Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (66 page)

Despite the negative notes, Julia enjoyed the communal experience in the mansion, with everyone working on the project, including students from Santa Barbara City College Hotel and Restaurant School who assisted in the preparation of the food. The final segment was a barbecue with mariachi band and Julia in Western garb, while overhead the helicopters churned—not for her filming or a nearby forest fire, but for President Reagan’s arrival to and departure from Rancho del Cielo.

Julia toured for the new series to Washington, DC, and elsewhere, always working to organize chapters of the AIWF wherever she went. She and Paul, who continued to be depressed about losing his brother, returned to Santa Barbara to spend the first five months of 1984 by the sea.

“
A
MERICAN CELEBRATION
”

Fresh oysters from Puget Sound, Tomales Bay, and Vancouver Island opened the eleven-course feast at the Stanford Court in San Francisco on May 4, 1983. Many predicted that the eleven chefs would not be able to work in the same kitchen to prepare the eleven specialties for the meal, but Michael McCarty of Michael’s in Santa Monica, who arranged the dinner, and Mark Peel, a chef at Spago, disagreed. The chefs had a ball.

The “American Celebration” feast fed 372 patrons, most of whom paid $250. It was called “the dawning of a new age for American cuisine,” by one well-fed journalist. Julia, who was in the kitchen until moments before the dinner began, called it “an amazing event.” One newspaper announced: “A Summit of U.S. Cuisine.” Another: “extravaganza.” The “American Celebration” was a fund-raiser for the American Institute of Wine and Food. (Three months later 700 people showed up—300 had to be turned away—at an AIWF fund-raising garden party on the grounds of the Hope Ranch.) But it was the San Francisco “Celebration” that both inaugurated an era of high living for the AIWF and was emblematic of a new decade in American cuisine: American chefs were emphasizing ingredients over technical skills.

When Jimmy Schmidt (Detroit) was preparing his stuffing of wild root vegetables, fiddlehead fern, and hazelnuts from Michigan, Larry Forgione (River Café in Brooklyn) and Bradley Ogden (Kansas City) rolled up their sleeves and helped him chop and slice. When Paul Prudhomme’s blackened redfish was ready to be prepared, Jonathan Waxman (Michael’s in Santa Monica), Wolfgang Puck, and Mark Miller joined in the last-minute cooking. When Jeremiah Tower was ready to put the chocolate and sabayon sauce on his pecan pastry, Alice Waters and Barbara Kafka (New York City) joined the assembly line. Each course was accompanied by a different wine, with Mondavi’s 1974 Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon served with the American cheese selection (California chèvre, Iowa Maytag Blue, and a New York Camembert). By midnight, everyone joined the “After Hours Party” for the final courses: Mark Peel’s “Spago’s pizza” (served with Domaine Chandon Blanc de Noir) and Barbara Kafka’s tripe gumbo (served with Christian Brothers Private Reserve Centennial Sherry). All the wines were Californian. And all the chefs were known for his or her quest for a distinctive American cuisine. Several had cooked at Chez Panisse or Ma Maison, and all, Alice Waters admitted to a reporter, were “from the controversial end” of the American spectrum. Indeed, only Puck and Ogden were guests on
Dinner at Julia’s
(being filmed at that time), suggesting the traditional nature of
her
guest chef list.

Upscale restaurant dining would boom in the Reagan years of the 1980s, and the chef became a new hero during that so-called decadent decade. In a panel discussion during this three-day event in San Francisco, William Rice, the editor of American Express’s
Food & Wine
(and a sponsor), said restaurants will play “an important part” in American culture and “chefs are taking their natural role as leaders.” Significantly, at the “American Celebration” there were no live speeches, just four giant television sets showing the preparations in the kitchen. “Chefs are on a par with artists and musicians,” Julia confided to a journalist at her table.

Mimi Sheraton (who ate at home only five times the previous year) later called the 1980s a period of affluence, generous news coverage of restaurants, celebrity chefs, and dining out. “Julia criticized me directly and obliquely for being a bad influence on restaurants,” says Sheraton, “because I terrified chefs by having such negative reviews.” Yet it was the reviewers who stirred the pot. And, as the press and panel discussions noted, diners were getting more discriminating. “The revolution in food began in 1963,” the food authorities agreed, “when Julia Child went on television and alerted Americans to the pleasures of gastronomy.”

If chefs are known for cooperation—as illustrated in the San Francisco “Celebration”—the food writers were territorial and competitive, as evidenced in a scandal that rocked the food world in 1983. The story, which broke on December 7, Robert Clark calls “a kind of Pearl Harbor for the food community.” In February, Richard Olney sued Richard Nelson
(Richard Nelson’s American Cooking)
for copyright infringement and punitive damages, asking $1,050,000. Nelson was a past president of the International Association of Cooking Schools, based in Washington, DC, and strongly supported at its founding by Julia Child; he was also on the advisory board of AIWF (and a cooking school founder and food columnist for the
Portland Oregonian)
. Because a recipe is a formula, Julia always believed they could not be copyrighted, though she tried to give credit for any original recipe inspiring her own variation. According to Ann Barr and Paul Levy: “Julia Child is … generous [about her recipes], and was the first to telephone Nelson to give him her support.” She told Simca a decade before that she felt “the recipe business is about hopeless.” Through the years they both recognized their own work in
Gourmet
and other places: “I agree with someone who said that the recipe is only the score (for the music), and that each virtuoso interprets it as he sees fit, and according to his own personality…. After all, at the Cordon Bleu there were no recipes provided at all, which made it easier.”

Nelson allegedly “stole” at least fifty-six recipes, some from Julia, without creative variation in ingredients or language. He took thirty-nine recipes from Olney’s
Simple French Food
(1974), including every turn of phrase and personal narrative introduction. The fault, Olney soon learned, was that the recipes he sent to Beard, who was going to write the introduction to Olney’s book, were xeroxed and circulated in cooking classes Beard and Nelson taught in Portland. “Nelson thought he was stealing from Beard,” Olney concluded. Nelson did not give any indication that he understood what the fuss was about, but he paid out of court an undisclosed amount that August. Beard, who had perhaps misjudged Olney’s originality, felt betrayed by Nelson and humiliated. Olney never spoke to Beard again.

The AIWF board searched for an executive director for more than two years until Dick Graff finally found the man to lead the organization. Julia agreed with Graff’s selection of George Trescher, who, she said, “made a great hit with everyone.” Though born in California, Trescher had made his career on the East Coast, working for Time-Life and fund-raising for the New York Public Library and the Museum of Science. He had just the right “East Coast credentials,” Julia explained to Simca, because “the East Coast knows nothing at all about us out here … it is like starting something in Lyons—how do you get the Parisians to take it seriously? We like Trescher very much indeed—think he will finally get the Institute on its feet and going.” Trescher, later called “Party Chairman … one of the people who make New York tick,” moved to San Francisco for a reported income of six figures. Julia, Mondavi, and the millionaire founders believed that to get the organization on its feet, they had to buy the best talent. Child and Mondavi, who co-sponsored the fund-raising feast in San Francisco the year before, emerged as titular leaders of the AIWF (Graff preferred to stay out of the limelight). Under Trescher, the AIWF was characterized by its rapid growth and grand national conventions, beginning with the first, in Santa Barbara in 1985. When they announced a goal of raising $2 million in nine months, Paul Levy responded from London: “Two million dollars! That cake certainly rose.”

Julia was invited by the Reagans to attend the state dinner for French President François Mitterrand in the spring of 1984. She hated the food, right down to the purple sorbet with canned peaches. When she sent her thank-you note to the Reagans on April 14, she talked about the progress of the gastronomic arts in the country and the goals of the AIWF, and added: “A number of us in the cooking profession have wondered [given the existence of an advisory committee on the decoration of the White House] if it might also be possible to have a panel on food served at official dinners.” Though her family and friends knew her dislike for the Reagans’ politics, this appeal to improve state dinners was a long-standing concern without a political basis. Indeed, earlier that year the
Washington Post
declared, “Julia Child is about the only hero left. She … as far as we know has never had a political thought.”

At the peak of her career, Julia was never so aware of her own mortality. Even while she kept up a professional pace commensurate with her energy (taping
Parade
segments in Cambridge, attending the Association of Cooking Schools conference in Paris), she was reminded of her age. Paul was still haunted by the loss of Charlie. Her seventy-year-old brother had been hit by a car and was slowly recovering. Brother-in-law Ivan Cousins had a prostate operation and radiation. Most distressing was the gradual decline of Paul, who fell asleep at meals, even after she gave him a poke. Then what she had been fearing for several years happened: James Beard was taken to the hospital with only one functioning kidney and a very weak heart. He died early in the morning of January 21, 1985, and his ashes were eventually scattered along the coastline of his native Oregon.

Chapter 25
S
EASONED WITH
L
OVE
(1985 – 1989)

“Boutez en avant!”

JULIA CHILD

T
HE PRESS
, the food world, even Hollywood (represented by Danny Kaye) turned out for what was billed as the First Annual Conference on Gastronomy of the American Institute of Wine and Food on January 25–27, 1985. Trescher hired Gregory Drescher as Program Director to help him plan the Santa Barbara conference. “Dining in America—Inside or Outside the Home” was the vague and all-encompassing title under which leading American culinary figures from the United States and France spoke on a variety of issues. Trescher remembers the conference as “magic.” When Alice Waters spoke too evangelically about organic food, Julia turned to her and said she was bringing the whole spirit of the thing down with this endless talk of pollutants and toxins. The founder of Chez Panisse was stung and embarrassed. Julia herself downplayed pesticides because it reinforced the country’s ingrained fear of pleasure and she believed that Alice’s “romantic beliefs” would not help feed two hundred million people. Later that year, for example, she told
U.S. News & World Report
, which was doing a cover story on America’s “Diet Wars,” that “too many experts are trying to scare people” and her best advice for a healthy life was to eat a great variety of fresh food. With the death of Beard just days before and worries about funding the renovation of Cliff House on the campus of the University of California at Santa Barbara, Julia wanted to keep the mood of everyone upbeat. For her, it was always
“Boutez en avant!”
(full steam ahead), as she loved to shout.

T
HE WAY TO COOK BY CASSETTE

Julia was optimistic after the conference as she drove on Channel Drive, along the coast in front of the Biltmore Hotel and by the Bird Refuge, to 40 Los Patos Lane, to see the kitchen built for the new filming project. She (Julia Child Productions) signed a contract with Knopf’s new VideoBooks for a series of six one-hour cassettes called
The Way to Cook
and a future book. The cassettes were at the cutting edge of technology, they all believed, and would mean enormous sales, perhaps as many as if not more than the book. Not for television this time, but for direct sale, with an accompanying pamphlet of recipes. Knopf had a contract with WGBH to make the cassettes and share the profits. Knopf’s VideoBooks handled distribution and sales. WGBH was financially responsible for building the kitchen in a studio rented from Michael Hutchings’s Waterside Inn, which occupied an antique house next door. D. Crosby Ross, a founder of the AIWF and of a culinary emporium in Santa Barbara, did the design and furnishing (as he had for
Dinner at Julia’s)
. The studio and kitchen were spacious. More important, most of the old gang was arriving from Boston for the preparation.

Since a planning meeting the previous November, when Russ showed the demo they filmed during
Dinner at Julia’s
, there had been a tug-of-war between Morash and her lawyer Bob Johnson over who was in charge of the production. Johnson wanted to be the producer. He was enamored of the media food world, of Julia and her fame (the food was secondary). Morash, who “insisted upon complete control,” would not stand for someone who did not understand television making decisions for him. Marian intervened with Julia, who was able to resolve the conflict by interrupting her
Parade
shooting in California that fall to return to Cambridge for what she called a “long friendly session with Russ.” Her resolution, typically, was to hand both a title: Morash was producer/director; her lawyer was executive producer of Julia Child Productions, meaning, among other things, that he hired someone to do her hair and clothes. She informed Mary Frances later that Russ is “wonderful at this, the Alfred Hitchcock of how-to … a real boss, and someone with lots of imagination and visual style.” What Julia and others did not know was that Johnson was ill with AIDS and in later weeks would be acting more erratically. Also behind the conflict was Julia’s desire to have an editor to ensure a more polished result than they had on
Dinner at Julia’s
. Stung by the criticism of that series, she focused her blame on Morash’s editor, who was not a cook. “I need a writer who could take care of continuity, sparkling and meaningful dialogue where necessary … and a more professional series,” she informed Judith.

Tension now diffused, they began in early February a rhythm of one week’s discussion and planning for two programs at the house (Russ and Marian rented an apartment in Montecito Shores near Julia), followed by two weeks of filming in the studio—a one-hour cassette each week, shot in fifteen-minute segments. Russ was creating six one-hour teaching videos, conceived as a cooking school on cassette for the home cook. Marian Morash (Executive Chef) and Rosemary Manell (Food Designer) were Julia’s left and right hands, and they hired four others to assist in the preparation work. Occasionally someone had to run to the back door of the Waterside Inn to borrow some food. They scripted the opening and closing lines, but Morash filmed, as always, without a script. For the “First Courses and Desserts” tape, Julia made Reine de Saba: “Here’s my
all-time
favorite chocolate cake!” This fourth version of the cake (“new and improved”) used two kinds of chocolate and five eggs. The final cassette was shot the first week of April.

Julia had been given her biggest contract yet from Knopf for the series and book
The Way to Cook
. She received $100,000, or a fourth of her advance, but worried that she would not be able to deliver the manuscript within Knopf’s deadline. She had written to Judith Jones that she would return the “mazuma” if she missed deadlines, “because I am only interested in doing another book in my own way by myself.” Her own way meant waiting until the taping was over (the writing would take her several years to complete). Judith was on the set every day where she worked on Julia’s recipes, watched the filming, and prepared the inserts for the videos, using cross-references for ease of shopping and meal planning.

During planning sessions and taping, Julia attended the Association of Cooking Schools conference in Seattle, where a memorial luncheon for James Beard was held. Madeleine Kamman was scheduled to give a talk, “A Philosophy of Teaching,” but first ten people were to memorialize the pioneering work of Beard. When it was Julia’s turn, she whipped away the funereal tone with a call for action. She heard from Peter Kump that Reed College (where Beard was kicked out as a student), which inherited the Beard house, was going to sell it and that some of his belongings were already auctioned off. In her typically practical and authoritative manner, she announced that something had to be done immediately to preserve his memory and the home that meant so much to their profession. Some heard her suggest they buy his house as a memorial; others heard her say they needed a place to drop in for culinary fellowship and a spot of sherry. Whatever the clarion call, it fell most heavily on the ears and shoulders of Peter Kump and Kathleen Perry, a food professional from Longwood, Florida (the Perrys gave a three-month loan of $100,000, not repaid until 1995). Kump began raising funds with dinners in honor of Beard around the country.

Julia got back to Cambridge in time for the arrival of the cassettes and a trip to Northampton to receive an honorary doctorate from Smith College. President Mary Maples Dunn called her “one of our national treasures” as she presented her with a Doctor of Humane Letters. Julia had to bend very low for the short president to place the colors over her head. The menus for the inaugural weekend of President Dunn were planned by Julia, including an original dish,
crêpes Maples Dunn en flammes
, for the inaugural garden party. The New England ingredients, to be prepared as a filling for her crêpe recipe in
Mastering II
, included Granny Smith apples, raisins, maple syrup, walnuts, and spices, and the recipe was published in the
Smith Alumnae Quarterly
that fall. She had turned down previous honorary degrees, including one from Middlebury College in 1983 when she was busy filming in California, but Julia was moved by this tribute from her alma mater.

“Knopf is going all out to promote [the cassettes] because this is the first venture into video for them,” Julia told Mary Frances. After a ten-city promotional tour for
The Way to Cook
VideoBooks, Julia returned to Cambridge and asked Rosemary and Nancy to take over the photo sessions of the
Parade
series so she could care for Paul and complete her book. In 1986 she resigned her role as food editor and turned the job over to young Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins, of the Silver Palette cookbooks fame. They promptly inaugurated their term with recipes using goat cheese, arugula, and pesto. Gone were Julia’s traditional puff pastry, savory lamb, and braised ham menus. It was certainly a generational shift, she thought while writing to Elizabeth David, who had sent Julia her latest book: “We miss Jim Beard a great deal. I did lots of telephoning and talking and gossiping with him and I seem to miss him more now when I realize that he is just not there.”

During their six weeks in France that summer, Julia and Paul received word that Robert H. Johnson, their lawyer for sixteen years, had died of AIDS at the age of forty-five. “It was a big shock to her when he died of AIDS,” says Marian Morash. “I know she was surprised,” added Jane Friedman. Even some of his colleagues did not know he was homosexual, nor did they know what AIDS was. Paul had written a poem to Johnson years before, celebrating his long line of lady friends, whom Johnson was careful to bring to social occasions. His occasional grandiosity offended many, including Judith Jones and Russ Morash, but he was a tough negotiator for Julia until he was incapacitated. She was grateful for his work and deeply grieved at his death. Though her passport still read that in case of emergency Johnson was to be notified, Julia had already been visited by William Auchincloss Truslow, a colleague of Johnson’s at Hill & Barlow, who informed her that he would assume her representation. She willingly concurred, for Bill Truslow was a friend of two decades’ standing.

Truslow, a graduate of Yale and Harvard Law, had represented John Kenneth Galbraith since the death of Brooks Beck, Julia’s first lawyer. Truslow left Wall Street to work with Beck and to enjoy the human exchange: “Trusts and Estates is people,” he points out. His sister Jane was married to longtime friend Peter Davison. Truslow admired Julia’s generosity. Five years before, when his sister Jane was diagnosed with breast cancer, Julia had been one of the first to call, and when Jane’s cancer returned the next year, Julia lent her Santa Barbara apartment to Jane and Peter for a holiday just before Jane’s death. Truslow also admired Julia’s frankness (though she could make this New England lawyer blush) and her honesty (“She does not waste psychic energy on deception … her personal persona and her public persona are the very same”). In turn, Julia adored this personable gentleman and scholar who had a well-bred politeness and was so comfortable with wit and laughter.

If her occasional frank talk could make him blush, her gusto for exotic foods sometimes frightened his palate. One day when he was visiting Santa Barbara and a man dropped off a bucket of sea urchins at Julia’s door, he watched in amazement as she opened the sea urchins, still alive, and spooned out the orange/pink reproductive organs and tasted them, murmuring with pleasure. She picked up the second, scooped it out, and passed it over to him. After swift mental calculations, he opened his mouth and swallowed, gagging it down. When she reached for another, he mumbled something about having to call his wife and dashed into the other room.

The second AIWF Conference on Gastronomy was held at the Weston/Copley Plaza in Boston on October 23–26, 1985. There were now nine regional chapters, and the Boston chapter, as host, was determined to impress the national body. The head of the Boston chapter was K. Dun Gifford, whom Julia first met in the early 1970s. “Julia was quite taken with the tall and elegant Dun,” says Robert Huttenback. According to Gifford, he had watched
The French Chef
(which came on the television immediately before
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.)
all during law school, then worked for the Kennedys until after Chappaquiddick. Gifford’s brother John (Jock) owned the Straight Wharf restaurant in Nantucket, where Julia had worked line crew with chef Marian Morash. It had been Julia who said the year before to Dun, with whom she loved talking politics, “Why don’t you be the president” of the new Boston chapter.

Paul, who continued to travel with her, was increasingly forgetful and occasionally could not grasp what was said to him. “The only thing that really upset him,” according to Anne Willan, “was when she was not there.” Julia encouraged him to keep active at La Pitchoune, but he did not want to go for walks. He would lift his weights, but walking activated the arthritis in his back. Though she continued to write to distant friends for another year or two that he was happily painting away, he, in fact, no longer painted. During this visit he started a crude outline of several links in a chain he once photographed. The painting is disturbing, just black suggestions of chain links on a white canvas, and remains unfinished.