by Bob Spitz
Reckless, of course, couldn’t be further from the truth. Julia’s cooking owed its success to details, fundamentals, precision, practice—mastering technique. There was nothing reckless about it. She devised her recipes so that the enthusiastic cook would “know exactly what is involved and how to go about it.” Nevertheless, even the best cooks suffered their share of mistakes; it was part of the process. Mistakes—and failures; they went hand in hand. “Cooking is one failure after another, and that’s how you finally learn,” Julia explained during a dessert show called “Gâteau in a Cage.”
Yet the press continued to focus on her nimble wit. Here was a character that journalists could sink their teeth into: Julia Child, “natural clown.”
In fact, her humor, such as it was on TV, was anything but buffoonish. True, she bumped around the French Chef set much as she did in her own kitchen. But Julia’s mishaps were commonplace to the point of being mundane: putting away a colander and then forgetting where it was, hunting high and low for a utensil, reaching for the butter and finding a note that said “quarter pound of butter to be placed here.” Commonplace. On her apple charlotte show, she instructed viewers to remove the mold carefully so the dessert wouldn’t fall; then when it sank under the hot lights, exclaimed: “Well, for goodness’ sake, it did fall!” Commonplace. On the endive show, she offered a Yogi Berra–style malaprop: “Now don’t wash endive—that is, unless it’s dirty.” And during an episode of forgetfulness: “I did not have my glasses on when I was thinking.” Once, she sorted through a jungle of seaweed in search of a twenty-pound lobster lurking in its folds; another time, she lifted the veil over a platter hunting for the “big, bad artichoke” lying furtively underneath. They were hardly the slapstick antics of Steve Allen and Ernie Kovacs, to whom one overheated writer compared her. Nor was she a descendant of Lucille Ball, as another claimed.
These high jinks, however, were irresistible to viewers, who retold and enlarged on them so often and so outrageously that they eventually became legend. “Sometimes she drops a turkey in the sink,” Lapham wrote in his Saturday Evening Post profile. That never happened, Julia never dropped a turkey, but others recalled it gleefully as two chickens, or a duck—or a pig. They also remembered seeing Julia deglaze a pan with vermouth, then finish off the bottle herself, saying, “One of the rewards of being a cook.” Actually, during a demo on juicing tomatoes she treated herself to a lip-smacking sip. But wine, of course, sounded funnier.
And made things trickier. “We had to continually defend Julia against those who thought she was staggering around the set,” says Russ Morash. “Right from the outset, that was a problem.”
Using wine and alcohol as savory cooking ingredients was unheard of on TV in 1964. Not only wasn’t it done, it was an unwritten taboo on the same order of never showing a husband and wife sharing the same bed. Audiences were particularly finchy when it came to drinking alcohol; a woman drinking alcohol bordered on heresy. But as early as the first episode of The French Chef, Julia extolled the use of wine in her recipes. A wine-dark sauce, she had purred, before sloshing a third of the bottle into the bœuf bourguignon. The next show, too, she struck again, adding a cup of vermouth to the onion soup gratinée. There was no wine at all in her chicken casserole, but when she brought it to the table, her advice was clear. “You want a red Bordeaux wine with this or, as some people call it, a claret. It must marry with the chicken, not overpower it.” Wine with chicken! Some viewers were outraged. And did that woman just say she would marry a chicken?
THE EXTREME REACTIONS, pro and con, only added to Julia’s celebrity. “I can hardly go out of the house now without being accosted in the street,” she wrote to a friend at Knopf. People recognized her wherever she went, and her lessons, from week to week, had a direct impact on business. After her show on broccoli aired, “the local supermarkets sold more of it in a week than they had all year long,” an article reported. The same thing happened in the case of hardware stores when she mentioned a particular paring knife and rolling pin. “She told the audience they needed a good omelet pan,” Russ Morash recalls. “ ‘Now, you need a fish poacher like the one I’m showing you here.’ People felt like they had to rush out and buy one—for $112!” After her soufflé shows, when she beat egg whites with a wire whisk, “her followers,” it was reported, “bought out every whisk in town.” Pots and pans, rolling pins, good olive oil, vegetable steamers—artichokes. Items that stores never sold before were suddenly flying off the shelves.
Paul got a taste of Julia’s influence when he was sent to pick up a meat order at their butcher in Cambridge. While Jack-the-Butcher, as Paul called him, was cubing a slab of veal shoulder, they watched a young woman approach, stoop down, and draw out a copy of Mastering from a little shelf below the counter. She flipped to the index, paged through a few recipes, made a shopping list, and waited her turn in line. “They all use it,” the butcher assured Paul, who watched in amazement as the scene repeated itself over the course of a half hour.
He watched at the studio, too, as visitors and guests mobbed Julia after the taping of every show. He opened letters from viewers who wrote odes to her, sent her photos of their children and grandchildren, their crème caramels and their ratatouilles. He fielded phone calls from promoters at all hours of the day. And night. Sorted through offers for speaking engagements and personal appearances. Calculated her royalty statements every six months—the most recent one with a check for $14,000, more than three times what Paul had last earned in a year.
When he added it all up, the evidence was incontrovertible. No doubt about it, his wife had become a star.
Nineteen
The Mad Women of La Peetch
By 1966, the culinary world was ready for a star.
With America burrowing deeper into a war in Southeast Asia, the populace back home took refuge in a burst of new experiences. After an era of dreary button-down conformity, a longing for the Good Life had taken hold, with its roots stretching into almost every form of self-expression. People searched for something, anything, that would dazzle their senses, as “the everyday,” according to a social critic, “was being converted into the extraordinary.” The arts, sex, and drugs, especially, were in splendid flux; anybody with a whit of curiosity was seeking new direction and new inspiration.
The cultural upheaval that blazed new paths through the subconscious and the bedroom eventually reached the kitchen. It was no longer satisfying—or adventurous—enough to feast on casseroles or TV dinners. Americans began to crave food beyond mere subsistence. Suddenly beef Wellington was all the rage on the posh dinner-party circuit, as well as ceviche, with its nod to freshness, and custardy quiche. “The concern with good eating, which first became evident after World War II, has now swept across the nation,” Time reported. Upscale ingredients were no longer solely for self-styled gourmets, as supermarkets realigned their shelves to meet the new popular demand. Where, only a year earlier, shallots had been as hard to find as a hairy-eared dwarf lemur, there were also fennel and endive and vanilla beans. Cheese departments offered Porte Salut and wheels of runny Brie. Fresh herbs had pushed their way into the produce section, alongside the big, bad artichoke. Needless to say, there was a run on vermouth.
Sitting for the cover of Time, with Boris Chaliapin, 1966 © The Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts (Photo credit 19.1)
As the public caught on, restaurants responded in kind. The French restaurant business in New York—which had sprung from Le Pavillon, the sensation at the 1939 World’s Fair—was still thriving. La Côte Basque, La Granouille, La Caravelle, Le Veau d’or, Lutèce, and Chambord still drew the faithful older, fabulously wealthy crowds. But their menus were set in concrete; they all offered the same classic French fare. The chefs were invisible; people came because of the owners and maître d’s who patrolled their front doors like martinets. That began to change in 1966, as the culture scanned younger and the young had money of their own to spend. Restaurants
were no longer an indulgence only for the rich, but a scene, a place to eat, of course, but also to mix and be seen. The new crowd shunned places with flock wallpaper and snooty waiters, where they were looked up and down like common curs. Instead, they sought out places with personality, design, and flair—restaurants that were distinctive, with chefs who exerted a level of creativity making food that lit up people’s appetites.
The shift away from French cooking began in the late 1950s with a man named Joseph Baum, who played a decisive role in the reshaping of the American dining experience. He had worked for Norman Bel Geddes, the great theatrical designer, and shared office space with architect I. M. Pei, so Baum came to food with a showman’s sense of style. For Baum, food was spectacle. He “operated in the conceptual territory where food and theater overlapped.” He understood that it wasn’t enough to provide a menu of exquisitely made standards; you had to entertain the clientele, to offer exciting food in a unique setting. “Dining out, in Joe’s view, had to be an unforgettable experience,” says Barbara Kafka. “He was innovative, inventive. He brought the world of international upscale food to New York and beyond.”
Baum’s prescription was simple: restaurants with imaginative menus and gorgeous décor. In quick succession he opened the Forum of the Twelve Caesars, an Italian restaurant modeled on ancient Rome whose waiters dressed in togas and served exotic drinks in centurion’s helmets; La Fonda del Sol, a splashy Latin American–themed cantina that resembled a Peruvian bazaar; the Hawaiian Room, all Polynesian razzle-dazzle, in the basement of the Lexington Hotel, with a slide for its entrance; and his masterpiece, The Four Seasons.
America had never seen anything like The Four Seasons before. Craig Claiborne, writing in The New York Times, called it “perhaps the most exciting restaurant to open in New York within the last two decades.” Designed by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson in the ground floor of the modernist Seagram Building, it featured a duet of dramatic dining spaces—the Pool Room, with its twenty-foot marble fountain and ornamental fig trees, and the Grill Room, with a Richard Lippold abstract metal sculpture suspended over the bar. There was a huge backdrop designed by Picasso and Joan Miró tapestries, chairs by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen, and yet none of these visionaries managed to upstage the food. The Four Seasons redefined what restaurants served from that moment on. Its dishes emphasized fresh seasonal produce as opposed to a specific cuisine and introduced provisions people had never encountered before: snow peas, cherry tomatoes, baby vegetables, edible wildflowers, and a variety of rare mushrooms foraged by no less than John Cage.
The Four Seasons was a game changer for the American dining establishment, but sophisticated and expensive, like the other restaurants under Joe Baum’s sway. It wasn’t until April 1966, when Warner LeRoy, another incorrigible showman, opened Maxwell’s Plum that the scene opened up to a younger, hipper crowd. Maxwell’s, planted along a sterile outpost on First Avenue at Sixty-fourth Street, wasn’t a typical high-toned expense-account restaurant. It was as much a scene as a place to eat—tables jammed shoulder-to-shoulder on multiple levels that revolved around a central bar, where singles and couples clustered five or six deep. The place was as loud and boisterous as its uninhibited décor: miles of brass railing, a jungle of enormous ferns, and ceramic animals underneath a Tiffany stained-glass ceiling that measured eighteen by thirty feet. There was no dress code, unless wide-lapeled flowered shirts and bell-bottoms counted as protocol. Its menu was continental, a term that, at the time, meant “potpourri” as opposed to “European”: you could order a delicately stuffed squab, a grilled veal chop, or seafood crêpes, but also spareribs and hamburgers, and chili con carne—“not the hautest of haute cuisine,” as Craig Claiborne declared, but “amusing” nonetheless, and very much of it good.
Maxwell’s Plum was an immediate hit, and it catapulted restaurants from stodgy special-occasion places into hot, trendy scenes. “It became chic to go out and discover these hangouts,” says chef and cookbook author Rozanne Gold, who grew up in the revolution that realigned New York’s kitchens and went on to become one of its illustrious figures. “First it was Maxwell’s, then Friday’s, then soon afterward, Trattoria da Alfredo, which introduced regional Italian food—beautiful homemade pasta and pesto—to eager young crowds that only knew veal parmesan and spaghetti and meatballs.”
New Yorkers in the know had easy access, but most of America, the people who were starting to take a real interest in food, didn’t yet have the kind of places to indulge their awakening appetites. They would have a long wait until local restaurants would notice the trend. For the most part, menus across the country still offered a ghastly bill of fare: a wedge of iceberg lettuce slathered in Russian dressing, fruit cup, well-done prime rib au jus, sweet-and-sour chicken, baked stuffed flounder, goulash, fried shrimp, ham steak accompanied by a slice of canned pineapple, baked potatoes with sour cream, lima beans, coconut custard pie. In the early sixties, home cooking seemed like the only hope for anyone with budding culinary ambitions. The only strategy was to pick up knowledge and technique wherever possible, from a cookbook or, of all things, television. “Otherwise, it was still the Dark Ages,” says Corby Kummer, a writer who would begin covering the food scene in the 1970s. “Everyone was waiting for the culinary messiah.” A vision appeared on their TV screens: Julia Child was it.
TIME MAGAZINE DELIVERED the Word: they put Julia on the November 25 cover, where cultural, social, and political icons were celebrated. They anointed her “our lady of the ladle,” concluded that the shows “have made her a cult from coast to coast,” and declared 1966 “the year that everyone seems to be cooking in the kitchen with Julia.” While they quoted Julia’s standard line—“French cooking is easy if you get good working habits and stick to them”—the article was less about the cooking than it was about her persona, her “success as a showman,” and the “flubs,” “contretemps,” “gaffes,” and “goofs” that captured the public’s imagination. There was something delightfully endearing about this anti-personality, this uninhibited, plainspoken, gentle giant with the warbly accent who “thinks nothing of belting down a couple of stiff bourbons at home” and admits that she “hates people who put on the dog.”
Everything about Julia Child struck a common chord. Even though she was an unabashed Francophile—“I will never do anything but French cooking,” she told Time—there was something as American as apple pie about her. Even though she lived in Cambridge, she was down-to-earth, not someone with Harvard pretensions. Even though she preached strict adherence to technique, technique, technique, it was clear that she relished breaking the rules. How could America not fall in love with her?
“That Time article catapulted Julia into a whole other stratosphere,” recalls Russ Morash. “It made her the voice of American cooking,” says Jacques Pépin, who had graduated from Columbia University and was emerging as a talent in his own right. “At last, there was someone who the public could turn to for advice, someone they trusted to teach them all about food, not a Frenchman or a tyrant, not a made‑up figure like Betty Crocker—but someone very much like them.”
It was the persona, the up-from-nothing spirit of America that the Time article celebrated—the idea “that the mistress of all this expertise could barely boil water when, at the age of 34, she married,” that a “C average” student could become “the most influential cooking teacher in the U.S.” and make herself a household name. A household name. Even if it hadn’t been so before, it was so now. There she was—on the cover of Time.
The verdict was unanimous. The letters that poured into Time confirmed what the editors already knew. “Hurrah for Julia Child,” wrote Robert F. Hever from Mettitt Island, Florida, after he arrived home from work one night and found filets de poisson gratinés à la parisienne on his plate. “Around our house she is spoken of as a member of the family,” Frances R. Looney wrote from New Haven, Connecticut. “We just plain love her.”
But the Time cover merely capped
the year’s media splash. In April, The French Chef was awarded an Emmy, the first ever given to an educational TV station. Life had also done a feature spread on Julia that appeared the last week in October, as had The New York Times Magazine, in which Craig Claiborne, now the most influential food critic in the country, referred to her glowingly as “one of the most extraordinary talents in the food field in America.” Still, one jealous rival managed to get in her licks. The Times Magazine article quoted “another well-known professional cook trading candor for anonymity,” whose resentment of Julia was all encompassing. “She’s neither French nor a chef,” the nameless source lashed out. “She hasn’t worked as an apprentice, taken the examinations, and gotten her chef’s certificate. It’s a shame that the term ‘chef’ is used so loosely these days.”
It didn’t take long for Julia to unmask the scold’s identity. Within days, word drifted back that the source was Madeleine Kamman, a “feisty,” “fierce”—James Beard called her “peppery”—Cordon Bleu grad with a “psyche,” she claimed, that “Americans do not understand,” whose brilliance as a cook and teacher would forever be overshadowed by “the central question” in her life: “Why Julia? Why not me?” Kamman was French, she’d toiled in a one-star kitchen in Touraine, gotten her diploma, paid her dues. All admirable accomplishments, yet there was one affliction that stuck in her craw: “Why would they want an American ‘French Chef’?” The question galled her. It didn’t parse. For years afterward, she would openly deride Julia’s tidal wave of fame; at the moment, however, it hardly caused a ripple.