Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  In 1970 the level of cookbook criticism was still amateurish and the food world small enough so that few were qualified to analyze new books with any depth or candor. Julia’s stature loomed large in this world: at fifty-eight, she was a beloved television personality with her first volume already a classic, its techniques and recipes “adopted” in numerous magazines and cookbooks. An exception to the amateur’s level of reviewing was Sokolov’s review in Newsweek, which declared it a “daunting book. It leaves Volume I behind in a shower of spun sugar and makes that honorable world of the trout mousse and cassoulet seem in retrospect as naive as Spam…. It is hard to conceive of a cookbook to follow this one. It is without rival, the finest gourmet cookbook for the non-chef in the history of American stomachs.”

  For her French bread recipe, Julia was honored by the Confrérie de Cérès in France. Public response was vigorous and sustained. Julia was delighted by the number of men who were cooking. When readers complained about a problem that was clearly of their own making, Julia was privately critical; when their difficulties were based on her own error or lack of clarity, she wrote back in detail and took steps to make minor changes. She answered all questions. As with the voluminous television mail, she created form letters for common queries concerning her published work.

  Knopf’s promotion was better planned than any promotion to date. The media blitz began a year before the publication: Vogue did a June 1969 feature on Julia’s Provençal kitchen (Esquire would later do a full inventory of her Cambridge kitchen); House Beautiful presented the kitchens of five “master chefs,” including Julia (first), Beard, Lucas, Field, and Claiborne. Just before publication, she was on the cover of Publishers Weekly. The most effective stroke was McCall’s cover and three-part profile of Julia and the “Making of a Masterpiece” (October, November, and December 1970). During the filming in La Pitchoune, Simca was awkward and stiff before the camera, and McCall’s slighted Simca (which angered Julia and hurt Simca). The New York Times made amends with a profile.

  Knopf gave them a real author’s tour, despite the insistence of WGBH that she stay home and continue her taping. With Jane Friedman, then a twenty-two-year-old Knopf publicist (who later became a vice president), Julia, Simca, and Paul traveled to Minneapolis, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, and Boston. “We had a ball,” says Friedman, who booked them into hotel suites for entertaining the press:

  There was not then such a thing as an “author’s tour,” but I figured that with the keen interest of local public television stations and the book departments of department stores (such as Marshall Field in Chicago) … we could have a good tour. We flew into a city, did all the media, and had a big party co-sponsored by the public television station and the department store that was sponsoring the demonstration the next day (and always took out a full-page ad). In Minneapolis I saw nearly a thousand people on the street at 7 A.M. waiting to go into Dayton’s department store for the demonstration in Sky’s Restaurant to make mayonnaise (that is all Julia did!) and then she would sign books.

  At the second stop, at Halle’s department store in Cleveland, she dropped an egg in a blender with the lid off and the chocolate mousse mixture shot a splat on her face. “Now you see why I always have a towel stuck in my apron!” But the funniest moment, according to two attendees, was her disapproval of the pots and pans arranged behind her. “How wonderful of Halle’s to put these up here so I can tell you Never, Never, buy a pot this thin,” she said, flinging one after the other over her shoulder onto the stage behind her. “All of us chuckled,” said a man in attendance, “thinking about how the poor Halle’s buyer must be twisting in agony at the review of his/her choices.” The Bunsen burner representative singed her eyebrows and beehive hairdo at another stop. These stories became legend.

  They appeared on the Today show (Simca took an immediate dislike to Barbara Walters), were given a luncheon by the editor of McCall’s, Shana Alexander (a “lovely creature,” thought Paul), and Julia was interviewed by David Frost. Simca continued touring while Julia resumed taping the television series so they could get back to France for Christmas. By November 1, her butcher, Jack Savenor, and George Berkowitz of Legal Sea Foods, her fish dealer, displayed the volume for sale on their counters. Their loyalty through the decades was reciprocated by Julia. When Savenor was caught in a scandal about possibly short-weighing his customers the following year, Julia remained fiercely loyal, blinded (according to Paul) by his charm. When asked, she informed a reporter she disbelieved the charges.

  PROVENCE, JAMES BEARD,

  AND RICHARD OLNEY

  The plane from Paris to Nice, flying over the Rhone River, descended from the mountains and canyons of coastal Provence, banking left over the Mediterranean and gliding low along the rocky coast, past Cannes, St.-Tropez, and Cap d’Antibes. Lower and lower it moved over the water, until finally, and to the relief of Paul, sand appeared beneath them and the plane touched down at the Nice-Côte d’Azur airport at water’s edge. Julia was always exhilarated by the flight and by the sun and palm trees. For Paul it was deliverance mixed with some pride in his having overcome his fear of flying. When they were not rushed, they took the train from Paris or drove a rented car on a slow gastronomic journey south. Marc Meneau, before he earned any of his three Michelin stars at L’Espérance in Vézelay, remembers Julia stopping to taste and encourage his cooking.

  With thirty-nine programs in the can and the book launched for the Christmas 1970 season, Julia and Paul, nearly caramelized from exhaustion, had only five weeks in France. The pattern of their busy lives was illustrated in the activities of the coming months. They returned to Cambridge before February to tape thirteen more programs and to begin renovation on Julia’s office, the guest room, and the bathrooms as well as to install a new security system (by 1973 crime in Cambridge increased by 38 percent). On May 5, the morning after she narrated Tubby the Tuba at the Boston Symphony, the Childs left for three months in France, during which they took a tour of Norway with the Pratts. By August they were back in Cambridge to film twenty-six more programs, then back to France with plans for another book based on this color series. The book would use the television recipes, which she now typed out before each show and mailed to the newspapers. They rarely missed a Christmas at La Pitchoune until 1973, when Julia began writing monthly recipes for a magazine and finishing a new book.

  At La Pitchoune, they sipped Chinese tea in the morning on the olive terrace (the mulberry terrace at the side of the house was for shaded afternoon cocktails or barbecues). Under the mulberry tree, Julia drank “reverse [or Ivan] martinis,” dry vermouth flavored with lemon and a dash of gin. They looked out to the Estérel Mountains and on a clear day to the distant sea, listening to the sounds of frogs and nightingales. Only at night would the quiet be occasionally disrupted by the noise of rock music and motorcycles as local youth gathered at the “ranch” down the hill. Julia and Paul were rather more disturbed by the building boom in the region, which threatened to turn the Riviera into a French Miami Beach. Even Simca and Jean were now building another house just below them, to be called La Campanette, perhaps anticipating (sister-in-law) France (Fischbacher) Thibault’s desire to reclaim the old house, which Simca named Le Mas Vieux.

  Upon arriving at La Pitchoune, Julia’s first efforts were always to warm the house, restock the kitchen with produce from the market and household products from the Casino supermarché. She wanted some frozen puff pastry in the freezer for an ever-growing number of visitors. Initially, there were quiet days for reading newspapers and magazines and keeping up with what Paul called their “weekly dose of Watergate medicine,” which left him with a bad taste in his mouth but feeling good. Avis’s witty reports—especially by 1974 when “Nixon [was] melting like a Popsicle in the sun”—kept them amused. Paul’s rantings against Nixon, he admitted, reminded him of Julia’s late father’s ranting about the liberals. They also read contemporary biographies, such as Nancy Milf
ord’s Zelda and Eric F. Goldman’s The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson.

  Julia always had her eye out for her own or a neighboring cat who would come for a daily feeding and eventually stay. As Paul told his brother: “A cat—any cat—is necessary to Julia’s life.” When she was in Cambridge, she kept in touch with Simca concerning the lives of all the cats and dogs of the compound. Indeed, as late as the mid-1990s, the Thibault family was still caring for one of “Julia’s cats.”

  In Plascassier she was “Madame Shield,” the tall American who smiled and chatted with each shopkeeper and market seller, especially with the wine merchant in Grasse whose son ran Le Cygne, one of the Childs’ favorite New York City restaurants. When they went to Grasse to shop, they carried a large Styrofoam box with plastic bags of ice cubes to keep their market produce from wilting while they enjoyed lunch at Restaurant des Oliviers.

  Because Boston in 1971 was “still a gastronomical wasteland when it comes to restaurants,” Julia and Paul loved the great simple country restaurants of Provence with their garlicky odors emanating from kitchens and their sunny terraces shaded by heavy grape arbors. Julia detailed the restaurant food in letters to Beard and Fisher. Paul’s letters described Julia’s cooking. During their summers in Provence, Paul depicted the olive and jasmine world for Charlie, who was describing for Paul his spruce and granite Maine.

  Paul painted in the small cabanon across the driveway while Julia cooked, tested, and wrote programs for future taping, composed her monthly recipes for McCall’s, which would eventually constitute her second French Chef cookbook in 1974. She was moving far beyond the recipes of Simca to her own creations. When Simca and Jean came down from Paris, they shared meals and recipes with each other. One day Julia served them her new creation, named after a recent and scandalous film (La Grande Bouffe) shown at Cannes, La Grande Bouffe aux écailles et au chocolat (the scales were sliced almonds covering the outside). Julia read and made a few corrections on the manuscript of Simca’s Cuisine, the first American book by Simca herself, and one that Knopf would publish in 1972. Julia and Judith had talked Simca into doing the book, though the woman who worked on translating the manuscript into English had difficulty working with the irascible author.

  Julia was occasionally caught between Paul’s continued dislike of Simca and her own devotion to her colleague, whom she got along with much better now that they were “just friends” and not collaborators. She agreed with Paul that Simca was stubborn, opinionated, proud, and an “eccentric whirlwind,” but Julia was still faithful. Paul had little in common with Simca, who he thought had a voice that could “be heard in Montevideo” and an interest level focusing solely on clothes, gossip, manners, and bridge. And he was not crazy about the “feeble fops” who crowded her parties.

  The guests they most enjoyed were Sybille Bedford (now working on the second volume of her biography of Aldous Huxley), her companion Eda Lord, and Jim Beard. These three friends were gay, but Paul, who used the term often, would never have called them “fairies,” a distinction based on class as well as the absence of precious behavior. When Beard visited, he and Julia spent all day in the kitchen together, though they also enjoyed testing the best restaurants in the area. Their mutual friend Peter Kump believed Beard and Child shared an upbeat attitude toward life and a joy of cooking. When they prepared a meal together, Paul called it la cuisine de l’enfant barbu (bearded child).

  After Simca, Julia probably most enjoyed cooking with Beard. Her letters to him are full of food talk and gossip, news of restaurant meals and new inventions. She kept him informed about France, he kept her up on the New York gossip. (“He loved the skullduggery and the bitchiness in the food world,” Barbara Kafka told me recently, “and he was not a bit player himself.”) When Julia learned in France from a student of Gaston Lenôtre the secret of using a blowtorch to brown crème brûlée and other dishes, she immediately wrote to tell James about it (and to say she was buying one). Always fascinated with gadgets, she would use the blowtorch to brown food and unmold aspic at La Pitchoune, where she had no broiler.

  When Beard came to visit, they drove him to visit Richard Olney, an American cook and painter now settled permanently against a rocky hill in Solliès-Toucas, just east of Toulon on the coast. Olney and his brother James, a professor of English, dined at La Pitchoune on several occasions. Though Julia considered Olney creative and eccentric, she thought that he should do more to build a career. She wrote to Mary Frances that she could not find his books in bookstores in the United States because “he won’t do anything to make himself known.”

  Olney was an instinctive cook who eschewed rules and formal education in cooking. He published recipes in Cuisine et Vins de France in the 1960s and published The French Menu in 1970, which is when Julia went to meet him. (When his masterpiece, Simple French Food, was published in late 1974, he stayed with the Childs in Cambridge and she reported to Simca and Mary Frances that she liked the book—“it is entirely honest, entirely Richard”—that his reviews were marvelous, and that “he is a natural on TV.”) He also demonstrated cooking at Lubéron Collège in Avignon. One summer Madeleine Kamman, visiting from her cooking school in Newton, Massachusetts, came to Olney’s class and was overheard saying of Julia that she was “going to Boston to teach that bag to cook.”

  The professional tension—one need not call it a battle, except perhaps in Kamman’s mind—between her and Julia escalated in the 1970s, as their correspondence in the Schlesinger Library attests. Kamman told one newspaper she had “learned nothing” from the Cordon Bleu or L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes (with Simca, who had refused to write an introduction to her first book) and indeed it was she (Kamman) who “taught them something!” Yet her publicity continued to list among her credits the school created by Child, Beck, and Bertolle. At first Julia did nothing, then wrote to ask the publisher never to mention her name in publicity about Kamman (they stopped). Then Julia repeated to a reporter the rumor that Kamman dominated Olney’s class, perhaps an impression she received from Olney himself, who had become very nervous when he discovered Kamman in his class. The following year (1974), when an article in the Washington Post claimed Kamman was an “enemy” of Simca and Julia, Kamman wrote a letter accusing Julia of gratuitously twisting the facts to harm another woman and claiming that she had been helping Olney by offering to teach a beginning class in Avignon so he could teach the advanced class. She also reprimanded Julia for saying that men are better cooks than women and accused her of making the Kamman family suffer. Julia did not respond, nor did she publicly talk anymore about the issue. She simply sent copies of all of Kamman’s letters through the years to her lawyers.

  Julia lent La Pitchoune to family, including Dorothy and Ivan Cousins and their family, and she rented to friends from the OSS and their diplomatic world, including Janou and Charles Walcutt. Others in the food world, such as Gael Greene and Peter Kump, visited or rented La Pitchoune. Kump, a native of California and student of Simca, who remembers the Childs attending Simca’s weekly cocktail parties, would open a professional cooking school in New York City under his own name in 1974. Kump in 1994 told me that four people changed American cooking: “Beard, Henri Soulé [Le Pavillon], and Claiborne created this big bonfire and Julia came along with the match.”

  The Walcutts, in turn, lent Julia and Paul their Paris apartment for April 1972. At 81, rue de Longchamps, in Neuilly, Julia lived again in her beloved Paris and tested restaurants, including Drouant, Chez Les Anges, Prunier-Duphot, Chez Garin, La Truite, and Tour d’Argent. She wrote detailed reports of her dining to Beard and to Waverley Root (The Food of France, 1958), whom she invited to dinner so they could meet. He had stayed two nights at La Pitchoune when Michael Field was renting it and wrote to inform Julia that he “admired” her kitchen. But he was suffering from a slipped disk and their meeting did not occur until February 1973.

  Her month in Paris studying restaurant cooking coincided with the emergence of what Henry Gault and Christian Mil
lau (in their Nouveau Guide) would later call “nouvelle cuisine,” a term first used in 1742 but which now referred to a group of young chef-entrepreneurs who owned their own restaurants and valued originality, simplicity, and lighter sauces. Paul Bocuse, the Troisgros brothers, Michel Guérard, Alain Chapel, and Roger Vergé were the stars, and all of them were influenced by Fernand Point (as well as by André Pic and Alexandre Dumaine). Nouvelle cuisine was characterized by the aesthetic presentation of the dish, or, as Julia quipped about American nouvelle cuisine (in a phrase that would be repeated for twenty years), “the food is so beautifully arranged on the plate—you know someone’s fingers have been all over it.”

  Julia described for James Beard their collapse at La Pitchoune with post-work fatigue and colds, followed by a revival of holiday celebration. Olney came for Christmas dinner. On New Year’s Eve the Childs and Kublers dined with chef Roger Vergé at Le Moulin de Mougins, then joined a crowded party at Simca’s home. Paul detested Simca’s parties and described this one in detail to Charlie—the blaring television and record player turned to high, the crowd of giggling people, the forced conviviality. An artificial note in their harmonious natural world. He also described their reluctance to leave Provence: “I walk around, look at the olive trees, smell the lavender, bend my ear to the nightingales, taste the dorade, the loup, the pastis, but in a few days, after the tidal wave of Boston-Cambridge has rolled over me, these living vital impressions will be glimmering, evanescent, dream-like, vanishing.”