by Bob Spitz
Meanwhile, the Boston Gas Company’s largesse was running on empty. They needed their auditorium back for another purpose and gave The French Chef its two-week notice. In consideration, they referred the show to their colleagues at Cambridge Electric Light Company, which just so happened to have a demonstration kitchen on hand. It was in a two-story timbered warehouse on the Charles River, where coal-powered fire had once been produced. Now it was used to introduce new cooking appliances. There was a little set made out of plywood, with a fake window and frilly curtains. The stove and refrigerator were finished in the latest avocado color. As a permanent set, it had a lot going for it, and it was Julia’s to use, almost uninterrupted, anytime she needed it.
Naturally, Cambridge Electric had never put in a gas line, so she had to settle for using a clunky electric stove. At the outset, that was the least of Julia’s worries. It took somewhat more doing to wrestle with the cable mike. The sound technician brought it up through her shirt and pinned it to her collar, while the rest snaked down her left leg and out behind her, to the mobile unit outside. But every time she touched the stove, she’d get a mild shock, which strengthened or weakened depending on how much Julia perspired. No matter how hard they tried, the crew was unable to fix it and, over time, she learned to live with it. But in the early shows, when it took her by surprise, you can see Julia twitch in response to an errant jolt.
The French Chef schedule was every bit as fitful. During the weekend, Julia wrote the scripts for her upcoming shows, then on Mondays and Tuesdays, rehearsed them with her production assistant, Ruth Lockwood, who paced the progress with stopwatch in hand. They shot two shows on Wednesdays and two more on Fridays, which left Julia almost no time to rewrite and get props—dishes, candlesticks, wineglasses, napkins, silverware, and tablecloths, as well as ingredients and equipment needed for each recipe. Eventually, she would farm out those tasks to a contingent of loyal volunteers, but in the beginning Julia saw to every detail herself.
Such were “the rigid necessities of television,” as Paul saw fit to call them, which foreordained “a monstrously busy life.”
It may have seemed that way at the time, but he didn’t know the half of it.
Eighteen
A Law unto Herself
Monday evening, February 11, 1963, was a good night for Bostonians to stay home and watch TV. It was frightfully cold outside, and snow flurries had been falling since the sun went down. Checking the listings in the Globe revealed a mixed bag of prospects. The whole city was keyed up for the annual Beanpot face-off between Harvard’s and Boston College’s hockey teams, but it didn’t begin until nine o’clock. To pass the time until the game, there was I’ve Got a Secret on Channel 5 or The Detectives on Channel 7. But the newspaper’s “Hot Spot,” the show it spotlighted that day, was a new series, The French Chef, on Channel 2 at 8 p.m.
The curious souls who tuned in to the educational TV station got more than they bargained for. Julia cooked her signature bœuf bourguignon, and for anyone watching at home there had to have been a terrible moment when hunger, uncontrollable hunger, gripped them like a fever and forced them to stage a manic raid on the family fridge. You could almost smell that meltingly tender stew in a “wine-dark sauce,” as Julia described it, wafting off the screen. A fleet of onions and mushrooms floated luxuriously in the stock. “A perfectly delicious dish,” she assured her audience, albeit needlessly. The proof was right there in black-and-white.
But while the stew was intended as the featured attraction, viewers found it impossible to take their eyes off the host. By the time she tasted the sauce, licked her lips contentedly, popped the casserole back in the oven, and said, “Hello, I’m Julia Child,” there was already a sense that something special was cooking. Julia filled the screen with her easygoing presence and, without any artifice or affectation, upstaged the star braise burbling in the pot. Even on TV, she was larger than life. At fifty, she was a vibrant, vivacious woman, not obviously pretty or delicate, but handsome, and never more so than when she encountered food and her eyes sparkled. Julia looked at food the way some people looked at their children, and when she cast her adoring gaze at three pounds of raw beef chuck, the folks at home knew something was up.
With the Chicken Sisters, April 16, 1970 (Photo credit 18.1)
It was impossible not to be drawn into her intimate fold. From the get-go, Julia radiated an enthusiasm that felt natural and approachable. When she pointed to a slab of steak and said, “This is called the chuck tender, and it comes from the shoulder blade, up here,” indicating her own shoulder, one could understand in a way that was unmistakably clear. “And this is called the undercut of the chuck, and it’s like the continuation of the ribs along here, where it gets up to your neck.”
The rest of the show was just as straightforward and informative. Julia taught viewers how to correctly brown the meat so it wouldn’t steam instead of sear or stick to the skillet, and how to deglaze the pan with wine, which infused the dish with rich, lush flavor. “It’s called a fleur in France, when the meat looks like little flowers,” she said offhandedly. Julia took great pains not to sound too French. Her goal was to demystify French cooking, not venerate it, and she knew there was a fine line between explaining a French tradition so that she informed and entertained without sounding pretentious. But her engaging way eliminated any chance of that.
The entire lesson was relaxed and entertaining. Her ongoing patter sounded casual, unforced; there were no awkward silences, no instances where she hesitated or lost her train of thought. The process seemed to come naturally to Julia. Occasionally, she looked into the wrong camera, but immediately caught the mistake without becoming flustered. She seemed completely comfortable in front of a demanding, invisible audience. That metal box and piece of glass is your best friend. And you really want to let that person know you care about them.
From day one, Julia’s persona was already intact. She was, as one historian observed, “already recognizably Julia,” charming, nonpatronizing, unaffected, inspiring. There was something intrinsically genuine about this anti-personality, this plain-looking, enormously appealing character in a boxy cotton blouse with a homemade badge—“École des 3 Gourmandes”—pinned to it. And that voice—that rickety gearbox of a voice! It may have caused some disgruntled viewers to jump up and adjust the sound on their sets. But long after the savage warble lost its power to distract, it was the image of Julia standing with her hands braced on the counter, rocking back and forth as she talked, eyes twinkling, game and encouraging, all-knowing, that lingered in the public imagination.
“You are the only person I have ever seen who takes a realistic approach to cooking,” wrote a viewer after the first show was aired.
It was the genuineness, the Everywoman persona that came across on the screen. If the woman next door, that Julia Child, could cook up bœuf bourguignon one-two-three, then surely it could be done by anyone who watched her.
“We love her naturalness and lack of that TV manner, her quick but unhurried action, her own appreciation of what she is producing,” another viewer wrote. “By the time she gets to the table with her dish and takes off her apron, we are so much ‘with’ her that we feel as if someone had snatched our plates from in front of us when the program ends.”
The biggest fan of all was Paul Child, who kept up an endless stream of correspondence with his brother, Charlie, proudly relating every detail of Julia’s “success-wave,” with the cookbook and now her own TV show, but especially her “real pro’s imperturbability” with so much busyness swirling around her.
Despite his obvious pleasure, it was by no means easy for Paul to figure where he fit in. After the pilots were finished, he wrote, “I have decided to keep out of this punishing new series and pursue my own life, though the temptation is great to lend a hand.” But there was no escape. By the time The French Chef went on the air, he was an irreplaceable part of Julia’s team. “Man can hardly catch his breath,” he noted, describing his new
role. Ostensibly, he was chauffeur and chief bottle washer, staying “after the shooting sessions to wash the mountainous heap of vessels and dishes, pick up and pack utensils,” and anything else to “relieve Julie of the task following her all-day tension in front of the cameras.” But Paul became obsessed with the necessity to prepare, prepare, prepare, relying on his display-making experience for choreographing Julia’s scripts. For each show, he made a “diagram of the stove, the shelves, the sink, etc., listing on them every single piece of equipment, and every bit of food, spice, flavors, liquids, spoons, dishes, oven-temperature,” the works, in order that everything should flow smoothly once the director called “Action.” So that if during the taping Julia reached for, say, the olive oil, she’d see a note that says: “shelf #1, left-hand side, glass bottle.” Preparation aside—and the preparation was epic—Paul loved to observe how skillful she was “at covering‑up when something goes wrong, as it inevitably did from time to time.”
He didn’t have long to wait. The second French Chef episode was onion soup gratinée, and Julia began to hit her stride. In addition to the basic recipe, the show was chock-full of valuable hints and tips—how to keep an edge on a knife (swipe it across a steel—a sharpening blade), how to get the smell of onion off your hands (wash them with salt), how to intensify flavor when browning onions (toss in a teaspoon of sugar), how to make a great beef stock, how to make croutons—delivered with chummy nonchalance. Julia’s interaction with the camera was particularly smooth. In just two shows, her eye contact seemed instinctive, unstudied. She had really taken Russ Morash’s advice to heart—and it showed. “She was locked in, not conscious of the camera,” he noticed. Even a minor on-air slipup failed to rattle her. “You need some salt,” Julia said when it came time to season the soup, but the box wasn’t in the place where Paul had diagrammed it. Without missing a beat, she did a one-eighty and spotted it by the sink, on the other side of the set. “Now, I’ve left the salt way over here while I was washing my hands,” she said, retrieving it as naturally as if it had happened in her own kitchen. Everyone watching at home understood; they got distracted like that every day of the year. Cooking wasn’t foolproof, not even for Julia Child, a woman, apparently, just like them.
Later, however, she found herself really in the soup. To finish the recipe, she had topped the bowls with a slice of bread and a fistful of cheese and put them under the broiler to give the crust some color. In most cases, a cook would keep a vigilant eye on the oven, but Julia was busy chatting with the folks at home. Too much time had elapsed when she finally rescued the pot, which was all too apparent from the smoke rising off the rack. “That’s really browning, I think possibly too much,” she said, staring at the thick black cinders atop the soup, “—but it gives good effect.”
It gives good effect! There was no way she was going to acknowledge the mistake. Instead, Julia carried the smoking pot to her dining room set, plunked it on the table, and caressed the aroma with her nose. “Ahh—there you are,” she purred, digging through the char to the liquid center. “That’s a wonderful smell, a very appetizing one.”
IN JUST A few short weeks the verdict was in. “Julia was a sensation very quickly,” Russ Morash says. “People were tuning in to WGBH in a way they had never done before.” Word of mouth began to build steadily. Instead of a fragmented handful watching Science Reporter, The French Chef drew a loyal audience that rivaled the offerings of network TV. And when viewers dug in, when they decided to come back to the program week after week, sponsors emerged from the Boston fringe: both Polaroid and Hills Bros. Coffee ponied up grants to subsidize the show.
WGBH realized soon enough that The French Chef wasn’t just a show—it was a phenomenon. The local audience, it seemed, was “just ripe” for good cooking, and not just cooking, but Julia Child cooking. After the fourth show had aired, the station was inundated with fan mail and letters pleading for the recipes. Six hundred envelopes sat piled on a desk, with more arriving by the day. The mail brought good news and bad. The good news, of course, was that people were watching. On the other hand, as Julia reported: “The station is getting a bit worried as it costs them about ten cents an answer, but luckily quite a few of the letters enclose contributions to the station.”
There were also tremors along the syndication front. In 1963, WGBH was one of the few “producing stations” in the embryonic National Educational Television (NET) network, the predecessor to what is now PBS. Few of the fledgling sister stations had either the capability or the resources to produce the kind of programming geared for national distribution, but WGBH was already a prominent light in an otherwise dim canopy of stars. They’d fed a few of their series into the NET pipeline—a variety of dance, classical music, and fine arts shows. The French Chef, however, was something altogether different, something unusual, something distinctive, something extraordinary for its broad appeal. So they put out feelers to other markets. “We’ve got a tiger here,” they reported to the stations. “We’ve got a show that people are watching. We’re getting phone calls, our contributions are up.”
Almost immediately, a half-dozen or so affiliates jumped on the bandwagon: KQED in San Francisco, WQED in Pittsburgh, WPBT in South Florida, WHYY in Philadelphia, WENH in Durham, New Hampshire, WCBB in Lewiston, Maine, and two small stations in upstate New York. That, as it turned out, was only for starters. This initial interest produced a snowball effect, picking up eleven more stations as The French Chef barreled east and west, north and south.
This was an extraordinary moment in the brief life of educational TV. Never had a presenter caught fire like Julia Child. Oh, there was a children’s show from Madison, Wisconsin—“a guy in an elf’s suit, playing a Jack-in-the-beanstalk character”—that got some syndication here and there. But Julia was the first personality to emerge nationally—“she was the first educational TV star.” And because public television never had quite enough programming to fill its broadcasting schedule, The French Chef was repeated three other times during the same week, which gave her even greater visibility. Many viewers reported watching her initial segment Mondays at eight o’clock, trying the recipe on their own, then catching a rerun to fine-tune their technique.
Julia wasn’t immune to the wave of attention. Everywhere she went—“in the subway, or in stores, or on the street, or in elevators, or in business offices”—people stopped to congratulate her and tell her how much they enjoyed the show. To thank her for The French Chef. To thank her—imagine that! Even Paul got a taste of the billowing acclaim. During one of his routine medical checkups, a nurse pulled him aside and said, “Please tell your wife how wonderful I think she is! Even my husband, who never looks at television, says he wouldn’t be anywhere Monday night at eight but right at home glued to that machine!”
The public reaction made Julia so appreciative, so gratified, that she refused to rest on her laurels. If people depended on her to teach them how to cook, she decided she owed them her best all-around effort. The show could be smoother, better. Tighter. Paul recounted their struggle to polish Julia’s performance: “These evenings, when other folk are at the movies or the symphony or lectures, find Julie and me in our kitchen—me with stopwatch in hand, and Julie at the stove—timing the various sections of the next two shows. Over and over and over, with critical comments, and with suggestions for new language, or new demonstration methods.” She was relentless in her persistence of perfection. Everything had to flow naturally. This was television, after all—it needed to look effortless, and to entertain. She even took to dispatching sixty strokes on a rowing machine every morning, so that when she beat egg whites during the show, she wouldn’t get out of breath.
Smoother. Better. Tighter. Looser. Julia began to relax into the role, and as she did, another side of her emerged. It showed itself gradually, first as a kind of chummy informality in which she deviated from the script to deliver wry observations. Then, again, as Russ Morash said, “On live TV shit happens, and when it does the c
amera is on it and she learned to roll with it.” For instance, during the making of pommes de terre Byron, a sautéed potato pancake, Julia flipped the concoction—onto the stove. “Oh—that didn’t go very well,” she murmured ruefully, fingering the mess back into the pan. “But you can always pick it up. If you are alone in the kitchen, whoooo is going to see?”
During a roasting episode, as the camera homed in on a chorus line of uncooked chickens, her voice sang out: “Julia Child presents—the chicken sisters! Miss Broiler, Miss Fryer, Miss Roaster, Miss Capon, Miss Stewer, and old Madame Hen!,” giving each a playful slap, as though sending them out onto the stage. “The caponette,” she pointed to a plumper bird, “is the same as the capon, but she’s been ‘on the pill,’ instead of having the operation.” Another time, she indicated the difference in sex between lobsters, flicking her knife across “the hard feathery parts” particular to the male, which, she admitted, “is rather fun.” From time to time, she might “throw a pretend little fit,” like with a rolling pin that didn’t suit her. “Just throw it away,” she’d say, flinging it over her shoulder to a thunderous clank off-camera.
Her humor was extemporaneous, droll and playful, occasionally blue. “But she had a black side, too,” Russ Morash explained. “She was quite wicked, and she knew she was being wicked.” He recalled a gala segment they planned for roast suckling pig. During a dry run, they went over the recipe to sequence the necessary camera shots. “When I show the suckling pig,” Julia told him, “I will say something like, ‘It’s a bit like burning babies.’ ” Morash advised her against making such a remark, but he held his breath during the show, unsure whether or not she’d actually cross the line.