As a way to earn money and get a class going I gave cooking lessons at a friend’s house for her friends [she told food writer Barbara Sims-Bell]. I would give them a great lunch, such as poached egg on mushroom and leek salad, a little pastry thing with béarnaise sauce, and chocolate cake. I did not have to worry about buying the food or getting the friends; I only charged $50 dollars; sometimes I would buy the food and give them the bill. They provided the wine. Then I would leave them with the dishes. I would leave with $200. I would not have made money in my own home. For all that work, you should make some money.
The last months of 1962, before they left for Christmas in San Francisco with Dorothy, were devoted to preparations for the January filming of thirteen (of a projected twenty-six) half-hour programs of The French Chef, produced by Russ Morash. Associate producer Ruth Lockwood, Paul, and Julia planned and named each segment. Life would never be the same again.
Chapter 17
LET THEM EAT QUICHE:
THE FRENCH CHEF
(1963 – 1964)
“I’m a teacher and I’ll stay with the educators.”
JULIA CHILD
As THE CAMERA moved in toward the steaming pot, Julia leaned down with her kitchen pinchers and lifted the cheesecloth cover to peer inside, then looked up into the camera and said, “What do we have here? The big, bad artichoke. Some people are afraid of the big, bad artichoke!” The music swelled and the title The French Chef filled the screen. “Welcome to The French Chef I’m Julia Child.”
She stood behind the counter on another day, with a large knife held high over a row of naked chickens, each resting upright on its tail, or what was traditionally called (she would later point out to a few angry viewers) the “pope’s nose.” As she moved from her left to her right, the smallest chicken to the largest, she tapped each chicken as if knighting them and announced dramatically, “Miss Broiler, Miss Fryer, Miss Roaster …” The music announced The French Chef and Julia introduced herself last.
On another occasion, after making a potato pancake that did not properly brown on one side, she demonstrated how to flip it over in the pan. “You have to have the courage of your convictions,” she said, giving the pan a short, fast jerk forward and back. She succeeded only partially and had to pick a piece of the potato mixture off the stovetop. “But you can always pick it up. If you are alone in the kitchen, whooooooo is going to see?” she sang with confidence.
At the end of each program, even one in which she was moist with stove heat and exhausted by chopping, she carried her dish to the demonstration “dining table,” lighted the candles, poured the wine, and tasted the dish with obvious relish and triumph, almost with an air of surprise. Once again, “the forces of art and reason,” as Lewis Lapham put it, had “triumphed over primeval chaos.” “Bon appétit!” she called out, lifting her glass of wine. Brought to you by Hills Bros. Coffee and Polaroid.
Theater, as Aristotle pointed out two thousand years ago, is both spectacle and a well-turned plot with beginning, middle, and end. To Ruth Lockwood’s credit, Julia’s half-hour programs were mini-dramas beginning with the presentation of the characters (chorus line of chickens, steaming artichokes), then the plot (the challenge of creating a dish called poulet en cocotte bonne femme), the rising tension (deboning, stirring, mixing), the climax (cooked chicken drawn from the oven), and the resolution (nibbles from a beautifully presented dish). Each program had about it, one critic noted, “the uncertainty of a reckless adventure.” Drama and resolution.
Julia’s sense of timing and her dramatic skills were an integral ingredient in the success of The French Chef. The gangly girl who staged plays in her mother’s attic with her brother John and the Hall children, who acted in plays for the Katharine Branson School, Smith College, and the Junior League, had long prepared herself for performing in front of an audience. Even when she and Simca were creating their book, she urged her partner to think in terms of an audience and “clean up” any bad habits.
Julia understood the value of the visual presentation, whether it was lining up naked chickens according to size or holding up two baguettes to the camera, watching one fall slowly and limply until it formed a circle, then tossing it over her shoulder with disdain, saying, “Terrible, terrible bread!” Or holding up two lobsters and explaining how to tell the boy lobster from the girl. Julia credits Lockwood and later Morash with some of her great openings and closings. Later she named a suckling pig John Barrymore because of his beautiful profile. “She is a natural clown,” Paul pointed out to the numerous journalists who in the years to come would visit the tapings. Many reporters commented on the ease of her performance. One reporter mistakenly called it “an ad-libbed show,” and a magazine termed her approach “muddleheaded nonchalance.” The best dramatic talents make their work look “easy.” As her friend Betty Kubler, a founder of the Longwharf Theater in New Haven, said of Julia’s acting genius, “Well, she’s got it! It is something you have or don’t have … a presence, timing, instinct for what’s funny, the ability to carry through with a gag or prop, it’s instinct.” Food writer Jeffrey Steingarten adds: “It is her personality. She didn’t invent herself for the show.”
MAKING THE FRENCH CHEF
Behind the scenes, as few in the audience would know, were many people, hours of preparation, four to six versions of the same dish at various stages of preparation, numerous notes and lists, and—as it is in legitimate theater—a lot of mess and fakery: though she appeared alone, there were several technicians and a hardworking husband behind the camera. The “wine” in the bottle was really Gravy Master (a darkening mixture) diluted with water. One false behind-the-scenes story that took on mythical proportions had assistants crouched under the table to take away dirty bowls. That scene was staged as a skit for a WGBH fund-raiser.
The first program of The French Chef was filmed on January 23, 1963. WGBH began with a series of thirteen episodes, then added thirteen more—never knowing there would eventually be 119 half-hour programs. Each program lasted 28 minutes and 52 seconds. Julia began with boeuf bourguignon and French onion soup, and ended with lobster à l’américaine and crêpes suzette: “Ruth, Paul, and I decided to start out with a few audience catchers, dishes that were famous [Russ called them her old chestnuts], like boeuf bourguignon, and then gradually work into the subject.”
When the Boston Gas Company dismantled their original kitchen, Russ Morash found a demonstration kitchen which would accommodate his outdoor bus at the Cambridge Electric Company on Blackstone Street. It was on the second floor of “a warehousey-looking building behind the smokestacks that line the Charles River.” Citizens paid their electric bills elsewhere in the building, but the kitchen, used for home economics demonstrations, “was a real Leave It to Beaver kind of kitchen with chintz curtains looking out on a fake background with sink and countertop, refrigerator, and built-in oven. We built an island for the stove and the cutting and chopping area.” Design Research again sent over the dining-room set to be used in the final scene of each program.
Paul, who arrived early and shoveled the snow off the fire escape steps above the parking lot, was porter and unpacker, even dishwasher. “Paul was the entire physical part of it,” said Ruth Lockwood. “He was there from the planning to the wash-up.” Julia and Ruth arranged the equipment Paul brought up the fire escape and, while Ruth called out each item on a long list, Julia said “check.” Julia arranged simple idiot cards (“put butter here,” “turn on burner #3”), and Ruth held a loose-leaf notebook and stopwatch as well as cards that said “stop gasping” and “wipe face.” Marian Morash, married to Julia’s producer, Russ, describes Julia as “an incredibly organized person who would come to the location with everything organized. I loved the no-nonsense care when working with food, and [her] spontaneous gaiety and sense of humor that surrounded the business at hand.” They began doing four programs a week, then cut back to three, eventually two, and at the end of two years finally one. Russ Morash believes that a
s the idiot cards got more detailed and numerous, the program became “less spontaneous” (though more professional). “The best programs were the first ones we made, which are no longer available.” Avis also thought these were “the best of the lot” because they “had a sort of purity to them.” In the introduction to her next book, Julia explained why they became more structured: she had no sense of whether one or five minutes had passed, and making onion soup one day she thought she had too many techniques to demonstrate—cutting, softening, browning the onions, crouton-making, gratinéing:
I rushed through that program like a madwoman but I got everything in, only to find that when I carried the onion soup to the dining room I had gone so fast we still had 8 minutes left. Agony. I had to sit there and talk for all that time. Russ erased the tape back to about the 15-minute point, but after it happened again, Ruth devised the plan of breaking up the recipe into blocks of time. I could go as fast or slow as I wanted in the allotted time block, but I could not go into the next step until I got the signal.
For the first series Julia spent the weekend planning and writing the program, spent Monday shopping with Paul, preparing the food and rehearsing at home. On Tuesday, they moved everything over to the studio and taped the program. On Wednesday, Julia began the process again while Morash filmed The Science Reporter, and on Thursday they set up and taped another one or two programs. For the next series they taped on Wednesdays and Fridays, putting the program together live, meaning they taped without stopping the film. Julia had to come prepared with a raw goose, a partially cooked goose, the cooked goose, and a spare.
The purpose of the programs, as in all her teaching, was to present French techniques, such as wielding a knife, boning a carcass, cleaning a leek, whipping or folding egg whites. “The idea was to take the bugaboo out of French cooking, to demonstrate that it is not merely good cooking but that it follows definite rules. The simplicity of a velouté sauce, for instance, is butter, flour, and seasoned liquid, but the rule is that the flour is cooked in the butter before the liquid is added. If you don’t cook [in this sequence] your sauce will have the horrid pasty taste of uncooked flour.” Julia the teacher spent nineteen hours preparing for each half hour of teaching: a fraction of the time taken for a recipe in their book, yet a disproportionately long amount of time for “classroom” preparation; but her ephemeral art was being made permanent on film and her audience was a thousand times greater than an average demonstration class. “Mrs. Child,” said Lewis Lapham, “thinks of herself as a missionary instructing a noble but savage race in a civilized art.” When the news went around that “commercial networks are begging her to come aboard,” she informed one paper that “I’m a teacher and I’ll stay with the educators.”
Russ operated on a shoestring, and he believes that his ability to keep down expenses was “one reason for the lengthy success” of the program. He called it “guerrilla television,” for operating with huge machinery under an urgent sense of time was like going to war. At first the studio paid $50 per episode to Julia and Paul, who did all the shopping. By 1966 she received $200 plus expenses per program.
Educational television (now called public television) began in Boston as an outgrowth of lectures at the Lowell Institute. It got its money from government grants and industry donations but did not operate for a profit, and was especially blessed in Boston, which granted it a low number (Channel 2). Because lower frequencies are easier to tune in, most big cities gave their lower numbers to commercial stations such as ABC, NBC, and CBS (a commercial exploitation that held back educational television a generation, says Morash). The efforts of Boston banker Ralph Lowell and the power of the city’s educational and cultural institutions—WGBH is licensed by the FCC to MIT, Boston University, Harvard, the Boston Symphony, the Boston Museum, and Boston College, among others—resulted in getting the lowest number for their educational channel. But, as Morash points out, “we did not have the money to buy a transmitter big enough to get the signal up to New Hampshire then. It was like putting the signal out with a fifty-watt bulb and a guy pedaling.” Nevertheless, Julia was there at the beginning; indeed, she helped to build what would be one of the most influential educational stations in the country.
When the taping was over, the crew usually ate the edible food, though sometimes they refused to eat produce such as asparagus, which was unfamiliar. Slowly, they became more adventuresome and ate asparagus, mushrooms, and chicken livers. “The best free lunch in town,” said one grip. Julia sent the raw or partially cooked version home with Russ, with detailed instructions for its cooking. Marian, his wife, prepared the dish as if she were taking at-home classes with Julia. Her burgeoning talent for cooking eventually won out over her shyness and she came onto the set of a 1970s series as a regular assistant to Julia.
They set an incredible pace the first year of taping by working twelve-hour days and finishing thirty-four shows during the first half of the year. “I like working with men,” Julia often said. “Russ,” who was not yet thirty, “was the boss!” In 1994 he said, “By today’s standards the schedule was heroic.” “It’s the hardest work I’ve ever done,” Julia informed Helen Evans Brown, who wrote from Pasadena that she heard Julia’s programs “are terrific…. It takes a certain very definite personality to come over the air and you have it. Poor Jim [Beard] doesn’t, which is a pity as he is 7/8th ham!” (By October the Pasadena station was airing The French Chef.) Beard, with whom Julia hoped to collaborate, invited her down whenever there was a break in her filming to teach several classes at his cooking school. Her letters reveal that Julia intended to present other cooks, both professional and talented amateurs, on her television program, but while she was waiting until the program was professionalized enough to invite Beard to appear, she became the only performer the audience expected and wanted to see each week.
In addition to this back-aching schedule, Julia managed to correct the page proofs of the British edition of Mastering, tape promotion ads for WGBH fund-raisers, teach classes for Beard, give special demonstrations at the Women’s City Club, the Boston Club, and Newburyport’s Smith Club, as well as sit for interviews with the press in Boston and New York City. That summer she and Paul missed Bread Loaf, but took two and a half months in the fall to visit Norway (sailing on the Oslofjord for Oslo on August 22), France, and England. Julia saw for the first time France’s only television cook, Raymond Oliver, who appeared every two weeks and “took five minutes to peel the peppers,” she wrote Avis DeVoto. But the most important result of these weeks in the south of France was to plan with Simca for a second volume of Mastering. They also discussed the possibility of building a small house for Julia and Paul on Jean Fischbacher’s family land in Provence.
Julia also met Elizabeth David, England’s doyenne of cookery writing. Their meeting was preceded by several important moves: advance buildup by DeVoto and Beard, a mailing of Mastering to David (who responded on May 10, 1963, that it was “marvelous” and “meticulous”), and the publication of the British edition of Mastering by Cassell, for which David wrote a review. Formerly an actress, David now shunned the public spotlight and wrote enduring culinary literature (French Provincial Cooking, her penultimate book, was published in 1960); indeed, her first books did not even list ingredients. “Her recipes were the reverse of Julia’s,” says Alice Waters, her most ardent American disciple, “she begins at the market and then makes the recipe.” Julia, overlooking her anti-American reputation, found her “nice, quiet, shy,” and when she read David’s review (“the first one from a real pro”) she was ecstatic: David drew a lengthy and exalted comparison of Julia with her “predecessors” Eliza Acton and Madame Saint-Ange—all three had “quiet persistence … style … and heart.” As happy as Julia was with the review, she shuddered at the “translation” into English by someone who was not a cook.
Julia returned to Boston for immediate resumption of filming The French Chef in the first week of December 1963. One-third of the recipes for the
program came from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, but most were slightly revised because time constraints necessitated cutting a few steps. She learned to bring in one prechopped onion and one on which she would demonstrate the chopping technique before showing the viewer what the fully chopped onion was to look like. Some of the recipes would be used later in Mastering II. “How am I going to squeeze in another book?” she wondered. “That is the big question.”
One of the most imaginative aspects of the programs concerned the invention of titles. Ruth Lockwood remembers laughing uproariously at the Childs’ kitchen table as they created the titles for later programs: “Waiting for Gigot,” “Introducing Charlotte Malakoff,” “Lest We Forget Broccoli,” and “A French Cape.” “We were so proud of our titles, but no one paid attention to the titles,” said Mrs. Lockwood ruefully.
In 1964 she taped thirty-one more programs, filming every Wednesday and Friday for six weeks, then resuming after a month off and repeating the process in the spring (in November and December they made one program a week). They also initiated formal rehearsal time and used more unpaid assistants to help in preparation and washing up. Rosemary Manell came up from Washington, DC, to work for the spring shoot as Julia’s unpaid assistant and food arranger. They had cooked together in Marseilles, Georgetown, and Brussels (when the Childs were in Bonn). Rehearsal time and other factors increased the cost of the production.
Julia continued to teach at Beard’s cooking school and sat for an important interview with Craig Claiborne. His article featured her kitchen and batterie de cuisine on half a page of the March 5 issue of the New York Times. Except for sold-out demonstrations at Wellesley for the Smith alumnae scholarship fund (she raised more than $2,000), Julia had to turn down most requests for her time. She avoided public speaking, but would ad-lib through a cooking demonstration. Her first public speech (on cookbooks) was in a small library in Massachusetts and was a chore, even with Paul’s assistance. When the second shooting of the TV series was finished in the late spring, she spent a week in Lumberville for the publication of Charlie’s book on the building of their Maine cabin, Roots in the Rock, edited for the Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown by Peter Davison, who spent repeated summers on Mount Desert Island and knew it well.
Appetite for Life Page 38