Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (72 page)

Julia’s place in the food world seemed to be unaffected for several reasons: her almost untouchable stature with the public, the fact that she had close working relations with gay men, and because people knew that there were gays on the AIWF board, among the founding members, and working in the national office (including the man who did get the job). What Julia may have paid in bad public relations is difficult to assess.

The response from some in the gay community was dismay. One man gave away all of his beloved cookbooks when he mistakenly heard she had “fired someone on her staff for being gay.” Another shrugged and said, “Like any other fag sophisticate, I’ve always been rather a fan.” A few contacted her directly:

My God! Julia—
You’ve been the goddess of the gays for 20 years!!! I’ve got a shelf full of your books! You are mentioned at every gay dinner party (with great affection). How could you get this reputation as a homophobe!!?

[signed]
Martin

Her response was not ringing. She spoke of unjustified claims. Whatever prejudice she shared with her generation and possibly with Paul—who occasionally expressed antihomosexual views, according to his family and friends—she would never have acted upon it. The evidence of her private attitude is mixed. On the one side is her close friendship with many gays, including Cora DuBois, Sybille Bedford, James Beard, and the children of some of her closest friends, as well as several passages in letters (one encouraging a friend for being “out of the closet at last! Makes things easier all around”). She did, nevertheless, pick up the slang expressions for male homosexuals and in writing once (a decade earlier) expressed (to a close friend) her displeasure that gays seemed to dominate the food business, particularly the cooking schools, thus discouraging women and heterosexual men. However, the letter can be read as an argument for inclusion of others rather than exclusion of gays.

“It’s a world of self-generating hysteria,” Nora Ephron quoted Nika Hazelton as saying about the food establishment more than twenty years before. Ephron, who was then reporting on the Michael Field versus Craig Claiborne feud when Field’s first Time-Life book was published, added that it was a “bitchy, gossipy and devious” world. Olney’s plagiarism suit in 1984 may have exposed the corruption of recipe stealing, but nine years later, when Christopher Hitchens reported Martha Stewart’s lifting of a Julia Child recipe for chaudfroid sauce, he almost passed it off with the quip: “To be a culinary plagiarist is to be no more than an omnivore.” Hitchens called the “foodie world … a bitter and competitive one, roiled by great, passionate gusts which it is given to few to understand.” When Evan Jones’s new biography of James Beard stirred up a veritable cat fight among the New York Beardians who were “fighting over [his] remains,”
Newsday
described it as a “bonfire of the foodies.”

One potential scandal that never reached the press, perhaps because it is so pervasive in the food world (as it is in the academic world), is the use of work done by one’s assistants. James Beard is probably a prime example, for he leaned heavily on the work of assistants. Few have written about the hardworking second tier of writers and editors who actually wrote the books for the stars, pinch-hit prepping and washing their dishes, chauffeuring them and carrying their suitcases. They did all this out of love or learning or both. For her later books, Julia Child used assistants for writing, food design, and demonstrations. But unlike some, she acknowledged her assistants by name in each book and paid their expenses and salaries. The public at large, however, never fully knew the indispensable role that Rosemary Manell played in designing the dishes for every photograph, helping to develop recipes, and proofreading.

Julia was no longer hurt by the criticism of others, specifically the Hesses and Madeleine Kamman. And she seemed almost oblivious to the private embittered attacks by Richard Olney, who was stung by Julia’s recommendation years before that he was not qualified to edit the Time-Life series (she was echoing Beard’s judgment). His letters to Simca and Julia were friendly, however. After the death of Simca, who had many photographs of him on her wall, Olney asserted that the two authors of the
Mastering
books were just after money and fame, did not like to eat or to cook, and could not do the latter.

Julia was fortunate that she was in her eighties and a national treasure when the full impact of others’ money and vainglorious ambitions were at their peak. She occasionally got enmeshed in the tensions among the national food organizations and in what has been called the food world’s “log-rolling” and “mutual back-scratching” (the flip side of its feuding)—because her first instinct was not to suspect the motives of people (“She sometimes is not the best judge of character,” several of her friends insist). The conflicts within the AIWF and her own staff and entourage reveal something of Julia’s management style and means of dealing or failing to deal with conflict. The “head girl” never wanted to play the “headmistress,” preferring to avoid controversy and bitterness. According to her family and closest friends, “she had learned to deal with Paul’s occasionally disagreeable nature” by creating a pleasant atmosphere “as a form of control to keep the negative away.” If pushed to do so, she might write a letter, but she always backed away from confrontation. If she scheduled two friends into one of her vacation homes, she asked them to resolve the conflict. One day Stephanie Hersh was left on the porch with her suitcase when another assistant accompanied Julia on tour. It was sometimes difficult for Julia to set limits. She could not ask a slothful boarder to leave or fire anyone. “She has trouble confronting relationship problems. Paul always took care of this,” notes one friend. “She wants to be loved,” adds a family member. Another associate believes she played people off against one another to promote her own autonomy.

Others, particularly her men friends, saw her management style as a wise executive skill. By virtue of the confidences each group gave her, she could watch the infighting of employees and assistants, food groups and academic institutions, while maintaining power and interest as she evaluated her own opinion and position on the issues. Dun Gifford compared her executive style with others he had worked with, especially the Kennedys. She tested her position by listening to the warring sides, maintained chaos control by being the only person who knew the entire story, and kept the social interaction intellectually stimulating for herself. Gifford also compares her to Ronald Reagan in her willful resilience that does “not forget to smile.”

Another woman executive cynically analyzes this interpretation of the Child administrative style as one of a “Teflon leader … who stays above the fray.” It is “her and Bob’s [Mondavi] institute, but they get none of the blame for its fiscal irresponsibility”:

It is cunning: she listens to every side, but does not take sides. Here she is in the cattiest, back-bitingest industry and she has risen above it; nobody is mad at her. Her personal generosity is second only to the Pope’s, yet she is a guarded, complex woman under the guise of a simple one. She has all this warmth, yet I do not know her after years of working with her…. I have a hard time talking to her. She knows just what she wants and come hell or high water, she is going to get it. She has played all her cards right, yet the simplicity and bumbling make her no threat to anyone.

She was an executive who had direct control or influence over millions of dollars. In December 1989
The Nation’s Business
featured her in the “Lessons of Leadership” series. She told Anne Willan if they had gone into business they would have made millions. She sought out professional expertise in her personal and professional life and played good cop to her assistant Stephanie Hersh’s bad cop. Because she had the assistance of Stephanie, plus an accountant, lawyer, editor, and publisher’s public relations staff, she could keep to a demanding personal schedule and serve on the board of directors of several of her favorite causes—like any successful CEO. The woman who once told Smith College’s personnel bureau that she was looking for a position “being someone’s general and all-purpose assistant” became her own general, directing a group of assistants.

C
OOKING WITH JULIA

Geoffrey Drummond, who made
New York Master Chefs
in the mid-1980s and was working in France, approached Julia through Jacques Pépin and Rebecca Alssid (head of the Boston University culinary program, where Julia occasionally demonstrated). Drummond was a producer, director, or executive producer for
A Prairie Home Companion
and
Going Home
. Now he wanted to do a series on master chefs for Maryland PBS to be hosted by Julia, who had not made any new series with Morash and WGBH since 1984 and whose work at
Good Morning America
was now only occasional. His original intention was to film the chefs in action, as he had for his
New York Master Chef
series, but this time he would send her the tapes and she could provide the opening commentary in her own kitchen. “There was no way she was going to let me go off and work with the chefs and not be there. She wanted to be involved…. Ultimately she became my collaborator and partner.” Drummond, a young and personable producer, serious but sensitive to others’ needs, was a collaborative director (though compulsive about his work) and perhaps suited to her experience, as Russ Morash was to Julia’s inexperience. This time, it was Julia who was pushing to be part of the action, a real partner in the venture, working with her laptop from 6:30 in the morning until 11:30 at night.

Drummond packed his cameras and crew, Julia her suitcase, and on March 12, 1993, they began flying from city to city, taping sixteen prominent chefs for a new series entitled
Cooking with Master Chefs
. She had talked to Drummond, co-owner of A La Carte Communications, and Maryland Public Television for two years about hosting a sixteen-part series featuring American master chefs. Though this was a new stage in her career, it was an old idea for her. From the very beginning, after every series she talked to the press about having guest chefs on her program. From her list of sixty names and a list from Drummond, they consulted and chose sixteen chefs who were available and represented variety (location, race, gender, food type, age). Now she proudly announced she was going to play the role of Mrs. Alistair Cooke or Alistair Cookie, an allusion to the august host of PBS’s
Masterpiece Theatre
.

When they finally had the money for sixteen shows and a book contract from Knopf, they traveled to New York (André Soltner), Washington, DC (Jean-Louis Palladin), New Orleans (Emeril Lagasse), Houston (Robert Del Grande), San Francisco (Jeremiah Tower), Los Angeles (Michel Richard), and Hawaii (Amy Ferguson-Ota) to film these chefs and others in their own kitchens. She also visited Jacques Pépin, a Connecticut neighbor of Drummond. It was not difficult to stand in the role of the viewer, for Julia took great delight in learning from each chef. She loved their “nifty knife work” and was fascinated to learn from Alice Waters, who turned a fork, tines down, and rubbed a naked garlic clove over the tines for a quick puree. After filming with Lidia Bastianich of New York’s Felidia, Julia declared she “finally understands” risotto. She was especially proud that ten of the sixteen chefs were American, and of that ten, half were women. They returned to Cambridge and filmed Julia’s introductions to each segment at her kitchen table, the produce from the recipes of each chef displayed in front of her.

There were two major difficulties with the first series: traveling to each location, where a local film crew joined the core film crew plus the simultaneous filming and book writing for joint release. She had to record exactly what each chef did, relate it to their list of ingredients, and have the recipe tested again. During the second half of the production, Julia’s computer crashed and she realized that she needed help with the writing. She called Nancy Barr, who sat with her laptop during each filming, taking down what each chef said and later helping with their biographical profiles, the reediting, and proofing. Most chefs presented a full menu. For example, Charles Palmer of New York’s Aureole prepared venison steaks, large herb potato chips, timbales of butternut squash, and chocolate tarragon mousse cupcakes. Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken, owners and chefs of the Border Grill in Santa Monica, on the other hand, prepared dal (a spicy lentil dish), curry popcorn, a curry of spinach and eggplant, pickled tomatoes, and ginger-lemon tea.

Although each chef cooked his or her recipes in their home kitchens, they were professional chefs working in restaurants—a shift from Julia’s emphasis on home cooking, though a teaching program nevertheless. “It’s not a show for fluffies,” she explained at each stop, but for serious cooks. Another shift that disappointed some of her fans was the minor presence of Julia on the program. These two factors and the shortness of the series may account for the weak sales of the book. The video series, however, was nominated for an Emmy, the only food show to be nominated for a national prime-time category, Drummond says proudly.

Julia promoted the book with vigor, especially in the city where each chef lived. According to Janice Goldklang, her Knopf publicist: “She was very insistent that it not be just her show, that it was a collaborative effort.” Frequently the chef cooked a high-priced dinner to benefit the local PBS channel. In San Francisco, for example, Jeremiah Tower and Alice Waters cooked for KQED. When Knopf scheduled in rest stops after a flight, she asked for more book signings. She tried to arrive early because people were always lined up, a line that often took two hours to thin out. “I may not be a spring chicken anymore, but I’m a tough old bird.” Despite her promotional efforts, the book was not nominated for a book prize.