Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  The other factors distinguishing Julia Child as a television cooking teacher are interrelated: she was noncommercial and she was located in Boston. Julia refused to become commercial, especially when what Paul called “the Madison Avenue hounds” began calling in 1964. Olivetti offered her $2,500 to be photographed with their typewriters, but she declined. She represented public television: she believed she could never endorse a product or accept money to represent a profit-making institution. This stand lent credibility both to WGBH and to her own opinions. She could not be bought. In later years, her lawyer would stop anyone who tried to borrow the Child name for promotion purposes.

  Her choice of Boston as her home base kept her out of the food wars and competition of New York City, though Barbara Kafka believes that “the competitive atmosphere in New York was not that bad then.” New York City thought of itself as the center of food and cooking and television. Boston was a smaller town with a greater reverence for history and tradition, if not a sense of intellectual superiority. Boston “suits her to a T,” adds Kafka. Most significantly, it was the home of WGBH: “New York City could not have afforded to bring her in,” Kafka remarks. “Her proximity to WGBH was critical to her career.”

  Boston was also the home of Fannie Farmer, the maiden aunt of home economics and “scientific cookery,” as well as The Boston Cooking School Cook Book in the late nineteenth century. Julia Child brought a new aesthetic to food, one based on the centrality of pleasure and taste. Though Boston named some of the streets in its older neighborhoods Fish Lane, Bean Court, Corn Court, Grouse, Quail, Milk, Water, Fruit, Berry, Millet, and Russet, the food tastes of its natives were as simple as the street names suggest. Privately, Julia complained that Boston was “a gastronomic wasteland.” Yet the city took its new celebrity to its heart, and in the decade to come, like Boston Pops director Arthur Fiedler, she would become a beloved institution along with Faneuil Hall, Durgin-Park, and the Red Sox.

  LIGHTENING UP THE DARK AGES

  “We did not have freshly ground pepper or leeks, copper bowls or whisks, fresh garlic or herbs other than parsley. And our wine had screw tops,” says Russ Morash. “Except for a few gourmet shops in New York City, we lived in the Dark Ages.” Culinary historian Barbara Wheaton says that when she returned to the United States from Europe in 1961, she could find leeks only at a farm stand near Concord. For those with gardens, the produce was excellent, the preparation simple. Salt cod and baked beans were the dishes most revered in Boston, and fish was eaten every Friday, no matter how it was cooked or what your religion was. Across America, consumers were being urged to buy canned and frozen TV dinners, and their TV tables stood in the corner of most living rooms or family rooms. Though there were regional specialties, such as Boston’s beans and cod, there was no American cuisine. Such was the cooking world that Julia was trying to change.

  Disinterest, ignorance, even fear of food were endemic in suburbia. Every new health warning (Poisons in Your Food) reinforced America’s puritanical relationship to food and wine. Food was either sinful or a bothersome necessity. The most popular food books in the early 1960s were Calories Don’t Count and the I Hate to Cook Book, though every bride received the red-and-white-checkered Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook. Peg Bracken was the author of the I Hate to Cook Book, which, like Poppy Cannon’s Can Opener Cookbook, came with attitude, saucy and satiric, and an attack on both home economists and gourmets. Surprisingly, when Peg Bracken, who sold three million copies of her book, reviewed Lyndon Baines Johnson’s barbecue recipes in 1965 she made the following suggestion: “Elect Julia Child—if we want a cook for President, let’s get a good one.”

  The first challenge to Julia’s efforts to teach French cooking to Americans arose just before she left Oslo when she read a “horrible” article in Time about cholesterol and wrote her editor that she “hoped it blows over before September … I don’t believe a word of it.” She might momentarily stem the “hate to cook” tide, but thereafter would always have to fight the cholesterol battle. In her favor she had Americans’ increasing travel abroad, the wider prosperity and habit of eating out, and the growing interest in both ethnic produce and French chic. “For all Julia has been attacked by nutritionists,” said Barbara Wheaton in 1994, “she has done more to make nutritious food palatable than an army of nutritionists armed with no-calorie oil. More people eat fruit and vegetables because of her. She is living proof that moderation is the key.”

  Julia made vegetables and basic dishes familiar to many. One interviewer in 1964 had to explain to his readers that quiche is “a cheese pie,” something that would never occur to a journalist today, thanks in part to Julia’s efforts. Perhaps the eggs Benedict and quiche craze of the late 1960s and early 1970s was introduced by Helen and Philip Brown in their Breakfast and Brunches for Every Occasion (1961), but it was Julia who showed more Americans, from Saugus to Sacramento, how to make the dishes.

  The commercial impact of The French Chef was considerable. Time magazine (March 20, 1964) said, “She provokes a rating more accurate than Nielsen ever measured.” When she cooked broccoli, Time noted, the vegetable was sold out within two hundred miles of the broadcast station. When she made an omelet, every omelet pan was sold out of the few specialty stores stocking them. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Williams-Sonoma had “many requests for special cooking utensils [that were] received the day following the telecasts.” Charles Williams, who met Julia in 1961 when she was in San Francisco promoting her book with Simca, opened his kitchen equipment store in 1956 and moved to the city on the bay two years later. He carried all sizes of quiche pans, omelet pans, charlotte molds, soufflé dishes, sauté pans, and porcelain ovenware made in France. “Much of the baking equipment was unknown then,” said Williams in 1995, “but Julia helped to change all that, and her shows clearly impacted what people bought, even the very next morning.”

  Her social impact was already evident in May 1965 when the first public parody of The French Chef appeared at a charity event in San Francisco. In “Varieties of 1965,” a man named Charles Huse donned a toque (which Julia would never have worn) and stuffed a turkey with everything but the bottle of wine that he was chugalugging. “Cooking While Gassed,” he called his show, and it brought down the house, according to the San Francisco Examiner on May 13.

  Julia began several important trends during the 1960s: home entertaining, television cooking (cooking became entertainment), a greater precision in teaching cooking, and the phenomenon of the cook as star. She was the first major television-created personality in the cooking world. Changing Americans’ attitudes toward food would take decades, but the impact is undeniable: she celebrated her appetite, the joy of the kitchen, and the pleasure of food, a pleasure conveyed in the way she patted the bread dough and caressed the chicken.

  Julia finished taping shows on brioches and veal Prince Orloff, in time for the WGBH 1964 holiday party and for Christmas at Lumberville with Charlie and Freddie. They were filming that fall in a kitchen with a movable set in WGBH’s new building. Julia thought it was “beautifully decorated in the French Provincial style. It looks airy, dignified, chic, and I would like to bring the whole thing home with me.” She and Paul were worried about the escalating costs of building their house in Provence and preparing to tape a new series of programs in January before they sailed on the Queen Elizabeth for France.

  The following year, in 1965, they filmed another twenty-two programs, taking a break between July and September for family and visitors, for Bloody Marys and the spirit of Robert Frost at Bread Loaf, and for chowder and croquet in Maine. Before completing her fall taping and entertaining an enlarged family of twenty-one for Thanksgiving dinner, Julia held a September 17 taping for the press. She announced that the following year they would open up the programs for audiences of 100 for a fee benefiting WGBH. The French Chef was now syndicated on sixty-six stations; it would grow to ninety-six by the end of the year. In addition, sales of Mastering the Art of F
rench Cooking were picking up speed; 200,000 copies had now been sold!

  Chapter 18

  PROVENÇAL WINTERS

  (1965 – 1967)

  “We are, after all, partly European,

  and just must return.”

  JULIA CHILD to Elizabeth David,

  April 14, 1964

  AFTER TWISTING and turning along French roads built during medieval times, Julia and Paul drove the last sweep down a steep hill beneath Plascassier, passing La Ferme de le Brague and turning right onto a dirt road. They crossed a small brook and drove between two stone pillars to a fork in the road. Instead of taking the road to the left for Simca and Jean’s three-story, rectangular stone house, they turned right and climbed the hill where they first encountered their new peach-colored stucco house with green shutters. They called it La Pitchoune, “The Little One.”

  They were in the hills above Cannes, the Riviera community made famous by the French film festival and Hollywood, just off the road that leads into Grasse, the perfume capital of France. Olive trees and bushes dotted the hillsides, alternating with flower-growing fields of roses and jasmine, local crops for the perfume factories. Grape vines and olive trees signaled more earthly physical nourishment in this Alpes-Maritimes province. Their address was Plascassier, later attached to the town of Châteauneuf de Grasse.

  Of all their previous homes, this one resembled most those in Julia’s native Southern California, with its warm climate, stucco houses, and red-tiled roofs. In this fertile pocket, flowers bloomed year-round and the mimosa and violets perfumed the air. They had thought of building in Maine or California, but Provence was in sunny France, she was the French Chef, and Simca was next door. This vacation house was Julia’s reward for years of hard labor as a writer, teacher, and cook, a reward for doing what she most loved.

  Essence of long-held dream was in the air

  When, on a slope with olive trees above,

  Foundation stone took root….

  Paul Child (1967)

  THE HOUSE BUILT BY A BOOK

  The first formal plans were agreed upon by mail back in November 1963, the week John Kennedy was assassinated. Julia wept openly at the President’s death, Paul reported in his letters to Simca and Jean. When they decided on a single-level dwelling, Paul opened a line of credit for Jean and Simca to use for the building. Paul had originally struggled with the builder, who wanted to create a palazzo. But Paul and Julia wanted a more modest home requiring little maintenance, one built from book royalties, where they could live a simple life. “I finally got what we wanted,” Paul said. “I’m tough and I speak perfect French.” Despite Paul’s public frugality, Julia’s January 1966 royalty payment of $19,000 paid for half the house (the previous midyear royalty total had been $26,000).

  That December, they walked through the front door facing the hill town. Before them was the long living and dining area with a fireplace on the left wall, all in white stucco. The floors were tiled. Down the hall to the right were the kitchen on the left, guest room to the right, and at the end of the hall, Julia’s room on the left, with her built-in desk shelf along the window facing south, and to the right Paul’s room with a little fireplace and door opening out to the front stone terrace. His room contained the double bed, where Julia, a prodigious snorer, could cuddle with her insomniac husband every morning. “The house is a jewel, even in its unfinished state,” she wrote Avis. Julia told the Smith College alumnae newsletter that they planned to “smell the mimosas all winter, curing our own olives and cooking entirely with garlic and wild herbs.” She wrote Helen Evans Brown (a month before Helen’s death): “We live on an olive-strewn land, and we hope to hobble about the vineyards there when we are 80 and 90—the Lord willing.”

  This first five-month stay, from early December 1965 through March 1966, would set the pattern—from three to six months a year in La Pitchoune—that was to continue through the 1970s, when Paul’s declining health necessitated shorter visits. While Julia wintered in Provence, her television programs continued running, now in nearly a hundred cities. Her audience always felt her presence in their homeland, if not their own homes, and Avis mailed weekly analyses of each program to Julia in France.

  “All the essentials are here,” Julia wrote to James Beard at the beginning of the new year. “Paul [with Charlie’s help] has ‘hung’ the kitchen, so we feel we are in business. In fact, we are so happy I doubt if we shall go to Paris at all. The weather has been sunny, rainy, warm, cold, and the garden is growing. Simca and Jean have been so thoughtful of every detail, we are quite overwhelmed.”

  With the new year coming to a close, Julia settled in to preparing her recipes for what would be the final shooting of The French Chef. The hope by 1966 was to suspend making new tapes until they finished Mastering the Art of French Cooking II. Paul turned sixty-four in mid-January with a sense of peace, listening to the wind sighing in the cypresses and what he called “my favorite woodpecker … tap-tap-tapping away on TV recipes.”

  This first lengthy stay in La Pitchoune was devoted to cooking, writing, and typing recipes for the tapings, a preparation made easier without the constant telephone calls and appearances. She was talking to WGBH, Beard, and Michael Field about having a weekly half-hour cooking program featuring a variety of chefs. She confided to Avis that if WGBH would get Michael Field (who had a New York cooking school) and others on the Educational Television Network, it “would let me off the hook, and would give others a chance, and be refreshing to have a change.” Such sentiments express her generosity as much as they do her possible naivete about the growing competitiveness of the market.

  Among their favorite guests was Sybille Bedford, the English novelist (best known for A Legacy, 1956), who rented nearby with her mate Eda Lord (a former classmate of M. F. K. Fisher and, according to Paul’s description, “[Bedford’s] Alice B. Toklas”). When Julia was particularly busy, Simca’s maid and sometime cook, Jeanne (Jeanette) Villar, an illiterate but much adored domestic who lived on the property, would prepare the roast lamb for their dinners together. They liked Sybille (a Cora DuBois type, Paul thought), bearlike and direct, colorful and outspoken, who poked into every drawer and cupboard on her first visit. They admired her eccentricity, intellect, and passion for wine and food (Paul took her advice on wine purchases). They pumped her with questions about her coverage (for Life) of the Jack Ruby trial in Dallas.

  Other favorite guests, whose visits were “cozy and relaxed,” were Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark, who lived nearby in 1967. It was only when “Red” received the Bollingen Prize that Julia discovered he wrote poetry as well. On a return visit to the Warren house, they dined with Max Ernst (and, according to Paul, his “loud-mouth” American wife). Other visitors in 1967 included Bob and Mary Kennedy of Boston, Bill Koshland of Knopf, Hélène Baltrusaitis (without “old Yogourt,” her husband) from Paris, and Peter and Mari Bicknell from Cambridge, England, who would stay on during April after the Charlie Childs and Kennedys drove back to Paris and headed home (with a trunk full of French cookware for the WGBH auction). “No hidin’ place …,” Paul informed Charlie. It was as if old friends and gastronomes would arrive in Cannes or Nice and follow the smell of mimosas. “It’s astonishing how many of our friends and family have reached this semi-demi-mini hermitage since we first touched down,” he wrote to Charlie on April 7, 1967. And each year the numbers grew.

  Julia was also caught up in the local community, nursing Jeanne Villar when she was ill, getting involved in the lives of all the local shopkeepers, including the illnesses and deaths of their neighbors. She seemed to know them all by name, according to her letters.

  Julia and Simca were in the talking stages on their second volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Julia constructed the outline in 1966 (by then their first volume had sold a quarter of a million copies); they were choosing and testing the recipes in 1966 and 1967. Recipes went back and forth in their weekly letters (when they were not together). Mastering II
would include some of the recipes, particularly the baked foods, they had not put in the first volume. Simca continued to teach her class in Paris during the winter months. Julia would visit occasionally on her way to or from La Pitchoune, with a detour to see her own chef, Max Bugnard, now eighty-two and crippled with arthritis.

  “Simca was outspoken and a lot like my mother,” said one of Simca’s students, Ailene Martin. “Everything was black and white, there was no middle ground.” This French dogmatism did not always endear her to Paul. Simca had a ferocious concentration that some called driven or obsessive, and her laughter could be harsh. One journalist described her as having hints of Margaret Leighton and Marlene Dietrich in her manner. She was vivacious, stubborn, and opinionated, and sometimes Julia and Simca had major disagreements. Each called the other, behind her back, une force de la nature. Betty Kubler confirms the willfulness of Simca: “Julia had an instinct about when to go along and when to hold back … it was the same instinct she had on the stage; it was sheer drama working with Simca.”

  When Julia walked out onto her stone terrace with coffee cup in hand early in the morning, she looked over the rolling layers of hills and listened to the silence. She particularly admired the 150-year-old olive tree in front of their house where the workman had carefully lowered it for replanting. In the spring, when the almond trees were flowering, she “would hear the frogs croaking in the little river at the bottom of our hill,” she wrote Avis. One or the other of the cats, Minouche or her mother, Mimimère, rubbed against her leg in greeting. Later, when the warm sun would bake the floral smells, and mimosas scented every breath, she would take the fieldstone and grass path to the side kitchen door of Simca’s kitchen, where they planned their day and discussed the problem of a particular recipe.