Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child

by Bob Spitz

  Julia had worked too hard for too long to cede the spotlight to others. If WGBH was hesitant to pull the trigger with her alone, perhaps there was more bump-and-bang with a double-barreled lineup. She and James Beard together were a commanding two-for-one, and their concept, in 1976, sounded unbeatable: a program about American food from the Revolutionary War period, featuring cooks who worked in what had been the original thirteen colonies. The old PBS would have eaten it right up, especially after viewing the slickly produced pilot, which spotlighted the two biggest stars in the culinary firmament. Julia sparkled on camera, she was back where she belonged, but Beard suffered from his longtime curse: discomfort on TV and overacting to cover it. He put out absolutely no wattage on screen, even less than the lusterless subject, and the new PBS refused to bite. Aside from WGBH, no affiliate signed up, damning the show to oblivion.

  Julia was frustrated that she wasn’t back on TV. She was viewed as an old network personality, like Milton Berle or Lucille Ball, someone from its glorious past, but not its future. “Nobody ever said, ‘We don’t want Julia anymore,’ ” says Russ Morash, “but that was certainly the feeling we got.”

  The Morashes and Childs were regular dinner companions throughout the seventies, assembling often to cook and talk shop. Their blowout bash was always New Year’s Eve, when a full guest list was invited to round out the evening. “People who didn’t know Julia very well assumed we were going to have a king’s banquet,” recalls Marian Morash. “But we’d have a nice oyster chowder—oysters and milk. And Goldfish for hors d’oeuvres, which Julia gobbled by the handful, always her favorite.”

  One night, right after their festive celebration in 1977, Julia was musing on her inability to break back into the WGBH lineup. “Isn’t it funny that they don’t want to continue where we left off?” she asked Russ. She wasn’t offended or unnerved by rejection, he recalled, just confused by the changing tastes that were seeming to pass her by. Understandably, Morash was plenty “pissed off” at the station’s outrageous indifference to reestablishing its biggest star. The underlying problem, he felt, had nothing to do with Julia but rather with their formula, which was worn around the edges. Sitting around the Irving Street kitchen table, they discussed rewriting the winning blueprint they’d devised thirteen years earlier. “Instead of a single recipe,” he said, “why don’t we do some menus building up to a party?” Julia loved the idea: “a meal-centric program for occasions, like birthdays, Sunday-night supper, or dinner for the boss.” She could break “out of the French straitjacket” and do “a lot of plain old American cooking—like Boston baked beans, and a chocolate-chip rum cake.”

  It didn’t take them long to polish the concept. In February, they pitched Julia Child and Company to WGBH, which agreed without hesitation to underwrite a thirteen-episode run. Morash worked out the details. Julia would only have to tape one show a week. There would be no shopping for her and Paul, no endless trial-testing at home; prep work would be delegated to a battery of assistants, with plenty of time set aside for rehearsal. To keep costs in check, Russ proposed that he build a dedicated set that didn’t come down from one show to the next. “Julia loved that,” he says, “because it meant she and Ruth Lockwood could come in and rehearse their brains out day after day without having to worry that it would put us over budget.”

  And what about a book to showcase the new recipes? Julia had already put her foot down—no more books—but at the time she must have had her fingers crossed. Don Cutler insisted on a companion volume for the show, and before he hung up the phone with her, Julia was back in the book business. An arrangement was made so that she wouldn’t have to write during production, as before; instead, they hired Peggy Yntema, an editor at Atlantic Monthly, to produce a first draft using dialogue from the rehearsals, to which Julia would add recipes and tweak as she received fresh copy. “This way,” Cutler explains, “the book would appear as the show went on the air, instead of months afterward, when the excitement faded.”

  Naturally, Judith Jones expected Knopf would publish the book. “A new cookbook by Julia!” she exulted. “Half of America would be watching, and at least half the audience would want those recipes.” But a week or two later, she got a call from Bob Johnson, a lawyer from the Boston white-shoe firm Hill & Barlow, whom Julia had just hired to represent her. “He said that Little, Brown was very interested in publishing the book and that it might be of value to Julia to work with a Boston-based publisher instead of us.” Jones held the phone steady, without responding, trying her best not to cry. “In any case,” Johnson said, “I don’t think Knopf’s royalty rates are acceptable.”

  I don’t think Knopf’s royalty rates are acceptable. It was French for “You are screwing my client.”

  Johnson came on like a steamroller, flattening the dainty Jones. Stunned and dispirited, she enlisted the help of Knopf’s financial hatchet man, Tony Schulte, and they flew up to Boston the next day. “We went to Bob Johnson’s apartment,” Jones recalls. He was a handsome, eccentric, volatile character who trod a treacherous high-wire between Brahmin Boston on one side and the gay demimonde on the other. Julia was oblivious to his sexuality and never failed to introduce him, without any irony, as “my he-man.” Her friends, like Russ Morash, failed to see the humor in it. “Johnson was the most miserable son-of-a-bitch you ever could meet,” Morash says, “an odious creep, who had Julia locked in his clutches.” Judith Jones seconded that opinion. “He was really quite crude, and vicious, not nice at all,” she recalls.

  From the opening of negotiations, Johnson refused to back down. He didn’t give a damn about Julia’s long-standing relationship with Knopf or her friendship with Jones. They meant nothing as far as the deal was concerned. He wanted more money for his client, both up front and on the back end, and if Knopf wouldn’t give it to him he was taking Julia elsewhere. Tony Schulte had come prepared. He brought a complete breakdown of the company’s profit and loss on a typical Julia Child book to explain the slim margins of return. Johnson hardly glanced at the wobbly math, throwing the profit-and-loss report back at Schulte. He didn’t give a damn what the figures showed. “I don’t believe your bottom line,” he said, holding fast to his terms.

  Jones knew it was a deal they couldn’t make. “It was prohibitive,” she says. “We wouldn’t have made any money.” After sixteen years as Julia’s editor, confidante, and friend, she sensed the wonderful partnership was over.

  But not without a fight. Desperate, Jones decided to break two cardinal rules of publishing etiquette: discussing business directly with an author, and using tears as a weapon. She picked up the phone and dialed the Irving Street number. “Julia,” she sobbed, unable to check her composure, “do you know what Bob Johnson is asking for? I think you should, because he’s making it impossible for us.”

  All warmth drained from Julia’s voice. “I don’t want to hear it!” she snapped at Jones. “That’s why I have a lawyer.” The silence that followed was thunderous.

  Jones recalls, “It was like a knife through my heart.” With Julia, she knew, there was always some element of mistrust with regard to publishers, dating from the early debacles with Ives Washburn and Houghton Mifflin. But she assumed Knopf had done everything to heal old wounds, and anyway, this went beyond publishing; this was Judith and Julia. Jones thought their friendship transcended business. It went well beyond the customary author-editor relationship. They had often served as each other’s therapist. Jones freely offered advice on how to deal with Paul’s illness. When Julia learned the details of Judith’s pitiful salary, she implored her, “Ask for more money! Push yourself, Judith.”

  This antagonistic book deal put everything in jeopardy. Knopf would make the deal; they had to. They’d cave in to Johnson’s usurious terms. It was more important to keep their celebrated author. But as far as the relationship, it was forever changed. It would always be warm and cordial on the surface, but Julia had drawn the bottom line.

  FINALLY, JULIA WAS ready to ro
ll. Production on Julia Child and Company was slated to begin October 20, 1977. After a five-year stretch, she’d be back in front of the cameras and the anticipation filled her with a schoolgirl’s enthusiasm. This show was going to gleam with polish. If anything, the long absence had given her even more perspective on the lessons from The French Chef. In the interim, Julia developed informed opinions that helped her differentiate between a seat-of-the-pants local show and a seamless national broadcast. All the elements were already in place. She and Russ had mapped out a strategy that would recapture the old glory in a new, modern guise.

  The summer had been rough, a combination of rehearsal and family obligations. Paul’s condition had started to improve. He began to draw and paint again with some degree of finesse, although his French remained rusty and his speech therapy leveled off. “My field of comprehension is murky,” he wrote Charlie in July. “Numbers are stuck, rooms full of many people talking confuse me.” He recognized, with regret and resentment, his best days might be behind him, but his will remained strong and he vowed “never to give up.”

  Julia was relieved by her husband’s progress, so much so that they made a short impromptu visit to La Pitchoune. She needed to get away for a while, not so much to plan menus, as she told her staff, but to refurbish her image out of the public eye by having a face-lift and dropping fifteen pounds.

  The weather was especially inviting that summer in Provence. Julia and Paul had both missed the balmy serenity that surrounded them in Plascassier. It was the perfect escape for them under the streaky Van Gogh sky, a place to relax and to collect their lives, “a little bit of heaven.” They spent hours, sometimes whole days, sitting on the terrace beneath the mulberry tree, gazing out at the scenery, “the almost tropical growth” as a result of an unusually wet spring. The surrounding hills were “abstract swatches of pale-gold ginesta,” the air intoxicatingly “sweet with commingled honeys”—heaps of lemon verbena and summer mimosa, spicy fig leaves, an extravagance of plush lavender, ambrosial roses everywhere. Paul never missed a chance to walk the gently sloping periphery and take pictures of the Impressionistic landscape. Occasionally he would try to read one of the books they’d carted from Cambridge, but gave up when the words conspired against him, and asked Julia to read to him.

  Julia was still nursing her various ailments at La Peetch, when she picked up an overseas call from Erica Child. Her mother, Freddie, had suffered a sudden heart attack and was in the intensive care unit of a hospital in Maine. Freddie! The news struck Julia with grave unrest. They must go—immediately. But was she in any condition to travel? Her face was still purple and swollen from the surgery. And how would Paul bear the news? He remained in a fragile state and any sudden shock could trigger a setback. Erica did everything to assure Julia that her mother was all right. Freddie’s condition had stabilized; they hoped to bring her home in the next week. Julia and Paul could wait to see her when they returned, the last week in July.

  By then, however, it was too late. While they were en route to the States, Freddie had a second attack, and the impact of it had killed her.

  They were heartsick. Freddie and Charlie and Julia and Paul—they had been a tightly tangled foursome for more than thirty years, the closest family Julia had known aside from Dort and John III—maybe even closer. Freddie had been her first cooking inspiration and her ultimate partner-in-crime: Mrs. Child and Mrs. Child; they’d never managed to pull that one off. But Freddie had always been Julia’s go-to gal, the oracle she consulted when crucial advice was called for. And she’d always been Charlie’s rock. What would become of poor Charlie now? He was “shattered,” Julia realized. He was seventy-five; he was losing his eyesight, with a cauliflower ear he’d gotten in boyhood courtesy of Paul. And, “he hated to be alone, it gave him anxiety,” says his daughter Rachel.

  Julia already had some idea of what his decline might be like. She had seen it in his twin, who was crushed by Freddie’s death. Clearly, Paul and Charlie were now shadows of themselves, their eggshell frailty all too apparent over the last pivotal year. “I can only thank heaven that I am ten years younger than Paul,” she resolved. “Dommage that we are not all eternal!”

  Julia loved Dan Aykroyd’s impersonation: “Save the liver!” (Photo credit 21.1)

  Twenty-two

  Looking Forward

  Work was Julia’s fountain of youth. All around her, the spoils of age were taking their toll. Ever since Paul’s stroke, she had been especially attuned to the decline of others in her immediate circle. Michael Field, overwhelmed by work and penniless, dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of fifty-six. Ruth Lockwood’s husband, Arthur, died suddenly, after having a pacemaker installed. Julia’s editor at McCall’s, Helen McCully, lay in a coma in a New York City hospital. Charlie Child lapsed into a “deep depression” before settling in an assisted-living complex. Jean Fischbacher had prostate trouble. M. F. K. Fisher developed “a kind of palsy, with cataracts in both eyes.” And Jim Beard was his usual self, a walking, talking, physical mess.

  Aside from her knees, which had tormented her since college, Julia felt like “a teenager” when she was working. Work invigorated her, kept her current, forward-thinking. Whether out of ambition, or distraction, or emotional need, over the next few years she buried herself in an avalanche of projects that, physically and mentally, kept her humming like a DeLorean. Julia Child and Company had reignited her star power. Her TV persona resurfaced in tip-top form, a larger, more sophisticated audience tuned in to embrace her, and the reviews confirmed the obvious: Nova may have been the station’s latest star, but Julia was its supernova. The show’s companion cookbook flew off the shelves—more than 200,000 copies before the thirteen weeks elapsed—and her backlist got a powerful lift. Mastering, especially, found new life, necessitating a tour of book signings in the major PBS markets. On paper, Julia resented the constant grind, touring to support the book. “I am even hoping I won’t have to go out and promote it this time,” she wrote Simca. But, in truth, she loved the face-to-face contact with her fans. “It’s where I learn what really goes on in American kitchens,” she said. In between appearances, she wrote a column for McCall’s and did demonstrations at a number of charity events for Planned Parenthood.

  More than any other medium, however, Julia drifted toward television, and in late 1978 there were two appearances that elevated her image as a cultural icon. The first, in November, was a Thanksgiving guest spot with Jacques Pépin on Tomorrow, hosted by Tom Snyder. During prep for the show, which was rushed and chaotic, Julia cut herself with a borrowed chef’s knife. “To Julia it was nothing, but it was a very big cut,” recalled a publishing rep, who had accompanied her to the set. She spilled a lot of blood. Still, Julia, ever the trouper, continued to work through the show, with a towel wrapped around the hemorrhaging wound.

  Snyder’s late-night show, a mix of hard-hitting interviews and often bizarre and wacky personal observations, attracted a hip and countercultural audience. Among the media personalities he influenced over the years were David Letterman, Howard Stern, and Dan Aykroyd, the latter of whom parodied Snyder’s hearty, expressive laugh as the basis of a regular impersonation he did on Saturday Night Live.

  “We saw Julia cut herself on Tom Snyder,” Aykroyd recalls. “Everybody was talking about it.” A few days later, SNL writers Al Franken and Tom Davis brought Aykroyd a skit based on the Tomorrow segment that would eventually become a classic. In it, he’d play a campy Julia Child demonstrating a roast chicken recipe, during which she cuts herself and bleeds out on camera. “I was a little reluctant because it seemed like one long blood joke and thought that it might not work, but Franken talked me into it.”

  Unbeknownst to his SNL cohorts, Aykroyd had a personal connection to Julia. His aunt, Helen Gougeon, the author of several popular cookbooks, was known as “the Julia Child of Canada,” with a long-running radio show, Bon Appétit, on CJAD, in Montreal, and a shop called La Belle Cuisine. Her recipe for bouillabaisse inspi
red his famous “Bassomatic” skit, in which he dropped whole fish into a Ronco blender. “Both my Aunt Helen and my mom had Mastering the Art of French Cooking and made recipes from Julia’s books all the time,” he recalls, “so as a kid I ate the kind of belle cuisine she was famous for. And, of course, I was totally a big fan of her show.”

  Aykroyd and Franken tinkered with the sketch, then performed it at the show’s read-through on Wednesday afternoon. “Now, first, remove the giblets—and you should really save the giblets,” trilled Aykroyd, dressed in a fright wig and apron. “Save the liver! Don’t throw it away! I hope I’ve made my point. Don’t throw the liver away!” A few beats later, while cutting out the backbone of the chicken, Aykroyd nicks his hand, à la the Tomorrow snafu, and blood begins to spurt. “Crap! Oh, now I’ve done it—I cut the dickens out of my finger.” Somehow, the cut was as powerful as Old Faithful, with blood squirting on the chicken and pooling along the kitchen counter.

  “The read-through went well,” Aykroyd remembers, “it hit all the right notes, but when we did it in dress [rehearsal] on Friday before the show, it didn’t work, the blood didn’t pump right.”

  To save it, Franken decided to get into the act. When the show went on the air, he knelt under the table, running the fire extinguisher full of fake blood himself, pumping it like crazy while “Julia” started to reel. “Oh, God, it’s throbbing!” Aykroyd blabbers, tying a tourniquet made with an apron and a chicken bone. “If you’re too woozy to tie the tourniquet, you might call Emergency Help.” But after picking up the phone and dialing 911, he realizes that it’s only a stage prop and starts to hallucinate. “Why are you all spinning?” he asks the audience. “Uh … I think I’m going to sleep now. Bon appétit!” He falls headfirst onto the counter into the pool of blood, but jumps up one last time to say “Save the liver!” before dying in a series of twitches.