by Bob Spitz
On the surface, she came off as a raging homophobe, but her feelings were more complicated and often contradictory. James Beard was certainly one of her closest friends, whom she loved dearly and without reservation. His sexual disposition was never a factor. Never. He was a “soul mate,” as some saw it. The same with Sybille Bedford, her neighbor in Provence, and Craig Claiborne and Dick Graff, and Richard Olney, for whom she gave a press party when he published Simple French Food and always expressed the greatest respect, though it wasn’t always mutual, as she might have hoped. “Richard never forgave her for being homophobic,” says Paul Grimes. “He was tired of all her veiled innuendoes and told people to watch it around her.”
Clark Wolf, at the time a young protégé of Jim Beard, says, “It would be easy to call Julia a homophobe, but it depends on how you define that term. She was politically incorrect on a regular basis about a lot of things, propriety be damned.” A handicap parking space was “where the cripples park,” and she liked the way “colored people” cooked. Friends would cringe when these labels popped out of her mouth but knew that she was a product of her times, unaware of giving offense.
She certainly wasn’t thinking when it came to Bob Johnson. “She never thought Bob Johnson was gay,” says Jane Friedman, “and she was really shocked when she finally found out. I mean, really shocked!” He would always be her “he-man lawyer,” a man she trusted unconditionally, and in her eyes every bit “as normal” as Russ Morash. The two men conducted a fragile truce.
Together with a staff of twenty-five, they put the show into production that January of 1983 and quickly resumed the frantic pace of previous Julia Child series: rehearsing, staging, lighting, editing, socializing, and occasionally cooking. “The house was utter chaos,” Rachel Child recounted. “It was like Grand Central Station at rush hour. Friends, neighbors, even passersby with their kids would stop in to have a look at the proceedings, perhaps hoping to touch Julia or maybe her food. It seemed like the set was a big happy party; everyone was in pretty good spirits.”
Julia’s niece, who was living in Pasadena at the time, was enlisted to visit the set and stay close to Paul, muzzle him, she says, “because he would yell instructions to Julia during filming.” In San Francisco, while Julia performed with René Verdon, the former White House chef, he’d shouted “Read your cue cards correctly, Julia!” from the back of the auditorium. At regular intervals, he’d shout out the time. “Nineteen minutes!” “Thank you, Paul,” she’d respond, without lifting an eye from the cutting board. “That’s my husband, Paul, our official timekeeper.” Paul had just turned eighty-one, and though he was “quite well physically” in Julia’s eyes, she knew he was “mentally often confused.” Regularly, he fell asleep during dinner, just nodded right off at the table while the meal was in full swing, and Julia would order the person sitting closest to him to “kick Paul, hard.” After being jolted awake, Julia usually chortled, “Ah, welcome back, Paul.” It was age—“c’est l’âge,” she said—age was catching up to him. She wanted to protect him for as long as she could.
For the most part, her instincts were good when it came to Paul. She made sure he had enough distractions to keep him busy on the set and named him the official photographer for Dinner at Julia’s, even though a young, talented professional covered the action. But on February 8, as production began on a new episode, they got news that would throw Paul a wicked curve. Charlie Child had died “very suddenly”—his twin, his echo, his other soul. “We were truly parts of each other,” Paul explained to a friend, certainly no overstatement. Their relationship was symbiotic, though not always mutually beneficial. Paul wrote Charlie long, beautifully composed, introspective letters nearly every day, for forty-five years, though through them he was never able to reconcile their very complicated sibling rivalry. But losing Charlie was tantamount to losing a part of himself. “I suffer because of Cha’s death,” he scribbled across a page in his datebook. Confined to some dark, private place in his mind for several months afterward, he languished in despondency, alternately grieving and lashing out for no particular reason. Julia recognized the severe blow it had dealt Paul’s condition. “Charlie’s death really set him back mentally,” she admitted.
Julia paid a high physical price for keeping Paul by her side. Throughout the taping of Dinner at Julia’s her knees grew stiffer and more swollen, despite a steady dose of Indocin to reduce inflammation. Strong and self-reliant in public, in private she suffered excruciating pain after long days “slogging through viscous mud … to gather a basketful of yellow precious chanterelles” or braving choppy waters on a salmon boat in Puget Sound. There was no end to her grueling balancing act.
DINNER AT JULIA’S took her mind off the infirmities. “She had a ball doing it,” Russ Morash recalls. The whole experience was “fast-paced and lively,” different from anything she’d done before—and new, which was Julia’s greatest delight. “It was great fun having visiting chefs,” she said, in particular the four French virtuosos—René Verdon, Jean-Claude Prévot, Jean-Pierre Goyenvalle, and Yves Labbe—who’d updated Escoffier in ways her mentors might consider sacrilegious. Their food was inventive, trendy. The French were gamers, not at all uptight once they hit these shores, she thought. Meanwhile, it was “good to have some red-blooded Americans doing things,” as well.
Each show was a lavish production. Besides the adventure and the guest chef and winemaker segments, the dinner itself was a glitzy, luxe affair. Guests didn’t just arrive at the mansion in their own shabby cars; they were delivered in a Rolls-Royce sedan polished to a high-gloss sheen. There was a head butler named Ken to greet them and enough fresh flowers to dress a royal wedding. And speaking of dress, who was that dolled‑up figure circulating as hostess? Dearie, it was none other than Julia Child. Not the Julia Child audiences had come to recognize and love, in her boxy skirt and frumpy blouse with the Trois Gourmandes badge pinned to it. She looked grotesque, like Jessica Rabbit, in a splashy caftan, her hair done with “every possible twist and turn and curl,” and “tarted up” with way too much makeup. Russ Morash took one look at her and thought she “looked like a figure from Madame Tussaud’s.”
He pulled Bob Johnson aside and said, “This won’t do,” but neither Johnson nor Julia wanted to hear it.
The critics zeroed right in on Julia’s startling makeover. She got pounded for her image as much as for the show’s content, a pastiche of disconnected scenes that catered to the frivolous well-to-do. Time said her “wardrobe was worthy of Auntie Mame,” while The New York Times saw it as “silly and distracting.” Even longtime loyal viewers weren’t buying into it. “To see this darling, feisty, gifted lady dressed up in cowboy clothes, tottering around in boots, swishing among rather wooden-looking ‘guests,’ and above all to see her modest, perfect little show given the Beverly Hills treatment, the ostentation, the waiters, the gratuitous free plugs … well, it’s awful!” one fan wrote. Another begged, “We want you to be human,” before pleading: “How could you?”
If Julia and her handlers thought they’d reinvented Julia Child, they’d miscalculated. “We were ultimately criticized because we’d gotten away from what viewers thought they wanted, which was more of the same,” Russ Morash concluded. “Apparently, people hate change, especially when it involved Julia.”
Even so, Julia wasn’t bothered in the least. She’d had a swell time doing the series and if people couldn’t adapt, then so be it. “We had such a good time making those shows,” she told a reporter. Drawing from her principles of cooking, she clung to an old favorite: Never apologize. Serve it up and move on.
BUT BEFORE MOVING on—that is, moving on back to Cambridge—Julia kept a promise to the newly formed American Institute of Wine and Food (AIWF). The little engine that could, powered by $50,000 anted up by Julia, the Mondavis, the Sanfords, and a half-dozen other founders, had been chugging along slowly, gathering momentum where it could. An early meeting in Santa Barbara laid out the AIWF’s mission state
ment: to create a national educational organization, a crossroads of professionals and laypeople, academics and practitioners, that would promote food and wine to the American public. It sure sounded good in theory, and so did its motto: inter folio fructus, “between the leaves there is the fruit,” the grapes, which could also be construed as meaning “between the leaves of books there is the fruit of education.”
Julia was excited. In a roundabout way, it was another form of teaching, her true passion, and she threw herself into it headlong, without reservation. Meetings, dinners, phone calls, appearances, solicitations, money—whatever they wanted from her she gave unconditionally. Promoting wine and food was a fine and noble cause, but she also had two other goals up her sleeve: to establish a college degree in the culinary arts and to make sure women got more involved.
The CIA—the Culinary Institute of America—which stood more or less alone at the forefront of academia, was “just a good cooking school,” in Julia’s estimation, no different from Le Cordon Bleu. But gastronomy and culinary arts demanded a broader perspective. What about the science of food, or culinary history? There was plenty to learn about nutrition and diet, even food writing. Julia envisioned a curriculum that covered all the bases, maybe even separated cooking and baking. And treated women respectfully. Even as late as 1983, she continued to rail against the CIA’s attitude toward women. Oh, sure, sure, they were admitting more to their program, but the ratios were still way out of whack. “When I was there, women were not supposed to be in the kitchen,” recalls Sara Moulton. “All the chef-instructors were European men who ran the place like a military academy. They ignored the women in their classes, for the most part. And Julia knew it.” This was one injustice the AIWF would correct. You could count on it; she’d see to it herself.
First, however, you had to feed the beast. AIWF needed funds, donations, and a lot of them to underwrite its intentions. The founders had ponied up seed money, but it was hardly enough. More, more, MORE they needed—for a library and a newsletter, and a skeleton staff. It took money to grease the wheels of their culinary conveyance. The fastest way to a donation was through one’s stomach, they decided, and God knew they had the wherewithal to mine that lode.
Julia made a lunch to benefit AIWF, but that was chicken feed. Along with Jeremiah Tower, she prepared a lobster bacchanal that succeeded in raising a few more shekels and cast the nets a little further, attracting fat-cat sponsors like Fritz Maytag, the washing-machine magnate, and comedian Danny Kaye. But they needed to make a splash; they needed to reel in bigger tunas.
Determined to pull out all the stops, the AIWF staged its first public bash on May 4, 1983. They called it the “American Celebration,” an eleven-course feast held at the Stanford Court in San Francisco, prepared by a brilliant constellation of new American chefs who exclusively used homegrown American food. It was a way of announcing “we’ve got the stuff” to a fan base that paid dearly: $250 a head for the meal and various workshops. On the surface, as Julia noted, “it was a tremendous success.” The event was a complete sellout; more than 370 people showed up. “But AIWF spent a fortune—it must have cost them a trillion dollars,” says Clark Wolf, “and it was an event from which they almost never recovered.”
Three weeks later, they repeated the extravaganza in Santa Barbara as a big outdoor garden party, with all the food and wine donated by local merchants. This time, seven hundred people attended, with hundreds more, cash in hand, turned away at the door. With such a smash turnout it felt like the big launch AIWF was hoping for. So why were the founders feeling ill at ease? Fund-raising, it seemed, meant staging big dinners. “It began to dawn on us,” says Richard Sanford, “that all we were doing was throwing parties for wealthy people who had the money to participate—Julia referred to them as ‘the robber barons’—and it was becoming more elitist than we liked.” Julia loved the idea of presenting food to the people. “But she was afraid it was becoming pretentious and separatist, instead of inclusive.”
No one was giving up the ship, as of yet. There were too many good ideas and resources to build on. But if AIWF were to succeed as a populist enterprise, they were going to have to retool in order to cast a wider net.
Julia took this sapling back to Cambridge with her, intent on laying down some fertile East Coast roots. The national organization of AIWF was to be built upon local chapters, and New York was already answering the call. Julia was hoping that Boston might step up to the plate, depending on whether its food scene had evolved.
Up until 1980, Boston’s palate hadn’t changed much since the Pilgrims landed. It had very little going on in the way of fine dining. Chowders, fish fries, pot roast, and puddings pervaded the Yankee menus. Dinner vegetables went on the stove sometime after breakfast. The most visible upscale establishment was a place called Locke-Ober, a wonderful old chophouse saloon presided over by cruel men who wheeled out stainless-steel trolleys heaped with mutton and the like. The Union Oyster House, adjoining city hall, was a classic Irish pub and bona-fide Boston legend. The dining rooms in the Ritz and Parker House were stuffy hotel restaurants that served continental, a posh name for stuffy hotel restaurant food. There were a few popular red-sauce Italian joints in the North End, where a plate of spaghetti and meatballs could sustain you through the winter. And Maison Robert—Ro-bear—which was Frenchy French, Escoffier-style, and a dinosaur among the fossils. Only Harvest’s menu offered anything that could be construed as creative—a muscular French-style cooking uprooted with American ingredients that heralded the so-called New American revolution.
But by the end of 1983, when Julia arrived home, the revolution had stormed the citadel. “Boston was ready to eat,” says Jasper White, who was leading the charge at Seasons, in the Bostonian Hotel. “Everyone here was breaking the mold—doing the same old shit, because our bosses insisted on it, but putting a personal statement on every dish.” He hired Lydia Shire, whose wildly original cooking was already raising eyebrows in the city, and they did menus with regional ingredients designed to rattle the Puritans’ diet, dishes like trout with fried grits that would seem timid today but were absolutely revolutionary in 1983.
But it wasn’t White’s food that transformed the scene; it was his banker, Jack Sidell. “He gave me a bank loan!” says White, incredulous to this day, because he hadn’t “a pot to piss in,” much less credit enough to get a car loan. Sidell, however, had some experience with restaurants and could smell what was in the air. He knew there was no revolution without financing, and when he gave White the money to open his own place, chef-owned restaurants became viable entities. “Once the chefs got their hands on restaurants, everything changed,” White says. The money was put in the hands of the artist, as opposed to the businessman, and now the cooks could do anything they wanted.
White opened Restaurant Jasper a few months later with a powerhouse menu that kicked out the jams: ricotta-filled tortellini in a rich rabbit sauce; homemade garlic pasta with crayfish and fresh tarragon; rare, meaty squab paired with breaded oysters; and pan-roasted lobster with whiskey—yes, whiskey!
The inmates had finally taken over the asylum.
Across America the revolution stepped up its charge. A new style of cooking finally burst on the scene that would be embraced by a vast tide of young chefs at the helm of their own places. Within months of White’s coup, Jeremiah Tower opened Stars, Wolfgang Puck opened Spago, Jonathan Waxman opened Jams, Larry Forgione opened An American Place, and in the six months that followed there was an explosion of New American Chefs. “It was like a cauldron boiling over,” White recalls.
Jasper sent another friend to Jack Sidell—Todd English, who borrowed enough to open Olive’s. Lydia Shire also opened her own place, as did Michaela Larson, who introduced Boston to the kind of Italian food that hewed to Italy as opposed to Italian America.
Julia was absolutely beside herself. There was so much attention being paid to food in the city, so much high-pitched excitement. From what she’d heard, “
it was still a pretty sloppy scene,” but explosive; she was intrigued by its brashness. “She wasn’t really prepared for the upheaval going on in Boston,” says Sheryl Julian, “but she was determined to be part of it.”
As soon as she’d unpacked, she grabbed Paul and their friends the Pratts and headed out into the thick of it. They began eating their way across the new landscape, beginning at Jasper’s, through the middle of the lineup, and on down to the lowliest newcomer. “At first, she didn’t like all the experimentation,” says Corby Kummer, who occasionally accompanied the Childs on their rounds. “She didn’t like the excess, there were too many things on the plate. But every so often we’d hit a real winner, and Julia would say, ‘He has technique.’ That was her highest praise.”
No matter what, after dinner in every new restaurant she would head into the kitchen to seek out the chef. There would be an initial jolt of panic. One can only imagine looking up from the stove to find Julia Child staring over your shoulder. But she’d find a few kind words to say about the food, offer encouragement, “keep up the good work.” She’d call them dearie, always dearie. “Tell me, dearie, was there a little tarragon in your mayonnaise?” “Was that your idea, dearie, putting celeriac in the potato puree?” No matter who the chef, she invariably wanted to know how many women were working the line, suggesting ever-so-gently that more be involved, never forgetting to throw her arm around the dishwasher before she left.