Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  The dozens of cartoons that appeared over forty years assumed that every reader knew Julia Child: two thin men staring enviously at three fat men in a television studio (“They’re the crew for the Julia Child show”); Macbeth’s three witches peering into their cauldron and holding a copy of a cookbook with Julia Child’s name on it; “The Cat Who Tasted Cinnamon” refused food until its owner studied Julia Child. More references appeared in the beloved “Beetle Bailey” cartoon strip than in any others.

  From The Muppets to Saturday Night Live, she understood the humor and the compliment. It was only when manufacturers crossed the line, calling their products “Julia Chives” or “Julia Chicken,” that she saw their intentions for what they were and had her lawyer take action. Any “use of her name for advertising purposes” was a “con game” and “hucksterism.” Ocean Spray Cranberries was threatened and withdrew its cartoon character named “Julia Chicken;” the Sheraton Hotel in Boston promptly withdrew an advertisement that suggested her endorsement when the lawsuit was drawn up; one company paid $5,000, another $40,000. All proceeds went to public television. Such integrity allowed her to praise a blender by name onstage or comment on the tasteless mealiness of an apple by name (even if the apple grower was sponsoring the event).

  Her lawyer seriously considered an offer by a ceramics company for a line of Julia Child ware in 1979. He allowed the talk to move to six figures, discussing with Julia scholarships for study at La Varenne, until the correspondence suddenly stopped. She nixed the idea. Occasionally she would allow a company to use the cover of a book, but not her name or photograph. She did allow her name to be used in a French textbook, but that was in keeping with her career as teacher and her association with educational television.

  GOOD MORNING AMERICA

  In 1980 she finally became associated with commercial television, telling Mary Frances she was “now through with public television.” She had appeared on many commercial television stations before, but never on a regular basis. Now she began cooking on ABC’s Good Morning America, a sort of variety show interspersed with news. Julia performed two-and-a-half-minute cooking spots produced by Sonya Selby-Wright, from whom she willingly took orders as she did from her editor, Judith Jones. Julia earned $605 per appearance plus expenses for herself and an assistant. She took the job less for the money than because public television was not using her. And she was able, she told Mary Frances, to “do six spots in just a few hours.” Nevertheless, “Julia’s segments were a bigger production than the others,” says Jane Bollinger, who would become her second producer.

  Julia explained to John Wadsworth, an interviewer for PBS-TV, New York: “We just KILLED ourselves [on Julia Child & More Company]. We had the best team we’ve ever had. But PBS—I don’t know whether they forgot we taped it or what, but it never got on in New York, and if you’re not on in New York, you ain’t nowhere.” Just beginning to warm up to her subject, she went on:

  Knopf … gave the advance for the book, and [the series] never got off the ground, and I just thought to hell with that. It’s a twelve-hour day and a seven-day week, and I’m not going to go into that kind of thing and have it just lay an egg. That’s a damn good book, and they were damn good shows and very original recipes. A lot of places didn’t get it because they never announced that it was going out there and everybody made their fall schedules without it. So I’m through, frankly. It was so good, that’s what annoys me.

  Wadsworth published what sounded like her farewell to PBS in Dial and added: “Julia is a gentlewoman and a scholar, a cook in the classical tradition who is just as preoccupied with la nature des choses—the essential flavor of things—as any of the people she calls the nouvelle boys.”

  After she taped the first group of spots for Good Morning America, she hired another person to help her when ABC took her on permanently and planned to shoot on a variety of locations, whether on a shrimp boat or wherever Julia happened to be. Nancy Verde Barr was a perky five-foot-two-inch, cooking school owner—Paul soon named her “Sparkle Plenty”—who was in charge of the “food stuff” for the demonstrations. Julia was impressed by her efficiency and invited her to lunch in Boston to meet Sara and Liz. Incidentally, Nancy had studied with Madeleine Kamman, now in Europe, but left when she got pregnant before completing her practice cooking experience. “I loved working for Julia. Her mind is so incredible. Something is always happening in her life,” says Nancy. “She is nurturing but not motherly. She takes people under her wing, but she is very businesslike and nonjudgmental. When she hired me, she did not hold it against me that I had studied with Kamman.” By 1981 Nancy was an integral part of the team; and Julia’s spot ran every Tuesday morning at 8:40, during the last half hour of Good Morning America.

  Julia’s two latest books, still selling well as the 1980s began, reflected the changes in America’s growing obsession with food. “There was a big wave of home cooking through the late seventies,” says Mimi Sheraton. Certainly Julia—as well as the Cuisinart, the pasta machine, and television cooking—ignited the trend, she adds. Claiborne long encouraged home cooking in his Times articles, which gave real (not home economist’s) recipes. If you were a good person, you made your own ice cream, notes Sheraton, it was almost a moral imperative. If you were a serious cook, you bought a Garland range. Perhaps because they were tired of the Vietnam War and Watergate, Americans focused their interest on home cooking. Tired too of the classical or codified approach to anything, cooks turned to American regional food and to ethnic food, as evidenced by the broad array of new cookbooks: Diana Kennedy, The Cuisines of Mexico; Madhur Jaffrey, An Invitation to Indian Cooking; Marcella Hazan, The Classic Italian Cook Book; Paula Wolfert, Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco.

  America was also waking up to problems in food. The health food counterculture, begun as early as the 1890s, surged in the 1960s and, with each new scientific study, grew steadily through the 1970s. Julia eagerly read and investigated all the reports, beginning with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and the first studies on cholesterol in 1969. She was also aware of a young woman who opened a small restaurant in California in 1971 called Chez Panisse, where only organic foods and garden produce were served: Alice Waters would become the mother of what was then an intellectual and bohemian approach to food, eventually labeled California cuisine. “I’m [also] interested in the freshness and goodness of produce,” Julia told reporter Susan Rogers, but then pointed out that there are not enough horses for the manure to feed 200 million people organically. “Several hundred people per day are dying of hunger in Pakistan; there’s a need for scientific agriculture,” she insisted.

  Underlying all her answers to each food crisis was her sense of the practical and her trust in the essential good nature of people. Because the first decade of her culinary education was in Europe and because of her good health, hearty pioneer stock, joie de vivre, and casual approach to life’s worries, she resisted joining any crusades or food-fear causes. She was more worried about overpopulation, hence her commitment to Planned Parenthood. The fear of mercury in swordfish in 1972 led to a remark about how much of the fish would have to be eaten in order to endanger one’s life. Moderation is what she preached. Moderation and a balanced diet. She was a teacher and a promoter of pleasure in eating.

  Chapter 24

  PACIFIC OVERTURES

  (1981 – 1984)

  “I am, as you know, a Californian,

  and still have that feeling in my bones …”

  JULIA CHILD to Louisette Bertholle,

  January 20, 1981

  IN SANTA BARBARA, where steep green mountains meet the blue Pacific, Julia and Paul found a home amid what she called “towering eucalyptus trees that smelled sweet and spicy.” Great twisted oaks, heavily perfumed camellia bushes, and the sounds of birds and pounding waves made Montecito Shores a paradise. Of course, the costs were high, since there were no high-rise buildings permitted under the city’s strict building code, and after weeks of rent
ing and looking at condominiums, they became accustomed to the prices. When Bob Johnson assured them the money they had in bonds was making less for them than real estate would, they made the leap, buying a top-floor apartment in a three-story, secured community across the street from what used to be called Montecito Park when Julia was a child.

  On a hill twenty miles away at Hope Ranch, Julia’s parents had courted in the early spring of 1905, when Caro Weston brought her sister Dorothy Dean to the desert climate for her health, where they found Easterners sunning themselves, playing tennis, golf, and bridge. Young Johnnie McWilliams came courting to take the two Weston girls horseback riding in the hills. Seventy-six years later, in 1981, Easterners still migrated to Santa Barbara, including Caro and John McWilliams’s eldest daughter, Julia, who preferred a beach near the city. “Montecito is indeed a bit of heaven,” Julia wrote Mary Frances Fisher.

  SANTA BARBARA BEACH

  Julia settled in at Seaview Drive in Montecito Shores, just yards from her summer playing field. For years the McWilliams family had rented a large gray shingled house on the grounds of what became the Biltmore Hotel, with its Spanish red tiles and bougainvillea, white stucco arches and vast green lawn sweeping to the sea. Her brother John was born in this town in 1914 when Julia was two years old. Now many of her Pasadena childhood friends returned to their summer town of Santa Barbara to retire. “Our gerontology group,” she called them, especially when they engaged in memory recitals and lists of all those who had “slipped off the raft.” What an expression, she exclaimed, and would be busy when they next called. Unfortunately, Charlie Child was no longer in Southern California. Recovered from his two-year depression after the death of Freddie, he left daughter Rachel’s Pasadena home and was now living in a senior citizen home near his old house in Lumberville, Pennsylvania.

  The warm sea breezes through their third-floor windows, the walks along the beach each day, and the warm swimming pool nearby offered daily succor for the seventy-nine-year-old and infirm Paul. Julia even enjoyed the domestic convenience of a nearby trash chute and the elevator beside her front door that whisked them belowground to their car. Both saved her aching knee, now almost stripped of cartilage. But she had no plans to be caught up in a swirl of retirement parties and litanies of death. No retirement in the near future for her!

  The year 1981 was a watershed in her life and in the larger culinary world: the purchase of a third home, where they intended to spend their winters and eventually settle; a greater involvement in furthering the cooking profession—a heavy schedule of live teaching in cooking schools and, most significantly, the founding of the American Institute of Wine and Food. Also during this time she made two promises that ensured full activities for years to come: to become food editor of Parade magazine in 1982 and to make a new television series, this time in Santa Barbara, in 1983. It was as if the warm Pacific breezes gave her a second or third wind, as it would the new President of the United States (just a few months older than Julia), who lived here when winter weather threatened the District of Columbia. Ronald and Nancy Reagan owned Rancho del Cielo high in the hills above the Childs. Nancy was also a Smith graduate, Julia pointed out to Avis DeVoto, who was in snowbound Cambridge when she issued a needless warning: “Don’t turn into one of those California Republicans!”

  “Because the continental shelf drops down so fast here, the fish selection is now immense,” Julia wrote Simca, Avis, and Louisette. The Dungeness crab, fresh shrimp, spiny lobsters, and sea bass excited her, as did the “wonderful fresh vegetables” from nearby Oxnard. The restaurants were nothing to get excited about, but she would soon have an impact on the local food scene. She turned the dining room next to her kitchen into a study, Paul hung pots and pans in the kitchen, and Julia enjoyed cooking with all the fresh local produce at home. Not unlike others who move to California, she was on a diet, having slowly put on weight through the years. She had heard about the new diet sweeping the country when she went to her Cambridge hairdresser and complimented his slimmed-down waist. She walked straight to a local bookstore after the shampoo and set to buy Herman Tarnower’s The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet.

  By 1980, as Robert Clark points out in his biography of Beard, the American public had become schizophrenic about its food: encouraged to eat deep-fat-fried potato skins, McDonald’s hamburgers, and goat cheese with their bitter green salads on the one hand, and on the other to monitor fat, cholesterol, sugar, and salt and take up jogging. Media images conveyed the full range from hearty-eating gourmets (James Beard was extreme at 260 pounds) to Twiggy-thin commercial models.

  Throughout Beard’s life, Clark notes, he “could effectively lose weight only as a captive in hospitals and clinics, a Ulysses of appetite lashed to the mast.” Julia’s weight never varied widely because she did not have an eating disorder. At age forty-two (after purchasing her first pair of reading glasses) she put on eight pounds in ten days of pasta eating in Italy, pounds which she quickly lost. Upon quitting smoking after her mastectomy in 1968, she gained ten pounds in three months. This time, after taking the ten pounds off, she slowly put back twenty. When she decided to lose weight in 1974 on a 1,200-calorie diet, she lost ten and put back twenty—typical of dieting patterns. By 1981 she realized she would have to change her eating patterns permanently and found a jump start with the high-protein, low-carbohydrate Scarsdale plan. The daily discipline appealed to her very nature, and the weight came off. When she was filming a series of spots for Good Morning America that fall, food writer Betty Fussell made a note on her taped interview about Julia’s “slender hips” and the “length of torso from waist down. [We] don’t see this on [the] TV frame, but she has an elegance that is not the bosomy matron projected from the waist up.”

  Julia turned her weight-loss and change-of-eating routine into a lengthy article with recipes for one of her monthly McCall’s articles. In this, one of her last features, she vowed, “I do solemnly swear that I shall never be fat again.” She kept her word. After all, she was nearly seventy, not able to exercise as much because her knees bothered her, and constantly surrounded by food. At home she cooked lighter, as illustrated in the fat-free tomato sauce she featured in the McCall’s article—a sauce that could be used in stews, a squid dish, chicken bouillabaisse, and any pasta dish. The recipe included ripe tomatoes (chopped and drained), canned Italian plum tomatoes or tomato paste, and small green tomatoes, but the flavor came from the onion, garlic, half cup of wine, a few drops of hot-pepper sauce, pinch of saffron, and basil (or thyme or oregano). She simmered the mixture, cooled it, then kept it in her refrigerator in a covered jar. When she dined out, she learned to leave food on her plate. She could take just two bites of a rich dessert. But she never gave up quality products such as “rich creamery butter” (the three words always went together in her vocabulary). Everything, but in moderation.

  Except for two months in the spring and two months in the fall in Cambridge, Paul and Julia spent the first year in Santa Barbara. They even canceled their trip to France (for the first time in nearly twenty years), to have two porches enclosed for extra space in their condominium. They left only to tape Good Morning America in New York City and to fulfill commitments to conventions and professional organizations.

  “Only Moses disrupting the Red Sea caused more commotion than Julia Child’s hike down the housewares-jammed aisles of McCormick Place in Chicago.” She fingered, squeezed, patted, bent, and lifted the new appliances, skillets, and microwaves at the National Housewares Manufacturers Association’s semiannual exhibition. Yes, she would try anything in her kitchen if she could send it back. “I am not a prisoner of any manufacturer,” she informed a reporter. The next year they invited her back as the principal speaker.

  “THE LIGHTBULB DINNER”

  Gertrude Stein was correct when she said the French love to talk about talking about food. But conversation among foodies is not always about the food eaten yesterday, today, and tomorrow. During a Santa Barbara dinner on Fe
bruary 9, 1981, at the home of a woman named Flora Courtois, the talk turned to doing something significant about the way Americans cook and eat. The dinner was initiated by Richard Graff, whom Julia had met earlier in Provence and then at his (and his brother’s) Chalone Winery in Sonoma County. He invited Julia and Paul to dinner, again enlisting his friend Shirley Sarvis. Also at the dinner was Robert Huttenback, then chancellor of the University of California in Santa Barbara.

  They would dub this evening “The Lightbulb Dinner.” It began when Julia expressed frustration about there being no educational center for culinary arts and sciences, which she believed was not acknowledged as a very serious subject for study in the United States. She seemed ready to take on American academia the way she had tackled French cooking thirty years before.

  “It is a shame that the program they have at Antioch is not more of a success,” Julia remarked, comparing gastronomy to architecture—“you have the history, theory, and the hands-on as well.”

  “Well, why don’t we do it out here at the University of California?” Bob Huttenback remarked. “There is a piece of land with a house out on the west campus [by the ocean] that is not being used.”

  Such was the beginning of what would ultimately be called the American Institute of Wine and Food, but the talk that day had less to do with an “institute” than with an academic center like that tried by Professor John Ronsheim of Antioch College in Ohio. Ronsheim was a brilliant eccentric who championed academic degrees in food studies. (“He was nuts and full of wonderful, crazy ideas,” says Alice Waters.) Julia was keen for education; Huttenback (a historian) was interested in an independent research center and clearinghouse outside the traditional academic disciplines. Anticipating the faculty response, he said it was too early for an academic program. He was a creative chancellor at the Santa Barbara campus for three years, raised millions for the university, and was determined to turn what was called “Surfer Tech” into a world center of academic excellence.