Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (67 page)

Despite the ten-city tour earlier that summer and more traveling in the fall to promote the Knopf cassettes, sales were disappointing. It was not that Julia failed to carefully demonstrate the cooking techniques of poultry, meat, soups, vegetables, eggs, and fish. Morash insists, “They are very valuable … ahead of their time. Someday they will be shown as a series and sold because they are Julia at her best. It is classic stuff.” Four reasons account for the weak sales. There was poor distribution for cassettes in the 1980s; few people had television or videos in their kitchen; these videotapes were expensive at $39 each. Also, poor sales may indicate that people watched Julia Child on television because they loved to watch a master in action and they enjoyed her personality, not because they wanted to make the dish she was cooking. They would show up during her tour because they wanted to see her, not necessarily to use her cassette.

While on the road promoting her cassettes, Julia met with persons interested in beginning a chapter of AIWF. When she spoke at the Smithsonian in the fall of 1985, for example, she met with the Washington, DC, chapter. In San Francisco, Jim Wood, who had covered her activities and books for the
San Francisco Examiner
took her to eat at Tu Lan, his favorite Chinese restaurant, located near the newspaper’s office but in the scuzziest part of town. Long before he became food editor, Wood had learned to cook from
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
. Now, after twenty interviews with her, he was in awe of her physical stamina and the breadth of her fame. When Julia emerged from the Knopf limousine, one of the street drunks announced, à la Ed McMahon on the Johnny Carson show: “It’s Joooooolia!” Wood noticed over lunch that as she was talking about her cassettes, “the cooking school of the future,” she and Paul were handling their chopsticks like experts and eating with relish. Soon the talk turned to their OSS work in China and their admiration for Barbara Tuchman’s biography of General Joseph Stilwell. As the limo pulled away from the curb, and before Wood headed back to his office, another drunk walked into the middle of the street, lifted his cap in a large bowing circle to Julia, and called out,
“Bon appétit!”

The first six months of 1986 were spent in Santa Barbara, where, Julia told Avis, “the mimosa are in bloom, the avocados ripening, flowering bushes, fresh broccoli and spinach in bunches” at the local farmers’ market. When she wrote to “Red and Eleanor” Warren to congratulate him on his appointment as Poet Laureate, she described their “condo overlooking the green meadow and blue Pacific”—the colors of her many kitchens and book covers. Paul was briefly hospitalized with shingles, which was treated successfully. They were able to attend the Third Annual AIWF Conference in San Diego, a charity cooking demonstration at the Stanford Court Hotel to benefit the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and a weekend in the Napa Valley, but increasingly she was limping around with an aching knee. She told the Walcutts the bum knee was “the result of an old ski injury and forty years behind the stove.” Finally she had what she called “a total knee replacement” the first week of February. She took her physical training regime seriously, she wrote, and was on the knee-flexing machine soon after surgery, in a walker the next day, home in eight days, and “in three months I can start ballet.”

She had to get back to her book and, more important, she felt, keep being involved with people and the professional world. In March the Childs attended the First Annual AIWF Founders Banquet and the Monterey Wine Festival, as well as the Association of Cooking Schools (later renamed the International Association of Culinary Professionals) conference in Washington, D.C. Peter Kump, the next president, planned a dinner honoring Simca, with a reading of letters from her friends and colleagues, including Julia, who wrote about “our lasting and loving culinary sisterhood.” Simca remained in France to work on her memoirs with Jane Owen Molard (“I thoroughly empathized with what Julia must have gone through when writing the first
Mastering,”
she says today). But a greater reason for staying in France was her husband, Jean, who was ill (and would die that summer). The next month Paul had his second prostate operation as well as a number of other physical ailments. The year 1986 was not a good or healthy one, though some letters Julia wrote painted a jolly picture of “Paul … busy and happy, painting and photographing.” In truth, she was cooped up with her book and a disoriented husband. Nevertheless, she pressed on this spring with a visit to the Sebastiani estate, another week of classes at the Mondavi vineyard (with Maggie Mah and Rosemary assisting her), a gala at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco, and attendance at the San Francisco Food Writers dinner—always accompanied by Paul.

By summer she was beginning to doubt she would ever complete
The Way to Cook
. In a letter to the Walcutts, after discussing her worries about the conservative Supreme Court, the new laws against sodomy, and the abortion question, she added: “I am engulfed in my mammoth new cookbook and doubt, at this point, if I shall ever get it finished. There is so much to do, and I have to
think
, which takes so much time. The IBM-PC is marvelous, and I bless it every day.” She completed the poultry and vegetable chapters and left Santa Barbara erroneously thinking a secretary that fall could put various recipes from
Parade, Dinner at Julia’s
, and
The Way to Cook
tapes onto her computer disk.

Leaving the manuscript behind, Julia took Paul, just after their fortieth wedding anniversary, back to France while she could. It would turn out to be his last Provençal journey. As usual, according to the Pratts, who accompanied them, she had the itinerary to Alsace, Switzerland, Italy, and Provence carefully typed out and planned. She always told people she returned to Europe “to see what they are up to.” That is why she visited Patricia Wells, whom she met at a cooking school meeting in the fall of 1984 in Paris (after having written her a fan letter that spring when
A Food Lover’s Guide to Paris
was published). “They came to my fortieth birthday party that fall,” Wells told me in 1995. “I had never watched her on television, but I knew her from her books. There was no other way to learn to cook, and there never will be another like her.” She was impressed with Julia’s generosity, curiosity, and breadth of knowledge (“though she does not wear her knowledge overtly”). It little mattered that Wells and Julia would not always agree on their assessment of French restaurants they visited together over the next decade. Julia could be stubborn once she made up her mind, and “she hates trendiness … and frozen food.”

“My God, it’s Beverly Hills in the south of France,” said Clark Wolf when he first visited coastal Provence. Wolf, a quick-witted food retailer, later a restaurant consultant, and active member of the New York chapter of AIWF, was visiting Bramafam for Simca’s annual cocktail party, which included the Childs and Susy Davidson. Wolf could be just as outspoken as Julia and they liked each other. “When you get to Julia’s base, it’s about very sophisticated, very simple life … she is deeply intuitive. She just loves men and she makes men feel special, though she is enormously supportive of women. Her thinking is liberal but her approach is conservative because she likes structure and discipline. She’s very American, very grounded.”

The trip to France was a disaster for Paul, according to one friend they visited. “He would eat everything during very rich meals and developed a digestive tract blockage. He could suddenly become fractious. But whatever embarrassment Julia may have felt, she never showed it.” As they were leaving France, Julia herself told friends that he would drop off to sleep during meals.

They stopped in New York for her appearance on
Good Morning America
. Julia and her crew were waiting for the cameras to roll, one key assistant missing because her husband had deserted her. “She forgot the three F’s,” Julia whispered to Sara Moulton: “Feed ’em, fuck ’em, and flatter ’em.” Seven minutes later, on-camera, she pronounced her
Bon appétit
. Charlie Gibson, who began working with her when he joined the cast as host in 1987, adored Julia and her outspoken matter-of-factness:

Julia is game to do anything; she is marvelous to work with and asks no quarter because of her age. She is an incorrigible flirt and she loves to talk politics, especially about Congress, which I used to cover. Once as I left after dining with them, I said to Paul, “It is a very impertinent thing for a young man to say, but I have always been in love with your wife.” Paul answered immediately, “That’s okay, I have been in love with her too.”

A
GREAT GATSBY ERA

Even before D. Crosby Ross and Dun Gifford took over the American Institute of Wine and Food in late 1987, Julia was having trouble with the organization she envisioned—or rather the organization that was
not
what she envisioned. The more money they worked to raise, the more money they seemed to need. She enjoyed the first-class conferences that brought together the best thinkers and practitioners in the country, but she was getting tired of the constant dunning for dollars. George Trescher, who was hired for $100,000—a huge sum for a small organization with no endowment (and a library debt)—returned to New York City after fourteen months as president, he says, in order to run his business there. For one more year he remained on retainer, spending ten days a month in San Francisco.

The Fourth Annual AIWF Conference on Gastronomy, in Texas, on November 6–9, 1986, was the most extravagant to date and was sponsored by the Campbell Soup Company, Food and Wines From France, and Rosewood Hotels (the program insert listed seventy corporations and vineyards as “contributors”). The institute flew in medical doctors, academicians, national journalists, food producers, editors, chefs, and winemakers. From France they flew in chefs Jean-Pierre Billoux, Jacques Cagna, and Gérard Besson, as well as Patricia Wells, Anne Willan, Rudolph Chelminski, and Richard Olney. It was a star-studded gathering with first-class accommodations, intellectual stimulation, sumptuous meals, and a variety of wines, champagne, and stretch limousines.

The champagne and caviar conferences, planned by Trescher and Program Director Greg Drescher, may have reinforced the image of a “wine and cheese” society that the students and faculty at UCSB had complained about. Indeed, the conferences were worthy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby and in part a reflection of the frenzied trend-making and the conspicuous consumption of the 1980s. They drew civilian food and wine lovers, many of them wealthy, for the admission was expensive. These conferences were heavily underwritten and costly, but they dispensed enough mental and gustatory stimulation to sate any palate. Those who made frequent presentations at the conferences included England-based wine expert Hugh Johnson, the
New York Times’s
R. W. Apple, Jr., anthropologist Lionel Tiger,
Esquire’s
John Mariani, food historian William Woys Weaver, and Albert Sonnenfeld, a professor of French and comparative literature.

The same tone of splendor, but without the corporate underwriting, existed at national headquarters. Hiring of staff and travel expenses were unrestrained, given the cost for administration and publications. The seeds of the problem lay at the founding: Child, Mondavi, and Graff (who in their own businesses always had business managers) hired Trescher, who was an outstanding fund-raiser and conference planner, but not strong on managing and budgeting an office. D. Crosby Ross, whom one founder called “the most profligate with his champagne and limousines,” was now earning $125,000. Under Ross, who served as president in San Francisco, the debt reached $285,000. Under Dun Gifford, chair of the board of directors, the debt soared to $635,000. “They were all great at spending money,” according to Richard Graff, “but no one could touch Dun Gifford for that. He had great ideas but tripled the deficit.”

The
Journal of Gastronomy
was published quarterly at enormous cost. Dedicated to the theory and history of cuisine and initially edited by David Thomson, the journal was the most scholarly element of the organization. First published in the summer of 1984 and running about 125 pages each, its early issues featured essays by such nationally and internationally recognized scholars and artists as Roland Barthes, Alan Davidson (founder of the Oxford Symposia on Food History), M. F. K. Fisher, Jan Langone, Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, Raymond Sokolov, Joyce Carol Oates, and Harvey Levenstein. Topics ranged from “On the Esculent Fungi,” “Paradise Lost: The Decline of the Apple and the American Agrarian Ideal,” “Food in France After the Revolution,” to “The Cooks of Concord.” Artwork (René Magritte’s
L’Invention
Collective
opened the first volume) as well as photographs of the covers of antique culinary books were included. As Paul Levy wrote from London: “The rates of pay are … appetizing. Foodie writers passed the word around that for a long piece,
Gastronomy
pays the equivalent of 40 four-toque dinners.”

The
Newsletter
, which Dick Graff had published as a four-page report to all the members, became an eight-page, and then early in 1987 a twelve-page AIWF monthly newsletter redesigned and edited by Robert Clark (who would author Beard’s biography five years later). The February issue included articles by Ruth Reichl, then food editor of the
Los Angeles Times
and later of the
New York Times
, as well as pieces by Julia Child and culinary scholars Barbara Wheaton, Philip Hyman, and Mary Hyman. By 1988 it took on more news of the business of the organization.

After reading the May 1987 issue of the monthly newsletter, Julia wrote a letter to the editor (published in July) commenting on two articles that made it evident the AIWF was risking a fall into what she called “The We Happy Few Syndrome: Nothing produced for the mass market is worth considering by the cognoscenti, be it coffee, bread, vegetables, wine, or whatever.” They must, she insisted, be just as concerned about the quality of canned and frozen produce as they are about truffles and foie gras. Coffee magnate Tim Castle, who wrote one of the articles, responded immediately to insist he was being grossly misinterpreted, his career hurt, and asking for an emendation. There is no indication that she responded.