Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (57 page)

The Bantam paperback paid her handsomely (it had a printing of four million) and their sales promotion was better than Knopf’s. Johnson threatened to take her next book elsewhere, giving Judith Jones the impression that Knopf was cheap and ungrateful for not offering a higher advance. Relations with Judith and Knopf became strained in the late summer of 1971. Eventually Knopf countered an offer from Little, Brown and Julia remained with Knopf. Julia would call it “my one little fling” of unfaithfulness to Knopf.

Before they settled in to complete the manuscript for J
ulia Child’s Kitchen
, they took a trip to Italy with Herb and Pat Pratt. In Venice, Paul suffered what Julia called a “dreadful case of shell-fish poisoning.” His letters to his brother detailed a number of small physical problems; Julia says he is “cross and touchy” and he does “not know why! Must hold on to self.” Back at La Pitchoune he was particularly irritated by Jean and Simca’s bossy ways, and by the parties for nine (including Beard and Olney) and the foodies’ visits to three-star restaurants such as L’Oasis (“pretentious … too rich food”).

Julia, Paul, and James Beard were sitting on the terrace enjoying their last cup of morning tea, Jim sitting under the olive tree in what Julia called “his big blue Chinese kimono.” Whenever Jim was around, Julia’s letters were full of more foodie news and Paul was amused by his wit. Paul was working to prepare more illustrations for Julia’s new book and correcting the first proofs of his own book of verses a friend was printing. He did not tell Julia he was suffering from chest pains. He soon stopped writing in his diary, explaining to Julia that the Empirin he was taking gave him a rash.

When she was not interrupted, Julia worked from 9
A.M
. to 7
P.M
. on the manuscript. In a philosophical letter to Charlie and Freddie in May, she declared, “Paul and I shall certainly go on about our work well into our 90s and 100s … we are fortunate to be so tough and healthy.” Still, she was worried about signs of aging in Paul, though the doctor had pronounced him in perfect health before they left Cambridge. She completed her manuscript by August 31, and they stopped off at the Willan/Cherniavsky home in Paris to celebrate. Anne and Mark remember that Paul was irritable, distracted, and probably not feeling well when they were dining at L’Ami Louis.

Finished with
The French Chef and
the two books based on it, and freed of her collaboration with Simca, Julia was looking forward to a new challenge. A year before, she told Simca that if she ever did another television program, she wanted “all kinds of chefs and cooks.” But by January she told Simca she wanted to do “only demonstrations.” Whatever the next phase of her professional life, she would “work for the good cause of
la bonne cuisine
by finding good young people to carry on.” Instead, this next stage of her career would be inaugurated by personal crisis. It was in Paris that Paul finally revealed to Julia the severe chest pain that signaled a possible heart attack.

Chapter 22
A
T
IME OF
L
OSS
(1974 – 1977)

“I am making no future plans.”

JULIA CHILD, March 20, 1975

O
N SEPTEMBER
27, 1974, immediately upon their return, Dr. Julian Snyder put Paul in Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. For two weeks they administered angiography, anticoagulant treatment, and medication to slow his heart, trying to determine the extent of his infarction and artery blockage. His heart attack had “crept up on tiny, padded feet, like a field mouse,” he later informed Charlie. Five years before, he had had mild pain, which he attributed to gas and which stopped if he rested. Since 1970 the pains recurred almost daily, relieved temporarily by Empirin. Yet at every semiannual examination, doctors told him he had the “heart of an athlete of thirty.” On August 4 at La Pitchoune, Paul had a series of nosebleeds in the night, perhaps a result of the amount of blood-thinning aspirin he was taking. When he finally told Julia the extent of his pain, she insisted they see the doctor. Now she informed Louisette (who was working on a new cookbook) and others that he was hospitalized “with a slight heart condition.” For Paul, the long hospitalization was traumatic and unsettling:

There’s a phrase in Nabokov’s new book
Look at the Harlequins
[he wrote Charlie]. It goes like this: “As she opened the door of the hospital room I emitted a bellow of joy, and Reality entered.” This describes exactly my sense of pleasure (and nightmares passing) when Julia comes into my room at Beth Israel.

When the doctor asked if they wanted to test a new surgical procedure, Paul and Julia said yes, anything to save his life. Only 5,000 heart bypasses had been done since the first one in 1967, and only 64 patients, or 1.3 percent, had died. The odds looked good. The surgery was scheduled for October 18, 1974.

“
L
UCKY TO BE ALIVE
”

During the surgery, while veins were taken from his left leg to graft three bypasses around clogged arteries to his heart and clean out other entrances and exits, Paul had several small strokes. They would only learn this months later, so at the time Julia’s spirits were high as she told everyone that “the surgery is a miracle. He is lucky to be alive. If he had not had this operation, he would have been dead.”

As the weeks went by and he remained “weak and groggy”—or, as she admitted later, “in a vegetable state”—she kept thinking it was just a slow recovery. She canceled a heavy schedule of fall and winter demonstrations, which also allowed her the time to complete the manuscript for
From Julia Child’s Kitchen
. When Paul came home on November 24, he was clearly frustrated by his inability to process information. Surprisingly, the doctor gave him no dietary restrictions or any prescribed therapy, saying (according to Julia), “You don’t have cholesterol blockages, you obviously diet sensibly.” There was no known cause for coronary arteriosclerosis, the doctor informed them. The presence of Abe and Rosie Manell for Thanksgiving cheered them both. But by Christmas, Paul still could not read, and when he tried to write, the words came out scrambled. Neither food nor wine tasted good. And his French was gone.

At the suggestion of her sister Dort, Julia began taking Paul to a speech clinic in February. She described his aphasia to M. F. K. Fisher as comparable to dyslexia. But it was more than reversing letters or words: he was having trouble processing what he heard. For the first time in her letters she mentioned arteriosclerosis and the strokes that caused brain damage during the surgery. He has “scrambled brain trouble,” she told her closest friends.

Ever the activist, Julia took charge, installing a costly elevator on the back side of the house to allow Paul to move easily between the bedroom and office floor, the first-floor kitchen, and the basement, where his carpentry tools and wine cellar were located. In May she took him for a week of sun in Bermuda. By April he was able to write a coherent letter to Charlie, but only after several drafts and several hours. At Paul’s request, Charlie and Freddie had waited five months to come for their first visit. Paul’s pride was hurt (by the devastating results of his strokes), his masculinity and perfectionism frustrated (“I am only half a man,” he said). But his willpower was strong and he struggled on, applying those powers of deduction he had assiduously honed all his life. The recovery was slow, and never full. His spark was gone, Julia confided to a few friends.

During all the months of his illness and recovery, Julia worked full days completing her manuscript, which grew beyond the inclusion of her seventy-two recipes from the new
French Chef
television series. From June 1974 until February 1975, she added reminiscences and cooking tips accumulated over twenty-five years. Narrative sections spoke about her neighborhood shops, her French cooking teacher, chef Max Bugnard, her neighbor “Jean [deSola Pool]” and her English friends “Peter and Mari [Bicknell].” She also hired Judith Jones to help her with editing above and beyond her usual editorial duties. During the summer of 1975, Julia redid the index after receiving the version done by someone who was not a cook. Because Paul could not work his camera or construct any more drawings, she and Judith conferred on using what was already on hand and hiring a photographer to complete a few more.

Coincidentally, during this first year of Paul’s recuperation, Julia revealed to the world she had had a mastectomy six years before. In a serious article about the frequency of this cancer in women, Julia, Betty Ford (the President’s wife), Happy Rockefeller (the Vice President’s wife), and Shirley Temple Black (the movie star turned diplomat), among others, testified that they were still alive and wished other women would carefully examine themselves. Julia’s desire to save “even one life” and her natural frankness overcame her Yankee sense of privacy. For the same reason, in October 1977, she would appear in a National Cancer Society fashion show in New York City.

She could not easily retreat from the public arena as Paul would have preferred (“It is very important for Julia,” Paul said about the presence of other people). Though she kept the groups small for Paul’s sake, the entertaining of friends and reporters continued. Rosemary Manell came to cook, “with her unfailing good humor;” Olney visited on his book tour for
Simple French Food
(Rosie helped him with his television appearances). Julia remained matter-of-fact about Paul’s illness, neither apologetic nor embarrassed. Jim Beard visited with young Carl Jerome (Julia called him James’s “acolyte” and was grateful that someone was looking after her dear overweight friend). Beard was as inquisitive and restless as Julia, though Paul had described his arrival at Cannes that previous summer as “ponderous, sweating, panting, walking in short steps on those swollen legs.”

For the national bicentennial year, Julia and Jim made a pilot television program together in February on American food of the Revolutionary War period, which they hoped would include other cooks in its thirteen segments (they were never able to sell the series). Julia also was deeply involved in the Paris cooking school plans of Anne Willan and her husband, Mark Cherniavsky; upon the advice of their lawyer, Julia and Paul privately agreed to invest $10,000 in their friends’ new school, the future La Varenne. Jim and Simca soon followed with $5,000 each.

The frenzied cooking world rushed on around them, with Julia staying close to Paul and planning their book tour. Simca was teaching for two weeks in Rutherford, California; James Beard gave Simca a party in his Greenwich Village home; Julia saw Simca cooking on NBC; Simca’s student Peter Kump opened his own cooking school in New York City; Poppy Cannon jumped to her death from her twenty-third-floor apartment in New York City (in 1980, the chronically depressed José Wilson would jump to her death into a deep quarry); and Paul’s beloved friend Samuel Chamberlain died in Marblehead. Julia kept in touch with triumphs and tragedies by telephone with Jim and by letter to Simca, who since the completion of La Campanette had moved herself and her school from Paris to Bramafam. Julia got caught up momentarily in investigating the issue of nitrates in swordfish and considered teaching with Simca and Anne Willan the following year at the Gritti Palace Hotel in Venice. Plans for the release of her book in the fall continued. It would be a year after Paul’s surgery, and he was able to face the inevitable book tour if it had built-in rest and free days. Julia would not consider leaving him to travel alone. He had always expressed disdain for what he called the “geriatric-living syndrome.” First she took him for a holiday at the Child cabin in Maine, driving in tandem with the Kublers.

During this period of post-television calm, Julia wrote several articles, including a piece about her Cambridge home for
Architectural Digest
and a review of the new
Joy of Cooking
, which she placed first on her list of indispensable cookbooks in English. She informed
Architectural Digest
, a Los Angeles-based “slick, clubby
ne plus ultra
monthly” (in
Newsweek’s
words), that her Cambridge place “was not grand, just a comfortable working place.”
Architectural Digest
added the Irving Street home to the celebrity series that included the homes of Truman Capote, Robert Redford, and Richard Nixon. Doug Dutton of Dutton’s Brentwood Bookstore, a noted bookseller and music professor, observed that the Childs’ bookcases were only one of two homes shown with a “not bought by the foot” library.

F
ROM JULIA CHILD’S KITCHEN

To launch both the publication of
From Julia Child’s Kitchen
and the founding of Anne Willan’s La Varenne cooking school in Paris, she and Paul spent ten days at the Dorset Hotel in New York City. At her own expense, Julia had Rosie Manell and Liz Bishop with her at five demonstrations at regional Bloomingdale’s stores and one at Altman. After appearing on
A.M. America
and the
Tomorrow
show, they attended a dinner party at Beard’s house for Julia and Paul, Jacques Pépin and his mentor Helen McCully, and Mark and Anne Cherniavsky. Finally, she and Jim hosted (and La Varenne paid for) the American launch party for La Varenne at the Four Seasons “to introduce Anne to the Foodie types, and the travel people as well” (she told Simca). La Varenne would open a month later (November 10) in Paris, and Claiborne would be there to cover it for the
New York Times:
he had made the winning bid on American Express’s French meal in any restaurant, money-no-object contest (he and Pierre Franey dined at Chez Denis for $4,000 at American Express’s expense).

Published on October 6, 1975,
From Julia Child’s Kitchen
was a beautifully designed book, full of Paul’s black-and-white photographs. Filling the title page is his photograph of Julia in the window of their first Marseilles apartment, the harbor and boats behind her. The title page of each chapter contained a photograph of Marseilles, Provence, or Paris, and most sections began with a memory. The book was dedicated to Ruth Lockwood, her producer, “always steady, even-tempered, able, astute—she has been my ever-loving friend.” Ruth was moved to tears. “I went over to Julia’s house and stood eye to eye on the stairs and told her what it meant to me.”

Instead of the seventy-two
French Chef
recipes being presented in chronological order, as was done in
The French Chef Cookbook
, they were organized by category, from soup to cakes (the latter included her
Grande Bouffe
cake with almonds). She put in her French bread recipe, two recipes for madeleines, and the essential sauces and primary dishes from her other three books. Of course, most of the recipes were French—“because that is my training”—but there were also American favorites such as coleslaw, pizza, chicken Kiev, pumpkin soup, and hamburgers. Because 55 percent of the 714-page volume was made up of WGBH material, she gave WGBH 20 percent of the advance (“They put me on the map,” she reminded one reporter).

Reviewer Bill Rice said she “departed from the professorial tone of earlier works.” Her voice is indeed less pedantic, but the text is still thorough, offering full teaching charts on measurements and terminology. She included the use of the Cuisinart for the first time. Part of the informality of the book came from the inclusion of reproduced cartoons by the
New Yorker’s
George Price (“Any word as to the nature of the soupe du jour?” asks one man to another in a charity soup line). She also broke her rule about naming dishes and included
pommes Rosemary, les tartelettes Bugnard
, and her own Mrs. Child’s famous sticky fruitcake. This was her most personal book. She told Mary Frances seven years later that she found it “difficult to be personal” in her writing, but this was “my own favorite book, which is entirely my own, written the way I wanted to do it.”