Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  Julia and Simca flew up to Paris the first week of December for a morning session with Professor Calvel, head of the Ecole Professionelle de la Boulangerie, a world expert on bread making. After talking and observing, Julia concluded their bread dough was too firm (his was soft and sticky and rose slowly to twice its size). Amid the market din and smell of Les Halles, Julia bought three fresh foie gras and truffles for the coming holiday feasts. “God, it was great! Ten thousand smells, sounds, and faces! I kept thinking what a movie we could have made if that plan of ours hadn’t fallen through,” she wrote Avis.

  They were happy and clearly feeling financially well-off, for they had their trunks air-expressed to their door and bought a “miniature television machine” (to see De Gaulle’s press conference) and a large Kelvinator refrigerator with separate freezer space. They knew that in a month they would have to return briefly for Julia to read the voice-overs for the documentary, but for now they were away from all the daily business of life. For the last six months, amid the bread baking and recipes testing, the occasional interview, and preparations for the White House filming, they were overwhelmed with guests and dear friends from every part of their rich past.

  “This is really the first time either of us has been able to work without interruptions in months,” Julia wrote Avis. She finished twenty-seven pages of blah-blah introducing French bread and sent copies of it to Simca, Avis, and her editor (Avis was horrified at its length and said it should not go into the book) before moving on to pork. She and Paul visited the Alvaro pig farm to watch a crew of four slaughter a 300-pound pig in a ceremony as old as the Middle Ages. She was calm, unflinching, and curious to learn everything she could about it, for Paul was going to photograph her preparation of their Christmas suckling pig.

  Louisette and Henri visited one weekend, and an occasional American or English reporter would find her, including one from Newsweek. But most of their days were uninterrupted. Simca and Jean were in Paris. Only Sybille and Eda were invited for Paul’s birthday feast, which included a flaming mountain of ice-cream cake. It was Le Kilimanjaro, the chocolate and almond ice cream dessert, which would appear in the second volume of Mastering (page 420). She added a touch that is not in the book: on the top of the dessert “mountain,” she placed an empty half eggshell, filled it with liquor, and lighted it before taking the flaming volcano to the table.

  Here in La Pitchoune they were at peace. Paul would listen to the banging of his “Mad Woman of La Pitchoune” in the kitchen and write to his brother: “Well—I’m … smelling all these breads, chickens, pâtés, dorades, cooking, and hearing my tender little wifelet crashing around in the kitchen, scolding the pussy for meowing, whacking something metallic with something else metallic, like a Peking street vendor. A very jolly house.” Just two weeks before, he told his brother, “How fortunate we are at this moment in our lives! Each doing what he most wants, in a marvelously adapted place, close to each other, superbly fed and housed, with excellent health, and few interruptions.”

  A PERSONAL TRAGEDY

  “Left breast off” is all she wrote in her datebook for February 28, 1968. They had flown back to Boston on the first day of February to do the voice-over for the White House documentary, thinking that they would be gone no more than two weeks. Julia had scheduled an appointment to see her gynecologist during their stay, having felt a small lump several busy months ago. Dr. Arnold Segal wanted to do a biopsy but could not schedule an operating room in Beth Israel Hospital until the twenty-eighth. It would only be an overnight affair, she assured Simca in her frustration at not being able to return to La Pitchoune. “It is a very simple matter to take care of,” she added. It was routine. Two days before she entered the hospital, she wrote to Simca that she took the ten days to cut down the introduction to bread (it would be nineteen published pages), and she would be out of the hospital in two or three days and back to France.

  As it turned out, it was not “a simple matter,” as it might have been twenty years later. At the time they did the biopsy, they removed her breast and the lymph nodes in her left arm as a precaution against spreading cancer, a practice typical of that time. Today the surgery would be considered too radical, for on March 4, in the middle of her ten days in the hospital, she was told the small tumor had been neatly removed. “All analysis OK & negative,” she wrote in her datebook. She would have to wear a rubber sleeve and exercise that arm for months to remove the fluid and restore its use. “After seeing a photo of a naughty woman who refused to wear her rubber sleeve and what happened to her arm, I really hardly dare take mine off!” she told Simca. When she returned to Avis’s house, where they were staying because they had rented their own house, she sat in the bathtub and privately wept.

  With the same practicality she expressed when she told the doctor to perform the operation and get it over with, she told herself to get on with her work and not complain. “No radium, no chemotherapy, no caterwauling,” she said in 1996. Thank God it was my left side and not my right, she wrote to Simca in a letter full of details about their manuscript and plans to get on with the recipes for tripe, calves’ feet, and calves’ heads. Each week when she returned to the doctor she asked when she could get back to France. They spent a weekend on Martha’s Vineyard with Bob and Mary Kennedy, the weekend that LBJ said he would not run again for the presidency. World events would soon put her own pain into perspective: the next Thursday, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis.

  Paul was devastated by Julia’s experience. He suffered when she merely had a bad cold. His friends say he had a terrible time, fearing he would lose her. “He was good and loving about both [the operations],” Julia wrote Simca. “I bless him and feel very fortunate.” This man who wrote nearly every day of his life apparently did not write a word for weeks. Charlie and Freddie came to visit, as did John and Jo McWilliams, then Dort and her Phila, who decided to apply to Radcliffe for her college education and to live near her Aunt Julia.

  At noon on April 11, Julia and Paul attended the press preview of “The White House Red Carpet” at WGBH. She tossed her last cigarette out the car window when it made her nauseous. That afternoon she saw Dr. Segal once more, and the following evening the Childs flew out of Boston for two months of recuperation. When the documentary ran nationally on April 17, Julia and Paul were entertaining Simca and Jean at La Pitchoune.

  In June, Avis visited the Childs there, and she confided to Bill Koshland that she was “a bit taken aback” by Julia’s appearance. He agreed that when he had seen her in mid-May she was just beginning to come out of it. No one ever talked openly about mastectomies until Mrs. Nelson Rockefeller and Mrs. Gerald Ford were publicly candid several years later.

  Julia’s decision to stop smoking was reinforced in the spring of 1969 when Bob Kennedy was operated on for lung cancer and continued to smoke. A damned fool, Paul called him. He had the same opinion of Cora DuBois, who kept smoking after a diagnosis of emphysema. Three of their friends, all heavy smokers, died in 1969.

  That year, Julia retreated even further to work on recipes for their second volume, which she and Simca constructed and tested for three years. The following year in Cambridge she wrote most of the book by retreating to the stove and typewriter. The deadline was moved again and again, but finally met in March 1970.

  Chapter 20

  CELEBRITY AND SOLITUDE

  (1968 – 1970)

  “There is really no such thing as an original

  recipe…. But cooks must feed their egos as well

  as their customers.”

  M. F. K. FISHER to Julia Child, October 4, 1968

  AT THE INTERMISSION of the Boston Symphony, after Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 and Debussy’s Rhapsody for saxophone and orchestra, Julia and Paul walked up one flight to see the little art exhibit (Paul called it “the usual second-rate painting exhibit”) and were once more reminded, as they were in their walks about Cambridge, of her growing fame. Julia Watchers, as Paul called them. Would she
just sign their music program? You have changed my life! They sent her gifts (and would for decades), and she would give most of them to friends or charity. In a letter to Charlie, Paul quoted one reviewer of her The French Chef Cookbook speaking for her fans: “We will march with Julia, our banner an impeccably clean towel, and ‘Bon Appetit!’ our cry, as our soufflés rise higher and higher. We will conquer new Malakoffs and let our apple charlottes fall where they may.”

  Mary Frances wrote to tell Julia that her own fan mail often told her she had “a lot to learn, mostly from JC. You are mostly called ‘Julia’ … their husbands can’t keep their eyes off you for one thing and … there seems to be no overt jealousy … just a general amazement!” Even in her own Boston, Julia received honor. She was fast becoming an eccentric and lovable icon who, without pretension, brought honor to their city. The man who refinished her copper pots would not allow her to pay. And she was sought out socially by Stan Calderwood (a neighbor and vice president of Polaroid), Frank Morgan (Newsweek bureau chief), Tom Winship (editor-in-chief of the Boston Globe), and Louis Kronenberger (theater critic) when he retired to Brookline in 1970.

  THE PUBLIC JULIA

  Julia could not help but be aware of her public persona when she was stopped at the A&P, at the intermission of the symphony, or on the streets of Boston, or (by American tourists) in Paris. She was aware of it when the national journalists and photographers came for interviews and pictures. But the articles often came out when she was working with Simca in France; during the six months after her Time cover, she was out of the country and again in the months after her operation. She guarded her private life and did not need to stay around for the early edition displaying her face for the public. “She’s very reserved,” says restaurant consultant Clark Wolf. “If her physicality matched her voice, she’d be Soupy Sales.”

  “She had become a mover and shaker like her father,” her sister said. “He would have been proud!” Even when she was in France, she remained in the public eye. Television reruns and journal articles fed the public image, while the private Julia was testing recipes with Simca or typing long letters about their recipes in her office.

  When she was back in Cambridge, Julia was at ease with the press and, though she preferred cooking demonstrations, gave an occasional public speech. She was becoming a better speaker, Paul noticed. During an interview with Frank Morgan of Newsweek, Paul told Charlie, he became aware of a quality in Julia after she had several vodkas (only gin or vodka had this effect) that reminded him of the description of Tallulah Bankhead, who died that week, as “a personality as much as a star. Her vibrant energy, explosive speech and impetuous behavior seemed at times a phenomenon better suited for study by physicists than by the journalists who chronicled her antics. I simply do not know her,” Paul added, “no blurring of speech … [but] up go the decibels and the big swooping gestures. Interruptions-by-the-yard. The law is laid down, decorated by cuss-words, jokes, stream-of-consciousness …” In other words, Paul did not get a word in edgewise.

  Her name appeared in several Newsweek articles in 1968 as well as in McCall’s, New York magazine, TV Guide. (“The only national television female of real authority is Julia Child … because her opinions are confined to the natural and universal passion, Food. Nobody can knock a woman Doing Her Thing in the Kitchen. And nobody cares if she doesn’t look like Raquel Welch or have her hair done by Kenneth. In fact, quite properly, they care for her more because she is, simply, herself,” wrote Marya Mannes.) In dozens of articles about other food professionals, Julia is always the one with whom they are compared or contrasted.

  Vogue came to interview her in Plascassier, where she and Paul spent the 1968 holidays with Bob and Mary Kennedy. The Vogue interviewer was one of Judith Jones’s authors, as were several of the chefs chosen for Julia’s later cooking-with-Julia books in the 1990s. A more welcome guest was Beard, whose visit led to two grand meals, at least in terms of cost, at L’Oasis and the Casino in Monte Carlo. Together they watched (via satellite from Houston to Madrid) the astronauts return to earth on Apollo 8. In 1969 it was journalists from McCall’s and House & Garden who came to Pitchoune for interviews to be published in 1970.

  Julia and Paul were always interested in national and international arts and politics. He was going to vote for Humphrey, but she, despite Kennedy’s “kiddie spawning,” was voting for Bobby Kennedy. She was devastated by his assassination, which they heard on their tiny transistor as the church bell was tolling in Plascassier in June 1968. She felt personally let down when Jacqueline Kennedy married Onassis, and was disturbed by the violence at the Democratic convention that summer.

  American produce was a political issue as well. Julia took on fish as a cause when she was back in Boston that fall. She privately blamed in part the Catholics for the reluctant consumption of fish by the rest of the country (their traditional obligatory Friday fish regimen made many equate fish with penance and privation). With James Beard she planned a cooking demonstration for thirty newspaper food editors, asserting the need for government support for better boats and docks. Their efforts, she informed Simca, were “a public service involving our educational station, the fishing industry, the government and the press.” As important as the issue itself was what she learned about fish from the demonstration (she informed Simca that “individually peeled and flash-frozen shrimp are tough, but nonpeeled, block-frozen shrimp are better”).

  Nixon was a “very dull man, self-righteous, ambitious, solemn, [with] no interest in food, no cultivated tastes,” said Julia: a litany of qualities she most disliked in people. She repeated her opinions—and the same fish recipe—for the Chamberlains, who came to lunch on election day, and for the Brooks Becks the following night. She may have been perfecting her recipe, but she really wanted to talk about the dangerous “swing to the right” with the election of her fellow Californian, the man her father had helped enter national politics.

  She and Paul were swept up in the political unrest that defined Harvard student life and the streets of Cambridge that fall (“hippy-cum-Panther-cum-drug” scene, Paul called it). There were riots in Harvard Yard, numerous break-ins in the neighborhood, and at the deSola Pools’ next door (he was head of MIT’s Center for International Studies) two bricks flew through the front window with a note attached: “Down with all Fascist Imperialists!” Paul had his own idea of fascists (“God alone can’t get rid of J. Edgar Hoover,” he lamented). In February 1970, Paul put in unbreakable plastic windows on the ground-floor windows and installed an elaborate alarm system, informing Charlie that their house was now “an illuminated monument to fear and to greater safety.” (For aesthetic balance, he had a new wine cellar built, just for red wines.) In April the antiwar violence became familial when a second cousin of Julia’s named Diana Oughton blew herself up accidentally (while making bombs) at a Weatherman house on Eleventh Street in Greenwich Village. “We are all swole up w/pride. Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh,” Paul wrote cynically to Charlie.

  Their letters reveal the Childs as classic liberals. “If you eat right, you vote right,” she told a journalist in Northampton. Their old friends were now part of the establishment—Abe Manell was an assistant to the President, former Washington neighbor Stuart Rockwell an ambassador—but they themselves were sometimes antiestablishment. Each position was nuanced. They opposed the violence at Harvard, yet were in favor of abortion rights and the peaceful opposition to Nixon and the Vietnam War. She believed many students were in college “to grow up,” much like her own academic career at Smith (“Somebody like me should not have been accepted at a serious institution”).

  With the pressure on to complete Volume II, Julia resented every interruption and longed for solitude. If she had to travel she continued her experiments with friends and family. She worked on puff pastry (pâte feuilletée) in Maine in August; pâtés and terrines on Martha’s Vineyard while visiting Bob Kennedy; beef and fowl in Dublin, New Hampshire, with Helen Kirkpatrick Milbank for two Thanksgivi
ngs; and cakes on Long Pond beyond Plymouth at the Howes’ summer home. One tradition was always honored: once a week she and Paul went across the Charles River to have Julia’s hair washed and set and to dine together at the Ritz Grill (where women had to be accompanied by men). Another ritual was always to shop for groceries together, as much for companionship as the need for two people to transport their voluminous purchases.

  Every dinner guest was a guinea pig for the book, whether it was Sybille Bedford when she came to Cambridge to research her biography of Aldous Huxley; Gay Bradley or Rosemary Manell from California; or Alfred Knopf himself, to whom she fed her mousse de poisson. She never wasted time on a meal preparation that did not relate to her research. If the recipe was less than perfect, she said nothing. Their guests ate informally but well around the large Norwegian table in the kitchen.

  COMPLETING MASTERING II

  “Rushing from stove to typewriter like a mad hen,” she described herself midway through their final three-year push to complete the second volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She worked seven-day weeks during the first five months of 1969, went to France to cook with Simca—though Simca was there only part of the time—then returned for the final eight months (until nearly April 1970) for more seven-day workweeks. She even worked that Christmas, bemoaning only that they were missing for the first time the winter foie gras and truffle season in France.

  “I think we are the English-language Saint-Ange,” Julia confided to Simca. This book must be “better and different,” they agreed, for the competition is now greater, and “people expect to get the absolute word of the lord from us.” Because they had a great responsibility to live up to, Julia tested some recipes fifteen or twenty times if necessary. She was disappointed to learn that her beloved James Beard used his assistant to test his recipes and that there were errors in his Theory and Practice (1969). He is “doing too much else,” she confided to Simca. Then she heard that Michael Field signed on for twelve 150-page booklets, one to be published each month. By contrast, when Simca suggested they include couscous in their volume, Julia spent a full month researching the origins and ingredients and testing recipes until she finally rejected it.