Dearie

by Bob Spitz

  “She was always super-sensitive about what she said to young chefs,” says Sally Jackson, an early publicist on the Boston food scene. One night Julia and Jackson checked out a new Cambridge restaurant that had been making noise on the culinary grapevine. “The chef didn’t have any training at all, and when he came out to say hello, Julia very carefully said, ‘We had a wonderful time, dearie. This is such a lovely restaurant.’ But not a word about the food.” As they were about to leave, she pulled the chef aside and said, “I do hope you get to travel, dearie. It’s so important to experience cuisines in their native countries.”

  Again and again, she encouraged local chefs to find their own voices, to want to succeed, to be bold, to try to make a name for themselves. “Her disagreements with their style of cooking were minor compared to the idea that she wanted there to be independent chefs working in Boston who cared about making good food,” says Corby Kummer. “She promoted the scene, made connections, sparked competition. And she would call up people and recommend these chefs; she wanted others to know them and to publicize them.”

  Jasper White, especially, sought her blessing. His new restaurant was a big financial undertaking; its success was riding on word of mouth. “I really needed Julia to love it,” he recalls. “I needed her to put the word out.”

  She came in a few months after the kitchen got settled. “I was a fucking nervous wreck,” White recalls. “The rest of the dining room could have gone completely to hell. We just focused on her.” He and Lydia Shire personally cooked everything that got sent out to Julia’s table; every single ingredient had to pass their approval. “If I don’t see the bread,” he ordered his staff, “you don’t take it out to her.” Twenty-five years later, he still remembers the order: “She had oysters, Paul had rack of lamb, Julia my pan-fried lobster. I grilled leeks and roasted her potatoes in lamb fat.” After dinner, she came back in the kitchen to say she loved it. A week later she came in again and that pretty much sealed the deal. The jungle drums went beating across Boston.

  According to White, Julia transformed the Boston food scene. “She became the tent pole,” he says, “the anchor. Everything that went on in the city went through her. She took us all under her wing and was thoughtful about how she supported us. We got invited to her house; she made sure we all knew each other.” When a young cook named Gordon Hamersley moved back to Boston, Julia sent him to Jasper and Lydia. Later, when Hamersley finally opened his bistro, Julia quickly gave it her imprimatur.

  “If we were good, she made sure people knew,” says Jody Adams, who worked for Gordon Hamersley before opening her own place. “Thanks to her, Boston became a major restaurant town with a close-knit group of chefs who helped build it together.”

  The benefits worked both ways. “Restaurant food was shifting from classic French to New American,” says Clark Wolf, “and when the young chefs changed their styles, they dragged Julia along with them.” Resistant, at first, more as cheerleader than stovemate. “I will never do anything but French cooking,” she told Time in 1966, during her cover-story interview. But by the mid-1980s her curiosity was aroused. She quizzed the young upstarts relentlessly about their technique and favorite recipes. Her own cooking became looser, less observant of French dogma, more improvisational. “She began updating the French classics,” says Marian Morash. “It was so much fun to watch her unwind.”

  That feeling spread as 103 Irving took on an informal open-house policy. The young chefs dropped by regularly to talk, relax, and eat. Julia always put on her trademark lunch—a tuna fish sandwich with homemade olive-oil mayo—and a mix of shoptalk and gossip prevailed. Even the local press came by to socialize and eat instead of just seeking comment for the record. Sheryl Julian recalls taking time out from her Boston Globe food columns to join the festivities at Julia’s dinner table for the camaraderie, if not always satisfying fare.

  “One of the first times I went there, I had roast chicken with rice,” Julian remembers. “There were ten of us packed in like sardines, as the chicken came to the table. Now, I’m Jewish, so I assumed it was the first chicken; she’d cut it and another would be coming out in a minute. But I was wrong. Everyone’s portion was the size of an eyeglass lens. Yet it was one of the best parties I’d ever been to.”

  Practically every night was party night at Julia’s. Her kitchen door was always open and whoever happened by was invited to join the meal. There was always some celebrated person at the table—David Brinkley, John Updike, Charlie Gibson, Roger Vergé, whoever was in town—and a giddy atmosphere was strictly enforced. Like every hostess in America, Julia was always slightly behind schedule, so she put everybody, no matter how famous or distinguished, to work. Everyone pitched in the prep, no exceptions. A bowl of Julia’s beloved Goldfish served as hors d’oeuvres. Paul kept the wine flowing before nodding off at his place.

  Celebrations were only slightly more formal. The food would be copious to mark the occasion and considerably dressy—oysters and foie gras and truffled this-or-that and endless champagne. Only Thanksgiving became a chaotic affair. On Thanksgiving, Julia’s phone started ringing around noon and continued steadily until eight that night. The callers were all strangers, people in the throes of making their dinners who had either messed up or needed rescuing. Julia’s number was in the phone book—it was a famous fact that she was not only listed, but picked up the phone herself—so people took that as an invitation to call at will. She answered every single question, as though she were some sort of hotline. “Yes, dearie, you just put that bird right on the table.”

  “It was so charming!” says Sheryl Julian. “She was concerned that people were going to all this effort and their timing was off or they ran out of milk for the potatoes.” She was determined to do the troubleshooting, figuring a sentence or two would turn their meals around.

  “Dearie, you put that old sweet-potato soufflé right on the counter. No one’s going to care.” “Have you ever had hot turkey? No one eats hot turkey.”

  Occasionally, she’d call one of the emerging young chefs and pump them for answers to food questions. Jasper White recalls often picking up a call at home to find Julia on the line. “Dearie, last night I made red snapper. It was beautiful but turned out really tough. What do you think happened?” He’d gaze at the clock on his night table and think, “It’s six-thirty Saturday morning. Doesn’t she know I cooked until midnight?” Didn’t matter. Morning, noon, night—if Julia had a question, she’d say, “Oh, I know who to call!”

  Her life back in Cambridge only got busier and busier. Throughout 1985 and 1986, Julia immersed herself in a bruising cycle of work that would have derailed a woman half her age. She signed a whopping $400,000 deal with Knopf for a book and videocassette series called The Way to Cook, an encyclopedic instruction bible of everything she knew—recipes, ruminations, technique, and trucs—illustrated lavishly with photographs from her Parade columns. The book would take nearly five years to produce, but she completed the videos in practically no time, and supported them with a ten-city promotional tour. Even while she was on the road, she churned out weekly columns for Parade and flew back for regular appearances on Good Morning America. There were also fund-raisers for AIWF, the Women’s Culinary Guild, the International Association of Culinary Professionals, Les Dames d’Escoffier, the Association of Cooking Schools, Smith College, Harvard, independent bookstores, and any other needy case that caught her eye.

  There was no chance of her slowing down. “I have no intention of ever retiring,” she repeated like a mantra to journalists, hoping they’d eventually take her at her word, and vows to surge forward “till I drop” became ridiculously routine.

  Dropping had never really vexed Julia. Death was Paul’s department, intensified tenfold since Charlie had died. But Julia never really paid it much thought. She seemed content to trundle on, convinced that one day “you just slip off the raft.” And when that day came, it was fine by her.

  But there were snags in the journey as i
t flowed downstream. On January 23, 1985, while the Childs were resting at La Pitchoune, they got the news that James Beard had died. His death caught Julia by surprise. She knew Jim had been ill—he had been fighting one ailment or another practically as long as she’d known him—but last she’d heard, before leaving for France, he was hard at work editing his newspaper column. Little did she know that, in the month before his death, Beard suffered from congestive heart failure, intestinal bleeding, and kidney failure, to say nothing of monstrous weight issues and alcohol excess. Years of self-abuse had finally caught up with him. At the end, his dissipated body just plain gave out. Still, Julia grieved, grew melancholy and contemplative. To her, just like to the rest of the culinary world, James Beard had been larger than life itself. He’d transformed how Americans ate; they’d accomplished that feat together. Together. Reflecting on Jim and the legacy he left was a long, plaintive gaze into her own past, which must have seemed as gossamer as a meringue.

  If anything, it made her more aware of frailty and the ravages of aging. She only had to look around her to be reminded of its consuming effects. Simca’s husband, Jean, was seriously ill with kidney disease and Avis DeVoto was battling pancreatic cancer. On top of everything else, Julia learned that her lawyer, Bob Johnson, who’d been fighting a stupefying disease he’d contracted in the Caribbean, was sick with AIDS and had no hope of recovering. All these friends on the periphery of her world! “It was heartrending to see someone going downhill before one’s eyes,” Julia said, “and to know there is so little one can do.”

  No one knew better than Julia how age and health conspired to lay waste. Paul, she finally admitted, was “in a gradual decline.” He’d weathered a prostate operation, with a second one on the horizon. He was taking Ritalin, a powerful stimulant, to help control his attention deficit and narcolepsy, but “his receiving and processing of information has gotten steadily worse.” His stamina and personality were certainly impaired, but other telltale signs served to raise Julia’s fears. For one thing, his painting, what little there was of it, was crude, incomprehensible. Julia continued to assure friends that he was painting away, when in fact he rarely touched his brushes, much less put them to canvas. And his short-term memory was deserting him. In the summer of 1985, right before Julia left for Europe to shoot a travel segment for GMA called “Julia Child in Italy,” Paul had gone out for a walk to pick up his morning newspaper, but returned minutes later saying he couldn’t remember where he was going. He’d become frustrated, disoriented. Instantly, Julia realized that his mind, not just his body, posed a serious threat and that she could no longer chance to leave Paul alone.

  It also meant she had to reconsider some of the clutter that dominated her day-to-day schedule. There was too much chaos in their home, contributing to Paul’s confusion. Often 103 Irving seemed busier than the intersection at Copley Square, and she could tell the constant traffic made him agitated, addled. On any given day, there was a preposterous ongoing parade: Julia’s secretary, the housekeeper, their gardener, a full contingent of women testing recipes and prepping demos and styling dishes, grocery deliveries, friends stopping by, journalists, chefs, messengers, Russ, Ruth Lockwood, Avis, neighbors. Enough! In particular, the photo shoots for her Parade column turned the house upside down. Once a month, in Julia’s kitchen, they shot enough pictures to illustrate four columns. “The living room and hall become staging areas for plates, tablecloths, etc.,” she explained. “All the dining room furniture [gets moved to] the piano room … and the kitchen is busy indeed.” Then Parade’s crew invaded: Julia’s editor, the art director, the photographer’s assistants, equipment men. Enough! To simplify matters, she insisted they move the shoot to an outside studio, and eventually, in late 1986, she ended the Parade columns altogether, ceding them to the popular Silver Palate Cookbook authors, Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins, a succession that signaled a generational shift.

  Enough was enough.

  There were times when one had to be harshly unsentimental, and moving on often meant first closing doors. It was obvious when Julia took Paul to La Pitchoune in September 1986, just after their fortieth wedding anniversary, that it would most likely be their last time there together. She would be unable to bring him back there again. It was just too difficult traveling overseas with Paul. He was eighty-four, and age alone had become a factor, but his mental state was altogether too unstable.

  She had been wary of going back to Provence at all that year. Earlier in February, after years of pain and interminable suffering, Julia finally had her bum knee replaced, and the convalescence, typically, was a struggle to keep her leashed. On those rare occasions when she begrudgingly stayed put, there was hope that a litany of summer social obligations might be met. But Julia was beyond hope, untamable, too eager to “burst forth again like a tigress into the world of La Kweezeen,” as she playfully called it. Besides, she needed to stay a step ahead of Paul. After he had that second prostate operation in June, his physical condition was precarious at best. He was foggy and took “many cat-naps which he is not aware of.”

  Life was tough enough that spring. Bob Johnson’s condition grew progressively worse, necessitating his permanent move into a Boston hospital. The impact of his battle with AIDS dealt a double blow to Julia. First, she had to get over the shock that Bob was indeed gay. “She hadn’t a clue,” says Marian Morash. “Whenever he came to Julia’s house for dinner, he always brought a dark-haired woman along with him, and Julia used to ask me, ‘When do you think they’ll get married?’ ” An assistant recalls her saying, “It can’t be AIDS, dearie. AIDS is a gay disease, and Bob isn’t gay.” But now, no such revelation could temper her sorrow. She’d grown incredibly fond of Johnson over their sixteen-year relationship. He’d fought tough battles for her, often ruffling feathers, and often going up against her closest professional friends, winning important concessions she never would have achieved. He was her “he-man lawyer.” She was “scared to death for him,” she confided to a friend.

  She was also scared to death of AIDS, a disease she mistakenly believed was airborne. There had been plenty of talk about it in the months before Johnson’s diagnosis, uninformed debate as to whether it could be transmitted through food by chefs. According to a member of her staff, “Julia was close to what I would call obsessed over what we didn’t know about this threat to our health.” Fear: Bob Johnson brought it right onto her doorstep.

  Was she going to contract this dreadful illness? That really didn’t concern her anymore. She wasn’t about to let Bob bear it all alone. He was only forty-five years old, practically a son to her. Knowing he wasn’t going to survive, she visited him in the hospital, giving him a long, deep-felt hug, expressing her deep grief in no uncertain terms.

  Bob’s death that September seemed like a cruel, unnecessary blow. In August, Jean Fischbacher also died, from hepatitis C. The cumulative effect of these tragedies weighed heavily on Julia. She’d take Paul back to France for a nice long visit, but it would serve to close yet another door.

  La Pitchoune had long been their little slice of heaven. This one last visit would have to be—enough.

  Twenty-four

  The End of an Era

  For once, Julia was adamant. The publication of her next book, The Way to Cook, scheduled to be released in October 1989, would be her last. Over and done with. The reason she gave Simca was that writing had become “too confining,” but that argument only scratched the surface.

  This book, more than others, had been a slog, a seemingly endless five-year endeavor that, at times, felt more like forced labor than an exploration of cooking and technique. The sheer volume of recipes—more than eight hundred, culled from the Dinner at Julia’s series, Good Morning America segments, and Parade columns—was a lifetime’s work condensed in such a way that the recipes required extensive reevaluation and reediting. Deadlines came and went like overdue bills; all those years chained to a typewriter and computer really got to her. “Bookery is so damned sol
itary,” Julia complained to M. F. K. Fisher, not “lively and fun” like doing a TV program. But a new TV series didn’t seem to be in the cards. Prime time was angling for youth and flash—“the event,” as Julia envisioned it, instead of good solid “straight cooking.” The competition to land a new cooking show was fierce—and generally depressing. There were so many poseurs and rank entertainers on the air, galloping cooks and frugal cooks and sixty-second cooks and I-hate-to cooks. Besides, classic French cuisine was out of vogue, in Julia’s estimation, “because of health and cholesterol fads.”

  Julia felt about health and cholesterol fads the way President Bush felt about broccoli. So much fuss had been raised in the past few years that the kitchen had become an ideological battleground. George Carlin was right—there were seven dirty words you can’t say on television, but if Julia were to enumerate them, they would be butter, cream, veal, sugar, marrow, potatoes, and fat. Everywhere she turned “the food police,” a phrase she coined, were lining up to monitor what people ate. The organic proselytizers, the anti-veal fanatics, PETA extremists, anti-irradiation activists—vegetarians; Julia pronounced the word the way President Bush said liberals. “Whatever happened to good old moderation?” she wondered. “What happened to common sense—eating whatever you want, small helpings, combined with variation, exercise, and weight-watching?”

  On the set of The Way to Cook, with Russ Morash (Photo credit 24.1)

  The diet gurus were always on her back about using rich, sensuous ingredients. Nathan Pritikin had accused her of promoting wine and fat, and one of his acolytes sent letters to Julia’s WGBH underwriters claiming that her cooking contributed to obesity and heart disease. Typically, Julia was unflappable. “I must say,” she wrote in response, “after learning something about the severity of his diet and knowing not only of Pritikin’s long illness but of his relatively early death, I have often wondered if a good meal once in a while might have kept him going a little longer.”