Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child

by Bob Spitz

  There was never any need, however, to go to the mat. For Julia, the fight was never physical, but a visceral necessity. Conformity offended her; it was behavior to reject, like a foul-smelling turnip, and she fought all her life to transcend its strictures. She defied all the expectations that had been laid out for her. Privilege intruded at the top of that list. Julia Child grew up in a haven of Southern California, an exclusive sun-drenched paradise where privilege was a birthright, like education or fresh air. Pasadena in the 1920s doubled as a gorgeous Hollywood backlot, a scenic resort of palatial mansions, lush orange groves, posh country clubs, and opportunity galore. Wealth was the ticket into this selectively upscale enclave, and Julia’s family could afford the extravagant price. But prosperity and entitlement were not on Julia’s agenda. The oldest of three children in a traditional Republican family with deep Yankee roots, she scuttled her destiny as a “dilettante” and “social butterfly,” just as later, after graduating from Smith College, she foreswore the inevitable marriage track in search of something more meaningful. Relying on her self-esteem and a reservoir of optimism in an attempt to fashion a career, she succeeded beyond her—or anyone’s—wildest dreams. Imagine the gumption it took, in 1942, for a thirty-year-old woman who’d never been farther east than New York, to go halfway around the world to join a spy network in Southeast Asia. And, afterward, to enroll in an all-male cooking class whose French martinets scorned a woman’s touch.

  Conformity: Julia refused to conform. There wasn’t so much as a trace of it in her DNA. Unflinchingly, she pursued an area of expertise that had not been tackled before—or, at least, not in a way that resonated with the public. She was determined to teach French cooking to American housewives captivated by tuna casseroles and beef Stroganoff—“taking [it] out of cuckooland,” as she put it, and making it accessible to all. It fazed her not one bit that a large, middle-aged, unpolished woman who lived out of the loop should take her campaign to the masses via television, at the time a vehicle for glamourpusses like Gale Storm and Loretta Young. To hell with conformity! Without design or forethought, she created an enormously appealing personality that was unlike anyone else’s. Julia could seem at times gregarious, instantly chummy, like an eccentric aunt who comes to visit. Her personality left, in the course of a half-hour encounter, an individually personal impression, both because of its sweeping, informal power—she was capable of being gracious, entertaining, flustered, neighborly, ham-fisted, sly, and self-deprecating—and because the mechanism of that personality was unburdened by ideology. The world had never encountered such an embraceable character, but TV changed all that. “She had an animated way about her that was infectious,” says Russ Morash. “She wasn’t performing it; she actually felt that way.” Detailed instructions, the cooking lessons, came packaged as an intimate get-together between old friends. When she ordered a box of pears over the telephone, she would say, “This is Julia, dearie, I need some pears, and I bet you have some good ones.” The friendliness—that infectious quality—came bursting across on camera. After her appearance on the scene, people began talking about food, not as sustenance but as a staple of pleasure. She sparked an interest and understanding of food that whet people’s appetites for a different kind of culinary experience. It takes a real nonconformist to start a revolution, and Julia Child started a corker, one that was to affect the nation’s behavior and change the way its people lived their daily lives.

  NOTHING IN THE studio immediately augured those dramatic changes. Julia was nonchalant, all business, as she arranged her equipment on the coffee table. The way she went about it, her easy approach, seemed totally unrehearsed, even though there’d been plenty of practice. She’d spent all week anguishing over the set‑up and the demo: several dry runs enacted in the kitchen of Anita Hubby, a classmate from Smith, who lived around the corner; more in her own kitchen under Paul’s watchful eye. You had to concentrate, Julia discovered; the delivery wasn’t easy. Ten or fifteen omelets took the guesswork out of the process, but one never knew when that camera began to roll.

  Plus there were unforeseen hitches specific to the studio. The moment the cameraman laid eyes on Julia he cried out in exasperation, “How do you expect me to light this woman?” and he circled her dubiously like a livestock judge at the county fair. Ideally, in a conventional room, the camera rested at eye level. But if the person to be photographed was six foot two—or, in Julia’s actual case, six foot three; she had a lifelong tendency for shaving inches off her height—and the ceiling was eight feet, with lights hanging eighteen inches from the top, well then, brother, you have to be a magician to keep the lights out of the shot. Tilt the camera up or down and something got cut from the frame; pull back, and the scene wasn’t as interesting. For an instant, the cameraman contemplated sitting Julia down for the segment, but that seemed to defeat the purpose of a demo. “I take it you’ve never worked with T. Rex,” she joked. She took the problem into her own hands, placing the burner on a stack of coffee-table books and raising the pan a few inches so that the field of action was condensed. The cameraman peered into the viewfinder and gave the crew the high sign.

  Professor Duhamel, shunted to the side, looked lost in the process. Inviting this guest to the studio hadn’t been his idea, that was for sure. People Are Reading was a show about big ideas; theories and doctrines were its stock-in-trade. He wasn’t the least bit interested in cooking, but the girls in the office had insisted. They’d insisted. It wasn’t just his show, they’d reminded him. Cooking was a particular enthusiasm of theirs—and, by the way, while they had his attention, there’d be something in the future on sports, as well.

  Al Duhamel, as it turned out, was the perfect host. He introduced Julia with a bouquet of adjectives befitting a movie star, held up a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and ceded the spotlight to this amiable creature. His cockeyed grin, however, betrayed a hint of concern: What in the world was this woman going to do?

  The same question dogged Miffy Goodhart, the young assistant producer, who stood in the wings among a mostly female support staff, wealthy Cambridge housewives who volunteered at the station on a regular basis. They had more of a stake in this than anyone realized. Julia’s appearance was something of a breakthrough, a counterforce to the clubby fraternal order that cinched the ranks of academia. Miffy could count on one hand the number of women who had appeared on the show: finchy types with degrees in stupefying disciplines. Julia Child was going to cook. She was going to cook! And on TV, imagine that. This promised to be one for the record books.

  There was a brief, awkward moment as Julia unwound her giant frame from the precious leather chair. Producing a small copper bowl and a whisk, she looked directly into the camera with the intimacy of a lover, and said, “I thought it would be nice if we made an omelet … ” To Professor Duhamel and other viewers, she might have said, “I thought it would be nice to create nuclear fission,” the process was that unfathomable to their superior brains. “They’re so delicious and so easy to make.” She cracked two eggs into the bowl with a one-handed flourish and began to beat them with the fury of a half-crazed thug.

  Next she introduced her sturdy black-rimmed omelet pan. An omelet pan. It was unreasonable to think you could find an omelet pan in any store in Boston, but Julia assured her audience it was exactly what they needed. And butter, rich, silky butter—not that artificial stuff they produced in a lab. An omelet had to be exciting in the mouth, she purred, making it sound like oral sex.

  The cameraman crept forward, closing in on Julia’s paw-like hands, but had it picked up Professor Duhamel you would have seen bewilderment crisscrossed on his face. “This is going to work on that little burner?” he wondered aloud.

  “Oh, yes! And it’s going to be delicious, just you wait.”

  The butter crackled and sputtered as a chunk hit the hot pan, followed by a hush, what musicians call decrescendo, as molten egg flowed across the bottom. “This all happens very fast,” Julia said breath
lessly, “in just thirty seconds or less.”

  By this time, everyone in the studio, host and crew alike, was transfixed.

  In a sudden, sweeping motion, Julia grabbed the pan’s long handle and began jerking it back and forth, as if some unseen force was trying to wrench it from her grip. The energy behind it convulsed her body in sharp spastic tremors. This vision of Julia Child, gyrating like a wind‑up toy, would be an enduring, endearing image to millions of viewers for the next forty years, but that night, without warning, it set off alarms. In the wings, Miffy Goodhart held her breath, watching the unfolding action in horror.

  “[Julia’s] loose, white shirt was open at the collar,” she recalls. “And as she made the omelet, her rather large boobs were going furiously. And going! And going! The energy with which she made this omelet while talking about her book and … staring into the camera and … laughing madly and … talking to Albert on the side and … whisking everything up and … turning it over and … looking triumphant all at once—I was absolutely sure those buttons were coming undone. And what then?”

  What then, exactly. It was a function of live TV that nothing was foreordained. There were no contingencies in place for the unscripted faux pas or sudden expletive—or the unforeseen appearance of a locomotive breast. One did as Miffy Goodhart did: she held her breath and prayed. For just a moment, through the blinding skein of lights, Miffy glimpsed the entire future of WGBH resting on the breasts of Julia Child.

  In the end, there was nothing to cause anyone more than a mild case of heart failure. Julia Child, going rogue, was nothing less than a revelation. Her omelet was perfect, intense and creamy, a masterpiece of eggdom. Despite the constraints of black-and-white TV, it was hard for those at home to keep from drooling. You could practically smell the buttery concoction through the cathode-ray screen. Even Al Duhamel had to admit it was exciting in the mouth. Reluctantly, at Julia’s insistence, he’d taken a bite from her fork and had the kind of slow facial awakening akin to a child’s tasting something chocolaty for the first time. He lit right up, mouth still full, while Julia beamed from above. “Therrrre. You seeee,” she cooed. “Just as I said: delicious.”

  THE JUNGLE DRUMS started beating the next morning. Calls came into WGBH from viewers, wondering when that Julia Child woman would be back on the air. Not a lot of calls, but enough to get a producer’s attention. For a TV station, it was still the Dark Ages when it came to gauging audience reaction. There was no method in place for collecting scientific data, no Neilsen ratings, no overnight numbers. Response was measured strictly by what executives heard on the golf course or from their close circle of friends. They multiplied the anecdotal information they got by any number they wanted. So if the station received twenty calls, which would have been a lot for People Are Reading, they would say, “We’ve had an overwhelming response.”

  “We’ve had an overwhelming response,” Miffy Goodhart told Russ Morash, when he checked in the next morning. She related in breathless detail the entire Julia Child saga. “I was just blown over by her energy and how good she was on telly,” she says. Russ, for his part, wasn’t immediately convinced. “I had absolutely no interest in a cooking show,” he recalls. “I was twenty-seven years old, making $83 a week, and newly married, with a working wife whose party piece was a franks-and-beans casserole. Cooking was as relevant to me as Norse poetry read in the original Scandinavian tongue.” Besides, he already had a full plate directing a show called Science Reporter, which showcased the greatest minds at MIT and required all his energy. But Miffy Goodhart was not to be denied. “Let’s see if we can do something with her,” she pleaded. “What do you say, Russ? What do you say?”

  Before he could answer, she had Bob Larsen on the phone. Larsen, the program manager at WGBH, had missed Julia’s performance, but he’d already heard how well it had gone. Miffy mentioned there was a tape of the show. “Really, you’ve got to watch it,” she said. “For once you’ve got to watch the Duhamel show.”

  You had to admire Miffy’s gumption. She was a firecracker when it came to pressing her case. Bob Larsen was only stage one in the offensive she was mounting; she also called Dave Davis, the station manager, and laid it on thick, as well as her husband’s cousin, Henry Morgenthau III, who ran the entire operation. In a flash, she was knocking on Julia’s front door, purportedly to thank her for the bang‑up performance over a cup of coffee. But more groundwork was being laid. Miffy remembered Julia’s excitement after the show. Her adrenaline had been palpable. “Julia was elated, she’d really had fun,” Miffy recalls. “I told her, ‘As far as I’m concerned, we will be using you again.’ ”

  By March, WGBH could no longer deny the inevitable—either to itself or to the whim of its demanding viewers. There was something more than intriguing about Julia Child. This woman bore a special quality that appealed to their audience, yet a lot of unanswered questions remained. Could she fill a half-hour week after week? Would she have the kind of impact, the charisma, that ignited her People Are Reading appearance? Did anyone out there give a hoot about cooking? Would lightning strike twice? The answers to these and other relevant questions boiled down to one salient fact: the station was desperate for a hit. Desperate! Without a must-see show—without real growth of loyal viewership—there’d be no increase in donations at WGBH, no money to expand. It was unlikely anyone would pony up to watch a physics professor discuss string theory. Or an educator who led preschoolers in arts-and-crafts projects. But … cooking?

  COOKING: IT WAS the axis on which Julia Child’s world turned. The ingredients, the meals, the pursuit of pleasure and the sublime all dazzled her like nothing she had ever encountered, not as a scion of the Pasadena social scene nor as an operative of the CIA. Cooking signified her break from conformity. It was an expression of her freedom from a legacy of dead ends, but especially from taking the expected path of a midcentury homemaker. Julia was determined to stand at the center of her own world, to express herself without following timeworn rules. Being a housewife—that is, the ideal of a housewife—wasn’t in the cards. The bounds of domesticity couldn’t contain her. Through cooking Julia found real purpose in her life, and through that purpose a greater meaning.

  The story of her emancipation and self-realization runs parallel—and it is no coincidence—to the struggle of the post-war modern-day American woman: the dearth of opportunity available to her, the lack of respect for her untapped talents, the frustrations of the educated housewife who felt bored and trapped by the traditional role that had been handed to her, by the tedium of housework, the demands of motherhood, being the perfect cheerleader, the perfect hostess, the perfect lover, perfect wife—responsibilities that for generations kept most women from pursuing other dreams and desires. The domestic life of that era was fraught with dissatisfaction. Many women wrestled with the dilemma that personal creative and intellectual challenges weren’t being met. There was a discrepancy between what they wanted and what was expected of them. A shakeup was long overdue. The assumptions of what a woman’s place was were about to be altered, and Julia Child, despite looking like everybody’s Aunt Ethel, was one of the revolutionaries leading the charge to uproot the norm. It is no accident that Betty Friedan’s game changer, The Feminine Mystique, was published only eight days after Mastering the Art of French Cooking. As journalist Laura Shapiro noted: “Homemakers read The Feminine Mystique for the same reason they watched The French Chef. They had been waiting for a long time, and they were hungry.”

  Julia’s hunger was a well-known symptom. She was a woman with boundless appetites—for food, absolutely, but also for the tides of change. Nothing sustained her like a ripe idea, a fresh experience, a saucy challenge, the impossible. In that respect, her timing was impeccable, because Julia came into her own during the early 1960s, when not only the role of women, but also other cultural paradigms, were undergoing upheaval. The arts, politics, fashion, values were all breaking out of the narrow concept of everyday life. Julia, being an iconoc
last herself, was eager to shake up the norms. She took up arms alongside the other cultural guerrillas who were busy knocking down walls: Andy Warhol, Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, Hugh Hefner, Philip Roth, Martin Luther King Jr., Helen Gurley Brown, Allen Ginsberg, the Beatles. The Kennedys: their sophistication and youthful exuberance gave all of this momentum, leading Americans to look beyond their own culture for inspiration. “With the Kennedys in the White House, people were very interested in [French cooking],” Julia said, “so I had the field to myself, which was just damn lucky.”

  Actually, Julia Child found herself the leading advocate of cooking in America for reasons that had nothing to do with luck. She achieved that position of prominence by the same means that had shaped her skills from the beginning. Aside from stanching her insatiable hunger, there was nothing in her upbringing to suggest an interest in food, even less that signaled a desire to cook. “As a girl I had zero interest in the stove,” Julia recalled. She was “never encouraged to cook and just didn’t see the point in it.” Her foray into the culinary arts had less to do with pure talent than a desire to fully engage her passions. Throughout her long and distinguished career, she indulged in pleasure after pleasure, serving them up, without any stigma, to her loyal public to be sampled as one would a canapé or a sticky pudding. Her initial success, which most personalities might see as something not to tinker with, only gave her greater freedom to say and do as she pleased. “Out came whatever was on her mind,” says Jacques Pépin, “no matter how controversial or what the repercussions. It was a breath of fresh air, and people loved her because she said what she felt.”