Mrs. Kan wanted the Childs to see the kitchen. She also wanted to take their picture, and she refused to let them pay for the meal. Paul Child made certain that the photo would not be used as an endorsement for Kan’s—“We never do that”—and he said that they always paid for meals in restaurants. “We must be very careful, no payola,” Julia wrote on her pad. “Remember Watergate!” Mrs. Kan smiled firmly. Everyone got up and went into the kitchen, where Julia inspected mysterious vessels and vats, and put her arm around the chef. The chef, who stood a good eighteen inches short of Julia’s six feet one and a half, seemed absolutely delighted.
Going back to the hotel in a taxi, Paul was upset that he had not been permitted to pay for the meal. “She was so determined,” he said. “I didn’t want to do battle over it.”
“We’ll send her a book,” Julia wrote. And a little later, in a note to Mrs. Bishop, “We must all help to cheer up Paul. He gets depressed when anything wrong w. wife.”
The Childs and their associates were at about the midpoint of a demonstration tour that had begun in Seattle and would conclude in Honolulu. There were to be eight cooking demonstrations in San Francisco, at the Kabuki Theatre, in the new Japan Center on Geary Street. They had flown in from Seattle on a Thursday, four days in advance of the first demonstration, and they needed all of the time they had to get ready. In their comfortable suite at the Clift Hotel, the Childs, Mrs. Manell, and Mrs. Bishop spent hours going over lists, schedules, and recipes in thick loose-leaf notebooks. Other lists had preceded them—lists of cooking equipment and food staples and hardware and supplies of all kinds, which the Women’s Board of Presbyterian Hospital of Pacific Medical Center, co-sponsor of the event along with Liberty House, the San Francisco branch of the Honolulu department store, had agreed to provide. The Women’s Board had done its job with great zeal—had provided, in fact, more than fifteen hundred separate items, from a stove and a refrigerator down to rolls of paper towels and packages of scouring pads. (Many of the utensils were going to be raffled off to ticket buyers after the demonstrations.) There were always a number of things, like fresh vegetables, that could only be bought at the last minute, however, and Mrs. Manell and Mrs. Bishop were responsible for getting those. The dishes to be cooked onstage at the Kabuki were all fairly spectacular. Having more or less invented what could be called the theatre of cooking during her twelve years on television, Julia was not going to let her audience down, and the stage, she knew, required larger effects than the home screen. She would give San Francisco her Caneton en Aspic à la Parisienne and Charlotte Malakoff, Beef Wellington and Quiche aux Asperges, Le Loup en Croûte and Crêpes à la Pagode en Flammes.
By Saturday, two days before the first demonstration, Julia’s voice had returned. Her younger sister, Dorothy (Mrs. Ivan Cousins), who lives in Sausalito, had sent her to a throat specialist well known for treating opera singers and other performers, and he had painted and sprayed Julia’s aggrieved larynx so skillfully that she was able to go through with a scheduled press conference at the Kabuki Theatre that morning. Julia and Paul sat for an hour at a small table in the theatre lobby, which Liberty House had turned into a festive-looking culinary boutique for the demonstrations, and replied in their quite different conversational styles—cheery, gracious, down-to-earth in Julia’s case, precise and urbane in Paul’s—to the not invariably stimulating questions of a dozen or so food and feature editors. Julia recommended that newcomers to cooking approach it “with courage and daring.” Paul said they should not be afraid of hard work. Julia said cooking wasn’t really hard once you mastered the essential techniques. Paul said that mastering the techniques required much hard work. Julia came out against the term “gourmet,” which she said had lost all meaning through overuse (“We just say ‘good cooking’”), and she also had harsh words for the frozen string bean. A bearded reporter who said that he was from the Gay Liberation Press announced that he and his friends were coming to all the demonstrations. (“I think it’s very good they’re coming out of the closet,” Julia said later.) Since nobody asked her about cholesterol, Julia brought up the subject herself. It was a very bad idea, she said, to think that you could cut out all foods that were high in cholesterol, as those were often the healthiest foods. Everyone needed a balanced diet. “We’ve done research on this,” she said, “and we’ve found that some doctors believe a completely cholesterol-free diet can lead to premature aging and sexual frailty.”
Although the press conference was a great success, the publicity for the cooking demonstrations had been, up to this point, somewhat disappointing. Only one major story had appeared in a San Francisco paper (the Chronicle), and that one had printed the wrong telephone number to call for tickets and reservations. Tickets for each demonstration were priced at fifteen dollars, and advance sales had been slow—partly, it was thought, because San Franciscans were nervous about the so-called Zebra murders, and were afraid to go out in the evening. With Julia’s arrival, though, the trickle of publicity became a flood, and ticket sales picked up.
“This is such an American custom, the way these affairs are run by volunteer women,” Paul Child said that afternoon. “It’s practically unheard of in Europe.” Barbara Grant, the president of the Women’s Board, and Hannah Foster, the vice president, and their colleagues had started eight months before to prepare for the 1974 benefit. It had been Mrs. Foster’s idea to invite Julia Child—in previous years the Women’s Board’s fund-raising had centered on an annual débutante ball. Mrs. Foster, Mrs. Grant, and several others on the benefit committee put in long hours throughout the Childs’ stay in San Francisco, running errands for the cooking team, washing dishes and pots from the stage kitchen, briefing volunteer ushers, selling tickets, and not infrequently pressing their husbands into service as well. Only one or two of the people connected with the Women’s Board seemed to be what Julia refers to as “lady types”—the type that comes into a kitchen, sees several stacks of unwashed utensils, and asks, “Is there anything I can do?”
After inspecting the rather elaborate cooking setup that had been provided for them on the Kabuki stage—a made-to-order kitchen flanked by large hanging screens to pick up television images of what Julia would be doing from three video cameras mounted directly above the work spaces—the Childs were a little worried that the benefit committee might have spent too lavishly. “In Seattle,” Paul said, “we performed in the auditorium of the cathedral, on a set put together mostly from found objects. Somebody had contributed a stove, another person a refrigerator, and there were chests of drawers for work spaces and a couple of child-sized tables under the counters for shelves. It was really very clever and workable, and it didn’t cost much.” The financing of these demonstrations does not directly concern the Childs, who derive no money from them personally. They donate all their fees to WGBHTV, in Boston, the public television station where The French Chef originated, in 1962. The tour expenses are paid by the sponsoring group (WGBH picks up any extras), and the Childs look upon the rather considerable effort and time involved mainly as a means of generating favorable publicity for Julia’s books—the monumental Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volumes I and II, and a book of recipes from their television shows, called The French Chef Cookbook. Nevertheless, both the Childs wanted the hospital to make money from the San Francisco demonstrations, and they were somewhat alarmed to hear that the benefit committee had already spent something like thirty thousand dollars on expenses. Liberty House had donated most of the cooking equipment, and Safeway Stores had provided quantities of free staples, but there had been heavy outlays for the construction of the model kitchen on the stage of the Kabuki Theatre. An 850-seat house fitted out with tables for the audience to dine at while watching a performance, the theatre had been designed for the presentation of traditional Kabuki drama, but evidently there had not been enough Kabuki lovers in town to support it, so the management was planning to use the space for stage shows of various kinds. At one point, the management
had added to the benefit committee’s difficulties by trying, unsuccessfully, to cancel its one-week lease on the theatre.
The Childs refused almost all invitations to dinner or to cocktails in the days before the first demonstration. “We want to put on a good show,” Julia explained, “and we just can’t spare the time.” Lunches for the Childs and their two assistants were cooked by Rosemary Manell in the demonstration kitchen, and they ate them at a table in the wings. (Later, when they were giving demonstrations each afternoon and evening, they had dinner there as well.) They spent the weekend at the theatre, stocking and setting up for the first show and doing the necessary precooking. A great deal of precooking is done for Julia’s television series; a dish may have to be shown in three or four different stages of preparation, and since the twenty-eight minutes of allotted airtime do not allow for the completion of these stages, versions of the dish at each stage must be ready to show. In a three-hour live demonstration, much of the actual cooking does take place onstage, but puff pastry and yeast doughs must be made ahead so they can rise, backups are needed in case of onstage disasters, and cold ducks (for Caneton en Aspic) must be cooked in advance. Rosemary Manell and Elizabeth Bishop, who had both been on previous demonstration tours, knew the names that Julia and Paul assign to every item of equipment and every work space (to save time in explaining or describing), and they were even allowed access to the Sacred Bag, a phenomenally heavy black canvas satchel containing certain cooking items that Julia cannot do without (her favorite bone flour scoop, her large pastry-cutting wheel, her special knives, and so on), plus emergency items such as extension cords, of which there are never enough on hand. The Sacred Bag has been around since the beginning of the television series.
The Childs had known Rosemary Manell since 1949, when they were all together in France. Paul Child and Abram Manell, Rosemary’s husband, were both with the Foreign Service then, and the two couples, who shared an interest in good food, which in Julia’s case was becoming something more than an interest, used to dine together regularly in the Childs’ apartment, on the Rue de l’Université, or the Manells’, on the Île St.-Louis. Rosie, as the Childs and their friends (but no one else) call her, now lives in Belvedere, just across the bay from San Francisco. She is a talented painter and potter, an expert tailor, a first-class cook; she wears Scandinavian-blond hair in a thick braid down her back, and is nearly as tall as Julia.
Elizabeth Bishop, a Bostonian with close-cropped dark hair and a sense of humor that has often relieved tension at difficult moments, was one of the volunteers who came to work for The French Chef at WGBH. When the show started, Paul did all the behind-scenes washing up—and a good deal of the chopping, grating, mincing, and precooking as well. He had only recently resigned from the Foreign Service, after nearly twenty years, but because he has always adapted easily to changed circumstances, and suffers from no apparent insecurities of the male ego, he took, from the outset, an active and supportive part in Julia’s new career. “I’m here,” Paul used to say. “I’ll do anything.” But as the program developed, it soon became evident that more backstage help was needed, and, with no difficulty whatsoever, a crew of half a dozen volunteers was formed. Several of the women were married and had small children at home; they hired babysitters or housekeepers to come and do the dishes there while they went to the WGBH studio in Cambridge and spent the day doing the dishes for Julia. Actually, they did much of the precooking and testing for the show. Julia sometimes introduces them on the air. “Meet my associate cooks,” she says. “Mary O’Brien, Liz Bishop, Bess Hopkins, Edith Seltzer, Rita Rains, Bess Coughlin, and Gladys Christopherson. It’s always more fun cooking with friends, don’t you think?” Mrs. Bishop lives in Cohasset, Massachusetts, with her husband and their three children, and when The French Chef was in production she often did not get home until one or two o’clock in the morning. Now that the Childs are taking a year off from television and the show is being seen only in reruns, she is delighted to be able to travel with them on their demonstration tours. “Cooking is the least of it,” she told a friend in San Francisco. “You know, in a funny way I feel closer to Julia than I do to anyone. Of course I’m closer to Jack and the children, but there are things I could say to her that I couldn’t say to anyone else.”
Julia Child was born Julia Carolyn McWilliams in Pasadena, California, in 1912. The oldest of three children in a moderately well-to-do family—her father, John McWilliams, managed some family farming land in Arkansas and Southern California—she was entered in Smith College the day she was born. “My mother was in the Class of 1900 there,” she said recently, “and there was just never any doubt that I would go. In those days, people were very enthusiastic about their college.” As a member of Smith’s Class of 1934, Julia was planning to be a Great Woman Novelist. “They laughed when I sat down at the typewriter,” she told an interviewer in San Francisco. “And they were right, too, because nothing much ever came of the plan. I wrote for the Smith College Tatler, and after I graduated I went home for a while, and then I went to New York and tried to get a job with The New Yorker, but they turned me down. The woman-novelist idea was very vague and unformed. I just thought it would develop at some time or other.”
After three years in New York, working in the advertising department of W. & J. Sloane and living with two Smith classmates in an apartment under the Queensboro Bridge, she went back home and spent another two years in Pasadena. “I had a very good time doing virtually nothing,” she said. “There was always lots of fun and laughter.” Then the war came, and on the advice of her friend Janie McBaine (who subsequently married Marquis Childs) she went to Washington and got what she describes as “a dreadful typing job” with a government information agency whose nickname was Mellett’s Madhouse. After six months, she left and joined the Office of Strategic Services. At one point, there was a call for volunteers for overseas duty, and Julia McWilliams, reasoning that she would probably be going to Europe after the war in any case, put in for Far Eastern duty. With an oddly assorted group that included the anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Cora Du Bois and a congeries of explosives experts, forgers who had done time in federal prisons, and some missionaries who had been born in the Far East, she traveled by troop train across the United States and then by boat to Australia and on to Bombay, arriving the same day that two ammunition ships caught fire and blew up a large part of the Bombay docks. From Bombay, some of them went by train across the Indian subcontinent to Madras, and from there to Ceylon. It was at the OSS headquarters in Ceylon that she met Paul Child.
Child, who got to Ceylon a few months after Julia, was in charge of Visual Presentation for the OSS there. That meant, for the most part, setting up and maintaining a war room for the general staff, with maps and charts to show the areas, topographies, troop concentrations, and other factors on which military planning depended. (He had recently come from New Delhi, where he had set up a war room for Lord Louis Mountbatten and General Wedemeyer.) Julia was placed in charge of the Registry, a document center for messages to and from OSS agents in the field. She noticed the Visual Presentation officer because he seemed, on the whole, to be more civilized than anyone else there. Paul was ten years older than Julia, and he had seen a lot of the world. He had been a lumberman in Maine and a waiter in Hollywood, and he was a self-taught artist. During the twenties, he had knocked about Europe, spending several years in Paris, where he got to know Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and other expatriates; that supposedly golden decade had been a rather penurious one for Child, who had made a marginal living by selling his own woodcuts and making copies of the antique furniture in the Cluny Museum. After that, he had become a schoolteacher, first in France and later at the Shady Hill School, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and at the Avon Old Farms School, near Hartford, Connecticut, where he taught art and French. He was, in addition, an accomplished engraver and photographer, a black belt in judo, a master of several languages, and a man who could converse interestingly and amus
ingly on almost any subject. Although a more or less confirmed bachelor by this time, Child also noticed Julia McWilliams. “She seemed like a pretty great woman to me,” he recalled recently. “She was completely competent, unflappable—just the way she is now—and running a very complicated operation with great skill.”
At this stage of the war, late in 1943, the Americans and the British were planning an operation to cut off the Japanese garrison in Singapore by making a surprise landing behind enemy lines on the Malay Peninsula. This plan was abandoned when it became evident that the required naval support was not available—everything was going into the approaching invasion of Normandy. Child was sent to help set up other war rooms on the Chinese mainland, at Chungking, and then at Kunming. Julia McWilliams was also assigned to Kunming, and the friendship begun in Ceylon developed into something more serious. Kunming, which had never been in Japanese hands, was full of refugees from all parts of China. There was enough food available, and Paul and Julia were able to sample and become enthusiastic about many different Chinese cuisines. They were in Kunming when the Japanese surrendered. Soon afterward, Paul made his way home by way of Peking. Julia’s detachment was scheduled to go to Shanghai, but, with the war over, the unit’s morale was not what it had been. “I felt we’d lost the purity of our purpose,” Julia said recently. “You can see I’m a Victorian woman at heart. Anyway, I decided to go home. They flew me over the hump to Calcutta and loaded me onto a troopship, from which I disembarked, weeks later, smelling, as somebody said, like a cattle boat.”
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