Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child

by Bob Spitz

  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.”

  She’d always fought off the enemies of French cuisine, the Nervous Nellies, as she called them, claiming they made the dinner table “a trap, rather than a pleasure.” But in The Way to Cook she held out an olive branch. “In this book, I am very conscious of calories and fat,” she wrote, “and the major proportions of the master recipes are low in fat or even fat-free.” Then, again, she also crusaded for a shelf of indulgences that would contain “the best butter, jumbo-size eggs, heavy cream, marbled steaks, sausages and pâtés, hollandaise and butter sauces, French butter-cream fillings, gooey chocolate cakes, and all those lovely items that demand disciplined rationing.”

  Under ordinary circumstances, The Way to Cook should have been a pleasure to compile. It was an encyclopedic work, of sorts, an A to Z collection of everything Julia cooked, everything she practiced in the kitchen, all her culinary knowledge adapted for beginners, as well as “the new generation of cooks who have not grown up in the old traditions, yet who need a basic knowledge of good food.” Vaguely modeled on Jacques Pépin’s 1976 masterpiece, La Technique, the ultimate kitchen reference and practically every serious chef’s go-to guide, Julia saw The Way to Cook as “more recipe-driven than Jacques’s book,” according to Judith Jones, “more of a primer, so that someone interested in cooking could develop enough confidence using a master recipe to attempt variations on it.” A lazy writer might have stitched together the contents of her recipe files or simply anthologized her previous books. But lazy wasn’t part of Julia’s makeup. If anything, the familiarity of the material drove her to seek a deeper understanding of it. Her curiosity, insatiable as ever, tipped toward the obsessive.

  “[I] never feel I know enough,” she lamented to M. F. K. Fisher, while researching the meat chapter, “and have to go out looking at chops, cooking them, etc.”

  Looking at chops, cooking them—after thirty-five years! How much more was there to learn about meat?

  Plenty, apparently. The variety of cuts continued to confuse her—and, thus, her readers. Blade roast, tri-tip, shoulder filet, hanger, porterhouse, wedgebone, skirt, flap, rib-eye, flat iron, ranch, rump, flank—the possibilities were mind-boggling. She asked her butcher, Jack Savenor, to identify every conceivable piece of meat in an effort to reach a consensus, but there were so many other factors that needed to be addressed. What about freezing chops—or flanks, or tips? Julia identified with American home cooks who, out of convenience or necessity, cooked from their freezers. What were the best methods for defrosting? she wondered. At what temperature should the freezer ideally be set? These weren’t questions to which she could ad-lib answers. Her advice had to be accurate, scientific. So she conducted in-depth research, first by contacting the National Livestock and Meat Board and then the folks at Amana.

  The work began to consume.

  If only that were the main focus of her worries. But personal issues began to intrude. In 1988, in the throes of manuscript rewrites in Santa Barbara, Julia was “plunging around” her office when she tripped over her computer wire and fell, breaking her hip. “She was furious with herself,” recalls Nancy Barr, a kitchen assistant who had Julia’s ear. “Her work on the book suddenly skidded to a halt.” But she wasn’t as concerned with either her hip or her work as she was about how they distracted from Paul, who was relying on her more than ever.

  “[Paul], I am sorry to say, is not doing at all well,” she wrote to M. F. K. Fisher in March 1987, just weeks after his eighty-fifth birthday. The move to Santa Barbara served to facilitate his comfort but did nothing to reverse the effects of dementia. “He was still there,” says Rebecca Alssid, who ran the culinary arts program at Boston University, “but barely. At dinner, his head would practically fall into the soup.” Charlie Gibson, who replaced David Hartman on Good Morning America that February, described Paul as “clearly not well and fairly unresponsive. As far as I could tell he was practically lifeless.”

  Week by week, Julia noticed more signs of his regression. “He lurches about when he walks now,” she reported in a letter, “and the other day, although I had his arm, he plunged down some wooden steps onto the cement below.” A year before, he might have broken such a fall, avoiding serious injury. But with his coordination no longer intact, he subsequently cracked a bone in his wrist, as well as a tooth and a rib.

  Now, with The Way to Cook on the brink of publication, the usual hubbub was jacked up to a higher degree of intensity. There were so many last-minute details to arrange before going on the road. During a particularly chaotic week in Cambridge, before another trip out to Santa Barbara, Julia was engaged in back-to-back interviews intended to lay a little groundwork for the forthcoming book. While she was upstairs in the office doing several radio station “phoners,” a cleaning company working downstairs left the front door unlocked. It was only a matter of time before Paul, in his usual state of confusion, wandered outside by himself. Coincidentally, someone was getting out of a taxi at the curb. Paul hailed it and apparently gave the driver an address of some kind, but sometime later, when it became clear he had no money, he was booted out on a street corner far from home.

  It wasn’t until several hours later that Julia realized Paul was gone. Since his stroke, in 1974, she had been terrified of his wandering off alone. She knew he’d be helpless in a situation that was out of her immediate control, and, now, it had finally happened. As unimaginable as that must have seemed, Julia managed to keep calm, organizing a posse to scour the neighborhood. The police were of little help. Fortunately, a neighbor recalled seeing Paul get into a cab and a taxi dispatcher eventually helped to pinpoint his location. He was safe—for now. But Julia feared it was only a matter of time before something more perilous happened, something life-threatening … or worse. That evening, after she helped put Paul to sleep, she made up her mind: he needed to be somewhere he could be watched at all times.

  Julia couldn’t handle him by herself anymore, not with a book coming out, not in his diminished condition. They had been the closest of life partners for forty-five years; he was her mentor, her lover, her closest confidant, the person who inspired her to be herself, to do great work, more than that. He was the force behind Julia Child’s public personality. But he wasn’t that Paul anymore, and Julia, being an eminently practical person, knew she could not continue her career if she had to be a full-time nurse for her husband. She told herself that he didn’t really understand what was going on anyway.

  “If I tried to take care of him at home and people stopped coming to visit, then chances are I’d become resentful of him,” she concluded. “We had a wonderful time together, and I was very lucky, but the survivors have to survive.”

  In June 1989, while Paul was in the hospital for a prostate procedure, Julia made arrangements with a senior care facility in Santa Barbara to take him in on a part-time basis. Her new lawyer, Bill Truslow, supported the idea. “It was obvious Julia needed professional help,” he remembers, “and I strongly urged her to organize it. Doing it saddened her, naturally, but she didn’t hesitate. She was taking care of Paul—but also taking care of herself.”

  Julia tried to keep the arrangement as loosely structured as possible. Rather than hinting at any permanence, she told him it was “a place for him to recuperate.” To a man who had only sporadic understanding, it seemed harmless enough. Every day, like clockwork, she arrived during visiting hours, alwa
ys with a pint of his favorite ice cream. She often took Paul out to dinner nearby and dressed him for special occasions, when the situation allowed her to keep him by her side. In August, when the Southern California Culinary Guild presented an exhibit of his paintings, the Childs previewed it together before the gallery opened to the public. But Julia returned Paul to the nursing home before doubling back to arrive with the rest of the guests. As far as Paul knew, in those flickering interludes when his mind was lucid, he was in the facility for observation purposes only. He wasn’t aware that anything more permanent had been settled. But Julia needed to finalize the situation.

  Was Santa Barbara the right place to square him away? Julia knew that someday she would probably retire there. She loved the city and its sumptuous weather; the California spirit was still bone-deep, still an intransigent part of her makeup. But there was too much going on back East right now to consider making such a drastic move. Her gig at Good Morning America was especially precious, the only vehicle keeping her in front of a television audience. She hadn’t had a show of her own since Dinner at Julia’s in 1983, and the temptation was always strong to return. To be on the air again, with a new series, a new challenge—she couldn’t shake that powerful impulse. Her chances would be lower if she relocated out West. Better to stay in Cambridge, near WGBH and Russ Morash, to see if something developed. There was also a commitment she’d made to Boston University, where she and Jacques Pépin were helping launch the culinary arts degree program. If Paul remained behind at the Santa Barbara facility, she couldn’t see him on a regular basis. That wouldn’t do—no, that wouldn’t do at all. He was still too much a part of her life to put long distances and stretches of time between them.

  Not long afterward, Julia broached the subject with Dr. Tim Johnson, a longtime member of GMA’s Family who lived and practiced privately in Boston. “I’ve got to put Paul in a nursing home,” she told him during a brief, businesslike phone call. “Would you help me scout out some suitable places?” The request wasn’t unexpected to Johnson. “I’d gone out to dinner with them some months back,” he recalls. “I hadn’t seen them in a while, and I remember thinking, ‘This guy’s going downhill fast.’ ” As a favor, he made a few calls and discovered there were plenty of nursing homes in the Boston area, “many, however, that were not up to par.” Too many were more profit-oriented than patient-oriented, employing people at the lowest end of the wage scale. Johnson wanted to make sure he recommended a place where Paul would get capable care. One place, the Fairlawn Nursing Home in nearby Lexington, got high marks in that department. It was a private, family-owned facility in a reconverted Victorian farmhouse set amid acres of lush landscaping where residents could relax. Julia already knew of it from her friend Pat Pratt, whose aunt and uncle were residents. Johnson drove out to Lexington to look the place over and wound up recommending it to Julia, who acted on his advice.

  In September 1989, she and Paul flew back to Boston with Bill Truslow, who had agreed to help her get Paul settled at Fairlawn. Julia called Marian Morash and asked her to meet them there. When they arrived, Morash recalls, Julia was visibly agitated. “She told me Paul had been in a kind of quasi state, where sometimes he was with you and other times he wasn’t, but that this night he was totally with it.” Throughout the cab ride in from Logan Airport he’d repeatedly asked: “Why are we going out to Lexington? Why aren’t we going home?”

  Fairlawn had a private room ready for him near the nurses’ station. Thoughtful as always, Julia had arranged to have pictures that were familiar to him already on shelves and the nightstand next to the bed. Paul gave the place a cursory once-over and raised an objection. “This isn’t our house,” he argued. “What am I doing here?” Marian Morash recalls, “It was the worst possible scenario.”

  Julia assured him that it was a nice place to rest, where the staff needed to do some medical procedures. “It will just be for a while,” she insisted, though unable to say for how long. “She didn’t lie to him,” Morash says, “but she didn’t make it sound like he was going to be there forever.” It was a difficult balancing act, and she worked hard to sell it.

  It took more than an hour until she could find a way to leave. Then Julia climbed into Marian Morash’s car, put her head in her hands, and wept all the way home.

  JULIA FELT THE void right away. Although released from the constant worry that something dreadful would happen to Paul, she could sense something extraordinary ending for good. From Asia to Europe to Washington to Cambridge, Paul had never been far from her side. For the first time in forty-five years, Julia Child was alone, and the emptiness disheartened her. It was almost like grieving after someone had died, but without the rituals of grieving that can provide comfort. Some version of Paul was still very much around and she felt love for him, whatever version remained. There were so many conflicting emotions: relief at not having the daily responsibility, missing him even as he was now, guilt at not caring for him herself. But at the very core, grief for the real Paul who had given her so much.

  However, friends who saw her that week recall no outward show of sorrow. There was no grieving, no moping, no self-pity. She put on a face and got right back to work. “Julia didn’t dwell in the past,” says Russ Morash, who checked in with her later that day. “She had no interest in yesterday, only in today or tomorrow; moving ahead was how she dealt with life.”

  Almost mercifully, the book tour for The Way to Cook began three weeks later. It was a grueling, two-month grind for a seventy-seven-year-old woman, hopscotching across the country, from Boston to Pasadena and back again, with an entourage of four or five women. Her schedule, a marvelous mix of media, was relentless, brutal. Often, she lumbered through five events each day: press and radio interviews, local TV appearances, guest spots on The David Letterman Show and The Tonight Show, luncheons, and bookstore signings, the latter of which was easily the most demanding. Julia hadn’t lost so much as a smidgen of her appeal. Everywhere she went, the crowds “were incredible.” Long lines of fans snaked out of the bookstores. “Hundreds of people showed up wherever we went,” recalls Susy Davidson, a young cook who prepped for Julia’s GMA segments and often assisted her for demonstrations on the road: “It was more like a ritual, a divine observance, than an ordinary signing.” People’s faces glowed, they were dumbstruck when they finally laid eyes on her, like encountering Santa. There she was in the flesh, Julia Child—make that Julia, just Julia; everyone was on a first-name basis. Signing three or four hundred books at a clip was nothing to her. She’d inscribe each one, often dispensing bits of culinary advice and answering personal questions. People repeatedly asked her about Paul. “Well, dearie, he’s fine, just fine,” she’d respond, “slowing down a little, but aren’t we all.”

  Except that there was no slowing down for Julia Child, who was nicknamed “the nation’s energy queen.” Throughout the holiday season she continued to stump for the book, which was picking up steam in proportion to her super-size efforts. There was no lack of incentive for her to give it extra oomph. Knopf had gone out on a limb, producing a rather lavish number. It was a doorstop of a book, weighing in at almost five pounds, with a similarly hefty price tag of fifty bucks. That was twice as much as what people were accustomed to paying for a cookbook, and there was competition up the wazoo. That season, cookbooks were ridiculously plentiful. Julia’s friend Anne Willan had released La Varenne Pratique, a similar encyclopedic volume that was attracting serious cooks, and those Silver Palate gals had cranked out another best seller.

  Julia was determined to sell the hell out of The Way to Cook, if not to vindicate her publisher, then to make a final grand splash. She held firm to the notion that this would be her last book, and everything, bar none, had gone into it to secure her legacy. The New York Times agreed, calling it “a magnificent distillation of a lifetime of cooking.” Forty years of know-how sandwiched between two covers—it was a fitting knockout to a championship career.

  She could also use the
money to see her through retirement. Julia had a nice little nest egg to fall back on. Book royalties had made her a prosperous woman and there was an ample cushion from her parents’ estates. Julia had never had to worry about money. But she was in excellent health—“from good pioneer stock,” as she liked to say—and she fully intended “to run with the tide.” Travel, lots of travel, was on her agenda. And there was Paul to think about. His care would require a constant infusion of cash. She’d spend whatever it took to ensure his comfort and safety. She’d already hired a special-duty nurse to join him at dinner, so he wouldn’t have to eat alone. The provisions involving Julia were also expensive. While on tour, she insisted on flying back to Boston once a week, so she wouldn’t miss an opportunity to visit Paul. And her long-distance bills were monstrous as a result of long, rambling phone calls to him several times a day.

  The complexities of Julia’s schedule were labyrinthine. Demand for her presence at events was absurd. Every women’s group, from the Junior League to Hadassah to the Pillsbury Bake-off, invited her to their functions—and expected that she would attend. The same with nonprofit organizations. Her name was a beacon for any cause. Everyone felt as thought they had a right to Julia Child, and she did little to discourage that perception. If someone called her—which was easy; all anyone had to do was look her up in the phone book—and made a reasonable plea, Julia would try to accommodate. The Food & Wine Classic in Aspen—she’d shoehorn that in. A benefit for the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven—no problem; she’d hop in the car and drive right over.

  Sometimes she worried that she spread herself too thin, but when push came to shove she was unable to say no. That was exactly what happened with the whole James Beard business. Julia had been at a luncheon tribute to her fallen friend in Seattle. It had been a weird afternoon. Madeleine Kamman had shown up to say a few words, and when Julia reached across the dais to grab her hand a collective gasp shot through the crowd. Everyone knew their thorny story, but Julia was determined to keep the mood congenial. It wasn’t until word sifted down that Oregon’s Reed College, which had inherited Beard’s New York house, was planning to sell it along with his belongings, that things got overheated.