by Bob Spitz
One morning, Julia had set up in the studio to rehearse a recipe for croque monsieur. The cameramen were swanning around her, adjusting lenses and wires, while Julia cast an eye up to the control booth above the set, where Sonya sat. When the signal was given to start the run-through, Julia cleared her voice and began. “Today we’re going to do cock monsieur … ”
“Just a moment, Julia,” came the detached British voice over the PA system. “Let’s do that again, from the top.”
Julia gathered herself, took a breath, and began anew. “Today, we are going to do cock monsieur … ”
“Hold on, Julia.”
Sensing mischief, the cameramen began snickering and cutting glances at one another before looking skyward, in Sonya’s direction. They knew she was uptight about the word cock and had convinced herself she was the only person who had heard it.
Julia barreled right ahead with the demo. “The first thing you want to do with your cock … ”
Sonya’s voice broke in again. “Julia, listen to me. It’s c-r-r-r-r-r-oque monsieur.”
“Well, dearie, that’s what I was saying.”
“No, Julia, you were not saying that. Listen again. It’s c-r-r-r-r-r-oque, c-r-r-r-r-r-oque!”
Julia looked up and insisted they were pronouncing it exactly alike.
“No, you were not saying that.”
A look of exaggerated innocence played on Julia’s face. “Well, dearie, what was I saying?”
By this point, the cameramen were beside themselves. They knew what Julia was up to and were laying bets whether she could get Sonya to say the word aloud.
There was a long silence before the PA clicked back on. “Julia. You were saying cock.”
“What was that, dearie?” Julia played with the ingredients in front of her, distracted.
“Cock, Julia. You were saying cock.”
Julia put down a few slices of bread and looked up at the booth with a rascally grin. “Well,” she said in her swoopy drawl, “I’ll bet it sure tastes better that way.”
WHEN JULIA COMMITTED to working in New York in 1980, she knew in advance that the commute would be hard. All that travel back and forth, the disruption and the strain. There was no telling how Paul would take to it, and friends cautioned it could hinder his recovery. “She thought the activity would be therapeutic for him,” recalls Pat Pratt. “That it might get his mind going, take him back to the days when they were on the go, that they’d have this project together, he’d start using his camera again, click into the old routine.” Instead, unable to keep up with her or communicate effectively, he withdrew even further into his inner world. At ABC, where the hustle and drive were constant, Paul clung to the shadows. “He was very quiet, very reserved,” recalls George Merlis. “He always stood off by himself, always sharpening Julia’s knives in a kind of guarded, hypnotic way.”
All in all, doing the shows was “rough,” Julia reported to Simca, “but we do enjoy going to New York to do them.” There was plenty of time to take pleasure in the city, see friends, catch up on the swiftly moving food trends. Typically, they’d fly in a few days early, have dinner with Judith Jones or a culinary grandee. James Beard, busy revising a manuscript for The New James Beard, always made time to see them. He seemed to be doing much better than when they had last visited with him in Plascassier. His seventy-nine-year-old body was still “dangerously overweight”; he was “slowing down a little,” Julia thought, “but functioning.” Whenever possible, she stole down to the Village to cook with him. “James loved cooking with Julia,” says Clark Wolf. “Even after all those years, they always behaved like it was the first time, and it was always something of a performance, just the two of them at the stove.”
Jim fantasized openly about returning to La Pitchoune. A lengthy visit usually succeeded in reversing his tortured decline. It was a place where he could recuperate, away from the parasites and jackals, the constant deadlines that shot his blood pressure into the stratosphere. In Plascassier, there was little reason for him to be on his feet. He loved to while away endless days lazing about on the porch, sipping martinis, cook with Julia or go across to Simca’s. Christmas and New Year’s there were always over-the-top occasions. And the cast of visitors refreshed itself regularly and was gossipy enough to suit him.
It was an idyllic thought—they always enjoyed each other’s company—but Julia doubted they’d reunite there anytime soon. And it would be too difficult for Beard, “with his big old purple legs,” to get around Plascassier on his own, without them. Paul had already made it clear that he wanted a change of scenery. He fared even worse than usual in the seasonal damp chill, making another winter in the south of France out of the question. In fact, Julia had laid plans to take him west instead for their three-month hiatus in early 1981. The warm, dry weather in California was better suited to their needs than Plascassier, marginally; than Cambridge, not even close. “Why spend the remainder of one’s life in that awful climate?” she wondered. And the constant highbrow tension was fairly exhausting.
California was another world entirely. Where Cambridge and Plascassier were animated and intellectual, Santa Barbara was laid-back and economically diverse: a genteel but unpretentious community of oil barons and high-stakes investors intermixed with personal chefs, organic gardeners who supported the farmers’ market, and film buffs. There were plenty of other incentives to go west, as well. Dort and Ivan were just up the coast, as was Julia’s stepmother, Phila, in Pasadena, and they could reconnect with long-lost intimates from Julia’s past. “Lots of my old school mates and childhood friends are there,” she mentioned. A handful of Pasadena families still dominated the social scene. And all those memories—the idyllic summers on the beach in Sandyland Cove, the family drives through Montecito Park, watching her mother play tennis on the city courts. Her mother: when Julia pictured Caro in Santa Barbara she saw a vibrant, robust beauty with unconventional spirit. Julia’s spirit. The city—its easy lifestyle—was a powerful draw.
It didn’t take long to settle into a routine. Julia found Montecito “spectacularly beautiful, with the sea and the big rough green mountains in the very near background.” The sun’s heartwarming dry heat gave Paul an immediate lift; he seemed less reluctant, even willing, to participate in social situations, more responsive to Julia, which was encouraging for the long term. “We have found ourselves so happy here,” Julia wrote to Simca soon after their unpacking. Everything seemed to fall right into place. So many friends came to pay their respects. Julia joined the Birnamwood Country Club, the club for old established families. She discovered a batch of reliable restaurants—nothing gastronomic, like Bocuse or Moulin de Mougins, not even innovative like Four Seasons, but “jolly places,” she called them, where you could get a nice rare steak and an excellent local pinot noir. In fact, she’d become close to two winemaking artisans—Dick Graff at Chalone and Richard and Thekla Sanford, the young couple who owned Sanford Winery—and through them educated herself about the domestic wine industry, which was just coming of age.
Within a few months, the Childs decided to make the move more permanent. They bought an apartment in the Montecito Shores complex, across from the Biltmore Hotel where they planned to retire—eventually, some time distant. They settled in the top floor of a low-rise co-op, a two-bedroom space with a modest dining nook that Julia claimed as her West Coast office. A glassed-in porch overlooked a vast green meadow and beyond that the sea. Most important: “all on one floor,” Julia gloated, “with an elevator near (for my knees!).”
Julia’s knees were developing into a chronic problem. Since the accident on her wedding day they’d never been the same, and her ungainly size did nothing to help the situation. She was an enormous, big-boned, weight-bearing woman on her feet all day long. On top of that, crippling arthritis had set in, which only exacerbated the problem. She’d been warned by her doctor: she could only stand all day for so long with those knees. Twice already she had to have them drained, along with some
microsurgery to scrape out and repair scar tissue. But Julia didn’t intend to slow down anytime soon.
There were too many new places to go, too many new situations to explore, too many new people to meet in the lush lap of California. In the tradition of her grandfather, she prospected up and down the coast, mining experiential nuggets that yielded fat returns. The local wine industry was a particularly rich strike. Dick Graff showed Julia around the up-and-coming vineyards, through the Simi Valley north to Monterey and further into Napa and Sonoma, hoping to convert her to the sophisticated American-made product. Some fairly respected critics already claimed “that California wines … were as good as the French,” but Julia’s prejudices were pretty well fixed. “She and Paul were so negative about California wine,” recalls Richard Sanford, who befriended them on that early sightseeing trip. Even though the industry had been growing more polished and innovative through the seventies, they only basically knew the swill that came in jugs and screw-cap bottles. “I’d grown up on that stuff,” Julia recalled later, “and I knew better than to put much stock in it.” But Graff’s dog-and-pony show proved an eye-opener. They hopscotched across the vineyards tasting the California rising stars—Stags’ Leap, Heitz, Chateau Montelena, Mayacamas, wines with great depth and complexity—and “found true religion in those cabernets and pinot noirs.”
Julia learned an enormous amount from the charming and suave Graff. A “great artisan” in the precincts of new-world winemaking, Graff was another of the “really handsome, literate, but sexually conflicted” men to whom Julia was inexorably drawn. He was a glamorous and alluring conversationalist, strikingly muscular, with a black pencil mustache and sparkly eyes, and a knack for being more connected than an IBM mainframe. Plus, he was “wildly talented,” some called him “a genius,” and there was nothing Julia loved more than handsome, wildly talented geniuses.
Graff was Julia’s liaison to the small but hard-charging wine-producing community that seemed to be marching in lockstep with local restaurateurs. He introduced her to his winemaking friends, not the least of whom was the enterprising Robert Mondavi, and initiated her—very, very gradually—to a culinary style that was being called California cuisine.
Like many revolutionary movements, California cuisine sprang from the innate drive to create something different and the sudden availability of the tools to facilitate it. The American palate, so basic, so pedestrian, and so uninitiated, had been awakened in the 1960s by Julia Child, James Beard, and their merry band of acolytes, who mentored legions of young people wanting to learn how to cook. They studied Julia’s books, they watched her shows, inhaled every word she said; the serious ones went to France to learn more. They mastered the hands-on skills, the vocabulary, the cook’s way of thinking, and they came back to America wanting to take it to the next step. It grew out of the sixties ethos of valuing creativity and the seventies ethos of wanting to express oneself. These trained young cooks hungered to put their own stamp on cuisine: French-based with a decidedly modern, American twist.
California cooks had a leg up on the process, owing to the state’s luxurious year-round growing season and the stunning variety and quality of its produce. They had immediate access to the freshest and very best ingredients, most of them harvested on farms within a short, accessible drive. Leslie Brenner, who studied the phenomenon in her book American Appetite, noticed that local California greenmarkets overflowed with “a generous cornucopia of produce: six or seven types of exotic broccoli; juicy flavorful strawberries; tiny succulent mandarins; Haas avocados; Chinese water spinach; an heirloom variety of watercress; fresh fenugreek; even ripe flavorful tomatoes grown outdoors.” There was goat cheese, artichokes, nasturtiums, lettuces—mesclun—and patches of herbs in constant bloom. Cooks could prepare their menus with produce picked just that morning and have it on the table a few hours later, whereas the top New York restaurants depended on produce shipped from the West Coast, which inevitably lost flavor by the time it arrived.
It was undeniable: fresh ingredients inspired creativity in inventive young cooks, who began to put their personal interpretations on simple French cooking. In time, they developed a style entirely their own: classically influenced, sexy, ingredients-based, and creative. Simple grilled food with an attractive presentation was the foundation of California cuisine. Fresh field salad and baby vegetables added a quiet, dressy touch. Of course, The Four Seasons in New York and Harvest in Boston had been featuring such food since they’d opened their doors, years earlier. But suddenly a pack of new practitioners took it to another level: Alice Waters, Jonathan Waxman, Jeremiah Tower, Michael McCarty, Mark Miller, and Wolfgang Puck burst out of the gate in spectacular fashion. Finally, there was a synergy to the cooking. Their food was more experimental, more assured, and more refined in its execution, throwing a spotlight across the fashionable terrain. And the innovation didn’t stop at the plate. The restaurants they worked in were laid-back and casual instead of cathedrals to propriety. Before, any type of sophistication in regard to food in America was put through a prism that included an intimidating French waiter. Now, the server was likely to appear in a white shirt and jeans: “Hi, my name is Zachary. I’ll be assisting you tonight.”
California cuisine was a runaway success and the food press was quick to anoint the trend. Everyone, from Craig Claiborne to Mimi Sheraton to Jack Shelton gave it their blessing. Patricia Wells, writing in the International Herald Tribune, declared, “The cuisine generates an excitement about food, a sense of experimentation, plus an uncompromising concern for good food and good dining that seems to have been lost in much of America.”
Julia wasn’t so sure. Jim Beard had been cooking and promoting American seasonal cookery since his appearance on the scene, in the early 1940s. His food was elemental, it wasn’t from the grocery store, and he made no compromise to freshness or quality. The same with Richard Olney’s artisanal approach. Julia thought California cuisine was nothing more than southern French regional coupled with local cooking, and she said so whenever asked to comment. In a 1981 panel discussion sponsored by the San Francisco Culinary Academy, she responded to an address by Alice Waters that presented California cuisine as a simple, pure form.
“There is not as much of a California cuisine as you chauvinists would have us believe,” Julia said. “It is actually such a mixture that definitions cannot be made. Although you mention simplicity, I think menus are so simple they can become dull. Sometimes I’m glad when I can go back to France, where they really do things with food.” As far as the incestuous pact with foragers and farmers that made just-picked produce an almost religious requirement, Julia thought it was patently elitist. “You have an unduly doleful point of view about the way that most people shop for food,” she told Waters. “Visit any supermarket and you’ll see plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables. And if you don’t like the looks of what you see displayed, complain to the produce manager. That’s what I do, and it always gets results.”
In the search for a genuine American cuisine, California cooks were viewed skeptically by the establishment, whose allegiance was to classic French food. But their impact was not to be denied. The “grill it and garnish it” brand of cooking was a welcome change from the monotony of lugubriously sauced roasts and leaden casseroles that epitomized most fine-dining pretensions. And by the time the new cooking caught on, its top-flight practitioners raised the bar to a new level of pizzazz. Jeremiah Tower began serving roast duck with fresh basil along with composed salads that owed plenty to modern architecture; Alice Waters offered buckwheat pasta with arugula and goat cheese, as well as lobster in cabbage leaves with roasted peppers; and Wolfgang Puck reinvented pizza—smoked salmon pizza, duck pizza, pesto shrimp pizza, gourmet pizza. And collectively, they no longer allowed captains to cook, flambé, and carve tableside as was customary in most fancy joints, but rather the chefs themselves plated food in the kitchen to emphasize presentation, often finishing dishes by squirting sauces from a squeeze bottle in
Jackson Pollack–like zigzags across the entire plate.
It was the Wild West all over again.
Julia, understandably, had trouble dismissing the importance of California cuisine. The food was too well made and well-thought-out, and it conformed to her basic principle: “If it tastes good, it’s good. Period. End of story.” Jasper White says, “She was careful not to rail against the movement, although she called bullshit on grilled vegetables,” but she was also not quick to jump on the bandwagon. There were too many shortcomings that curbed her enthusiasm, one of which was apparent lack of training at the stove. Above all else, she believed, chefs must master technique. Julia was dedicated to the old French system, where would-be chefs toiled for years in the back of professional kitchens, topping-and-tailing beans, peeling potatoes, or making vats of vol-au-vent, before they were allowed anywhere near a stove. But Alice Waters, from what she’d heard, “never attended cooking school or served some kind of rigorous apprenticeship,” nor had Jeremiah Tower, a notorious head case. Jonathan Waxman put in some time studying cooking at La Varenne; otherwise, he’d kicked around in a series of amateur rock bands. At twenty-five, Wolfgang Puck, had he remained in Europe, would still have been apprenticing, still learning, still lightyears away from cooking, and even then, only cooking Escoffier-type standards. How could she endorse these young and reckless chefs? How could she forsake everything she stood for?
Even Sara Moulton had to pay her dues. Despite the fact that Moulton had graduated from the Culinary Institute of America, worked two cooking jobs in Boston—as the manager of a catering operation and chef at a restaurant called Cybelle’s—and had served as executive associate for Julia Child and Company, Julia was convinced she needed more formal training if she were to get anywhere in the professional culinary world. She never came out and told Moulton as much. Instead, she said, “Dearie, everybody should go to France.” Next thing Moulton knew, Julia had consigned her to an apprenticeship with a French two-star chef. “Her idea was that I go over and do a petit stage,” Moulton recalls. “He would pay for my room and board, and I would work for free. At the time, I was a chef at a restaurant in Boston, and he wouldn’t even let me work the line. And he chased me around on my day off.” Didn’t mean a thing to Julia Child. When Moulton complained later on that she’d been fed to the lions, Julia replied, “Dearie, what did you expect? They’re all like that. Get over it.” In her eyes, it had been a wonderful opportunity for a young, ambitious woman to learn, learn, learn.