by Bob Spitz
It was these uncertainties that particularly tormented Paul as he reacclimated himself to life at home. Since returning, he’d put everything into Julia’s new endeavor. He’d surrendered his own creative aspirations and turned his considerable skills as a painter and photographer to fulfilling his wife’s ambitions. In a way, he’d stepped in as the stage manager for the Mastering book tour. He organized the itinerary, kept everyone on schedule, handled incidentals for the gigs. Who would have guessed that all his “years of experience in setting up exhibits and demonstrations under stress would be a help to the gals in being certain about microphones, stage lights, tables, ovens, placement of various objects, testing apparatus,” and general emergencies that cropped up. Talk about “unpredictable situations!” Only a few months before, as late as May, he was the American government’s cultural attaché in Oslo. Now, in November, he wrote his brother, he was “squatting on the floor behind scenery-flats of a theater in San Marino, California, trying to wash a heap of egg and chocolate-covered bowls in a bucket of cold water,” while out front, “before an audience of 350 clubwomen, Julie and Simca were demonstrating soufflé de turbot, quiche au Roquefort, and Reine de Saba cake.”
Go figure!
Judith Jones recalls encountering Paul in the ladies’ room at Bloomingdale’s on Long Island. The auditorium had been packed with women waiting to see Julia and Simca. “It had been shocking, unheard of, to see such a response,” she says. “Authors in those days didn’t draw that kind of audience.” And during a lull, when she ducked into the bathroom to reapply her makeup, there he was, “happy as a clam,” washing dishes in the sink.
Julia, for her part, was taking everything in stride. Despite all the hubbub, the precipitous shove from the kitchen into the public eye, she kept her cool, impervious to the surge of attention. She wasn’t nervous, didn’t suffer from stage fright or doubts, refrained from following the book’s sales figures day by day. For all the draining energy it required, the hustle of the road, she remained upbeat, can-do, unruffled by the demands. She was the only one who didn’t seem surprised or affected by what was happening to her. She was uncomplaining about the breakneck schedule—in fact, if truth be told, she secretly enjoyed it.
In the midst of all this business she took a step back to reflect. “What a life we are leading,” she chortled to her family.
Julia Child had always been a person with a lot of excess energy and no proper outlet for it. All her life she had been like a high-performance race car perpetually stuck in traffic. No place to let it out, to make that baby purr. She had variously tried the life of a social butterfly, a government drone, an embassy wife, even hat-making, for god’s sake, the most unsuitable miscue of all. So many stabs at a vocation that never tapped into everything she had to give—and always she had more, much more with no place to direct it. She had almost got there, finding some satisfaction cooking alone in her kitchen. But this new public arena demanded all of her talents—her skill at cooking, her stamina, her force of personality, her unflappability, her abundant charm. All of her undertapped abilities were finally put to the test, finally bent to a task that she was good at, great at. She was increasingly proficient in front of an audience, a natural, comfortable, clever. Imagine that! This crazy place was where she’d belonged all along. It was the kind of stretch she’d been craving, needing all her life. And just when she felt she was easing into the groove, everything was about to get stretchier. And groovier.
Seventeen
A Monstrously Busy Life
Americans who tuned in to their local CBS-TV affiliate on the evening of September 26, 1960, got a bracing glimpse of the future, what Marshall McLuhan labeled the Electronic Age. On screen, two men sat facing each other, each vying to become the next president of the United States. They were eager to debate—the first televised debate between two candidates for the office. The issues were incontrovertible—the Cold War, civil rights, Quemoy and Matsu, the economy. But issues weren’t the issue as the encounter unfolded.
Richard Nixon, the current vice president, was the known quantity. For eight years, he’d been a fixture across front pages and on the nightly news as a stand-in for the oft-indisposed President Eisenhower, who had suffered several strokes. His challenger, John F. Kennedy, though a senator since 1946, was new to the national scene. For most Americans, he was an unfamiliar face, a glaring disadvantage in a contest that equated intimacy with confidence. Yet polls had the men neck-and-neck as they prepared to face off in a Chicago studio.
The outcome of the evening is one of those great American allegories—how JFK, who had worked on his tan on a hotel rooftop and patted on stage makeup to soften his image, charmed the discerning TV audience, while Nixon wilted sorrily under the hot lights, sweat beading up through the Lazy Shave powder that had been slapped on haphazardly to cover his beard stubble. How, before the camera’s eye, Nixon morphed from a cool head of state into “an Armenian rug peddler.” How the polls reflected that perception by the overnights that boosted Kennedy’s numbers. How the balance of power shifted in the camera’s telltale lens, which portrayed Kennedy as “boyish” and Nixon as “shifty,” Kennedy as “a star,” Nixon as an “assassin.” In an eventual wrap‑up of the debate it was noted: “The winner that night was not just Kennedy but the television image itself, which had, in a single stroke, demonstrated its new kingmaking power.”
Julia with Ruth Lockwood and Russ Morash, on the set of The French Chef, 1963 (Photo credit 7.1)
None of this was lost on Julia Child, who had watched a replay of the debates at a friend’s house in Oslo. A relentless Democrat, she had “solemnly sworn [she] would never vote for a Catholic, as a Catholic could not be a free man.” That left Kennedy out. Still, she said, “I don’t want Nixon,” who she thought was “smart—but really ruthless” and a darling of her father’s. Television, the great game changer, sorted everything out for Julia. Nothing conveyed the personalities of the candidates as sharply as being able to see and hear them for herself. It was the launch of a new era when the images that flowed through a screen into people’s living rooms became one of the most, if not the most, important determinants of how people thought and saw the world. Far away, in Oslo, reduced to watching this seminal event after it had already occurred, Julia couldn’t have been more removed from the seismic shift that was taking place via the media. She could never have grasped TV’s kingmaking power. Certainly she could never have grasped that, less than three years later, this shaky new medium would make her a queen.
THE KENNEDY-NIXON DEBATES announced to an otherwise ambivalent Julia that television had arrived. At the time, the Childs didn’t have a TV of their own, nor would a set be found among the crates they unpacked in Cambridge, in 1961. Even so, Julia experienced pangs of interest in its evolving potential. In a letter to her sister-in-law Freddie, as early as 1953, she wondered: “How about TV? Do you find you use it much, and if so, when, how much, what for, etc?” At the time, it never occurred to her that one might cook on TV, let alone teach cooking, much less French cooking, to the masses.
Julia may have been impervious to the wiles of television, but cooking was a staple of local TV almost from the moment it first went on the air, in the mid-1940s. Daytime programming played almost exclusively to women. And cooking was a lure, a way for broadcasters and their sponsors to draw women to TV during the day. Even before Dione Lucas spun out her first soufflé, there were dozens of regional TV cooks from Honolulu to Hartford. You could turn on almost any station, anywhere in the country, and bump up against a homemaking show with a cooking segment. Hams were coated with tinted mayonnaise, gelatin eggs were piped into empty eggshells, canapés of curried peanut butter were topped with shrimp, sandwiches were assembled with tuna fish and crushed pineapple mixed with whipped cream, cabbages were stuck with bits of hot dog. Almost three-quarters of the country’s 108 operating television stations were churning out these types of programs: Milwaukee’s What’s New in the Kitchen; The Bee Baxte
r Show in Minneapolis–St. Paul; Cooking with Roz and Cooking with Philameena, head-to-head in New Haven; Chicago Cooks with Barbara Barkley; Philadelphia’s Television Kitchen; the ever-popular Josie McCarthy in New York; and the L.A. favorite, Cooking with Corris, which ran for almost three decades.
In the ensuing scramble, no one broke out of the pack to catch on nationally. Among America’s leading culinary lights, the spotlight should have fallen on the avuncular James Beard, but he wasn’t suited to the warm and fuzzy medium. Dione Lucas came close. She was extremely skillful and respected by her peers. By 1954, she was known widely, if not well, and generally perceived, mostly on the basis of her stagy British accent, as “the Sarah Bernhardt of the kitchen stove.” But that’s as far as her showmanship went. Described by an insider as “actively unlikable,” her deadpan delivery couldn’t ignite the audience’s enthusiasm. She was contemptuous and “intimidating,” a total turn-off when it came to personality. “She had the technique but not the charm,” said Barbara Kafka, “no sense of theater.”
Yet Lucas at least refused to dumb down her demonstrations. She stuck to classic French recipes, combining gourmet cooking with simple, store-bought ingredients in an attempt to attract the new breed of working women. But her aesthetic sensibilities were ultimately too highbrow for her to appeal to the traditional middle-class homemaker, who dominated the audience.
One TV cooking personality who struck the right note was Lillian Gruskin Cannon Askland Philippe White, known to the masses as Poppy Cannon. A food consultant by nature, a columnist by default, Cannon had published lighthearted articles in Mademoiselle and House Beautiful, where she promoted a time-saving process called can-opener cookery. Despite her fondness for fine dining in French restaurants, Cannon “reassured readers that packaged foods were as good if not better than their homemade equivalents.” She was godmother to kitchen speed demons like Rachael Ray and Sandra Lee, “flinging” ingredients together, “whipping up” dishes, using a “splotch of wine,” “a generous flutter of chopped chives,” or “a great swish of sour cream” to tweak the flavors. Bam!
By 1954, almost a decade before Julia made her debut, Cannon forsook magazines and was launched coast-to-coast as TV’s preeminent cooking guru. She oversaw a recipe every weekday on Home, an afternoon women’s program, where her reputation as the “can-opener queen” flourished like food poisoning. She used Franco-American beef gravy for sauces, canned asparagus, canned macaroni and cheese, canned mushrooms, even Spam. For salmon mousse, she instructed the home cook to whip canned salmon, cream, red food coloring, and crushed ice in a blender for forty seconds. Presto!—salmon mousse.
There was nothing remotely epicurean about the food she prepared, nothing artful, nothing with “the French touch,” as Julia romanticized it. Her dishes were a vivid diner-menu mix, relying heavily on shortcut cooking and close-ups of the sponsor’s appliances—all the modern conveniences “needed to raise families and create a happy home life.”
Such a slapdash approach only underscored the differences between Julia and her predecessors. They had none of the qualifications necessary to make viewers really want to cook. In fact, by the end of the 1950s, almost the opposite had occurred. The powers that be concluded that cooking segments were more diverting than useful. “I think that perhaps women just want to be entertained—not instructed—on television,” said Arlene Francis, the game-show personality who also hosted Home.
Fortunately, Julia was oblivious to this current thinking, in the same way that she’d been spared the influence of the early TV cooks. Darned if she didn’t want to teach people how to properly prepare French food, “to cook with distinction from scratch.”
As luck would have it, she didn’t know any better.
RUSS MORASH KNEW even less. Aside from the fact that his employer, WGBH, had ordered up three pilots featuring a local French cook, there wasn’t a biscuit’s worth of foodcraft that Morash could bring to this show. Food was fuel; he ate to live, long and short of it. And he wasn’t very choosy about what he put in his mouth. A bag of chips could see him through most of the day, a cup of coffee, a Coke or two, about all a man needs. “I couldn’t tell a bouillabaisse from a coq au vin,” he admits. And he’d had it up to here with those froufrou French restaurants. “The one or two I’d gone to in Boston were run by cruel men in tall white aprons who hated their customers and almost dared you to eat their food.” No thanks. He’d stick to the stuff his wife, Marian, made. She did a wonderful thing with tuna fish and potato chips that would make Chef Boyardee cry.
Morash raked over these and other variables as he bounded up the front steps of 103 Irving Street. He’d gotten an earful about this woman, Julia Child. Ever since her appearance on People Are Reading, the office chatter was “Julia this, Julia that.” You’d have thought she’d discovered a winning formula for the Red Sox. He found out later, much later, that her gift was nearly as remarkable, but that afternoon, in late April 1962, it was all he could do to give her a quick once-over.
First impressions were pretty arbitrary. “I could tell right away she wasn’t your typical Cantabrigian housewife,” Morash recalls of the woman who greeted him that day. Julia, who would turn fifty that August, was a fairly ordinary, plain-faced woman, except that she towered over everyone in the neighborhood, aside from John Kenneth Galbraith, who was six foot seven. “She didn’t look like people I knew, that was for sure. I assumed that she was a bit eccentric. Her manner and her conversation and her speech were all unusual. But she was a friendly character, and that appealed to me.”
Julia already knew what Morash had come to offer: her own show, teaching cooking on television. Okay, it was educational television, the minor leagues. But plenty of people in Cambridge—the “eggheads,” as Paul called them—watched only WGBH. It would give her a chance to promote Mastering to a wider audience and, who knew, maybe serve as a platform for private classes or a cooking school that she’d dreamed of starting. “Paul was all in favor of it,” says Charlie Gibson, who would later introduce Julia’s segments on Good Morning America. “She told me that, at the outset, she was undecided about being on TV, but he was the one who really encouraged her to pursue it.” Television, Paul argued, would give her a distinct aura, the special something—like Kennedy’s image or Fred Flintstone’s Yabba dabba doo—that would be, for many Americans, an identifiable hook.
By the time Morash entered the picture, “she was all charged up about it.” Over coffee and toast points, he explained that they’d do three pilots, but if all went well, the station would probably commit to a series, a full season of twenty-six shows.
Twenty-six shows!
“What sort of things would you like to cook?” he wondered.
Julia had given this some thought before he arrived. She wanted to make classic French dishes that would be recognizable to Americans—nothing too fancy, esoteric, or intimidating. Right off the bat, she thought: coq au vin. Chicken was an easy sell, and it was essential to Julia that Americans get used to cooking with wine. Once they got a taste of that rich, tangy sauce, infused with bacon and onions, moving them to hollandaise and mousselines would be, literally, child’s play. And why not go for a soufflé while she was at it? They were basic and dramatic and so impressive to serve. Housewives usually avoided soufflés as too time-consuming and temperamental. But Julia’s recipe was fairly easy to absorb. All you had to do was to master the base and learn how fold in beaten egg whites without letting them collapse. You pull off a soufflé, it’s like catnip, a real confidence builder. So coq au vin and soufflés were definitely in.
“Could you manage that omelet?” Morash asked, referring to the demo she’d done on People Are Reading. “You’ll have to expand it to fill up an entire half-hour.”
Julia waved him off with a nothing-to-it backhand. “Oh, by the time we talk about the various fillings and how we prepare them and the machinery we need and the pan and the technique and what the right flame is and how we serve it, I think we’ll
have enough,” she said.
So the menu was set for all three pilots: coq au vin, soufflé, omelet. For the rest of the afternoon, they kicked around the format and the particulars. “You will have to practice speaking while you are cooking,” Morash warned her. “That’s not easy to do; it’s two dissimilar acts, sort of like patting your head and rubbing your stomach. And the video side has to prove what you are saying. You can’t say you are putting in one tablespoon of something if you’re putting in six. Through it all, you have to concentrate, which isn’t easy, either.”
For most women, this would have been a daunting prospect. It meant retraining oneself at mid-life, mastering an entirely unfamiliar set of skills—and in public, yet, in front of a sophisticated audience. It would be like a stay-at-home mom suddenly finding herself in a high-powered financial job or an office worker becoming an emergency medical technician, and doing it while under the unforgiving scrutiny of a TV camera. Most would be too embarrassed even to try. But Julia Child was utterly unself-conscious. The possibility of falling on her face in public was something that, strangely, didn’t seem to faze her. In her life she’d made a series of choices in opposition to social convention. She joined a secret intelligence agency, married a man her family disapproved of, lived abroad when most Americans were tethered to home, went to an all-male, all-French cooking school for professionals as a hapless female American cook, to forge a career that barely existed before, when most women were homemakers.