by Bob Spitz
There was also a wild card they needed to consider: Louisette. She continued to profit from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which was fine by Julia; Louisette was entitled to her 10 percent share. But she remained part owner of the title of the book. Legally, that also gave her and her heirs the right to exploit and determine the future direction of the copyright, and that was not fine by Julia, not fine at all. In no way would she sign a contract with Knopf for Mastering II until that little road bump had been resolved.
The easiest way to settle it was to buy out Louisette, including all future royalties to Volume I. Julia had done some investigating and came up with a reasonable figure: $25,000. Louisette had more like $45,000 in mind, which Julia dismissed out of hand as too high; $30,000 was as high as she would go. In the end, Louisette sought advice from her son-in-law, Arthur Terry, who examined her royalty statements and calculated what she could expect to recoup. “You are at or close to the peak of sales,” he explained. “If you sell”—and he was convinced that she should—“this is a good time to do so.” In any event, Louisette needed money. She was in tax trouble with the French authorities, but figured out how “she could accept a sum [like this] without being taxed.” Finally, she agreed to take the $30,000, which would be paid from the advance of Mastering II.
Julia and Simca wasted no time getting their new book back on track. Fueled by a new resolve, they wore out the path between their houses. Recipes they’d been testing for months took on a sudden finished shine: bread, ice cream, custards, soups, even the meat chapters started to gel. If the work continued apace, they could deliver a draft of the manuscript by year’s end: on time.
Invigorated by the progress, Julia flew back to Cambridge for some unfinished TV business. A spirited voice-over was all that was needed to wrap up the White House documentary, after which she’d return to La Pitchoune for the final thrust. Before she left, however, there was time to squeeze in her annual gynecological exam, specifically to examine a small lump in her breast.
She called her friend Pat Pratt with the results later that day. “I’ve got breast cancer,” she told Pratt matter-of-factly. “I’m going to have an operation.”
A biopsy had revealed a mass of malignant cells in Julia’s left breast and the doctor was worried about it spreading to the lymph nodes. The tumor was small, but he wasn’t about to take any chances. Out of caution, he intended to perform a mastectomy.
“What a nuisance!” Julia huffed, informing Simca of her upcoming operation.
A nuisance! She might have been talking about a dough that refused to rise. “Julia refused to let health matters faze her,” Pat Pratt explains. “She treated herself like a car; if you had a flat tire you went and fixed it.” Paul, on the other hand, envisioned a head-on collision. “He convinced himself she wouldn’t make it through the operation and worked himself into an awful froth.”
Paul had been burdened by death his entire life. His letters are filled with doomsday prophecies about his health and safety, not that the anxiety was completely unwarranted. Considering the fates of his family and friends, he had little hope to go on: his father’s sudden death during Paul’s infancy, the loss of lover Edith Kennedy to cancer at an early age, Bernard DeVoto, his mother and sister—all gone too soon. A friend from his government days, seemingly healthy, had recently dropped dead, and his brother Charlie’s routine prostate exam sparked a new wave of fear. Following his own colonoscopy, Paul wrote: “One always feels that the doctor has made some dread error, pierced the peritoneum, and that the agony will continue until death releases one, finally.” He was obsessed with dying, naturally and otherwise. Flying anywhere was out of the question due to his certainty that an airborne trip would end in fiery carnage. Simple aches and pains evolved into gruesome afflictions. In early 1968, while in France, Paul consulted his doctor about a stiff shoulder and was relieved at the diagnosis. “That angina pectoris running across my chest and down both arms to my little fingers … is a form of neuralgia,” he exulted, “not my heart, not muscular dystrophy, not polio, not tuberculosis, not a circulatory impediment, not death waiting just beyond the door to kill me in agony.” Just in case, he added: “Not today, anyway.”
One can imagine how he twisted Julia’s operation into certain death. The slightest rise in her temperature brought on a nightmarish vigil. “Death and degeneration sat on my chest like twin ghouls,” he wrote, “and I had a white night in spite of a double dose of sleeping pills: planning the funeral, the disposition of La Pitchoune and of our house in Cambridge, who to send the necessary telegrams to, the problems of whether the ashes would better be buried in the Plascassier cemetery, in Pasadena, in Cambridge, or simply scattered somewhere.” He couldn’t control what he knew were his “damn-fool emotions.”
By comparison, Julia was bloodless. “Left breast off” was the solitary notation in her datebook for February 28, 1968. To others, she was similarly stoic. “I’m going to get a false titty and I’ll have to wear a plastic sleeve on my arm,” she told a friend, “and I’m going to be fine, dearie.” Simple as that. It wasn’t grandstanding; Julia believed it with absolute certainty. She was an incurable optimist—strong enough for two. “Whenever Paul began to brood about her certain death,” says Pat Pratt, “she immediately changed the subject.” Death wasn’t going to creep anywhere near her. She wouldn’t hear of it, she wouldn’t allow it.
To Paul’s utter amazement, the operation was a success. Julia came through it with flying colors: the cancer “wasn’t life-threatening,” according to the post-op report. It was crucial, however, that her lymph nodes not swell, which required endless months of physical therapy to rehabilitate her arm. Cooking became a huge pain in the ass—and exhausting: it took the steam out of her pipes. The fatigue and the sleepless nights were beginning to take their toll. Four months later, Julia still wasn’t her old self. Avis DeVoto visited La Pitchoune in May and “was a bit taken aback” by her friend’s appearance. Others thought Julia looked “very tired and depleted.” Convinced that only work would reverse her condition, she plowed whatever was left in her tank back into cooking.
For the next year and a half, Julia worked like a dog, plying recipe after recipe to fatten the body of Volume II. It was a full-time job. She and Simca cooked around the clock, seven days a week, no time off for good behavior. Judith Jones had made it absolutely clear that Knopf intended to publish the book in 1970, no excuses, and the pressure was intense that the women meet the deadline: March 15, 1970. “They’d been working on the book for three years,” Jones recalls, “and it seemed like, unchecked, they could continue long into the next century.” Julia admitted they could use five more years. There was no time in the schedule for such indulgence. Especially since only three of eleven chapters were complete. Five years became five months, just like that, and the clock began ticking.
The deadline crunch gave new license to Julia’s old nemesis. Simca, who had been stewing privately ever since a House & Garden contingent visited Plascassier for an article on the forthcoming book and basically ignored her in favor of Julia, vented her resentment through familiar passive-aggressive behavior. “This is nothing new, of course,” Paul observed during their sessions at Bramafam, “but the difficulties seem more aggravated this year than last.”
It was a constant struggle.
“Simca simply would not listen to anything I had to say,” Julia recalled. “La Super-Française,” as the Childs dubiously nicknamed her, cooked straight through the recipes, refusing to acknowledge any contribution Julia made. The precise measurements, the detailed notes, the scientific research, the operational proof—all went out the window during their trials down the homestretch. “Deep down, Simca has never been convinced that all the accuracy and measurement is anything but a crazy American idea,” Avis DeVoto observed. Lately, in fact, Simca seemed almost to take a perverse pleasure in flouting Julia’s orderly process. When she tossed a fistful of salt into a bisque it was tantamount to lobbing a grenade—
and she knew it. Adding ingredients that were not in a recipe—a way to assert her leverage. Discussions about method erupted into florid scenes, Simca’s voice leaping tall octaves in a single bound, “going on and on, floods of French” swooshing around the kitchen, Julia bleating “oui, oui, oui at intervals,” if for no reason other than to calm Simca down.
Paul would shut himself in his room or move out to the cabanon to avoid the uproar, but a blustery backlash usually sifted through the walls. “Do it this way! Do it that way!” He tried to ignore the arabesques of Simca’s harsh voice. “No-no-no-no! Impossible!” Am-pah-seeb-luh! It was maddening. He fought to take into account her generosity and creativity, but confessed, “I would strangle her if I were in Julia’s position.”
Even the Atlantic Ocean wasn’t vast enough to stanch the divide. Simca’s letters to Julia, now back in Cambridge, grew more critical, demanding, strident—am-pah-seeb-luh. Recipes that had been fully tested and approved for publication were suddenly sabotaged by last-minute irrational scrutiny. “Ce n’est pas français!” became an incessant mantra. “Ce n’est pas français!” “Ce n’est pas français!” The phrase made Julia want to pull out her hair. “I can remember—more than once—visiting in Cambridge when she opened one of Simca’s long-winded letters and got angrier and angrier as she read through the pages,” recalls Judith Jones. “Simca was so difficult and condescending. The hauteur—it was unbearable. ‘Non, non, non—ce n’est pas français!’ We were idiots in the kitchen.” One such missive was so infuriating that, after reading it aloud, Julia exploded. “I will not be treated like a dog!” she declared, balling up the letter and banking it into the bin.
As the deadline approached, Simca could no longer hide the real reason for her behavior—either from Julia or from herself. She was sliding into an ominous depression. Since early 1969, a series of misfortunes had been piling up on her. First, a kitchen mishap with a broken bottle sliced through a major tendon between her thumb and index finger. Despite an operation, it had never healed properly, causing numbness and limiting the use of her hand. Soon afterward, she learned of a chronic heart condition, which her doctor said would require a pacemaker. On top of that, she was becoming progressively deaf and wasn’t responding to physical therapy. Her hips were giving her trouble, necessitating painful injections. And just for good measure, her husband Jean’s new business was faltering, which added undue stress to the health issues.
Julia had a rare intimate talk with her before Mastering II’s publication and found La Super-Française feeling vulnerable and scared. “She feels that Fate is closing in on her,” Julia told Paul. Nothing was turning out the way Simca had expected. There was even an outside chance that she might have to cancel upcoming plans to promote the book’s publication in the States in the fall. A heart specialist in Paris would deliver the final verdict, but either way Simca was already plying the gloom. She’d been looking forward to that trip for all the obvious reasons, but also to show Americans that Mastering wasn’t just Julia Child’s book.
For some time, Simca had felt shunted to the background in this affair, playing second fiddle to Julia’s star turn. The House & Garden episode was only the tip of the iceberg. Every journalist who came through Bramafam was looking for Julia. Every article she read featured Julia as its focus. It was Julia who was closest to Judith Jones, Julia who hung out with James Beard, Craig Claiborne, and Avis DeVoto. Julia, Julia, Julia—the TV star, the French chef. You’d think the cookbook had been her idea alone. Really, who was Julia Child to demand she cook a certain way? Page after page of niggling notes and instructions. It was demeaning for someone with Simca’s expertise. Hadn’t she taught Julia all the secret Beck family recipes? Hadn’t Simca allowed her to build a house on Fischbacher land? It seemed easy to see how the resentment had grown.
Julia did nothing to help reduce this bitterness when she broached the subject of changing their fifty-fifty royalty split. “One thing we have never taken into consideration at all is my role in publicizing the book,” she wrote to Simca. Ever since Julia looked over the full sweep of Knopf sales figures, a disparity rankled. There were times when it appeared that Mastering had run its course, only to be revived by The French Chef television series in 1963 and the Time cover story in 1966. The way she viewed it, the extra exposure exclusively promoted the book, and in every case, sales shot from a couple of hundred copies each month to several thousand. Not that the book didn’t deserve the attention on its own merits. But it had been “a tremendous amount of work” for her, “almost without stopping.” It seemed only fair that her efforts be taken into account with regard to future royalties. “If you hired an agent to do this work of promotion,” Julia argued, “you would have to pay a minimum of thirty or forty percent of your profits for this kind of publicity.”
If Simca had been stewing privately since the House & Garden article, she was at a full boil now. The request to alter their agreement was like a slap in the face. A visitor to Bramafam remembers how Simca “pored over the details of Julia’s letter” as if it were an eviction notice. Periodically she rattled off lines from it that, in stinging French, seemed to emphasize the underlying selfishness and lack of generosity. “There was no end to the indignities she had to endure,” the guest said, recalling how agitated Simca became over every perceived slight. Even the mocked‑up book jacket for Mastering II had Julia’s name first, not in alphabetical order. “Why not eliminate me completely?” she grumbled. “It’s as if I don’t exist.”
NO MATTER, MASTERING II was shaping up to be another blockbuster. Its publication on October 22, 1970, was “heralded like the second coming” and the ensuing hoopla did much to ease Simca’s discontent. She arrived in New York in time to join Julia for “a very swish affair” for 250 given in their honor at the Ford Foundation’s mansion on the East Side. “Le tout New York” toasted them with icy flutes of Moët, followed by a buffet that featured the highlights from their book. The party was the perfect kickoff to the main event, although Simca, radiantly sheathed in a black silk dress with red chiffon scarf, observed circumspectly that “Julia was a celebrity.”
Knopf had pulled out all the stops for the book launch. There was a first printing of 100,000 copies, with so many advance orders that a second run of 50,000 had already gone to press. The reviews were uniformly ecstatic, drawing apt comparisons to Mastering I. Gael Greene, writing in Life, called it “utterly intoxicating” and said, “No serious scholar of the kitchen will want to function without it.” Newsweek, aflutter with breathy rapture, actually elbowed Volume I aside, claiming: “[Volume II] is without rival, the finest gourmet cookbook for the non-chef in the history of American stomachs.” A burst of accolades rose from within the ranks of the culinary world: James Beard, Dione Lucas, and Craig Claiborne joined the growing hallelujah chorus. McCall’s debuted its three-part cover story of Julia and Simca to coincide with publication, and, as a hedge against disaster, PBS began airing a new long-awaited season of The French Chef—in color, for the first time, with a new kitchen set “and a plethora of unbridled joie de vivre!”
There was so much anticipation for the show, in fact, that WGBH pressured Julia to get back to work, pumping new episodes of her series into the pipeline. They made no secret of the fact that her viewers were major PBS contributors and, in case she needed extra incentive, major book buyers. But Julia was in no hurry to meet the station’s demands. More enticing, Knopf had set up a modest book tour for her. Actually it was Knopf’s first book tour of any kind, considering the majority of its authors “were neither living nor breathing.” As such, author promotion wasn’t anything they’d ever given thought to. But an aggregate of PBS stations from around the country had called, asking Julia to do promos for the show and an assistant figured out how best to tie that to the book.
Jane Becker had come to the publisher two years earlier in the management shake‑up that brought Bob Gottlieb to Knopf. She was only twenty-two; Judith Jones, who was now in her forties, wa
s the next youngest executive to her at the house. But, like Jones, Becker had decided to speak up at an editorial meeting and was being given a chance—or some rope; it all depended on how her idea turned out. She proposed to send Julia, this time on Knopf’s tab, to several cities where there were PBS affiliates and thriving department stores. “The TV people could host a cocktail party for her in the evening,” recalls Jane, who as Jane Friedman later headed HarperCollins. “The department store would take out a full-page ad announcing Julia was coming, then the next morning she’d do a demo in their auditorium. In between, we’d do some local television and newspaper interviews. With luck, maybe we’d sell some books.”
They decided to road test her idea in Minneapolis, at Dayton’s department store, in November 1970. The night before the first demonstration, Julia, Paul, and Jane huddled in the lobby of their hotel across the street from Dayton’s to go over a few last-minute details. “You know, nobody may show up tomorrow,” Jane warned them. “I’d be very disappointed, but that’s the reality. And if it happens, that’ll be okay. We’ll go into bookstores and sign books.” Julia wanted to know how many copies of Mastering II were in the city. “About five hundred,” Jane responded. Julia, she recalled, intended to sign every one.
The next morning, Jane got up early, in plenty of time to wake her author. The demo was scheduled for 8 a.m. in Dayton’s famous revolving Sky’s Restaurant, before the store opened for business at nine. At seven she glanced outside and immediately dialed Julia’s room. “My God! Look out your window,” she said.
Julia threw open her blinds. There was a queue down the block, what could have been a thousand women waiting to get inside.
The same thing happened at one of their next stops, Columbus, Ohio, where the Lazarus department store couldn’t accommodate all the people who had come. Instead, at the last minute, they rented a theater down the block where, from a hydraulic lift hidden below the stage, Julia rose up through the floor like Venus to the crowd’s wild delight.