Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  Julia upped the ante on these two series, in terms of concept and of cost. According to Russ Morash, producer of both shows: “She insisted on rehearsal days in the studio (the economics of it should not be overlooked, for every minute was costly). To give her what she needed, we went to a warehouse so the set would not have to be taken down. We built a studio kitchen at 495 Western Avenue [across from where the Star Market is today].” The kitchen was blue, green, and white—the colors of her own kitchen. They also built a ready room with a preparatory kitchen. Julia and her crew could walk in any day and begin cooking, saving the two hours for setup and the two hours for dismantling. Initially the new studio and the new equipment were leased for only thirteen shows, eight filmed at the end of 1977 and five the following year, and they would film only one program a week, not the two or four episodes they were accustomed to shooting in previous series. Three of these thirteen, in shorter version, went into her monthly column for McCall’s.

  Robert J. Lurtsema, a friend of Paul and the measured, orotund voice of classical music on public radio, wrote the theme music for the series. It was “all bassoons, which sounds like an elephant walking,” according to Julia.

  Julia remade her persona from the French Chef into the Elegant Hostess. This series focused on the dining room and a full menu, unlike any series or book she had done before, but similar in one regard to Simca’s Cuisine (“An Alsatian Supper”). In the “Chafing Dish” menu, for example, the first course was sliced fresh artichoke bottoms and raw marinated scallops with fresh tomato fondue; the main dish was steak Diane (with those bouncing peas); and dessert was a chocolate mousse cake consisting of a pound of chocolate, six eggs, a half cup of sugar, and one cup of whipped cream. She informed Mary Frances that the cake was gâteau Victoire au chocolat, mousseline, but for her viewers it was a flat chocolate cake decorated with whipped cream.

  In this series, the titles of dishes were in English and she would have, she informed Simca, “a lot of plain old American cooking—like corned beef hash, corn timbale, coleslaw, roast beef, Boston baked beans, and New England fish chowder.” She was “out of the French straitjacket,” but putting her French techniques to use in making creative variations on American dishes. Of course, the foundation recipes (such as the sauces) did not change, and there were some French dishes, such as chocolate truffles and coulibiac (sole in choux pastry).

  The ambitious concept of presenting an entire meal for guests on a special occasion—“Buffet for 19,” “New England Potluck Supper,” “Dinner for the Boss”—was matched by money and a large crew of volunteers. Co-producer Ruth Lockwood was her “collaborator and colleague,” performing all the duties she always did for Julia personally as producer, but, she said, “without the ultimate responsibility, which is what I did not want.” Rosemary Manell came from the San Francisco area and moved in with Julia and Paul. She was, in Julia’s words, “a marvel of cookery, workery, good humor, and everyone warms to her and loves her.” Elizabeth Bishop headed a group of six to eight volunteers who “did prep,” preparing food and washing dishes. In addition, there were Julia’s elderly secretary, Gladys, a makeup artist, and two office managers, including Avis DeVoto.

  Julia personally hired Rosie and Liz, who were her best buddies, both of whom had uncontrollable wit and appetites—Rosie for food and Liz for drink. Julia, who had put on weight after Paul’s operation, had taken off fifteen pounds in Provence. She hoped to stay on her diet along with Rosie, who had arrived thirty pounds lighter (with that many more to go). “[Rosie has] a terrible duel with appetite and she is, as you say, a compulsive eater, as am I,” Julia confided to Mary Frances in September. “If there is anything in sight anywhere I’ll eat it unless I most sternly and with supreme willpower and reasoning turn from it.”

  The second series (More Company) included the same crew, with the addition of two young women: Marian Morash, the wife of Russ, and Sara Moulton, chef at a Boston catering company. (Neither woman knew the other was hired until they both showed up on the set.) Sara looked like a small teenager. After graduating second in a class of 450 from the Culinary Institute of America, she worked for several years in restaurants and wanted to leave catering. Both women, along with Rosie, were hired by Julia to help her with creative menu ideas. Marian worked three days, Sara two (the other five at a restaurant nearby). With the six or eight volunteers and everyone jealous for Julia’s attention, it was soon evident Julia had to decide the pecking order. Characteristically, she gave everyone an executive position. Elizabeth Bishop was Executive Associate, Marian Morash Executive Chef, Sara Moulton Associate Executive Chef, and Rosemary Manell Food Stylist. Patricia (Pat) Pratt was in charge of buying and arranging the flowers for the dining-room table and the set (which Russ always thought was “too flowery”).

  Elizabeth played the “bad guy.” A few of them found her difficult to work with, jealous and competitive. One described her always walking around with what looked like a water glass in her hand. Yet another noted, “Julia and Liz together were like Abbott and Costello.” Paul always liked her naughty tongue, according to Judith Jones. Now she played the role that Paul had had in moving everything along and allowing Julia to be the “good guy.” Liz, the women believed, could make anything happen. Surrounded by women with a serious purpose, Julia was again the center of the pack, the Head Girl, as she had been in Pasadena and Northampton.

  “It was a Persian Circus,” according to Morash. The women called themselves “Harmony Inc. Complete Food Production.” In the introduction to the second volume of the books based on the two television series, Julia called them “our team,” and later “a family of intimates.” Rosemary said the “camaraderie was like the old sewing bees, like a party.” Sara, who would marry a man in the music business, probably had the best tag: “Julia’s Posse … rappers always have their posse”:

  What is both so frustrating and so great about Julia is that she treated us all like equals [said Sara Moulton, chef of Gourmet’s kitchen in 1994]. She did not behave like a big, important teacher, like she was, or an expert. She really valued our opinions. There were times when I wished she had, because I wanted to sit at her feet and learn everything from her. She made us feel good. It was really an exciting experience.

  Behind the elaborate plans for a series in which Julia and Paul would not have to work late hours was their lawyer, Bob Johnson. Johnson believed Julia was a national treasure who should be treated as such. Polaroid agreed and underwrote the series. He had spent several days the previous June at La Pitchoune planning the circumstances that would be best for Julia (and Paul): no work in their home, no shopping, no dismantling of the set, and plenty of assistants. According to one of Julia’s colleagues in the food business, “Johnson was a very good lawyer, who negotiated good contracts for Julia.”

  The week began on Friday morning at the studio when at least ten people gathered—all but the film crew—for “talk-through” from 7:30 A.M. until they had lunch together. Final decisions were made on what dishes and procedures would be demonstrated and what food was to be purchased (Rosie went shopping). Monday was “cook-through,” in which the same crew tried out the meal, and Tuesday was “dress rehearsal”: Pat bought and arranged the flowers, Ruthie constructed the cue cards, Rosie chose the colors of plates and everything on the table, and the food crew prepared food for the next day’s shoot (they made the chocolate cake thirteen times before getting it right).

  The taping with fifteen people was done on Wednesday, with Russ Morash outside in an enormous bus full of television monitors and lights. Lines and cables connected him to the floor manager, who took his directions. Electricians and cameramen all had headphones and Julia was wired down the back of her blouse (she told Simca she would continue to wear the L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes insignia on her blouse). Although they had several versions of each of the three dishes at different stages of preparation, they took a break in filming between each section. At that time, Julia’s silent partner Rosemar
y brought out the dish she had cooked in the prep kitchen and the still photographer went to work. They taped four hours in the morning, sat down to lunch with wine at a long table, then worked until late.

  Paul was able to be in charge of keeping the knives sharpened and taking black-and-white photos for distribution from their home. He was always “amazed,” he wrote Charlie, “that all these moving parts work so well together on each show.” James D. (Jim) Scherer, a young professional still photographer, launched his career by taking all the color photographs for WGBH and for the books based on the two series.

  Julia took direction well from strong men, her assistants noticed. In turn, Morash admired her because she was “curious, professional, and scholarly about her art … these are the three keys to Julia,” he adds. “She was never casual. She does not sit around and worry, she trusts professionals. She trusted me! That was a responsibility. I wanted to do the best for her. She asked, ‘Is that enough or should we do it again?’ She always delivers.”

  After filming a couple of programs, Julia realized she could not both write the book and film the series. She needed a professional writer to draft the text for the program. At Peter Davison’s suggestion, Julia hired Esther S. (Peggy) Yntema, a longtime editorial colleague of Davison’s at the Atlantic Monthly Press. Peggy Yntema attended all the remaining talk-throughs, dress rehearsals, and tapings, even helping out on the set. With her excellent memory, she went home and typed up crucial points. She wrote the frontispiece material and introductions to the dinners, then got recipes from Julia and smoothed out the inconsistencies (asking Judith Jones for model recipe forms). Soon she was completing a chapter with each show. An examination of the drafts of the two books reveals that Peggy was the writer, Julia the re-writer. Julia wrote all over the “esy” (Yntema) drafts, taking out wording, such as a literary allusion to Henry V, saying, “It’s not my style at all.” Occasionally Peggy returned some phrasing to the text and Julia left it in on the second read (“It was completely unpredictable what she wanted in or out”). Remarkably, she captured Julia’s voice well, and she had the book ready in time for the appearance of the series.

  Chris Pullman did the layout, following Julia’s desire to break up the visuals with lots of white space, headings, and subtitles (“We want it to look very magaziney”). Focusing on segments (“You do not want to read every single section every time you make the dish”) reflected Julia’s organized mind as well as the growing influence of slick food magazines in the 1970s (Gourmet was followed by Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, The Cook’s Magazine). The photographs were lavish. Peggy made a major contribution by adding the shopping lists, suggestions on what to do with leftovers, alternatives to the menu, and variations at the end of each menu, looking back through Julia’s other books so as not to be repetitive. Julia also wanted a postscript to each chapter, and they added menu alternatives and “cooking to bring” (when invited to dinner) to fill out the slim book. (In the second volume, they added a gazetteer and dropped the menu alternatives.) When the first volume was in galleys, Julia—in a further easing up on control—allowed others to proofread and took Paul to Provence for four months.

  When the first book appeared in 1978, Knopf printed 190,000 copies, and it was an alternative selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Peggy was surprised: “I read the proof and saw my name on the title page [“In collaboration with E. S. Yntema”]. It would have been terribly ungracious to say no, thank you, but I would have preferred not to have my name used.” Indeed, the copyright page rightly lists her as “joint author.” After anonymously serving as midwife to a number of noteworthy books at the Atlantic Monthly Press, including a famous novel of the decade, she preferred anonymity. She was also surprised by a large royalty check (Julia had added a share of the royalties to Peggy’s contractual flat fee) and gave $2,000 to the Schlesinger Library in Julia Child’s name.

  Peggy Yntema, who preferred the first volume (“fresher and less strained”) to the second, said of Julia’s organizational skills: “She could have been a general.” Of her character: “There is absolutely no falsehood to Julia at all; she cannot gild the lily; perfectionism is very important; she will make any number of tries to get it just right.” Of her style: “Her conversational style was born before she met Paul; her conversational style is so much like her books.” A good example of the style (“Julia wrote this section herself”) is found in the recipe for cassoulet, where she discusses what in private she would call farting: “Intestinal motility is polite gobbledygook for flatulence, which in turn means gas,” then quotes the scientists at the USDA on beans and their digestive qualities.

  WGBH made a one-time payment to Julia for each program (most of which was used to pay her extra assistants) and no residuals, though the programs ran for twenty years. Julia did not make money on any series, but she did on the books based on the series. At this point she had combined sales of more than a million books. As she told food writer Barbara Sims-Bell, “I don’t think that I made fifty dollars a television show; there is no money on public television. Caterers probably make more money.” She told the New York Times the same thing, adding, “I don’t do anything commercial except selling books of mine.” In 1991, Wings Books (distributed by Knopf) combined the two books—hurriedly, it would seem, from the number of typographical errors—in a big slick book entitled Julia Child’s Menu Cookbook.

  THE RESEARCHER AND THE CRITICS

  Jack Shelton in San Francisco, whom Clark Wolf calls the first food writer (pre-Claiborne) to call himself a “restaurant critic,” was Julia’s most devoted reviewer. He praised two qualities in her: “Julia knows how to listen” and she possesses an “unslakable thirst for greater knowledge.” The women who worked with her all recall her intense curiosity and her investigation of food-related issues, contacting national scientific groups such as the Bureau of Weights and Measures when she went on a losing crusade to promote the metric system. She told an exhausted Marian Morash, who was going home to her family, that Marian should “work on a fish terrine a certain way” and Julia would try another way and they would compare notes in the morning. Julia herself remembers trying to get a certain recipe from “a nasty French pastry woman who had a world-famous flourless cake.” When the woman refused, Julia spent years of experimenting until she made her own gateau Victoire au chocolat with whipped cream in time for Julia Child & Company.

  A passage in a letter to Louisette at the end of 1978 reveals another reason for Julia’s persistent research: “There are now so many people in this country, teaching and writing, who have had wonderful training such as working in restaurants in France, taking courses at Lenôtre, etc. I can’t pretend to keep up with them. It is amazing what a revolution in cooking has taken place in this country—I wonder if young people in France are that much interested? Or as expert? It has perhaps not yet happened there as it has here.”

  “I learn something new every day,” she told one reporter. “It’s endless. You’re never going to live long enough. I would very much like to go over to Paris to go to the Lenôtre pastry and catering school.” She also wanted to study charcuterie. Again she told a Chicago reporter, “I’d like to get some more training…. Maybe I could work as an interpreter at La Varenne.”

  When Marian Morash suggested Julia come to Nantucket, where she was chef for three years at the (summer-only) Straight Wharf restaurant, Julia spent a weekend in mid-August cooking on-line with the crew, serving 80 to 90 customers for lunch and 125 for dinner. With delight, she reported to Simca that she had done “actual on-line cooking” for the first time, detailing the dishes she helped to prepare. She reveled in the adventure, the learning, and the camaraderie.

  Hard work does not immunize one to criticism; indeed, and publicity attracts it. The first reviews in October 1978 brought a new attack by Madeleine Kamman, who sent Julia a copy of a letter to a Boston periodical in which she said Julia opened her oysters with “a can opener,” but “I will continue clicking an oyster open e
very fifteen seconds with an oyster knife.” Julia did not reply, as usual, but noted at the bottom of Kamman’s missive that fifteen seconds was slow. Through the years Julia did not write or utter Kamman’s name, yet never failed to report to Simca every appearance in the media of “your French pupil from Newton.” The following year Kamman informed Julia by letter that she was professionally dying in the small town of Boston, where Julia’s celebrity made her the only person to know. Soon afterward Kamman made the front page with news that she was returning to her native France to “battle the sexism of the French cooking establishment”—because the people of Boston did not appreciate her restaurant. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that she was going back to France to open a restaurant run entirely by women. When asked if anyone cooked better than she, she replied perhaps Frédy Girardet—maybe not better, but as well as she. (Many considered Girardet, in Crissier outside Lausanne, the best chef in the world.) Julia, in reporting this to Simca, added that “life will lose much of its savor without her, that’s for sure.”

  Privately to Simca or Ruth Lockwood, Julia could refer to Simca’s former pupil with some favorite epithet, but she also acknowledged Kamman’s talent and teaching skills. Chez la Mère Madeleine at the Modern Gourmet cooking school in Newton Center, which was opened in 1974, was sold to several of Kamman’s cooking school pupils in 1980 (at which point Julia and Paul visited, but were disappointed). One magazine called Kamman a “Woman with a Vision” and pictured her in Annecy, but the Boston Globe called her “the Cast-Iron Lady.” By 1983 she had opened a school in New Hampshire as well as Annecy and several years later settled in the Napa Valley to teach chefs. Eventually, her resentment against Julia abated somewhat as her reputation as a teacher of teachers became secure.