her artistic contribution (in August 1973 she was guest of honor at a party on Long Island that included Max Lerner, Jerome Robbins, Willem de Kooning, and many other artists). Her honors included a press award (the only one given to PBS) by
TV Guide
.

Julia and Paul went to London from Provence in February 1973 to tape promotions for the trial run of five of her programs for the British Broadcasting Corporation and to see the first show broadcast. Watching with Elizabeth David, England’s favorite cookery writer, Julia was appalled when she realized they had cut off her introduction (in which she said she was a home cook and not a chef, an American and not French) and began with her laughingly brushing her blouse in a disoriented way after having lifted the two lids of the chicken pans, not realizing there was steam on the lids as she touched the lids together like cymbals. She was demonstrating two chicken dishes (“Coq au Vin vs. Chicken Fricassée, Sisters Under the Sauce”). Because she was cooking with wine, the British press suggested that she was drinking—or that she was slapdash, untidy, and unprofessional—and the show fizzled. It also suffered from the time slot at 3:40 in the afternoon and was twice preempted. Julia privately complained that the programs were “ill-used, if not demeaned,” but publicly she said, “Too bad it laid an egg” and “The English are used to stiff aprons.” Her British supporters, notably Sally Miall and Anne Willan, blamed in part an anti-American attitude and a sense of British superiority.

American-born “British” food writer Paul Levy declared twelve years later, “Deprived by this rejection of the best television cookery series ever made, the British now have an appallingly low standard—our television ‘cooks’ would not be tolerated by the more sophisticated American audience.”

I
N PERSON: TOURING AND DEMONSTRATING

Because “teaching is a very good way to learn,” as she phrased it, and because she wanted to sell books and raise money for public television, Julia offered public demonstrations. She received hundreds of requests through the years, turned every commercial one down, but usually responded to work for a charity. “I like public service,” John McWilliams’s daughter often said. They paid her expenses, paid a fee to WGBH, and she profited only by the sale of her books.

She embarked on her first whirlwind tour to meet her fans in 1971 to promote her Bantam paperback boxed edition of the two volumes of
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
. Knopf sold the paperback rights to Bantam, with Julia’s one-third share ($115,000) paid to her over several years—a smart tax decision on the part of her lawyer. She called it “a really hard sell, at last!” campaign, beginning in a suite of the Dorset Hotel in New York City by fielding serial interviews with the press. Then she went on the road to sign books and hold clusters of demonstrations at leading department stores such as Bloomingdale’s.

From Hackensack to Houston, from Stanford to Seattle, she made fast omelets on talk shows around the country and responded to the same old questions as if she were hearing them for the first time. The formal demonstrations for large audiences were planned and diagrammed in minute detail. They were warmly welcomed in San Francisco, where Dorothy lived, and nearby at M. F. K. Fisher’s house at Bouverie Ranch in Glen Ellen. When Dinah Shore interviewed Julia on her television program, Paul remarked that they had an “immediate rapport” because Dinah was “as warm and as charming, as sensuous and as beautiful as Julia.”