Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  During 1967 and 1968 her programs were rerun, though she confided to Simca that she feared their large royalty checks might grow smaller. However, the appearance of the paperback edition of the recipes, together with the reruns on television, kept up the interest in their Mastering book. Julia turned to their new volume and to eight years of magazines with recipes yet to be clipped. She maintained her files in order to trace the origins of recipes as well as to get ideas and test alternative ingredients.

  The Julia cult, people within the industry called it. The ingredients that brought her to national prominence included the rise of educational television (to 54 million households), her unpretentious personality, her natural comic timing, her encyclopedic knowledge, and very hard work, to say nothing of Paul’s organizational skills. She was outdrawing William F. Buckley, Jr.’s political forum, and bon appétit, her signature sign-off, was now a familiar salute in restaurants and homes across the country.

  NOT PRINCE CONSORT:

  “WE ARE A TEAM”

  “‘Julia Child’ … is actually a husband and wife team,” wrote Paul Levy, who visited them in Provence. Numerous friends agree: “He was her manager on the road. They were true partners” (Debby and Fisher Howe). “He was a man one would instinctively trust” (Lyne Few). “He was always there … supportive and not obtrusive” (John Moore). “There was an atmosphere of reason, good sense, and endless affection between them” (Sally Bicknell Miall). Peter Davison admired their partnership and the manner in which they “treat life with a healthy irreverence.” Paul made a strong impression on her professional world. One news reporter said, “He sounds like [the actor] George Sanders, but claims his accent is Boston.” He said of himself, “I’m part of the iceberg that doesn’t show.”

  Accompanying the recipes and brief essays sent to food editors at newspapers around the country were photographs of the dish or of Julia herself preparing the dish for the week’s program. Paul spent decades serving as her official photographer. In addition he had an exhibition of his own work during the summer of 1966 in Wiscasset, Maine, as he had in Bonn and New Haven, and as he would later in Boston, much to Julia’s proud delight. His photographs would also appear in Yale Alumni Magazine, Middlebury College Bulletin, Vogue, Foreign Service Journal, and Holiday.

  His artistic skills were silently visible in many places, such as in the final (sixth) decorated cold salmon that was brought to the table at the end of one of Julia’s television programs. He set the table and coordinated the color scheme for every important dinner, including decorating the suckling pig in Maine, surrounding the platter with boughs and putting daisies in the eyes. “There would be no French Chef without him, that’s for sure,” she informed Simca.

  He also put his USIS exhibit skills to use when Julia went on the road to present demonstrations. The first major effort had been for the San Francisco Museum of Art benefit in March 1965 (the second was in Providence in May). Paul designed the set in the Ghirardelli chocolate factory, where Julia cooked for a week. The plans were as elaborate as for a military invasion, with floor plans, equipment and produce, training assistants, and timelines. Ruth Lockwood did the setups. Rosie Manell (who now lived near San Francisco) did some of the preparation, such as peeling the asparagus. When she had trouble flambeing, a local restaurant maître d’hôtel showed her his flamer filled with alcohol paste. (“Learn something new just about every day, as old Bugnard used to say!” Julia informed Simca.) Julia preceded the events with press conferences and small society lunches in various homes, and Paul was in charge of all their travel arrangements.

  Wendy Morison Beck, echoing most of their friends, suggested that “he was the temperamental one in that relationship.” But “I liked the no-nonsense way that she handled him,” Beck said in 1996. A few of Julia’s acquaintances called him “rude” or “in the way” or “harsh” in his criticism of Julia, but they were few and probably the feeling was mutual. Paul did not pander to those he did not like, and he could be strident. But for Julia he would do anything helpful—he called it “keeping the Julia-banner flapping.” He shelled peas for a later appearance on Good Morning America. During a women’s club demonstration in a Pasadena theater, when there was no water and they had to have clean dishes for a second demonstration, Paul took the dishes into the women’s rest room backstage and, using the little soaps on the side of the sink, washed every dish and pan. “I don’t care what it is,” he said, “I will do it.”

  He was her manager and photographer. They always shopped together. She cooked, he designed their kitchen and worked out schedules (with the precision he had used for Lord Mountbatten and General Wedemeyer), arranged the table for guests, and kept his eye on the clock during her programs. Occasionally he answered the fan mail (in verse). Together they planned the titles for her cooking programs and he helped her index the first volume of Mastering. “We did everything together until the end,” said Julia. “I was at my desk and he was in his studio. That is why you get married, as far as I am concerned. The main thing about Paul and me is that we were always together so that he could carry on his work and I could carry on mine. We got along very well. And except for a few incidents, we liked the same people.” They “moved as a unit, never more than a floor away from each other,” adds Phila Cousins.

  “Each time that I talked to Paul,” said Martha Culbertson of the Fallbrook Winery in 1995, “somewhere in the conversation he would make a fist with each hand, put the knuckles of his two hands together so that they fit perfectly and would say, ‘When I met Julia, that’s when everything started to happen.’ It was as if his life didn’t really begin until he met her.”

  Paul also organized and carried what her colleagues called her “magic bag” or “Julia’s black bag.” She went everywhere with it. It contained an apron, an overblouse, pocketknives, heavy pans, plates, straining spoons, serving spoons, a plate to offer the host a taste of the food, and every other necessity for performing on the road.

  However, it was not for carrying Julia’s black bag that Paul underwent a double hernia operation in the fall of 1966 soon after they celebrated their twentieth wedding anniversary. Contrary to George Meredith’s dictum: “Kissing don’t last, cookery do!” Julia and Paul’s love affair thrived. Theirs was a thoroughly modern marriage of passion and professional partnership. When they were apart, which was seldom, he wrote, “The whole house creaks and echoes with loneliness” and “Life is like unsalted food” without her.

  Paul’s ambition to publish his lengthy letter-diary, an ambition stirred by the publication of Charlie’s Maine memoir, Roots in the Rock, was discouraged by Peter Davison, Charlie’s editor at the Atlantic Monthly Press. Julia’s secretary typed the letters, but he feared he had given Wendy Beck too much to read. She wanted more about Julia. The plan was dropped. Davison says, “In these years Paul was increasingly becoming Julia’s amanuensis, publicist, adviser, and alter ego. She in her turn nurtured his own creative juices and impulses. They were a wonderfully interactive couple, but they were able to speak briskly to one another when so inclined.”

  In 1967 and 1968, while Julia concentrated on working with Simca on their second volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Paul’s role was to photograph her completed dishes as well as her techniques. He also helped with the interviews with the press, which ate up days of their lives. And, perhaps unknown to most people other than Simca, he also began baking French bread while Julia was experimenting with bread recipes. He loved the scientific aspect of the testing, and he told his brother that making bread was as natural and joyful as making babies.

  M. F. K. FISHER, MICHAEL FIELD,

  AND TIME-LIFE

  Among the growing group of cookbook writers, television cooks, and cooking teachers there was some emerging rivalry, though the letters between Julia and James Beard and Mary Frances Fisher do not reveal any attitude of competitiveness. Michael Field, by contrast, probably typifies the awareness of what Clark called “too many rivals.”<
br />
  A former concert pianist, Michael Field ran a cooking school in New York City and was publishing articles in periodicals. He was ambitious and involved (for $25,000 a year and over his head) in editing a book on French provincial cooking for a new (lavishly photographed) series of Time-Life books, “Foods of the World.” He rented La Pitchoune in order to research his volume on country cooking (The Cooking of Provincial France, the first of his eighteen books). Julia was being paid for “consulting”—though she remembered that he never took any advice—and M. F. K. Fisher (Mary Frances) was being paid for writing an introduction (she was billed as author). Julia counseled Field not to call the book “Provincial” cooking but “French Cuisine Bourgeoise,” a piece of advice that would have saved him some criticism down the road.

  Mary Frances Fisher, four years older than Julia, was a writer, poet, and memoirist of great style and literary merit (John Updike called her “a poet of the appetites”). Once called “the American Colette,” she was credited with carrying on “the tradition of Brillat-Savarin by documenting tales of feasts ancient and modern.” She translated his Physiology of Taste and did as much for eating as Julia did for cooking. Mary Frances was a prolific writer, though her books sell better today than when she was trying to support herself and her two daughters (she was thrice married). She took the job with Time-Life in good faith.

  Thus it was that Mary Frances met Julia and, as their letters of 1966 reveal, became what Mary Frances called “so suddenly and firmly a friend.” (Julia at first thought her too “self-absorbed,” she told Field, and “didn’t warm to her,” she told Simca.) It was not until Frances began writing to Julia while staying with the Fields at La Pitchoune that Julia warmed to her and invited her to come by Cambridge on her way home so they could drive to her daughter’s home in Kennebunkport, Maine, when they took their vacation at the Childs’ cabin. In Cambridge before the drive, Fisher immediately responded to Paul’s photographs of Provence: his camera “saw what I have seen, as none ever has.” In 1967 she asked him to collaborate with her on a book about Provence, with her words and his photographs (nothing came of the plan). Letters between the two women express Fisher’s admiration for Julia’s “use [of] other senses than merely looking and tasting [in her writing] … you often mention the Sound of good cooking.” She believed Mastering achieved “classic importance.”

  Fisher remembered (in an unpublished letter of September 9, 1982, to Julia) flying back from France to Logan Airport in Boston to meet Julia for the first time in 1966: “And there you were, standing at the bleak airport gate like a familiar warm beacon … old tennis shoes, a soft cotton shirtmaker … tall boarding-school teenager from Pasadena! We’d met before, not in this life but somewhere. I went happily along with you, and felt home again. And I still do … Plascassier, Nice, Glen Ellen, Marseilles.”

  They shared childhood California living (though Fisher was born in Michigan, her family moved to Whittier the year Julia was born), an enchantment with France, a love of cats, and hunger. “Like most other humans, I am hungry,” she wrote in The Gastronomical Me (1943). Both had interests beyond food, though Fisher’s ran toward the philosophical; when she wrote about security, pleasure, appetite, decay, and memory, she always got around to food, gently folding recipes into her narrative. She shared Julia’s wit and flirtatiousness, but Fisher was more vain in what Molly O’Neill called her “penciled Betty Grable brows” and glamorous dust-jacket photographs. Mimi Sheraton, who admired her, called her wily, “a tough cookie;” Barbara Kafka saw in her “a great beauty,” who, “like Julia, had a complete career.” Both were intellectuals (“our two intellectuals,” says Anne Willan), and their difference is implied in motivations behind their differing answers to a food journalist’s question, “What is your favorite junk food?”: Julia answered, “Pepperidge Farm’s fish crackers;” Mary Frances, “Iranian caviar.”

  Fisher wrote to Julia: “I saw you once on TV and thought you were exactly right … a quiet but exciting breeze clearing the kitchen murk.” It was a program about potatoes Anna, she remembered. Later: “People are starved for the synthesis in you of breeding, maturity, youthfulness, charm, education, subtlety, honesty … and you know that I don’t speak here of naive young housewives, but of mean cynical old English professors, and (last Saturday) a group of about eight teenagers near Napa who breed their own horses, work their way through school, dance and drive wildly, and watch Julia Child without fail every Thursday night.”

  When James Beard suggested to Fisher that they meet the following Easter in New York and include Julia and Paul, thus making it “The Big Four!” Mary Frances informed Julia modestly, “He was being polite about me, for I am not in any way in your class, except perhaps now and then with a snippet of Deathless Prose …” (February 24, 1967). Beard did not include Craig Claiborne, who, Julia believed, was “really in the ‘business’ of food.” When she dined with Claiborne in July 1966, he told her that “he turns all his material over to an editor to put his books together and he doesn’t even proofread anything or make an index.” Julia relayed all this to Simca in amazement and evident disapproval. Her feelings about Claiborne, whom “we do not warm up to very much,” she shared only privately with Simca, for he had given them their first great review. Publicly and privately she defended him and gave him credit for being responsible for making restaurant reviewing professional.

  Slowly and discreetly Julia and Mary Frances shared their belief that Field, whom they liked, was not the man to edit the book on French cooking in the provinces. Fisher reported he was a high-strung man isolated in the countryside with no knowledge of the language, had a “cooking block,” “snacked” from a virtually empty refrigerator, and dined out daily. “Michael is the glamour boy around New York at the moment,” said Julia, “a dabbler, a charmer, a word-monger, a butterfly, and ambitious.” She and Fisher both preferred the dedication, calm, and knowledge of Beard (they “are not in the same class,” Fisher concurred). Though Fisher did not meet Beard until April 1967, Julia pointed out that he was “dear and generous” and “has allowed himself to be used” by a greedy agent of commercial interests. As she would do with any dear friend, Julia explained Beard’s weaknesses (his commercialism) as someone else’s fault.

  She and Mary Frances had strong reservations about the entire Time-Life series, from which Fisher tried to resign when they began rewriting her words. Though Julia did not like her friend’s halfhearted introduction either, she referred to the project in letters to Mary Frances as “this venture about which I cannot but have misgiving tremors.” She told Simca she (regretfully) got involved because she thought she “should do something to be more in the swim.” But finally, less for the money (this gravy train was rich) than for “poor Michael,” they stayed aboard. Later she referred to him as a “front man”—a “Darling, I’m so busy” man. Julia limited her reading and consultation on photographs in New York to ten days and agreed to adapt two cake recipes from Madame Saint-Ange for his book. The best thing that came out of their misadventures with Time-Life, Julia and Mary Frances agreed, was meeting each other.

  Julia saw the first Time-Life recipes in November 1966 and thought them “AWFUL … a hodge-podge of copying,” incompetent and incomprehensible, she told Simca. Many of the recipes were poorly written copies from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. (But they were “stuck with” the theft because she agreed to be a consultant.) By February 1967 they were correcting early proofs, Mary Frances in Glen Ellen, California, and Julia in La Pitchoune, both seriously worried about the errors, of which Paul declared there were “an inordinate number.” (Julia liked her friend’s introduction—“she writes beautifully and sensually about food”—but it romanticized a France that once was.) Field, she told Simca, “is a real fumiste, but he certainly is a fine talker!” Buried in a letter to Avis is Julia’s motive for getting involved: “Takes a lot of time, and has to be done carefully, but I am so grateful for that Time article it is the least I can do.�
�� A month later she conjectured to her sister-in-law Freddie that she wondered if she would have been given the cover of Time had she not agreed to help Field.

  The fears about Michael and his book on provincial French cooking were realized when the Time-Life book appeared later. Craig Claiborne attacked the many fake French recipes and called Michael Field “a former concert pianist who might be excused perhaps on the grounds that he never played in the provinces.” Time-Life imprudently planned a translation into French, asking Robert J. Courtine, who had just edited the 1967 French edition of Nouveau Larousse Gastronomique, to write the introduction. (Several years later, when it appeared, Courtine mocked the mistakes in the book, and the reputations of Julia and Mary Frances—and Elizabeth David, who contributed some research—were besmirched by their association with the book.) Several typed recipes for Michael’s book, recently found in Simca’s Bramafam attic, contain comments in Julia’s handwriting (“but not French, alas,” she writes beside the mention of soy sauce in a chicken recipe). These documents and Julia’s correspondence with Mary Frances and Simca reveal their early suspicions about the volume. Indeed, when what she called Claiborne’s “blast” appeared in the New York Times (on the very day of Field’s book-launching party), Julia wrote to Simca, “I think he’s right!”

  Julia learned another important lesson when she refused to write an introduction to an American “adaptation” of Pellaprat’s classic L’Art Culinaire Moderne without seeing the galleys first. Field accepted the job, and Julia later judged the adaptation a “travesty.” It is “a good lesson to learn,” she told Simca, “he got $1,000 for it, but at what cost!” Thereafter, with a couple of rare exceptions, she gave no book endorsements.