“How to Cook for 40,000,000 by Julia Child,” the full-page advertisements shouted. Standing in front of her wall-mounted pans, a big smile on her face and her hand holding a green-and-red pepper for color, America’s favorite home cook appeared on the cover of her first issue, February 28, 1982. Parade editor Walter Anderson said he had a phenomenal response to her appearance, especially from men. This issue also presented her personal side with an article about her marriage to Paul. Each issue had several sections, each broken up with bold headings and illustrated by color photographs: how to cut up a chicken, sauté a chicken, make three variations on sautéed chicken (with potatoes and onions, with cream and mushrooms, with peppers, onions, and garlic), make a good pot of coffee, and “the greatest apple tart.” Finally, there appeared a small box telling a personal tale about cleaning an “evil-smelling refrigerator.” Mary Frances was one of the forty million: “I always find something very good and very Julia,” she wrote her D*E*A*R*F*R*I*E*N*D (as she always addressed her letters).
She managed her obligations to both Good Morning America and Parade as well as the numerous other endeavors through teamwork. Whether Pat Pratt or Marian Morash was visiting, or cooking friends were over for Thanksgiving, or she and Rosemary were demonstrating together, she was talking over ideas for recipes. “One gets so many ideas working as a team,” she declared. By 1985, she was filming four segments of her Good Morning America spots in one day. She also found that she could plan four issues of Parade at once and later film them together. Every four-month cycle taught her something that she passed on to Simca. During their cooking and filming two years later, Julia discovered that new flour with potassium bromate strengthened the gluten and made better bread than she ever made before. And when she noticed that Jacques Pépin would recycle a new recipe three times (in teaching, in a magazine, and in demonstrations), she decided she did not need entirely new recipes every time she prepared her Parade articles.
When Julia returned to France from late June through late September 1982, she had already planned, tested, and written eleven shows for Good Morning America and completed a list (with Rosemary) of the upcoming Parade issues. As this was their first trip to France in two years, they stopped at the Pont Royal Hotel in Paris, where Julia wrote a nostalgic letter to Dort about the St.-Germain-des-Prés area. In Beaune they enjoyed a weekend of Burgundy wine and grand dining. Accompanying them from Cambridge in June and again in September were the Pratts. Pat worked well with Julia in testing recipes at La Pitchoune. Julia also discovered the fiction of Edith Wharton, she wrote Jim Beard. While reading R. W. B. Lewis’s new biography of Wharton, Julia connected with Wharton’s descriptions of Paris and Wharton’s years in Lenox, Massachusetts, near her mother’s hometowns of Pittsfield and Dalton.
After Sara Moulton had to leave La Pitchoune, Susy Davidson came to visit. Susy worked for Trois Gourmandes Productions as Associate Chef on Good Morning America and at other demonstrations in 1981 and 1982. She was a tall, twenty-nine-year-old Oregon native with lovely dark hair and a first diploma from La Varenne. She had worked a year and a half with Simca to earn her final diploma, and both Julia and Simca thought she was “a dear girl.” Susy says, “Julia sets the pace. As far as I’m concerned, she is the professional by whom all other professionals are judged.” Also visiting briefly to show off his future bride was Steven Raichlen, who had finished his degree from La Varenne and would become its representative in the United States. It was during that summer that Susy and Julia discussed the number of homosexuals who seemed to dominate the food organizations, a discussion Julia put into writing to Anne Willan, which would come back to haunt her in years to come. Julia would always maintain that the comments were not personal; her only concern was that the culinary profession have more heterosexual men in its ranks.
Julia, who enjoyed saying, “I love being bicoastal,” was really tricoastal. When she and Paul left the Provençal coast, they drove to Joigny (where Willan and Cherniavsky had bought a château nearby in Villecien), then to Paris and the flight to Boston. After a late McWilliams family celebration of her seventieth birthday (August 15, 1982) in New Hampshire, Julia was honored by a birthday dinner offered her in New York by Peter Kump (all her cooking friends sent letters). She then embarked on a final burst of cooking school demonstrations before preparing for a new television show to be co-produced by WGBH and her renamed corporation, Julia Child Productions, from which she drew a “salary” (for tax purposes).
DINNER AT JULIA’S
On the twentieth anniversary of their first work together, Russ Morash planned to film a video magazine series for Julia, beginning the filming in Santa Barbara. Julia had often told reporters after each series that she wanted to go on the road to where food was grown. Now American Express agreed to pay for the flights. As executive producer, Morash raised nearly a million dollars from Polaroid for a limited series of thirteen shows featuring segments of Julia gathering food, cooking, and then hosting a dinner party in Santa Barbara. Each program would have an accomplished chef prepare one dish in a three-minute appearance. Most significantly for Julia, they would take a week to film each program, there would be no book to accompany the series (though she would have the dishes and techniques photographed for a later book project), and she had a full-time makeup and wardrobe person.
After a brief trip north to visit Alice Waters at Chez Panisse and meet with the Mondavis about the AIWF, Julia devoted the first five months of 1983 to filming at the rented mansion at Hope Ranch, the twenty-five-acre ranch on the California coast thirty minutes from her Seaview home. The Morash family lived in the Hope Ranch home where work, filming, and dinners were held. Marian and Rosemary served as Julia’s Executive Chefs.
They began by flying to Seattle to tape segments for four shows, showing Julia salmon fishing on Puget Sound, sampling rich chocolate at the Filettante, visiting the Port Chatham smoking-salmon works in Ballard, and going on a crab boat trip at dawn. Sitting impatiently in the rented van outside Seattle, Julia waited for Debbie Wait to apply a thin coat of makeup before it was time to board the Destiny, a forty-six-foot Kodiak salmon boat. Puget Sound was windy and cold, and Julia was wrapped in a bright yellow waterproof jacket and pants. The waters were gray and choppy as Ken Thibert, the skipper, who had never seen Julia on television, guided the boat toward the crab pots. She was excited by the action and climbed up and down the boat’s ladders, bombarding the experts with questions: “How was the crab season this year?” (“Lousy.”) “What kind of bait will we use?” (“Geoduck stomachs.”) She was still going strong when Morash had the tape he needed and the boat headed back. Later that day, Julia made another appearance, followed by a wine reception before returning to film the next morning in Santa Barbara.
Because the series emphasized fresh American regional produce, she would also visit (with Paul) an artichoke field, a chicken farm, a date farm in Indio, and the Firestone Vineyard in Los Olivos. When there were too few chanterelles in the mountains above Santa Barbara, they “planted” them. Like a modern-day Dr. Livingstone, says one reporter, Julia approached in pith helmet, stout stick, wet weather gear, and New Balance shoes, “slogging through viscous mud that bogged down her party’s four-wheel-drive Bronco” (noted a visiting Time reporter), to gather a basketful of the yellow precious (and planted) chanterelles.
Visiting wine experts talked about the vintage to be served with each course (the marriage of wine and food) and a guest chef prepared a dish: René Verdon of San Francisco’s Le Trianon (White House soufflé with zucchini), Louis Evans of New Orleans’s Pontchartrain Hotel (crayfish bisque), Jean-Pierre Goyenvalle from Washington, DC, and Wolfgang Puck from West Hollywood’s Spago. Puck remembers arriving at the mansion early one morning slightly hungover after a late-night party. “Julia greeted me on the step and gave me a big hug, which planted my face somewhere in her chest region.” Austrian-born Puck came to make Santa Barbara shrimp in mustard/butter sauce.
The main dishes were prepared
by Julia and her crew, though only a part of the actual preparation was shown because this was not a how-to program. The main courses included a chicken dish called Winged Victory (a version of which she later used in Parade), Santa Barbara bouillabaisse, whole salmon steamed in white wine, roast deviled rabbit, and braised sweetbreads in puff shells. Morash filmed Julia and these dishes with a single handheld camera, and also filmed small segments featuring techniques, both for the program and for later use in a video series he was pitching called The Way to Cook. (She also told reporters she would be doing a book by this title.) He did not have Julia’s words fully scripted, except for opening and closing lines, for he believed she did best with spontaneity (indeed, even on the Good Morning America segments, after a couple of practice beginnings, she was best with partially improvised narrative). After all these segments were shot and the food ready, the show ended with a cocktail party and dinner for ten people, including hosts Julia and Paul. Sometimes when friends or journalists were bumped for more important guests, they joined the cocktail party scene and ate dinner off-camera. Her sister Dorothy can be seen at the table in her first segment, “The Salmon Dinner,” and her editor Judith Jones attended “The Turkey Dinner.” One of her honored guests was James Beard, who had to remain seated. She was worried about her “Dear Jim,” who, in and out of hospitals, did not look well.
On February 8, 1983, just when the film crew of Parade magazine left and Morash was beginning the shoot another Dinner at Julia’s segments, Julia and Paul received the news that Charlie Child died suddenly at Pennswood, his retirement home. He and Paul had recently celebrated their birthdays: “He and I had eighty-one years of understanding, of fun, of mutual learning, of creativity together, and admiration, not to mention, especially, letters from each other when we were apart during the war years. I find that I am still, unconsciously, storing up in my mind things to write [to him] about…. We were truly parts of each other,” Paul wrote their longtime friend Fanny Brennan.
Julia and Paul shared their grief in quiet private moments amid the frenetic activity of dozens of people filming; Paul, the introspective twin, was especially grieved: “I suffer because of Chas’ death,” he wrote in his datebook. Julia, typically matter-of-fact about death, threw herself into immediate tasks and looked ahead. For the Child children and grandchildren, Julia and Paul were all that remained of that generation. Charlie’s body was cremated and waited until the family gathered that August at Lopaus Point, Maine, where during a week together to memorialize him, they sprinkled his ashes along the coastal walks he loved so well and described in his memoir Roots in the Rock.
The glamorous Dinner at Julia’s began airing on PBS on October 14 of that year (it was rerun the last three months of 1984 as well). In the first program, when the limousines pulled up to the mansion and Julia appeared in heavy makeup and dark curly hair (one reporter called it an “Afro”), some of her friends were dismayed. Ruth Lockwood was sorry about the change of Julia’s image, feeling almost “betrayed.” Most food colleagues and longtime friends enjoyed the segments of fishing, mushroom picking, and date harvesting, but thought the series was “too elite, very non-Julia to be driving up in a Mercedes or Rolls-Royce.” A family member blamed Bob Johnson for pushing her into a “publicity stunt” series.
Reviewers were more positive, emphasizing the celebration of regional produce (“the French Chef has come home”), the slick new format, and the variety of segments crammed into each thirty-minute program. The variety drew some criticism for fragmenting the program, but most reviews were puff pieces, such as United magazine’s “Shows her at her bubbly, chirrupy best.” Time’s only swipe was at the wardrobe person who dressed her “in a wardrobe worthy of Auntie Mame.” The New York Times’s John J. O’Connor wrote that the attempt to “convey a sense of elegance” resulted “too often” in a “silly and distracting” program which appeared to display a “cavalier attitude toward cost.” (The Washington Post detailed the expenses, noting that the food alone “cost $1,000 a week.”) O’Connor liked Julia’s enthusiasm and the final barbecue segment, but not the full bottle of vermouth on the whole salmon and the Rolls-Royce pulling up to the door with a piano rendition of “These Foolish Things” playing in the background.
Despite the negative notes, Julia enjoyed the communal experience in the mansion, with everyone working on the project, including students from Santa Barbara City College Hotel and Restaurant School who assisted in the preparation of the food. The final segment was a barbecue with mariachi band and Julia in Western garb, while overhead the helicopters churned—not for her filming or a nearby forest fire, but for President Reagan’s arrival to and departure from Rancho del Cielo.
Julia toured for the new series to Washington, DC, and elsewhere, always working to organize chapters of the AIWF wherever she went. She and Paul, who continued to be depressed about losing his brother, returned to Santa Barbara to spend the first five months of 1984 by the sea.
“AMERICAN CELEBRATION”
Fresh oysters from Puget Sound, Tomales Bay, and Vancouver Island opened the eleven-course feast at the Stanford Court in San Francisco on May 4, 1983. Many predicted that the eleven chefs would not be able to work in the same kitchen to prepare the eleven specialties for the meal, but Michael McCarty of Michael’s in Santa Monica, who arranged the dinner, and Mark Peel, a chef at Spago, disagreed. The chefs had a ball.
The “American Celebration” feast fed 372 patrons, most of whom paid $250. It was called “the dawning of a new age for American cuisine,” by one well-fed journalist. Julia, who was in the kitchen until moments before the dinner began, called it “an amazing event.” One newspaper announced: “A Summit of U.S. Cuisine.” Another: “extravaganza.” The “American Celebration” was a fund-raiser for the American Institute of Wine and Food. (Three months later 700 people showed up—300 had to be turned away—at an AIWF fund-raising garden party on the grounds of the Hope Ranch.) But it was the San Francisco “Celebration” that both inaugurated an era of high living for the AIWF and was emblematic of a new decade in American cuisine: American chefs were emphasizing ingredients over technical skills.
When Jimmy Schmidt (Detroit) was preparing his stuffing of wild root vegetables, fiddlehead fern, and hazelnuts from Michigan, Larry Forgione (River Café in Brooklyn) and Bradley Ogden (Kansas City) rolled up their sleeves and helped him chop and slice. When Paul Prudhomme’s blackened redfish was ready to be prepared, Jonathan Waxman (Michael’s in Santa Monica), Wolfgang Puck, and Mark Miller joined in the last-minute cooking. When Jeremiah Tower was ready to put the chocolate and sabayon sauce on his pecan pastry, Alice Waters and Barbara Kafka (New York City) joined the assembly line. Each course was accompanied by a different wine, with Mondavi’s 1974 Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon served with the American cheese selection (California chèvre, Iowa Maytag Blue, and a New York Camembert). By midnight, everyone joined the “After Hours Party” for the final courses: Mark Peel’s “Spago’s pizza” (served with Domaine Chandon Blanc de Noir) and Barbara Kafka’s tripe gumbo (served with Christian Brothers Private Reserve Centennial Sherry). All the wines were Californian. And all the chefs were known for his or her quest for a distinctive American cuisine. Several had cooked at Chez Panisse or Ma Maison, and all, Alice Waters admitted to a reporter, were “from the controversial end” of the American spectrum. Indeed, only Puck and Ogden were guests on Dinner at Julia’s (being filmed at that time), suggesting the traditional nature of her guest chef list.
Upscale restaurant dining would boom in the Reagan years of the 1980s, and the chef became a new hero during that so-called decadent decade. In a panel discussion during this three-day event in San Francisco, William Rice, the editor of American Express’s Food & Wine (and a sponsor), said restaurants will play “an important part” in American culture and “chefs are taking their natural role as leaders.” Significantly, at the “American Celebration” there were no live speeches, just four giant television sets showing the prepa
rations in the kitchen. “Chefs are on a par with artists and musicians,” Julia confided to a journalist at her table.
Mimi Sheraton (who ate at home only five times the previous year) later called the 1980s a period of affluence, generous news coverage of restaurants, celebrity chefs, and dining out. “Julia criticized me directly and obliquely for being a bad influence on restaurants,” says Sheraton, “because I terrified chefs by having such negative reviews.” Yet it was the reviewers who stirred the pot. And, as the press and panel discussions noted, diners were getting more discriminating. “The revolution in food began in 1963,” the food authorities agreed, “when Julia Child went on television and alerted Americans to the pleasures of gastronomy.”
If chefs are known for cooperation—as illustrated in the San Francisco “Celebration”—the food writers were territorial and competitive, as evidenced in a scandal that rocked the food world in 1983. The story, which broke on December 7, Robert Clark calls “a kind of Pearl Harbor for the food community.” In February, Richard Olney sued Richard Nelson (Richard Nelson’s American Cooking) for copyright infringement and punitive damages, asking $1,050,000. Nelson was a past president of the International Association of Cooking Schools, based in Washington, DC, and strongly supported at its founding by Julia Child; he was also on the advisory board of AIWF (and a cooking school founder and food columnist for the Portland Oregonian). Because a recipe is a formula, Julia always believed they could not be copyrighted, though she tried to give credit for any original recipe inspiring her own variation. According to Ann Barr and Paul Levy: “Julia Child is … generous [about her recipes], and was the first to telephone Nelson to give him her support.” She told Simca a decade before that she felt “the recipe business is about hopeless.” Through the years they both recognized their own work in Gourmet and other places: “I agree with someone who said that the recipe is only the score (for the music), and that each virtuoso interprets it as he sees fit, and according to his own personality…. After all, at the Cordon Bleu there were no recipes provided at all, which made it easier.”
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