Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  THE BOSTON GLOBE AUDIENCE

  Julia was eager to add the written word to her television teaching. Before the first television program was shown on Monday, February 11, 1963, at 8 P.M. (and rebroadcast, as always, on Wednesday at 3 P.M.), Julia wrote an article about her first program for the Boston Globe. On Sunday, February 10, she was on the cover of Boston Globe TV Week, a pullout section of the Sunday magazine, sitting behind a large wooden bowl of almonds and holding a two-handled rocker knife. “Mrs. Child does actual cooking on camera in a delightful, easy and informal manner,” the paper announced. During 1963 and 1964, Julia offered forty-five short essays and recipes to the newspaper free of charge, with the stipulation that they not be bound. “40 Cloves of Garlic May Not Be Enough” was an essay about a visit from James Beard in which they cooked together, making poulet aux quarante gousses d’ail. From Grasse she submitted “Caves Age Roquefort Cheese to Perfection,” an essay with no recipes, but suggestions for using the cheese in dishes such as omelette au Roquefort. In another essay, she described her visit with Elizabeth David.

  This fifty-year-old housewife—the profession she then listed on her passport—became a local celebrity. “Dear Skinny” letters came from her former Smith classmates still living in New England. She received 200 cards and letters during the first twenty days of the television program. (Ruth Lockwood served as her business manager and personal producer when they were in Europe that first fall.) Her renown grew as her program was aired elsewhere. By the fall of 1964, when The French Chef was added by seventeen more stations, from New York City to Los Angeles, Julia would be sending recipes and photographs all over the country. Her face and voice were reviewed almost on a weekly basis. That fall she was invited to address the Newspaper Food Editors Conference at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City. As usual, she donated her $500 fee to WGBH. “As long as I can get clothes, and have a decent car, I’m not really interested in the money end of it,” she said to The Nation’s Business.

  Even her butcher on Kirkland Street became a celebrity. Jack Savenor and his wife, Betty, became close friends and their picture appeared in the paper dining with Julia and Paul. Twenty years later, the man who would say, “Hello, Julia, baby,” when she answered his telephone calls—“Hello, Big Jack,” she always replied—testified that she taught him much about the food business. She later established a strong bond with her fishmonger, George Berkowitz of Legal Sea Foods. But it was Savenor’s friendship with Julia that was the longest and strongest, and is typical of the respect she earned among her purveyors and associates in greater Boston.

  A careful study of the press coverage of these first few years reveals that Julia’s audience was broad, including both high and low culture, “from professors to policemen,” according to TV Guide. A group of avant-garde painters and musicians in Greenwich Village gathered every week to view her, believing initially that she was doing a parody of the traditional cooking program, but staying on as faithful watchers after learning otherwise. They especially enjoyed repeating the opening lines of the artichoke program. The San Francisco News Call Bulletin said in 1965 that she drew “more men than women viewers” to their Channel 9. The great American fear of being outré and gauche was diminished by this patrician lady who was not afraid of mistakes and did not talk down to her audience. With the Kennedys in the White House boosting the snob appeal of French dining and associating it with ruffles and truffles, Julia was making it accessible to everyone. Some, of course, would try to acquire culture merely by cooking a French dish, skipping the travel and study and suffering.

  In later years when she was asked about her audience, Julia denied that she was talking to what people thought of as “the stupid housewife.” “My audience is not la ménagère, but anyone interested in cooking, no matter the sex or age or profession. I want to show that there ain’t no mystery. Those who mystify are aggrandizing themselves.”

  In a profile in The Saturday Evening Post (with the Beatles on the cover), Lewis Lapham admired the fact that she “possesses none of the pretentious mannerisms so often associated with practitioners of haute cuisine.” Terrence O’Flaherty, in his San Francisco Chronicle column, called her “television’s most reliable female discovery since Lassie.” The Globe said, “She’s like a fairy godmother … she makes me a child again.” She “looks like someone’s older sister—the one who teaches high school gym class.” Such warm and fuzzy familiarity was not contradicted by the numerous references to her strength (implied in the gym teacher allusion). Even her assistant producer thought “she looked like the kind of person who should be out showing dogs or racing horses, not doing French cooking.” Another reviewer said she looked like she was off to play eighteen holes of golf because of that towel tucked into her belt. And the verbs used to describe her movements were strong ones, such as “crunch” and “bash.”

  Publicity doubled, tripled, and quadrupled as new stations aired the program around the country. Newsweek (July 15, 1963) said her program was helping “to turn Boston, the home of the bean and the cod, into the home of the Brie and the Coq as well.” She had to compose form letters to answer frequently repeated questions or comments. Most of the letters she received were full of praise, though some were filed in the “Julia Is Dirty” folder. The latter included complaints about her failure to wash her hands and her habit of touching food (“I just can’t stand those oversanitary people,” she responded). “You are quite a revolting chef the way you snap bones and play with raw meats,” one viewer wrote. Another: “I have turned off your program before today, when you seem bent on wine drinking, but this is the last time.”

  The most serious criticism emerged later when a French cooking teacher moved to Massachusetts and openly remarked that the star of The French Chef was neither French nor a chef. Even before this, Julia realized there was a problem with the title, but those who defended Julia pointed out that even if she was not a French chef, she was a damn fine home cook who knew French and French cooking techniques. Apart from the title of the program, Julia only referred to herself as a home cook. Never, even for playful skits or posing with French chefs, would she ever agree to don the traditional tall white toque.

  By August, less than a year since publication, Mastering the Art of French Cooking had sold 100,000 copies at $10 each and was in its fifth printing. Growing royalty checks, together with her third of her father’s $300,000 invested estate (probated in March 1964), allowed her to remain faithful to the world of public education. “Fortunately,” Paul wrote Charlie, “we are in a position where we don’t have to snap at the bait [of commercial temptations].” Now she was receiving 400 letters a week and hired temporary secretarial help to answer her mail. Ruth Lockwood took care of the requests for appearances and interviews when Julia and Paul left for two weeks in Maine and then five days at Bread Loaf in Vermont.

  But not before Julia attended her thirtieth reunion in Northampton. The celebration of the Class of ’34 provided the atmosphere for which all longtime graduates long: recognition and nostalgia. Mary Chase and many of her Hubbard Hall girlfriends were there, and everyone had read or seen Julia. She presented an improvised skit at the last minute with Charlotte Snyder Turgeon, daughter of a leading meat distributor in Boston, cookbook author, editor of the English translation of Larousse Gastronomique, and wife of King Turgeon, chairman of the French department at Amherst College. Charlotte and Julia stirred a big pot into which they threw various objects, including an old tennis shoe, and kept up a running commentary that made everyone laugh until they cried.

  TELEVISION’S ALL-STAR COOKS

  Julia was not the first to demonstrate her techniques on the little screen. James Beard had made his debut August 30, 1946, on network television: “Elsie presents James Beard in I Love to Eat!” announced Elsie the Cow, Borden’s promotional puppet. It was a fifteen-minute spot, expanded to thirty minutes, and canceled by his new sponsor, Birds Eye, the following spring. Beard may have begun in the theater, but he was ill a
t ease and awkward in front of the camera. Nevertheless, he appeared again on CBS’s In the Kitchen that fall, in At Home with Jinx and Tex, sponsored by Swift & Co. on May 11, 1947, and, after an interim of fifteen years, in The James Beard Show, a chatty, uninformative, and dated women’s talk show filmed in 1965–66 in Canada.

  But Beard was not the first television cook. In the early years of commercial television, local home economics teachers would come on in white uniforms and white shoes to illustrate the four basic food groups, most sponsored and influenced by food companies. Commercial television stations had built-in kitchen studios because advertisers were usually food related and the stations produced the commercials. Educational television stations, including WGBH, did not have kitchens.

  The first real food-centered teaching was done by Dione (pronounced Dee-o-nee) Lucas, who cooked on local commercial channels from 1948 to 1953. Lucas was in many ways the mother of French cooking in New York City. Born in 1909 in England, she came to New York City in 1942 and ran the Egg Basket, her combination restaurant and cooking school, which failed by the mid-sixties. Her first television cooking classes still stand up with integrity nearly fifty years later. Lucas was a crisp and neurotic woman whose apprentices thought her bossy. Others alleged that she was a veritable soap opera of eccentricities, dramatics, and migraine, exacerbated by drugs and alcohol; but she was generous and kind to Julia and Simca. After seeing one of her live demonstrations for the first time in November 1964, Julia wrote to Helen Evans Brown that “she is wonderfully expert.” Paul concluded she was “marvelously deft manually” despite the confusion of having three helpers on the stage, and he left “feeling bloody good about” their own program.

  Poppy Cannon, the can-opener queen, occasionally appeared nationally on CBS’s Home show, demonstrating, for example, how to make vichyssoise with frozen mashed potatoes, one sautéed leek, and a can of Campbell’s cream of chicken soup. The name of the soup and the only fresh produce in the recipe—that one leek!—seemed exotic enough for the American viewing public, most of whom had never seen a whisk before Julia Child made her televised omelet.

  “Child’s predecessors in the medium were less Dione Lucas or Poppy Cannon than Steve Allen and Ernie Kovacs,” said Robert Clark, Beard’s most recent biographer. Though the comparison diminishes her expert knowledge and teaching techniques—which are on a par with those of Dione Lucas—it does accurately note that she was a natural comedian belonging neither to the stern and serious Lucas approach nor to the glamour girl school demeanor of Betty Furness and Bess Myerson. She “was a droll six-footer with a Seven Sisters tone whose hearty and unself-conscious aplomb was the perfect foil to the pretensions of both fancy food and television,” Clark adds. She “transformed cooking into entertainment,” proclaimed Jane and Michael Stern in their Encyclopedia of Pop Culture (1987).

  Two other factors, apart from her humor, that distinguish her from other cooks on television then and even now—though there has been a legion of imitators since—are her voice and her mistakes. The Boston Globe published the following query:

  Q—Every time I see Julia Child, television’s “French Chef,” she seems to be out of breath. Does she suffer from asthma or emphysema?

  —H.B., Everett, Mass.

  A—Miss Child’s response is that her lungs are healthy. The art of cooking is a labor of love and involves a lot of manual labor. Try whipping a soufflé sometime.

  Her shallow breathing was reflected also in the high pitch of her voice (which got more pronounced with age), which would unexpectedly drop down, slide up, gasp, and pitch forward with a whoop—covering a full octave in the course of one recipe. Luckily, she found an audience before the television image-makers could discover that she was “all wrong” for television. Certainly today she would probably not have a chance at breaking into television. Despite the warbles, gasps, and breathlessness, she could keep talking—a considerable talent for a live demonstration—and speak in full sentences, interspersing narratives and effective references to France and to food.

  Reviewers could never place her accent. The first cover story in the Boston Globe Magazine (there would be many) described her “charming French accent,” but others described it as follows: “a flutey schoolmarm tone,” “a voice that bellowed its New England regionalism,” “not all that different from standard Californian,” and “that preposterous Boston Brahmin accent.” Many have tried to capture her unique vocal tone: “plummy,” “like a great horned owl,” “trills in that unmistakable falsetto with its profusion of italics,” and “a voice that could make an aspic shimmy.” Others used comparisons: “a combination of Andy Devine and Marjorie Main,” and “two parts Broderick Crawford to one part Elizabeth II.” Molly O’Neill says she “sounds like a dowager doing a burlesque routine,” and Clark Wolf says “it’s the voice of an English cookery lady.” Collectively, the impression was that hers was a voice as recognizable as those of Eric Sevareid, Walter Cronkite, and William F. Buckley, Jr. Her husband wrote a poem to her “mouth so sweet, so made for honeyed words.”

  The language Julia used was also a part of her unique character. Her choice of words and phrases reflected in part her age and the period in which she lived (she called her menstrual period “the curse” and homosexuals “fairies”). In conversations she could swear and speak frankly about private matters to the point that one of her lawyers would blush. On television she spoke of the icebox, not the refrigerator (though in her letters she called it the “frigo”), and the “chest,” not the breast, of the duck, and said “eek,” “wang,” or “bang” when she lowered her rolling pin or butcher knife with a thud to the table. She got a permanent every few months, wore falsies, and always wanted to be called “Mrs. Child,” yet she loved gossip, talking dirty, and a good belly laugh. Her favorite dismissive word—for abstract art, as an example—was “balls.”

  Among her friends, her expressions are legendary. Paul called it “Julie’s sleight of tongue,” naming double stainless-steel sinks “stinkless stains.” Or saying “blend the bladder” instead of “blend the batter” (or was it bladder blending instead of batter blending?). Of a minor mishap, she would say, “I did not have my glasses on when I was thinking.” In several restaurants she was heard to say, “The wine here flows like glue.” Leaving a noisy restaurant, she said, “It was so noisy I could not hear myself eat.” Gourmet magazine’s reviews were “a lot of mushmouthery!” She emphasized the last syllable of “shallot,” probably from the French é-cha-LOTE, and told Simca that she was “trying to get back into the grindstone.” When her work was interrupted, she exclaimed “Fistre, alors!” misspelling fichtre (screw it!) in dozens of letters to Simca. Bad news was punctuated by “Woe!” When she tapped the floured cake pan and flour fell to the floor, she quipped, “I have a self-cleaning floor.” There were many letters after that incident.

  She was known for delightful mistakes on her program, which became a frequent motif in news articles. The Boston Herald claimed she was blending olives when the top of the blender flew off, then the whole machine broke down: “Oh, well, who needs the mechanical age anyway?” she said. At first Morash could not correct minor problems because they had to keep the film running and did not have time to refilm an episode. He remembers stopping the film on only six occasions, including when the soufflé fell and when the kidney flambé failed to catch fire. Soon Julia realized that her recovery from near-catastrophe was an effective teaching tool and explained this fact to inquisitive reporters. She also explained to Helen Evans Brown that “people enjoy spilled wine bottles, dropped glasses, and potato plopped onto the stove—makes it so homey, they say.” Apocryphal stories have grown up around her accidents, including a story that she dropped a fish on the floor, picked it up, and continued. The only food that ever fell to the floor, according to Ruth Lockwood, was a piece of turkey wrapped in cheesecloth that rolled out from beneath a board. But the story of dropping a chicken (or fish) on the floor was continually embellished
until the Washington Post in 1992 had her dropping an entire side of lamb.

  Her ability at improvisation helped turn uncarveable suckling pig, flaming pot holders, and a melting dessert into human and humorous moments. One example of her improvisation that both Lockwood and Morash remember is the ringing of the freight elevator bell. Though they left a note downstairs saying they were taping, a loud ring sounded in the middle of a program and, without skipping a beat, Julia said, “Oh, that must be the gas man. But I am too busy and cannot answer it.” (Morash remembers her saying, “That must be the plumber, about time he got here. He knows where to go.”) Whatever the line, it was a great save. The melting dessert was charlotte aux pommes, made with bread and apples, rum and apricot preserves. Because she had used Gravensteins or McIntosh instead of the firmest apples, when she lifted the mold, the cake gave a sigh and slowly began to collapse. “Oh well, I don’t like these things too rigid,” Ruth Lockwood remembers Julia saying, picking it up and taking it to the dining table. It “began to sag,” as Julia described the incident a decade later, “and the whole dessert deflated like an old barn in a windstorm.”