Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child

by Bob Spitz

  “You don’t want to be anywhere near Julia when she gets her back up,” says Nancy Barr, who had accompanied her to the event. “It didn’t happen often, but this was one of those times and I could see flames shooting out of her eyes.”

  “We’ve got to stop this!” she huffed in a biblical rage, her face reddening with indignation. “We’ve got to stop it now! This is James Beard, a national treasure.” Something had to be done and right away. The house, for one thing—it had to be preserved. It was a landmark, if not for New York City then for the culinary world, which had to step in and make things right. Julia pledged all her efforts to help, and Peter Kump, a Manhattan cooking teacher who was in the audience, took her at her word. Soon, the two were engaged in raising money toward purchasing the house and its artifacts—which is how the James Beard Foundation was born.

  In addition to all Julia’s charitable work, the American Institute of Wine and Food still had a powerful grip on her to help expand and shore up its growth. “The organization had lost its focus,” says Thekla Sanford. “There were too many egos involved, and Julia was frustrated with it.” Rich society ladies seemed to dominate its ranks. Endowments had been necessary to underwrite its goals, so fund-raising efforts were focused on getting the AIWF into wills and trusts. Even so, they’d sunk deep into financial difficulty. The organization had been undercapitalized from the start and, by 1989, its walls had begun to buckle. In one year alone, the AIWF’s debt ballooned from $285,000 to $635,000. A bank loan became necessary to fend off creditors. Julia, Robert Mondavi, Dick Graff, Michael McCarty, and Dorothy Cann Hamilton, who ran the French Culinary Institute in New York, each put up $100,000 to guarantee the loan, and the bank demanded Graff’s Chalone Vineyard stock, as well. “Now we all had real money on the line,” recalls Hamilton, the group’s newly installed chair, “so it was time to put-up-or-shut-up.”

  What they put up was Julia Child. Her name was worth even more than her equity stake and they traded on it incessantly to enlarge the membership. If she were signing books in a particular city, an AIWF event was cobbled together so that Julia could appear and raise some cash. “I sent her all over the country, to the individual chapters for dinners,” says Hamilton—eight cities from March to July 1990; ten cities the following year. “She became our major fund raiser, and in no time we started swimming in money.” Thanks to Julia, the number of chapters swelled from thirteen to twenty-seven, with each giving generously to the national organization.

  One of Julia’s appearances for AIWF dropped her squarely into an issue that weighed on her mind. Since Bob Johnson’s death in 1986, she’d been haunted by the way he’d battled AIDS. Johnson’s destruction—and his courage—refused to fade, and when it came time to dedicate The Way to Cook, she honored him with a tribute to his memory. Julia felt increasingly angry and confused—angry at her inability to make sense of what happened and confused by her attitudes toward homosexuality. Finally, she was forced to confront her own views and she recognized how narrow-minded they had been. Ironically, AIDS had helped bring them into focus.

  “The whole culinary world was dealing with AIDS,” recalls Clark Wolf. “It was especially ravaging the restaurant industry, whose many chefs and waiters were gay and had been sleeping with one another for years.” Wolf, who’d been instrumental in launching the New York chapter of AIWF, helped organize a two-day event at the Boston Garden called “Aid and Comfort,” to raise awareness. It was a copycat version of a San Francisco rally at which fourteen local restaurants had donated food and Linda Ronstadt entertained. In Boston, there were similar celebrities, but one whose appearance provided an especially galvanizing charge. When the emcee introduced Julia Child, a thunderous roar rocked the arena.

  “Last year, my husband and I stood by helplessly, while a dear and beloved friend went through months of slow and frightening agony,” she said, her trademark hooting held to a measured grace. “But what of those lonely ones—the ones with no friends or family to ease the slow pain of dying? Those are the people we’re concerned about this evening.”

  Afterward, as Julia walked backstage, she paused and let her eyes sweep across the indistinct crowd. How many sitting there in the dark were Bob Johnson, she wondered, silently fighting for their very lives? It distressed her to think of their burden. For all her efforts, for all the elegantly spilled words and the outpouring of support from the food world, there was little hope of stanching this plague. “This is how meaningless we are in the scope of things,” she realized. For all her resources, Julia Child couldn’t make a dent.

  CIRCUMSTANCES CONSPIRED TO induce Julia’s reflective mood. With her eightieth birthday fast approaching, there were so many transitions for her to absorb, some of them painful, all of them life-changing.

  Paul, she realized, was slipping further from her grasp. After he was admitted to Fairlawn, his stretches of lucidness were fewer and farther between. Now, when Julia visited him—every day, without fail, when she was at home, in Cambridge—he often didn’t recognize her or was stranded in the past. Despite his unresponsiveness, she would climb in bed next to him and rub his head lovingly, filling him in on everything she’d been doing. Then at night she would call him, just before going to bed. “They were always very affectionate conversations,” recalls David McWilliams, Julia’s nephew, a frequent visitor during his graduate-school days in Boston. “One night I overheard him go on and on about how ‘we’ve got to go to the football game tomorrow, you can bring a lunch.’ ” Julia would play along with the story. “Dearie, how about I make your favorite BLTs? We shouldn’t forget to pack blankets, just in case.” Other times, he would get frustrated with his inability to come up with the right word. One night, trying to describe a meal they had, he said, “We had … we had … Godammit, Julia, what was it?” She’d calmly say, “Lettuce, Paul.” “Oui, laitue,” he’d respond, switching to fluent French for the rest of the night.

  After those calls, the house always felt emptier, her heart more tender and melancholy than before. The solitariness humbled her and touched off other regrets. A family, perhaps, someone close to share her love. Simca would understand; that was something they had in common. In a letter to her dearest colleague, Julia expressed the uncharacteristic emotions she was wrestling with. “That’s something we lack, you and I, ma chérie—no children and grandchildren, and we ultimately take care of ourselves,” she wrote. “But I realize at our time of life the great difference between ourselves and those who have produced!”

  Thoughts of the past, of loss and regret, intertwined with present-day loss and regret. What other reason did she have for digging out an old scrapbook and tracing the faces of the dear ones she clung to—her brother-in-law, Ivan Cousins, who died of cancer in 1989, followed the next year by Avis DeVoto, who’d finally “slipped off the raft”?

  Perhaps it was these memories, remnants of the past, that made Julia respond so keenly to an invitation from a Norwegian advisory board. “How would she like to go back to Oslo?” they wondered. They would lay out an itinerary of all her old haunts, as well as make it possible for her to experience Norway’s hidden treasures. Money was no object. They would pick up the tab for the entire trip as well as underwrite a travelogue, which Russ Morash would produce.

  Oslo: the city touched off a kaleidoscopic blur of faces and places. Julia loved the years she’d spent there and thought often—perhaps more so now—of the friends she’d made, the meaningful customs she’d encountered. What a thrill it would be to revisit that part of her past. “She said yes right away,” Morash recalls. “WGBH agreed to put it on the air, and we left in July 1991 for a complicated two-week shoot.”

  Their biggest snag, he figured, was Julia’s delicate age. “She was quite old at the time—just weeks shy of her seventy-ninth birthday—and the itinerary we’d laid out would have given a fifty-year-old pause.” Julia dismissed his concerns with a wave of her hand. She was nothing if not a gamer and barreled through the locations without uttering a com
plaint. They began nostalgically, walking through the home that she and Paul had rented, Julia running her gnarled hand over the kitchen counters where Mastering was completed. Tears tided into her eyes. There was a party in her honor at the American embassy, whose food hadn’t improved any since that dreadful shredded chicken and Jell-O salad luncheon in 1959. And longtime Norwegian friends turned out for dinners that stretched long into the night.

  The days were crammed with rugged sightseeing excursions. She visited an aquavit refinery and put away a stunning amount of the high-octane fuel; the Olympic village, on whose slopes she had skied as a young housewife; and a fishing camp, where you practically had to be royalty just to enter the gates. “We gave Julia an antique fly rod,” recalls Morash, “and stood her in the middle of a river for several hours while we made shots of her fishing, which she loved.” Later that day, they set out for a far-off mountain resort, where a chef doing indigenous food had popped up on Julia’s radar. The only way to make it work was going by helicopter, so Morash arranged for a pair, in order that they could shoot Julia in flight.

  “The guys who flew Julia were a couple of hot shots who wanted to show off what the helicopter could do,” Morash recalls. “They started doing wheelies and banks, real scare-’em-out-of-their-wits moves. We almost barfed up our lunch trying to keep up with them, and I was furious for Julia, if for nothing but her age.” Morash and the crew landed a few minutes ahead and waited for the second copter to come down alongside. The winds, when they finally arrived, were unusually strong. Morash checked his anger waiting for Julia to emerge, and after a few nerve-racking minutes decided to confront her pilot. “Just tell me, how is she?” he demanded, prepared for the worst. The pilot grinned and jerked a thumb inside. “She fell asleep,” he said. So much for that.

  “It had been a long sixteen-hour day, the likes of which I can’t remember,” Morash says. “My crew and I just hit the bed and crashed.” Fifteen minutes later the phone rang in his room. It was eleven o’clock at night, although the sun was still high, and Morash was tempted not to pick up what was certain to be a business call from the States. He was wrong. It was Julia. “Where are we going to dinner?” she asked, ready to roll.

  A LETTER HAD arrived for Julia when she returned from Norway. It was from Suzy Patterson, a writer for the Associated Press currently living in Paris who was working on a manuscript with Simca for a recipe-filled memoir meant to summarize an illustrious career. Julia dreaded opening it. This book project of Simca’s was something of an albatross. Simca had implored Julia to help her land a U.S. publishing deal while she was still hearty enough to do the legwork, but the response from editors had been underwhelming. Simca’s first book, Simca’s Cuisine, hadn’t sold all that well and its disgruntled author had bad-mouthed those she felt were responsible. After that, few houses wanted to take her on. Even Judith Jones backed away faster than a car thrown into reverse. Julia knew better than most how “difficult” Simca could be. Already, an editor who saw a proposal thought “Simca’s expectations were unreal,” her ideas confusing and “sentimental.” And she had taken up with a co-writer before Patterson, someone one editor felt not only couldn’t “write, [but] hasn’t the faintest idea how to put a book together.” This was so typically Simca, Julia thought. Only someone as obstinate as Simca herself, and with an iron constitution, dared work with that harridan. And even then, you’d probably stomp a foot through the floor, like Rumpelstiltskin—take it from Julia Child. Still, Julia had graciously sent letters to a series of New York editors in support of Simca’s project, which was pressing on, full steam ahead, in her Bramafam kitchen.

  The back-and-forth had been ongoing for five long years, and Julia could only imagine what Suzy Patterson’s letter might contain. When she finally opened it, however, she was immediately shaken. “Simca has been very, very ill, at death’s door, so to speak,” it said. “And there is nothing anybody can do about her.” Apparently, Simca had fallen, and unable to move, had lain on the floor for “some time”—maybe days—before a friend eventually discovered her. In the meantime, she’d caught a chill and developed double pneumonia.

  Poor Simca! Julia thought—isolated like that in an empty house at the age of eighty-six. Ever since Jean died there was no one to look after her. Julia had pleaded with her on occasion to consider consolidating her residences, perhaps selling Le Mas Vieux, and moving into a condominium in Cannes or Grasse. “It is never pleasant to contemplate our gradual degeneration and demise,” Julia conceded, “but it makes sense that we do so before senility sets in, and it’s then too late.” Julia had what she called “a workable plan.” She and Paul “put in at an attractive retirement complex,” she told Simca, “where you have your own apartment with kitchen, and they take care of you until you ‘slip off the raft.’ ” They were also members of the Neptune Society, which sponsored prearranged plans for their deaths, “and when we’re gone, you just call them up and they pick you up and cremate you.”

  Simca, she knew, was unprepared for such an event, as were most older friends with whom she discussed death. “Death didn’t faze Julia,” says her nephew, Alex Prud’homme. “She regarded it as part of the process, the end, over-and-done-with.” But, oh, how the deaths of close friends touched the heart! Only days after the letter about Simca’s situation, Julia learned that her good friend Liz Bishop, who had stage-managed all of the cooking demos and organized Julia’s schedule, had died of a brain aneurysm while on vacation in Canada. Worried that time seemed to be closing in around her, she immediately wrote Simca, promising to visit in January.

  Friends—it was so crucial to be surrounded by friends. Young friends especially kept one feeling young. Julia’s approach to old age was deny, deny, deny, and its repudiation was validated by those with whom she associated. For so long Julia’s posse had been filled with her contemporaries, but gradually the group composite began to change. Socially, she began spending more time with Nancy Barr and Rebecca Alssid, both of whom were young enough to be her daughters. And she hired Stephanie Hersh, a young woman just out of cooking and secretarial school, to be her full-time personal assistant.

  “It was very important for Julia to have an active social life,” says Alssid, “to be always on the go, always keeping herself occupied. I can’t tell you how many times she called and said, ‘Let’s go out, dearie.’ To the movies or to dinner, anything to get out of the house.” Julia and Barr made a pact to spend their Saturday nights together, and often wound up at a table at Jasper’s, in the North End of Boston. A young, handsome chef surrounded by a young, handsome crowd—it was catnip for Julia. Jasper always kept a table reserved for when she dropped in—table one, the best seat in the house. On nights when Julia didn’t appear, that table was taken by two regulars from the predominantly Italian neighborhood, Champagne Dennis and his sidekick, Tommy, two of the most feared heavy-duty North End gangsters.

  One night the boys came in and their table wasn’t ready. When they confronted Chef White, he said, “Sorry, fellas, but Julia’s here and she gets table one.” Did they go ballistic or threaten to heave her out by the ankles?” Au contraire. “They were beside themselves, like little kids,” White remembers. “These were guys who would stick their hands through your chest and rip your heart out, but when it came to Julia they were playful as kittens.” Men like them didn’t normally work during the day and spent afternoons in front of television sets—often watching reruns of The French Chef. If Julia Child was occupying their table, they’d be pleased, just pleased, to take other seats.

  Halfway through the meal Dennis waved Jasper over to his table. “We want to send champagne to Julia,” he said. “Send her the best bottle in the house.”

  White didn’t know what to say. The last thing he wanted was to get her mixed up with these gentlemen, but he also was careful not to offend them at any cost. “Let me check with Julia, to see if she’s drinking tonight,” he said, which, of course, he knew she was, but wanted an easy out.

&nb
sp; Furtively, Jasper bent over Julia and whispered that some customers wanted to buy her a bottle of champagne. “But between you and me,” he said, “they are ruthless North End gangsters.”

  Julia looked at him curiously and said, “Oh, really? What kind of champagne?” When he explained it would be a three-hundred-dollar bottle of Dom Ruinart rosé, she said, “That would be fabulous, dearie.”

  “Okay,” he said, “but you’re going to have to talk to them afterward.”

  “No problem, dearie. You bring us that champagne.”

  After dessert plates were cleared, Jasper gave both tables the signal and everyone moved over to a vacant table in the corner. “They were probably the two single most frightening men I’ve ever met in my life,” White says, “but for ten or fifteen minutes they sat there talking about food, looking up at Julia with big rheumy puppy-dog eyes, thrilled out of their skulls to be in her company.”

  Most Saturday nights were far less exciting. Julia and her coterie of young, attractive women hit the social circuit on a regular basis. But there was one thing sorely missing from the equation: men. “She just adored men, and having them around,” says Rebecca Alssid. “The conversation always revolved around which men were the most handsome.”

  “Men, men, men—she was obsessed with them,” says Nancy Barr. “Her relationship with Paul had been the most satisfying part of her life, and it was clear, even at her age, she still craved male company.”