by Bob Spitz
It had happened so suddenly: a phone call out of the blue. The voice wasn’t familiar, but the name, John McJennett, rang a bell. His wife had been a friend of Paul’s in the very early days, in Paris during the late 1920s and at Avon Old Farms, where he taught. Julia had vaguely known the McJennetts—there had been a scattering of social occasions; she remembered liking them immensely. She even recalled that a painting of Charlie Child’s, a Cezanne-like bushel of apples, hung prominently over the couple’s hearth. McJennett explained that he’d recently become a widower and had heard about Paul. They commiserated over their circumstances, one thing led to another, and he invited Julia to dinner in Mason, New Hampshire, the little village where he was living.
The man Julia discovered was a splendid physical specimen. He was tall, somewhat taller than Julia, and powerfully built, “a big, strapping Scots-Irishman,” slightly balding, with a kind of “domineering, old-fashioned masculinity,” much like her father’s, that she found wildly attractive. He had an unself-conscious, athletic way of carrying himself and the noticeably strong legs of the ex-Marine and baseball player he once had been. Known as “the big right-hander” in a series of newspaper clippings, he’d been a pitcher of some promise in the Red Sox farm system before a medical issue ended his chances at making the big league. Since then, he’d led a career that closely mirrored Paul’s, as a foreign service officer in the Philippines and East Pakistan, before it became Bangladesh. Even long after retirement, McJennett was “interesting, dashingly handsome.” Julia Child recognized a real he-man when she saw one.
Julia and McJennett hit it off from the get-go. Both were lonesome, both full of life, both unwilling to surrender to old age. She invited him to visit in Cambridge, and shortly thereafter he sold his house and moved around the corner from her, to a place on Day Street. Both seemed to think this was “a dandy arrangement,” despite Julia’s faithful continuing visits with Paul at Fairlawn. McJennett knew the score, he wasn’t jealous. “It wasn’t an issue for my dad,” says his daughter, Linda, “and Julia was practical—Paul was pretty much out of it, suffering from dementia.” A man, a handsome man, was a nice thing to have around.
“Julia never thought of it as dating,” says Stephanie Hersh. “She loved men, and she enjoyed having an escort for parties and events.” It meant the resumption of an active social life that she had sorely missed, a man to sit at the head of the table and pour wine when guests came for dinner. To help entertain. John was an eager conversationalist “who told the most hilarious dirty limericks,” which amused her no end. Her friends repeatedly heard the mantra: “It is nice to have a chap around.” And Julia meant it. John was changing her life.
Invigorated by his company and enamored of his charm, Julia looked forward to spending Christmas with John. She had a lot to be thankful for. It had been a weighty, exhausting year, a real emotional roller coaster, and finally there was promise of some joy as the holidays approached. Julia was even considering throwing her first party in some time, when news arrived that stopped everything in its tracks.
Simca was dead.
Julia felt as though “someone had slugged her.” Simca. Dead. Impossible—am-pah-seeb-luh!
They had come through so much together. Simca, her énorme chérie, her grande culinarieuse, her sœur, all names Julia had called her over the years. Together, they had preserved the heritage of classic French food and introduced its wonders to American home cooks. Together they had collaborated—and battled. Together, they had invented the modern cookbook, perhaps the greatest cookbook of all time. Together, they had formed a sisterhood that defied the male hegemony of chefs in the kitchen. Together they had shared the remorse of childlessness, as well as secrets as intimate as any Julia would share. Together, they had changed the world.
Simca. It was the end of an era.
Julia and Paul, inseparable always, 1989 (Photo credit 24.2)
Twenty-five
No One Gets Out Alive
There was never any question about celebrating Julia’s eightieth birthday, aside from where, when, who—and how often. The way people were making such a to-do about it, half of America wanted to take part. “I don’t want a fuss,” she told a Boston-based reporter. But from the outset, one thing was certain: her eightieth was going to be one hell of a bash.
Eighty! Julia could barely get the word out of her mouth. “I felt as young that day as I did my first week in France,” she said. The magnitude of the number, the audacity of it, didn’t signify. Sure, her knees were hobbled and her skin appeared pocked and pouchy; a bit of a widow’s hump had bowed her once-ramrod back. But make no bones about it: she was young at heart.
Stephanie Hersh recalls her telling a group of friends: “I’m about to be in my eighties, and I think I should probably slow down a bit,” after which the entire gathering broke out laughing. “No one believed a word of it,” Hersh recalls. “And after about six months on the job, I laughed like everyone else.”
Nothing, not even eighty, was going to slow Julia down. She had been breaking the speed limit from sixty to seventy-nine, and as the next decade loomed into view she cranked that old chassis into overdrive. Julia’s datebooks for 1992 and 1993 were blocked in solidly with commitments. Charity work—for AIWF, Planned Parenthood, and a few other lucky benefactors—dominated the schedule, but her Good Morning America appearances continued unabated and plans were under way for a new TV series.
It had been almost ten years since Julia last had a show of her own, and for a while, at least, chances of a new one had looked dim. The channels were clogged with would-be cooking teachers mugging and mincing about, which seemed to trivialize the seriousness of cooking. Their collective culinary expertise was open to debate, but the general theme seemed to be youth, youth, youth. Julia Child at eighty was viewed as a somewhat prehistoric character. Even WGBH, which she’d put on the map, had balked at giving her a series commitment.
In late 1991, however, soon after she’d met John McJennett, Julia was introduced to a man named Geoffrey Drummond at a cocktail party at Rebecca Alssid’s house. She had noticed him earlier that day, standing at the back of a cooking class she was giving with Jacques Pépin, at Boston University. He’d laughed particularly hard when she struggled with the spout of a kosher salt box; frustrated, she picked up a knife as big as a machete and just lopped off the top of the box, throwing it over her shoulder, to great cheers. Drummond was a TV producer. He’d done a PBS series called New York’s Master Chefs and was behind the wonderful 1981 Louis Malle film My Dinner with Andre, both of which Julia had loved. Now, he was about to move on to another project involving new up-and-coming chefs, and was looking for a host, someone with street cred, the gravitas, to seal the deal. “You ought to talk to Julia,” Jacques had told Drummond.
Julia listened intently as he made his pitch. Geof had a list of leading-edge restaurants that were attracting the new wave of uncompromising gastronomes, places where they naturally came for the food but were familiar with the chefs. “I want to take a look behind the doors of these restaurants and see what’s going on,” he explained. “Let’s see what these chefs are cooking—and maybe what they are cooking in their homes.” Some of the chefs he mentioned were friends of Julia’s—André Soltner, Alice Waters, Jeremiah Tower, and, of course, Jacques Pépin. But others, like Emeril Lagasse, Nancy Silverton, Robert del Grande, and Patrick Clark were unknown quantities. She’d heard the buzz about Lidia Bastianich, but didn’t know her. Drummond’s idea was to shoot film with these chefs, then bring the rough cuts to Cambridge where Julia would create openings and closings, so she wouldn’t have to travel that much. He intended to call the show Masterpiece Cooking. “And you,” he said grinning, “can be Alistair Cookie.”
Julia nearly jumped in his lap. “I think it’s a terrific idea,” she responded. It had always been her intention to have guests appear on The French Chef, but for one reason or another she couldn’t convince the higher-ups. “I’d enjoy working on it with you. B
ut if I’m going to be attached to this, I want to be there for the cooking.”
The format was a cooking show she could sink her teeth into. Besides, Drummond was just her type—tall, young, and good-looking, with the kind of WASPish confident masculinity that turned her on. He reminded Julia of a young Russ Morash, a he-man with his let’s-just-roll-our-sleeves-up-and-do-this attitude. He seemed like someone who knew how to call the shots.
The concept was a good one, but it was just a concept. There were still many details that needed to be pulled together. The chefs, for one thing. Julia was adamant they be good teachers, not just artisans who made good food. And the show had to be careful about choosing each of the participants. It was to be called Cooking with Master Chefs, so, in effect, they were deciding “who was a master chef—and who wasn’t.” She felt a great responsibility toward protecting her imprimatur. And what about Russ Morash? When it came to directors, he was Julia’s first choice.
Julia and Geof took the show to Russ, who “was very gracious, but didn’t want to go on the road with it.” And then, to her great dismay, WGBH passed. “I’m not sure if they thought Julia was too old,” Drummond says, “or if they were just gun shy from their experience with Dinner at Julia’s. But it was clear WGBH wanted no part of it.” Instead, Drummond took the show to a rival, Maryland Public TV, and they “jumped at being in business with her.”
A new station was not the only sign of a new direction. Drummond had convinced Julia that the old how-to format was boring, outdated. It was futile to build a show around a single dish, especially a French classic. Restaurant food was the new culinary currency and their mission, it seemed to him, was determining how to bring that kind of cooking into home kitchens. Julia surprised him by having the answer at her fingertips. Rather than focus on a meal, she thought each show should examine a spectrum of ingredients and techniques. That way, they could underscore certain disciplines, certain information, in order to give people something valuable in terms of their cooking that they didn’t have before.
“Nothing had prepared me for how insightful she was,” Drummond says. “After thirty years plowing the same ground, I half-expected her to resist any change. But she was eager—excited—to reinvent the medium, even if it meant standing it on its head.”
Julia couldn’t wait to leap into the project, but first she needed to fulfill a previous obligation.
La Pitchoune. Legally, the house was the Childs’ for as long as Julia and Paul were alive, but no life remained there for Julia to savor. It had been her and Paul’s special getaway for twenty-five years. Her and Paul’s. All her memories of it were invested in the good times they’d shared together. The meals on the porch with Jim Beard, the long walks to the village with Avis DeVoto, the day-to-day cooking with Simca. Without Paul—without all of them—it held no enchantment for her anymore. It was time, Julia knew, to give up the ghost.
In the summer of 1992, she returned there for a month, with her niece, Phila, and Susy Davidson. “We went to all her favorite places,” Phila recalls, “a restaurant in Biot called Galerie des Arcades, the Gallery Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, the Forville Market in Cannes, her friends in Nice.” Afterward, Julia began packing everything up: what she was taking back to Cambridge, giving to Phila, sending back to friends. “I’m ready,” she said, looking over the sea of boxes. “It’s time to move on.” One last time, she walked across the lawn to Le Mas Vieux, to deliver the keys to Simca’s heirs. Phila watched her aunt closely, hoping that she wouldn’t be overcome. “We said our goodbyes,” Phila recalls, “and Julia walked out, without looking back. There was no emotion whatsoever.”
Unburdened, she was finally ready to face whatever the future held. A new romance, a new show, a new direction for food—she was ready for anything, any adventure or adversity that might come her way. Eighty! What did that have to do with anything? It was just another number, another step along the path. She could handle whatever got thrown at her.
Slow down? Julia Child? Not a chance.
BACK HOME IN Cambridge, Julia was poised to kick off a jam-packed year. The plans for her new show were rolling along in significant stages, and she’d agreed to attend a series of dinners honoring her eightieth birthday doubling as fund-raisers for AIWF. She was cookin’, she was in demand. Any fears of obsolescence were fading fast.
Her enthusiasm was idling at an all-time high, when she learned that M. F. K. Fisher had died. Her D*e*a*r F*r*i*e*n*d, as she’d always addressed Mary Frances in letter upon letter, who had dignified the art of eating in whorls of sensuous prose, had just marked her eighty-fourth birthday, and the implication to Julia was loaded. Fisher had been full of piss and vinegar, writing right up until the end. Now she was gone, just like that. The same with her British friend Elizabeth David, who had died a few months earlier, as she approached the dire eighties. This watershed was some sort of abyss; it was like the Bermuda Triangle—and culinary writers disappeared into it. Julia thought often of Jim Beard, who was gone by his eighty-fifth year. The eighties were nigh. There was no time to waste.
Without delay, she set off with Geof Drummond to audition a few potential master chefs. They stopped in Houston to meet Robert del Grande, whose food was completely unpretentious, as was its architect. Del Grande, a former biochemist with a bluff, laid-back manner, made Julia’s kind of bluff, laid-back food—rare steaks seared in southwestern spices like pasilla chiles and ground coffee, with plenty of bourbon to wash it down. There was no question that he would fit into their plans. The same with Emeril Lagasse, who threw Julia a bit of a curve.
“We hit it off the first time we laid eyes on each other,” Emeril recalls. “She came in to eat at Commander’s Palace and later, right after I’d opened Emeril’s.” He wanted to impress her, but only on his terms, so he did an étouffée and crab-and-crayfish boil in the backyard, like he’d do for friends. There were no flourishes—no kick-it-up-a-notch, no bam. This was pre-TV Emeril; “he was shy and quiet,” all focus on the food. “He wasn’t play-acting for her,” Drummond recalls. “He was very much in the moment, and the moment was about his cooking and cooking for her.”
Emeril treated food the way Julia did, by putting his hands right into it without any to-do. She loved how he put food on the table, actually poured it on the table, out of a huge vat. No pretenses, no excuses. And the way he said, “You see how we eat these crawfish, Julia? We suck the head and pinch the tail.” He wasn’t some Cajun yahoo, like the shrimpers and gator geeks she’d been reading about. He was serious about his approach and “he could really cook.”
Julia trudged from city to city, “like an amazing trouper,” Drummond marvels, carrying her own bags and rampaging through airports. She often disappeared before boarding a plane, foraging for hot dogs—or hot dogs, as she called them—so they could eat down-and-dirty while flying first-class.
The show started shooting before her eightieth birthday. It was filmed on location wherever the chefs worked—Los Angeles, New Orleans, Houston, Chicago, New York, Washington, Hawaii. Julia was on the move. She’d work with the chefs, helping to prep their recipes, then remain largely off-camera, while the episode played out. This was hard for her; she was used to being in control. And sometimes, things didn’t work the way she’d intended.
The first show they did with Nancy Silverton was “a disaster,” according to Drummond. Silverton, a master baker who owned Campanile with her husband, Mark, as well as the La Brea Bakery, decided to make sourdough bread from scratch using a grape starter. It was an ambitious recipe that progressed over eight separate stages, but nothing beyond Silverton’s professional reach, and the setting was ideal: a private home in the hills above Sunset Plaza with a first-class kitchen that gave a sweeping view of Los Angeles. Everything was perfect until the cameras started to roll. “Nancy was totally locked up,” Drummond says. “I could see it developing. She had stage fright. She could not speak; she’d stand in front of the oven for ninety seconds without saying anything.”
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Stage fright? This had never happened to Julia Child. She seemed mystified, watching from her position behind the scenes. It didn’t occur to Julia that all chefs weren’t naturals in front of a camera, so she jumped in to help, talking Nancy through the recipe. They worked from six in the morning until nine at night to get a single twenty-eight-minute show, something she and Russ used to do in two or three hours. Still, no problem: Julia would do anything that was asked of her. She cared only about the integrity of the cooking itself, and in the end, the Nancy Silverton segment was the most popular show in the series.
“You couldn’t ask Julia to do enough,” Drummond says of his star. In addition to her on-air duties, he’d negotiated a new book deal for her, a companion to Cooking with Master Chefs. And because it was sold on the air at the end of each show, she had to write copy in real time, as the segments were being filmed. This was no easy assignment for Julia. Her typewriting was famously sloppy; the publisher often needed a cryptographer to decipher her manuscripts. And the recipes needed to be tested.
Julia had heard about a new device called a laptop, something that was still being beta tested by several computer companies. Through a friend, she managed to get her hands on one, and it went on location with her wherever she went. When she wasn’t needed on camera, she sat bent over that mini-computer, pounding away at it every chance she got. She wrote the book as she traveled, staying up late at night to polish copy, feeding it to Judith Jones the next day for immediate editing. “She was as efficient as that machine on her lap,” Drummond remembers. “It was remarkable, considering her age.”
Eighty. Who was he kidding? She’d stare that damn number into the ground.
Even so, the big day finally crept up on her and she could do nothing about it. Rather than make a big scene, she decided to spend August 15, 1992, quietly, out of the public eye. There was a party in her honor at her brother John’s house, in Vermont, not the low-key affair she was hoping for, but something better: the entire family turned out—Dort and Phila and the entire McWilliams clan, nieces and nephews galore, several Childs, cats and dogs, and one new sweetie, John McJennett, who clutched Julia’s hand throughout the day. It was a fine old celebration, exactly the way it was meant to be, save for one dear member who was sorely missed.