Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (71 page)

“
M
ERCI, JULIA
”:
STILL COOKING AT EIGHTY

Julia stayed busy and surrounded by young people. Her eightieth birthday almost took her by surprise. Never one to look back or bow to her years, she would have preferred to ignore the ugly fact of age. Indeed, she did not think of herself as old. For example, when she had flown to France more than a year before with Susy Davidson and arrived at Orly airport to take a cab to the Gare de Lyon, they looked in vain for a porter to carry their bags to the train bound for Provence. Ever one to
bouter en avant
(barrel on through), she seized her bags and dragged them up and down stairs until they were in the train. Once settled, Julia exclaimed how terrible it was that there was no one to assist them. “What do old people do?!” she wondered. When Nancy Barr ordered an electric cart at another airport, she settled beside Julia, each holding their portable computers, and remarked how she had always wanted to ride “one of these.” Julia announced, “I’ve always wanted to
drive
one of these!”

Julia returned to La Pitchoune in 1992 to pack her pots and pans and vacate the house, which was to go back to the Fischbacher/Thibault families. She was filled with the memories of Paul and Simca at every noise and aroma. Her niece Phila, Bob Moran, and their little son Nicholas were there to help. By the end of June she was packed to leave for good, saddened only by the loss that initiated her leaving Provence. “Without Paul and without Simca much of the heart has gone out of it,” she wrote Peter Kump. Much had also gone out of the country: Plascassier no longer had little shops, and the narrow roads were crowded with cars. Paul predicted in the 1960s that the place would someday look like Southern California, but it was worse. “It is 1920 France with an undigested appliqué of the year 2000,” she told Bill Truslow. “I left France this time with no regrets whatsoever.”
Boutez en avant
!

She came home to a steady stream of press running through her house with television cables and steno pads, all covering the birthday story. For some time now, her home had been a public place, with no sense of privacy; everything from the coffeepot to the toilet had notes stuck up with instructions for visitors. Julia would spend the actual day of her eightieth birthday celebrating with the McWilliams family at her brother’s home in Vermont, and later that month celebrating with the Child family in Maine. She also agreed to participate in a series of birthday dinners as a financial benefit for the AIWF. When she agreed she did not know she would have more than 300 appearances over the coming year. Her only regret about the coming plans for birthday parties all over the country was the realization that ninety-year-old Paul could not share it with her. He no longer knew where he was or recognized most of his family. She went to see him one to three times every day, and a nurse’s aide fed, walked, bathed, and put him to bed from four until eight. When Julia was not there, longtime friends, including their butcher Jack Savenor, visited him. The body that had sailed the seas on freighters and hauled logs with Charlie to build the family’s summer home in Maine, kept on living after the memory was gone, eventually even the memory of the voice now soothing him with loving endearments.

When asked by the president of the Unitarian Universalist Association about the difficulty of Paul’s deterioration, she answered, “Well, it’s part of life…. As it is [with Paul in a nursing home], now when I go to see him, I go full of love and help and everything else.” When asked if they had living wills she replied affirmatively. “We also belong to the Neptune Society. Our funerals are paid for—$600 each—and when we’re gone, you just call them up and they pick you up and cremate you.”

As she arrived at the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington, DC, at the end of July, nearly two and a half weeks before her birthday, a crowd of protesters was gathered outside. “Animals, beware! Julia is Hungry” read some of the placards. Inside, chef Jean-Louis Palladin and other prominent chefs in the area were preparing a feast with a finale of three cakes that took the pâtissiers three months to prepare. Atop the first cake were likenesses of her five books, the second the seal of L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes and a wire whisk, and the third a sugary painting of her Cambridge house.

Despite the fact that fifty free-range chickens from Iowa were missing from the kitchen, lost by the airlines and found rotten three days later, the party went on smoothly. The loss of the chickens, had the protesters outside known, would have punctuated their outcries about cruelty to animals. Julia, one magazine said, “made hash of the protesters” by announcing, “I am a card-carrying carnivore. I’ve got to keep my strength up.” Her objection was as much to their methods (trying to force their beliefs on her) as to their philosophy. In her experience, particularly in French gastronomy, there was never a consideration of the issues articulated by the protesters.

At times the carnivores and vegetarians were intolerant of each other, including Julia, who apologized in 1987 for a flip remark she made about “hating vegetarians.” For decades she received letters about her cruelty to oysters, to lobsters, to rabbits, pigs, and calves (“You shrill-voiced shrew—you would skin your grandmother and eat her if you could get her into your mouth,” one anonymous letter said). Paul Prudhomme called it the “Bambi Syndrome.” Peter Kump called protesters outside the Washington party “vicious vegetarians” and said they reminded him of the right-to-lifers. Julia’s paternal grandparents would have read Romans 14:3: “Let not him that eateth despise him that eateth not; and let not him which eateth not judge him that eateth: for God hath received him.”

When Julia left the Washington, DC, gala, and was walking past the protesters, a journalist asked her how she kept up the pace of her travels and she replied, “Well, you know, dear, I eat well.” She was “having [her]
génoise
and eating it too,” another reported, adding she had no immediate plans to retire, but would “move permanently to California when she turns 86 [in 1998].”

She wanted David Letterman to emcee her Boston birthday party, but he was busy. This second memorable birthday celebration, at the Copley Plaza Hotel on November 2, 1992, was given by her hometown and WGBH, which filmed the event for PBS. Her neighbor John Kenneth Galbraith sat at her table and gave a tribute. Dun Gifford sat at her right hand. Robert Hastings came from Los Angeles to remind her of their good-times gang in Pasadena before the war. Her office staff and television cooks paid tribute. Because gastronomy reconciles all the arts—painting, religion, theater, and music—it was fitting that at her local eightieth birthday party the Boston Pops played music on pots, pans, and whisks. Arthur Fiedler would have been delighted by “Fanfare with Pots and Pans.” When Diana Rigg read Paul’s poem to his “Cook and nifty wench,” the camera caught Julia wiping a tear from her cheek.

Fourteen chefs cooked New York City’s dinner for Julia in the Rainbow Room on January 24, 1993. The three hundred guests (sixty more were on the waiting list) paid $200 and more to hear Jean Stapleton read a poem and Joe Baum deliver a tribute, to see clips of Julia and those who best imitate her, and to feast with Julia on a menu that began with sweetbreads and ended with baked Alaska topped with sparklers. The room overlooking Manhattan was filled with votive candles and lavish floral arrangements topped by eighteen-inch whisks with a single red rose inside each wire cage. When Julia was given a four-foot whisk festooned with flowers and dripping with pearls, she placed it on her shoulder and marched around the room.

If New York’s birthday party was the most elegant, Los Angeles gave the largest and, at $350 a ticket, the most expensive. Five hundred people dined at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Marina del Rey on February 7. Michel Richard of Citrus organized “Merci, Julia” with nine great chefs from France who had never cooked together before. They were thanking “La Dame du Siècle” for introducing French cooking to the middle-class American home. “After so many years of Julia Child, Americans have improved their taste,” said Jacques Cagna, owner/chef of the restaurant that bears his name. In addition to Cagna, with his two stars in the
Michelin
, were Roger Vergé, Paul Bocuse, Marc Meneau, Alain Ducasse, and Michel Rostang, among others. A favorite pastime of the evening was counting the number of
Guide Michelin
stars on what was billed as the “Dream Team.” Moët’s Jean Berchon said, “Even in France if we wanted to gather so many chefs, we couldn’t [do so].”

Sixty hors d’oeuvres preceded the sit-down meal, said Merrill Shindler. “This was not a feed for amateurs, the faint of heart, or those watching cholesterol. It was an exercise in excess, in the midst of an era of lowered expectations.” Assisting the dream team were forty-four of the best French chefs from Los Angeles (Ken Frank, Michel Richard, Patrick Healy, Joachim Splichal), New York City (David Bouley, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Alain Sailhac, André Soltner), and Washington, DC (Jean-Louis Palladin). Jacques Pépin, Anne Willan, Drew Nieporent, and others assisted, as did about twenty sous-chefs brought by the big-name chefs (Bocuse sat in his tuxedo next to Julia). The French sponsors were prominent: Air France, Moët et Chandon (who put up $100,000), and Nestlé. The only sour note was the paucity of women chefs, a few invited at the last minute. “Thanks, Julia, but Where are the Women?” asked the
Los Angeles Times Book Review
. When the women’s anger at their exclusion escalated, Julia called the feminists “tiresome.” Madeleine Kamman declared that all these men chefs were “going to … cross their arms on their chests and put perfectly disgusting food on the table.” However, Ruth Reichl said afterward, “Dinner took five hours—and it was terrific.” When Kamman said, “Good old Julia is going to be with all these male chauvinists. The mere fact that I haven’t been invited is absolutely grotesque,” Marian Burros of the
New York Times
wondered “why Mrs. Kamman, who has been saying unkind words about Mrs. Child for years, would want to be invited.”

“Merci, Julia” was really a celebration of the French chefs in America—an effort she gladly assisted. French restaurants were in trouble, and Julia could help them. More than a year before,
Newsweek
writer Laura Shapiro had announced that formal French restaurants were “almost extinct” in America. “Our love affair with French food is over, done in by new passion for our own chefs and ingredients.” Those that have survived and thrived, she noted, were the French chefs who had evolved “California French” cooking, such as Los Angeles’s Joachim Splichel (Patina) and New York’s Vongerichten (Jo-Jo). Pépin agrees that the best French restaurants surviving were “French with a twist,” those that adapted according to the produce of the region. “The temples of haute cuisine are an anachronism,” said Marian Burros, and Faith Willinger (an Italian chef) called it “Americans’ sweet revenge” for being treated as unworthy. Michel Richard frankly admitted before the “Merci, Julia” event, “We want to be loved again.” The evening was their way of saying, “I’m all right, Jacques!”

Because Julia’s fame went beyond her French Chef persona, she did not seem to be affected by the waning influence of French cuisine and the rise of Italian cookbooks and restaurants. Chef Roger Fessaguet (Pavilion) said she “created a generation who understood and appreciated French cooking. She did more than any of us.” George Faison, co-founder of D’Artagnan, importer of foie gras and other specialty foods, says, “She sparked a transformation of American gastronomy, … articulated the flavor, smell and texture of exotic ingredients…. Because of Julia, everything changed.” She was the grande dame of all cuisine, the name synonymous with cooking in this country, as trustworthy as Walter Cronkite, as beloved as George Burns, as recognizable as the Pope.

B
ONFIRE OF THE VAINGLORIOUS

In February 1992, before the official birthday parties began and in between the AIWF conference in New Orleans and the IACP conference in Miami (at which Julia was the keynote speaker), the AIWF executive committee was interviewing potential candidates when the following headline appeared in the
Los Angeles Times:
“Julia Child ‘Rabidly Homophobic,’ Lawsuit Alleges.”

Daniel Coulter had filed a three-million-dollar lawsuit against Julia Child, the AIWF, and its directors for denying him the job as executive director of the AIWF because he was gay. The
Boston Globe
the next day carried more details of his charges: that his friend Richard Graff had suggested he apply, and that Dorothy Cann (chair of the board) told him their founder was “rabidly homophobic” and would undermine his effectiveness if he won the job. Speaking for the executive committee, Graff said that Coulter was not hired because he did not have fund-raising qualifications. Cann made no statement. Julia publicly (and accurately) said she “had nothing to do with the selection…. I haven’t heard of Coulter or any of the applicants, so I don’t have any comments at all.” In the
New York Times’s
coverage, she was quoted as saying “I don’t care who he or she is as long as they have the qualifications.” In the spring issue of
The Advocate
, a reporter for this gay journal said Julia was “incredulous that ‘someone named Daniel Coulter’ is blaming his own homosexuality—or rather her homophobia—for having been passed over.” This line was the only negative comment in an otherwise positive article about her. Privately, Julia called the lawsuit “silly” and observed that there was “very little backlash.” Her chief concern was that the AIWF was going to have to spend money on lawyers just when it was almost in the black. Dorothy Cann privately denied the charges (“No, I do
not
believe that Julia is homophobic. I believe she is a product of her age”) and was disappointed that she never received a personal word of support from Julia.

Neither Child nor Cann was ever deposed, for Coulter’s flimsy suit was settled immediately after his own deposition when he agreed to a small settlement from the AIWF. He had left them a $195 room service charge on the hotel bill when he was in town for his interview, according to two members of the executive committee. One of the men on the executive committee, who himself was gay, said, “Julia was the target because she had money. It was green mail, extortion, and it was slimy. It had nothing to do with Julia as a person because he had never known her. But the lawyer told us not to respond.”