Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (65 page)

By the time she completed a three-day cooking demonstration to benefit St. Mark’s Cathedral in Seattle, she declared she would do no more charity demonstrations. She had no time, because the filming Russ Morash was planning to begin in 1983 was rapidly approaching. Morash, who had filmed
This Old House
and
Victory Garden
series since his last
French Chef
series, was making grand preparations for an entirely new series for Julia.

Julia left
McCall’s
for
Parade
magazine in 1982 because she could reach a larger audience with her teaching skills. She was also paid a great deal more. She had contributed a monthly column to
McCall’s
for five years and was ready for a change and a promotion.
Parade
, distributed in Sunday newspapers to millions of readers, named her food editor. She was required to prepare one article each month, entitled “From Julia Child’s Kitchen,” with recipes for a full meal. And she could keep the photography rights for any future book. She could plan, test, and write these installments in Cambridge or Santa Barbara, with the dishes photographed on either coast. A friend came West in December 1982 to help her prepare the food for the photographs in the first issue. Later Julia hired Barbara Sims-Bell, owner of the Santa Barbara Cooking School, to help her cook for
Parade
. In a couple of years Julia would refer to their “Beverly Wilshire [Hotel] home” because of the frequent filming for
Parade
or taping for
Good Morning America
in the Burbank studios.

“How to Cook for 40,000,000 by Julia Child,” the full-page advertisements shouted. Standing in front of her wall-mounted pans, a big smile on her face and her hand holding a green-and-red pepper for color, America’s favorite home cook appeared on the cover of her first issue, February 28, 1982.
Parade
editor Walter Anderson said he had a phenomenal response to her appearance, especially from men. This issue also presented her personal side with an article about her marriage to Paul. Each issue had several sections, each broken up with bold headings and illustrated by color photographs: how to cut up a chicken, sauté a chicken, make three variations on sautéed chicken (with potatoes and onions, with cream and mushrooms, with peppers, onions, and garlic), make a good pot of coffee, and “the greatest apple tart.” Finally, there appeared a small box telling a personal tale about cleaning an “evil-smelling refrigerator.” Mary Frances was one of the forty million: “I always find something very good and very
Julia,”
she wrote her D*E*A*R*F*R*I*E*N*D (as she always addressed her letters).

She managed her obligations to both
Good Morning America
and
Parade
as well as the numerous other endeavors through teamwork. Whether Pat Pratt or Marian Morash was visiting, or cooking friends were over for Thanksgiving, or she and Rosemary were demonstrating together, she was talking over ideas for recipes. “One gets so many ideas working as a team,” she declared. By 1985, she was filming four segments of her
Good Morning America
spots in one day. She also found that she could plan four issues of
Parade
at once and later film them together. Every four-month cycle taught her something that she passed on to Simca. During their cooking and filming two years later, Julia discovered that new flour with potassium bromate strengthened the gluten and made better bread than she ever made before. And when she noticed that Jacques Pépin would recycle a new recipe three times (in teaching, in a magazine, and in demonstrations), she decided she did not need entirely new recipes every time she prepared her
Parade
articles.

When Julia returned to France from late June through late September 1982, she had already planned, tested, and written eleven shows for
Good Morning America
and completed a list (with Rosemary) of the upcoming
Parade
issues. As this was their first trip to France in two years, they stopped at the Pont Royal Hotel in Paris, where Julia wrote a nostalgic letter to Dort about the St.-Germain-des-Prés area. In Beaune they enjoyed a weekend of Burgundy wine and grand dining. Accompanying them from Cambridge in June and again in September were the Pratts. Pat worked well with Julia in testing recipes at La Pitchoune. Julia also discovered the fiction of Edith Wharton, she wrote Jim Beard. While reading R. W. B. Lewis’s new biography of Wharton, Julia connected with Wharton’s descriptions of Paris and Wharton’s years in Lenox, Massachusetts, near her mother’s hometowns of Pittsfield and Dalton.

After Sara Moulton had to leave La Pitchoune, Susy Davidson came to visit. Susy worked for Trois Gourmandes Productions as Associate Chef on
Good Morning America
and at other demonstrations in 1981 and 1982. She was a tall, twenty-nine-year-old Oregon native with lovely dark hair and a first diploma from La Varenne. She had worked a year and a half with Simca to earn her final diploma, and both Julia and Simca thought she was “a dear girl.” Susy says, “Julia sets the pace. As far as I’m concerned, she is the professional by whom all other professionals are judged.” Also visiting briefly to show off his future bride was Steven Raichlen, who had finished his degree from La Varenne and would become its representative in the United States. It was during that summer that Susy and Julia discussed the number of homosexuals who seemed to dominate the food organizations, a discussion Julia put into writing to Anne Willan, which would come back to haunt her in years to come. Julia would always maintain that the comments were not personal; her only concern was that the culinary profession have more heterosexual men in its ranks.

Julia, who enjoyed saying, “I love being bicoastal,” was really tricoastal. When she and Paul left the Provençal coast, they drove to Joigny (where Willan and Cherniavsky had bought a château nearby in Villecien), then to Paris and the flight to Boston. After a late McWilliams family celebration of her seventieth birthday (August 15, 1982) in New Hampshire, Julia was honored by a birthday dinner offered her in New York by Peter Kump (all her cooking friends sent letters). She then embarked on a final burst of cooking school demonstrations before preparing for a new television show to be co-produced by WGBH and her renamed corporation, Julia Child Productions, from which she drew a “salary” (for tax purposes).

D
INNER AT JULIA’S

On the twentieth anniversary of their first work together, Russ Morash planned to film a video magazine series for Julia, beginning the filming in Santa Barbara. Julia had often told reporters after each series that she wanted to go on the road to where food was grown. Now American Express agreed to pay for the flights. As executive producer, Morash raised nearly a million dollars from Polaroid for a limited series of thirteen shows featuring segments of Julia gathering food, cooking, and then hosting a dinner party in Santa Barbara. Each program would have an accomplished chef prepare one dish in a three-minute appearance. Most significantly for Julia, they would take a week to film each program, there would be no book to accompany the series (though she would have the dishes and techniques photographed for a later book project), and she had a full-time makeup and wardrobe person.

After a brief trip north to visit Alice Waters at Chez Panisse and meet with the Mondavis about the AIWF, Julia devoted the first five months of 1983 to filming at the rented mansion at Hope Ranch, the twenty-five-acre ranch on the California coast thirty minutes from her Seaview home. The Morash family lived in the Hope Ranch home where work, filming, and dinners were held. Marian and Rosemary served as Julia’s Executive Chefs.

They began by flying to Seattle to tape segments for four shows, showing Julia salmon fishing on Puget Sound, sampling rich chocolate at the Filettante, visiting the Port Chatham smoking-salmon works in Ballard, and going on a crab boat trip at dawn. Sitting impatiently in the rented van outside Seattle, Julia waited for Debbie Wait to apply a thin coat of makeup before it was time to board the
Destiny
, a forty-six-foot Kodiak salmon boat. Puget Sound was windy and cold, and Julia was wrapped in a bright yellow waterproof jacket and pants. The waters were gray and choppy as Ken Thibert, the skipper, who had never seen Julia on television, guided the boat toward the crab pots. She was excited by the action and climbed up and down the boat’s ladders, bombarding the experts with questions: “How was the crab season this year?” (“Lousy.”) “What kind of bait will we use?” (“Geoduck stomachs.”) She was still going strong when Morash had the tape he needed and the boat headed back. Later that day, Julia made another appearance, followed by a wine reception before returning to film the next morning in Santa Barbara.

Because the series emphasized fresh American regional produce, she would also visit (with Paul) an artichoke field, a chicken farm, a date farm in Indio, and the Firestone Vineyard in Los Olivos. When there were too few chanterelles in the mountains above Santa Barbara, they “planted” them. Like a modern-day Dr. Livingstone, says one reporter, Julia approached in pith helmet, stout stick, wet weather gear, and New Balance shoes, “slogging through viscous mud that bogged down her party’s four-wheel-drive Bronco” (noted a visiting
Time
reporter), to gather a basketful of the yellow precious (and planted) chanterelles.

Visiting wine experts talked about the vintage to be served with each course (the marriage of wine and food) and a guest chef prepared a dish: René Verdon of San Francisco’s Le Trianon (White House soufflé with zucchini), Louis Evans of New Orleans’s Pontchartrain Hotel (crayfish bisque), Jean-Pierre Goyenvalle from Washington, DC, and Wolfgang Puck from West Hollywood’s Spago. Puck remembers arriving at the mansion early one morning slightly hungover after a late-night party. “Julia greeted me on the step and gave me a big hug, which planted my face somewhere in her chest region.” Austrian-born Puck came to make Santa Barbara shrimp in mustard/butter sauce.

The main dishes were prepared by Julia and her crew, though only a part of the actual preparation was shown because this was not a how-to program. The main courses included a chicken dish called Winged Victory (a version of which she later used in
Parade)
, Santa Barbara bouillabaisse, whole salmon steamed in white wine, roast deviled rabbit, and braised sweetbreads in puff shells. Morash filmed Julia and these dishes with a single handheld camera, and also filmed small segments featuring techniques, both for the program and for later use in a video series he was pitching called
The Way to Cook
. (She also told reporters she would be doing a book by this title.) He did not have Julia’s words fully scripted, except for opening and closing lines, for he believed she did best with spontaneity (indeed, even on the
Good Morning America
segments, after a couple of practice beginnings, she was best with partially improvised narrative). After all these segments were shot and the food ready, the show ended with a cocktail party and dinner for ten people, including hosts Julia and Paul. Sometimes when friends or journalists were bumped for more important guests, they joined the cocktail party scene and ate dinner off-camera. Her sister Dorothy can be seen at the table in her first segment, “The Salmon Dinner,” and her editor Judith Jones attended “The Turkey Dinner.” One of her honored guests was James Beard, who had to remain seated. She was worried about her “Dear Jim,” who, in and out of hospitals, did not look well.

On February 8, 1983, just when the film crew of
Parade
magazine left and Morash was beginning the shoot another
Dinner at Julia’s
segments, Julia and Paul received the news that Charlie Child died suddenly at Pennswood, his retirement home. He and Paul had recently celebrated their birthdays: “He and I had eighty-one years of understanding, of fun, of mutual learning, of creativity together, and admiration, not to mention, especially, letters from each other when we were apart during the war years. I find that I am still, unconsciously, storing up in my mind things to write [to him] about…. We were truly parts of each other,” Paul wrote their longtime friend Fanny Brennan.

Julia and Paul shared their grief in quiet private moments amid the frenetic activity of dozens of people filming; Paul, the introspective twin, was especially grieved: “I suffer because of Chas’ death,” he wrote in his datebook. Julia, typically matter-of-fact about death, threw herself into immediate tasks and looked ahead. For the Child children and grandchildren, Julia and Paul were all that remained of that generation. Charlie’s body was cremated and waited until the family gathered that August at Lopaus Point, Maine, where during a week together to memorialize him, they sprinkled his ashes along the coastal walks he loved so well and described in his memoir
Roots in the Rock
.

The glamorous
Dinner at Julia’s
began airing on PBS on October 14 of that year (it was rerun the last three months of 1984 as well). In the first program, when the limousines pulled up to the mansion and Julia appeared in heavy makeup and dark curly hair (one reporter called it an “Afro”), some of her friends were dismayed. Ruth Lockwood was sorry about the change of Julia’s image, feeling almost “betrayed.” Most food colleagues and longtime friends enjoyed the segments of fishing, mushroom picking, and date harvesting, but thought the series was “too elite, very non-Julia to be driving up in a Mercedes or Rolls-Royce.” A family member blamed Bob Johnson for pushing her into a “publicity stunt” series.

Reviewers were more positive, emphasizing the celebration of regional produce (“the French Chef has come home”), the slick new format, and the variety of segments crammed into each thirty-minute program. The variety drew some criticism for fragmenting the program, but most reviews were puff pieces, such as
United
magazine’s “Shows her at her bubbly, chirrupy best.”
Time’s
only swipe was at the wardrobe person who dressed her “in a wardrobe worthy of Auntie Mame.” The
New York Times’s
John J. O’Connor wrote that the attempt to “convey a sense of elegance” resulted “too often” in a “silly and distracting” program which appeared to display a “cavalier attitude toward cost.” (The
Washington Post
detailed the expenses, noting that the food alone “cost $1,000 a week.”) O’Connor liked Julia’s enthusiasm and the final barbecue segment, but not the full bottle of vermouth on the whole salmon and the Rolls-Royce pulling up to the door with a piano rendition of “These Foolish Things” playing in the background.