Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  Proximity spurred their creativity. Julia made a deboned chicken breast stuffed with mushrooms for Simca and experimented with croissants. Simca created a frozen mousse with caramelized walnuts and kirsch in cookie cups. These experiments, dated February and March 1966, appeared radically transformed in the second volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. In July they were corresponding about chocolate cakes and finding the best method of melting chocolate. By 1967, they were testing soup and pâté en croûte, then moving in on their perfect chocolate cake (Julia brought American chocolate with her). The only cooking Julia disliked was deep-fat frying and the making of “little” hors d’oeuvres or canapés.

  Two or three times a week, Julia would go to one of the surrounding towns and walk through the shops or markets, filling her blue-and-green-plaid cloth baskets. Her kitchen quickly filled up, for, as Paul described it, “Julia is a compulsive gadget, cooking-vessel, and tool buyer.” They would buy wine at Clenchard’s in Cannes, check out the new supermarché in Cannes to compare it with the Giant in Washington, DC, visit the Fondation Maeght gallery in St.-Paul-de-Vence, and sometimes take brief trips to meet friends in Montreux, Gstaad, Lausanne, and Paris. Julia always visited Elizabeth Arden on Thursdays in Cannes for her hair trim and set (Paul called it getting “Ardenized,” and later approved of her purchase in Cambridge of a wig for “unexpected” public appearances—“slightly more chestnutty than her own hair color”). When they ate out it was at the Auberge du Coin in Biot or the two-star L’Oasis at La Napoule, just outside Cannes. After one such dinner, Julia and Simca re-created loup en croûte (French bass), which Paul photographed.

  The coming of the supermarché was not the only change the Childs observed through the years. As early at 1967 Paul declared, “We are in a Los Angeles 1915 situation,” referring to the mushrooming of new houses around Cannes. He bemoaned the “progress.” Julia was disheartened by the trend of French women to be “assembler cooks,” like American women who put together canned or frozen things with a bit of fresh stuff and flavoring before baking it. With prosperity, more conveniences, and hired help, French women soon would not be able to cook, Julia lamented. Simca agreed.

  The influence of Provençal cooking was evident in the Childs’ Valentine’s Day card of 1966: A chef wearing a toque is carrying a large spoonful of red hearts over his shoulder, the other hand is dragging a chain of garlics. (“Jeanne Villar taught Julia and Simca everything about Provençal cooking,” declared Ailene Martin.) In 1967 they just sent a photograph of La Pitchoune, for the mailing list was growing to more than 300 names and they were ready to end this tradition.

  Over the years, James Beard, M. F. K. Fisher, Michael Field, and other culinary luminaries were drawn to the shrine of good eating at the Beck/Child compound. In 1966, James Beard rented La Pitchoune for June; and Michael (and Frances) Field in July and August. In 1967, Poppy Cannon, now the food editor at The Ladies’ Home Journal, came by for a visit in March—Julia did not like the name of the journal (Ezra Pound once called it The Ladies’ Home Urinal) but invited her to lunch and later in the year gave an interview and recipes for a Christmas-in-Cambridge piece. Beard spent several summers renting La Pitchoune (May through July), working on his American Cookery there. Jeanne, who adored him, called him her “gros.” Perhaps all these food writers were unknowingly inspired by the ghost of Auguste Escoffier, who was born nearby in Villeneuve-Loubet.

  Each winter for nearly twenty years, Julia and Paul took the train (or flew) down from Paris, rented a car from Hertz, and spent the winter and early spring months at “La Peetch.” They adhered to their habit of early rising, marketing (Julia’s favorite was in the rue Meynadier in Cannes), and painting for Paul; and, after work, a cocktail hour on the terrace in warm weather. They walked every path and hill in the region, visited a restaurant every week (usually with disappointing results), kept up with events through letters, the International Herald Tribune, and L’Express. Paul resumed both his diary-letter to Charlie, in his best pen-and-ink script, and his painting in a renovated cabanon (a Provençal shepherd’s hut of two rooms, one atop the other) just yards from their home. The entire estate had been inherited by Simca’s two sisters-in-law and was called Bramafam (in local dialect, “cry for hunger”).

  AWARDS AND HONORS

  If La Pitchoune was the major material reward for her labors, the honorary public awards began that April 1965 at the Hotel Pierre in New York, when Julia was given the Peabody Award. She told Simca that their program was “receiving an award of some sort” in New York, not apparently impressed that the George Foster Peabody Award was the top award for broadcasting. Yet Paul was “all swollen up with vicarious pride.”

  The next month, she and Paul went to the Americana Hotel in New York for the East Coast ceremony for television’s Emmy (named for “Immy,” an engineering term for the camera tube). The ceremony was to be hosted by Bill Cosby, then a co-star of I Spy. The West Coast participants were gathered at the Palladium in Hollywood, where the show was hosted by Danny Kaye. Both audiences were being hurried through their dinner when a man came to the table and handed Julia her award: The French Chef won for the best program on educational television. Her producer, Ruth Lockwood, was sitting beside her and heard Julia, who rarely watched television, ask Cosby, “Would you mind telling me what your name is?” “Certainly,” Cosby replied, “Sidney Pokier.” When the ceremony began, all the Educational Television Network people at their table realized there would be no airtime for the presentation of their award. Commercial television had its prerogatives; Julia lodged a strong complaint, less for herself than for the snub of public broadcasting.

  Julia was the first educational television personality to win an Emmy.

  With the increased publicity and business, she hired a full-time secretary, Gladys Christopherson, who would work for her for the next ten years. When Julia was on the road or abroad, Gladys opened and forwarded mail. Ruth Lockwood always handled the business and appearances, saying no to some very important interview requests (such as The Times of London) so that the program taping could be finished and the book could progress.

  In August, while they were in Maine (where Julia baked dozens of experimental batches of brioches and they roasted a suckling pig), Joan Barthel’s lengthy feature story on Julia in The New York Times Magazine appeared, calling her “educational TV’s answer to underground movie and pop-op cults—the program that can be campier than ‘Batman,’ farther-out than ‘Lost in Space’ and more penetrating than ‘Meet the Press’ as it probes the question: Can a Society be Great if its bread tastes like Kleenex?” Her “simultaneously gravelly and trilling” voice emphasized the “comic vein running through the program”: the “chatty asides,” and occasional acrobatics (such as demonstrating on her own body the various cuts of meat). Barthel also reported that Ruth Lockwood had to talk Julia out of washing and toweling the suckling pig (“Please don’t call it ‘him’”). Instead, Julia mentioned on the air in passing that she brushed the teeth and cleaned the ears.

  A very different take on the appeal of her programs comes from MIT’s Douwe Yntema, who reports that a group of physicists and applied engineers at the Lincoln Laboratory gathered weekly to watch Julia. The men, according to Yntema, were interested in her technique, her attention to detail and rules. Here was a woman on television who was not sexy and was not selling something; she was demonstrating technique, and they were fascinated. Over 350 letters a week came into WGBH alone. Among the 104 stations, New York City’s WNDT sometimes received 1,000 requests for a particular recipe. Many letters could be answered by the stations, which had copies of the recipes, but Julia’s correspondence was always burdensome.

  She and Paul topped off their Maine vacation that year with a stay at Bread Loaf in Vermont, where Julia attended every lecture (“I learn so much! … But can’t say much for the institutional food”) and met with their old friend poet John Nims. After six years, Bread Loaf’s “spirit of Robert Frost and Blo
ody Mary” had not faded for Julia and Paul. She was one of many writers there, though she would not have considered herself one. The fame did not seem to affect her except for the influx of letters, which by September numbered more than her secretary and she could handle, even with the growing use of form letters.

  In the third week of October 1966, Life published an article featuring Julia “hamming it up in the haute cuisine” and three of Paul’s photographs. The article praised her “wizardry,” guessed that “a sizable portion of her following are people who wouldn’t know a truffle from a toadstool,” and asserted that her program “has immeasurable effect on the commodity market.” Julia confided to Simca that she was getting used to the publicity: “I find I am shamelessly avid for sales of the book. I can’t say I would do anything at all, of course, but I will certainly expose myself (or you!) to any number of things which would have appalled me some years ago, when good breeding meant never having one’s name in print!” Her next-door neighbor, Ithiel deSola Pool (MIT professor in communications and public opinion), often remarked to his wife, “You know, Julia is revolutionizing what women can do in this country. She may not know it, but she is doing it.”

  Then, on November 25, Time put her on the cover of the magazine in a feature article on American food, “Everyone’s in the Kitchen.” The article documented the increasing availability of American produce, the growing number of cookbooks (of the 206 “last year alone,” their five-year-old Mastering was still the best seller), and the history of American cooks (picturing Fannie Farmer, Dione Lucas, Craig Claiborne, and James Beard). Julia declared in 1984 that the Time cover story was the fifth most important event in her career, after meeting Paul, attending the Cordon Bleu and meeting Simca, the book, and television.

  The food community also considered the Time cover story something of a “watershed” event, conferring “genuine legitimacy on gastronomy and cooking after years of mockery and condescension,” according to one food writer, who went on to mistakenly claim that “the cult of Julia drew its initiates almost entirely from the most affluent strata of society and the inhabitants of Georgetown, Cambridge, Beverly Hills, the north shore of Chicago, and the Upper East Side of New York.”

  Here she was, “our lady of the ladle,” gazing benevolently from the cover of Time at her vast American following. She was now a reassuring and familiar icon, a national treasure, cherished for her pervasive presence on television. The large spoon she waved on the pages and covers of magazines was never threatening: like the baton of the conductor, it was calling her countrymen to a celebration of good food and wine, a magic wand offering entry to the secrets and joys of cooking. Every class of people loved her, as her mail and the greetings of workmen and tradespeople affirmed. If at first it was chiefly the affluent class of New England that cooked with her, her appeal reached out to the great middle class. “French cooking now rose from the ashes in middle-class America,” says historian Harvey Levenstein, and it was Julia, he says, who gave it “an energetic push.”

  While the feature stories and awards heralded her influence on the way Americans were learning to cook, the preponderance of citizens still tossed together casseroles of ground beef and canned soup and were enthusiastic about Tang, Cool Whip, and salads with bacon bits sprinkled on top. In the university communities they played folk music and ate paella, the most recent fad. And McDonald’s was, in one food historian’s view, “the nation’s greatest cooked food retailer.” While American tastes were still largely pedestrian, they were slowly evolving from green Jell-O and mock apple pie made with Ritz crackers to quiche lorraine and boeuf bourguignon. “The same working mother who repairs to McDonald’s three times a week,” claims one economist, “may settle down on the weekend for a bout of gourmet cooking.”

  Consequently, food writing and food consulting grew fast. According to food writer Robert Clark, “the stakes in food writing and consulting were rising exponentially … [and] it still seemed for most people in the food business as though there were too few opportunities and too many rivals.” Oblivious to rivalry, Julia urged Beard and others to come to Boston and “cook exactly the way you want.” The pay was only $200 plus food costs for each program, but she wanted them to teach on her local station. The benefits from television lay in book sales, she assured Beard.

  In return for the boost in her book sales, Julia gave much back to WGBH, including the earnings from her demonstrations, for which she received about $500 for a two-hour performance. She also participated in fund-raisings and auctions, helping them take in $126,000 in May 1967. Julia kept all her own financial books and did her own agenting until, at one of their Harvard/Atlantic Monthly group cocktail parties, Brooks Beck expressed horror that Julia was not involved in estate planning, establishing a revocable trust, and making provisions to protect her name from “invasion of the right of privacy.” Julia and Paul made plans to hire him.

  The Time cover and the resulting increase in book sales, which tripled in December (the months following the magazine’s appearance) and quadrupled in January, was most important financially to Simca and Louisette. Simca’s husband, Jean Fischbacher, was just beginning a struggling pharmaceutical company called Sederma, and Julia said, “I don’t know how they would have gotten along at all otherwise.” Louisette also needed money, though her share was only 18 percent (Julia and Simca each had 41 percent). One weekend in early 1967, when Louisette visited her two former partners with the man she was soon to marry, Count Henri de Nalèche (titled but poor), Julia realized that Louisette’s modest royalty check of nearly $3,000 meant a lot to them financially. More than a year before, Julia wrote Simca: “Well, who would have thought we’d ever get so much money out of that book, great as it is, I never thought we’d do much more than make expenses.”

  In 1967 she would receive more accolades. Harper’s Bazaar’s hundredth anniversary issue named her one of the “100 Women of Accomplishment” in America.

  THE FINAL TELEVISION PROGRAMS

  The previous May in Boston, they had frantically taped twenty-two more programs to complete what would be the first series, before Julia would quit to complete her second book with Simca, and Ruth Lockwood could go on to produce Joyce Chen’s Chinese cooking shows. Before each program Julia pinned on her blouse the round insignia created by Paul for L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes, the cooking school they started fourteen years earlier in Paris (one letter asked if the insignia was a De Gaulle button). She complained to Simca about the demanding television work, adding: “It certainly has sold that old book!” She laughed when Beard wrote her that Clementine Paddleford announced at a Dione Lucas dinner that “cookbooks don’t make any money.”

  Typically, Julia and Paul arose before dawn to pack their car with food and heavy equipment. “If it weren’t for Paul,” Julia said at the time, “I wouldn’t do the television.” She always wrote to Simca about the success and failures of each program, including the unmolding of a potato mold that “just quietly collapsed. So we had to shoot that final bit again…. Did learn something though, that you have to have them well browned down the side of the mold, indicating they are done and will hold.”

  The audiences, now invited for the final tapings, turned out in droves. “WGBH has to turn away hundreds of people weekly, each willing to pay $5 to the WGBH Building Fund for the privilege of watching the show backstage on tiny monitor screens,” said Boston magazine. It fell to Paul to warm up the audience by talking about Julia and warning them, “Whatever you do, please don’t laugh.” Keeping silent was a challenge, whether Julia was stuffing a pipe between the teeth of a big white fish or carrying a collapsing soufflé from the oven to the table. At one point, when the blender kept spitting out food particles until it groaned and sputtered, Julia feigned concern and said to the machine, “Now, are you all right?” As Alyne Model, a local journalist, noted:

  Not since the late Gracie Allen has television seen such a Mrs. Malaprop hold court. Hers is a kind of cameo theatre of the absurd
(“what a wonderful little imprension, I mean invention, the garlic press is”) that is all the more endearing because unlike the Burns and Allen Show, these minor bon mots are totally unrehearsed. “I don’t think we could rehearse them if we wanted to,” confides one station executive.

  Julia believed that her audience was among the middle class who shopped at the local A&P, where she herself shopped. Though Safeway, Sperry & Hutchinson, and Hills Bros. Coffee subsidized The French Chef, Julia made no endorsements and frankly criticized any product she found wanting. The audience trusted her and wrote her with questions and corrections, which she took seriously. Some were shocked at her “wine drinking,” but embraced her as America’s cook nonetheless. “Julia Child is the Chuck Berry of haute cuisine,” said one rock music promoter, “the One Who Started It All, She Who Cooked with Gas.” The mountain of letters was so overwhelming she sought help from volunteers. Until 1981 she kept typed lists of corrections for each book, often changing a word that confused a reader.

  In part to answer the requests of the watchers, she planned to publish a paperback book of recipes from the television series. She conceived the idea after talking to Beard in 1965, thinking (she informed Simca) that she could “just … send [Bill Koshland] the mimeo’d recipes (I hope).” By July of the next year she concluded that they were “pretty bad” one-page recipes that needed to be two pages. The 1967 contract was for an advance of $25,000 on a book entitled The French Chef Cookbook (1968), which would include recipes from her 119 black-and-white programs. The first fourteen, which no longer existed, had been redone in the series. She dedicated the book to WGBH and her crew of twenty-four and signed over 2.5 percent of the royalties to the station and to Ruth Lockwood. Half the recipes were taken, but slightly altered (usually simplified for television), from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Her Reine de Saba chocolate cake (#100), for example, added a pinch of cream of tartar and another tablespoon of sugar. According to her editor, there were no complaints about the duplications.