Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  The first six months of 1986 were spent in Santa Barbara, where, Julia told Avis, “the mimosa are in bloom, the avocados ripening, flowering bushes, fresh broccoli and spinach in bunches” at the local farmers’ market. When she wrote to “Red and Eleanor” Warren to congratulate him on his appointment as Poet Laureate, she described their “condo overlooking the green meadow and blue Pacific”—the colors of her many kitchens and book covers. Paul was briefly hospitalized with shingles, which was treated successfully. They were able to attend the Third Annual AIWF Conference in San Diego, a charity cooking demonstration at the Stanford Court Hotel to benefit the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and a weekend in the Napa Valley, but increasingly she was limping around with an aching knee. She told the Walcutts the bum knee was “the result of an old ski injury and forty years behind the stove.” Finally she had what she called “a total knee replacement” the first week of February. She took her physical training regime seriously, she wrote, and was on the knee-flexing machine soon after surgery, in a walker the next day, home in eight days, and “in three months I can start ballet.”

  She had to get back to her book and, more important, she felt, keep being involved with people and the professional world. In March the Childs attended the First Annual AIWF Founders Banquet and the Monterey Wine Festival, as well as the Association of Cooking Schools (later renamed the International Association of Culinary Professionals) conference in Washington, D.C. Peter Kump, the next president, planned a dinner honoring Simca, with a reading of letters from her friends and colleagues, including Julia, who wrote about “our lasting and loving culinary sisterhood.” Simca remained in France to work on her memoirs with Jane Owen Molard (“I thoroughly empathized with what Julia must have gone through when writing the first Mastering,” she says today). But a greater reason for staying in France was her husband, Jean, who was ill (and would die that summer). The next month Paul had his second prostate operation as well as a number of other physical ailments. The year 1986 was not a good or healthy one, though some letters Julia wrote painted a jolly picture of “Paul … busy and happy, painting and photographing.” In truth, she was cooped up with her book and a disoriented husband. Nevertheless, she pressed on this spring with a visit to the Sebastiani estate, another week of classes at the Mondavi vineyard (with Maggie Mah and Rosemary assisting her), a gala at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco, and attendance at the San Francisco Food Writers dinner—always accompanied by Paul.

  By summer she was beginning to doubt she would ever complete The Way to Cook. In a letter to the Walcutts, after discussing her worries about the conservative Supreme Court, the new laws against sodomy, and the abortion question, she added: “I am engulfed in my mammoth new cookbook and doubt, at this point, if I shall ever get it finished. There is so much to do, and I have to think, which takes so much time. The IBM-PC is marvelous, and I bless it every day.” She completed the poultry and vegetable chapters and left Santa Barbara erroneously thinking a secretary that fall could put various recipes from Parade, Dinner at Julia’s, and The Way to Cook tapes onto her computer disk.

  Leaving the manuscript behind, Julia took Paul, just after their fortieth wedding anniversary, back to France while she could. It would turn out to be his last Provençal journey. As usual, according to the Pratts, who accompanied them, she had the itinerary to Alsace, Switzerland, Italy, and Provence carefully typed out and planned. She always told people she returned to Europe “to see what they are up to.” That is why she visited Patricia Wells, whom she met at a cooking school meeting in the fall of 1984 in Paris (after having written her a fan letter that spring when A Food Lover’s Guide to Paris was published). “They came to my fortieth birthday party that fall,” Wells told me in 1995. “I had never watched her on television, but I knew her from her books. There was no other way to learn to cook, and there never will be another like her.” She was impressed with Julia’s generosity, curiosity, and breadth of knowledge (“though she does not wear her knowledge overtly”). It little mattered that Wells and Julia would not always agree on their assessment of French restaurants they visited together over the next decade. Julia could be stubborn once she made up her mind, and “she hates trendiness … and frozen food.”

  “My God, it’s Beverly Hills in the south of France,” said Clark Wolf when he first visited coastal Provence. Wolf, a quick-witted food retailer, later a restaurant consultant, and active member of the New York chapter of AIWF, was visiting Bramafam for Simca’s annual cocktail party, which included the Childs and Susy Davidson. Wolf could be just as outspoken as Julia and they liked each other. “When you get to Julia’s base, it’s about very sophisticated, very simple life … she is deeply intuitive. She just loves men and she makes men feel special, though she is enormously supportive of women. Her thinking is liberal but her approach is conservative because she likes structure and discipline. She’s very American, very grounded.”

  The trip to France was a disaster for Paul, according to one friend they visited. “He would eat everything during very rich meals and developed a digestive tract blockage. He could suddenly become fractious. But whatever embarrassment Julia may have felt, she never showed it.” As they were leaving France, Julia herself told friends that he would drop off to sleep during meals.

  They stopped in New York for her appearance on Good Morning America. Julia and her crew were waiting for the cameras to roll, one key assistant missing because her husband had deserted her. “She forgot the three F’s,” Julia whispered to Sara Moulton: “Feed ’em, fuck ’em, and flatter ’em.” Seven minutes later, on-camera, she pronounced her Bon appétit. Charlie Gibson, who began working with her when he joined the cast as host in 1987, adored Julia and her outspoken matter-of-factness:

  Julia is game to do anything; she is marvelous to work with and asks no quarter because of her age. She is an incorrigible flirt and she loves to talk politics, especially about Congress, which I used to cover. Once as I left after dining with them, I said to Paul, “It is a very impertinent thing for a young man to say, but I have always been in love with your wife.” Paul answered immediately, “That’s okay, I have been in love with her too.”

  A GREAT GATSBY ERA

  Even before D. Crosby Ross and Dun Gifford took over the American Institute of Wine and Food in late 1987, Julia was having trouble with the organization she envisioned—or rather the organization that was not what she envisioned. The more money they worked to raise, the more money they seemed to need. She enjoyed the first-class conferences that brought together the best thinkers and practitioners in the country, but she was getting tired of the constant dunning for dollars. George Trescher, who was hired for $100,000—a huge sum for a small organization with no endowment (and a library debt)—returned to New York City after fourteen months as president, he says, in order to run his business there. For one more year he remained on retainer, spending ten days a month in San Francisco.

  The Fourth Annual AIWF Conference on Gastronomy, in Texas, on November 6–9, 1986, was the most extravagant to date and was sponsored by the Campbell Soup Company, Food and Wines From France, and Rosewood Hotels (the program insert listed seventy corporations and vineyards as “contributors”). The institute flew in medical doctors, academicians, national journalists, food producers, editors, chefs, and winemakers. From France they flew in chefs Jean-Pierre Billoux, Jacques Cagna, and Gérard Besson, as well as Patricia Wells, Anne Willan, Rudolph Chelminski, and Richard Olney. It was a star-studded gathering with first-class accommodations, intellectual stimulation, sumptuous meals, and a variety of wines, champagne, and stretch limousines.

  The champagne and caviar conferences, planned by Trescher and Program Director Greg Drescher, may have reinforced the image of a “wine and cheese” society that the students and faculty at UCSB had complained about. Indeed, the conferences were worthy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby and in part a reflection of the frenzied trend-making and the conspicuous consumption of the 1980s. They
drew civilian food and wine lovers, many of them wealthy, for the admission was expensive. These conferences were heavily underwritten and costly, but they dispensed enough mental and gustatory stimulation to sate any palate. Those who made frequent presentations at the conferences included England-based wine expert Hugh Johnson, the New York Times’s R. W. Apple, Jr., anthropologist Lionel Tiger, Esquire’s John Mariani, food historian William Woys Weaver, and Albert Sonnenfeld, a professor of French and comparative literature.

  The same tone of splendor, but without the corporate underwriting, existed at national headquarters. Hiring of staff and travel expenses were unrestrained, given the cost for administration and publications. The seeds of the problem lay at the founding: Child, Mondavi, and Graff (who in their own businesses always had business managers) hired Trescher, who was an outstanding fund-raiser and conference planner, but not strong on managing and budgeting an office. D. Crosby Ross, whom one founder called “the most profligate with his champagne and limousines,” was now earning $125,000. Under Ross, who served as president in San Francisco, the debt reached $285,000. Under Dun Gifford, chair of the board of directors, the debt soared to $635,000. “They were all great at spending money,” according to Richard Graff, “but no one could touch Dun Gifford for that. He had great ideas but tripled the deficit.”

  The Journal of Gastronomy was published quarterly at enormous cost. Dedicated to the theory and history of cuisine and initially edited by David Thomson, the journal was the most scholarly element of the organization. First published in the summer of 1984 and running about 125 pages each, its early issues featured essays by such nationally and internationally recognized scholars and artists as Roland Barthes, Alan Davidson (founder of the Oxford Symposia on Food History), M. F. K. Fisher, Jan Langone, Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, Raymond Sokolov, Joyce Carol Oates, and Harvey Levenstein. Topics ranged from “On the Esculent Fungi,” “Paradise Lost: The Decline of the Apple and the American Agrarian Ideal,” “Food in France After the Revolution,” to “The Cooks of Concord.” Artwork (René Magritte’s L’Invention Collective opened the first volume) as well as photographs of the covers of antique culinary books were included. As Paul Levy wrote from London: “The rates of pay are … appetizing. Foodie writers passed the word around that for a long piece, Gastronomy pays the equivalent of 40 four-toque dinners.”

  The Newsletter, which Dick Graff had published as a four-page report to all the members, became an eight-page, and then early in 1987 a twelve-page AIWF monthly newsletter redesigned and edited by Robert Clark (who would author Beard’s biography five years later). The February issue included articles by Ruth Reichl, then food editor of the Los Angeles Times and later of the New York Times, as well as pieces by Julia Child and culinary scholars Barbara Wheaton, Philip Hyman, and Mary Hyman. By 1988 it took on more news of the business of the organization.

  After reading the May 1987 issue of the monthly newsletter, Julia wrote a letter to the editor (published in July) commenting on two articles that made it evident the AIWF was risking a fall into what she called “The We Happy Few Syndrome: Nothing produced for the mass market is worth considering by the cognoscenti, be it coffee, bread, vegetables, wine, or whatever.” They must, she insisted, be just as concerned about the quality of canned and frozen produce as they are about truffles and foie gras. Coffee magnate Tim Castle, who wrote one of the articles, responded immediately to insist he was being grossly misinterpreted, his career hurt, and asking for an emendation. There is no indication that she responded.

  Politics reared its ugly head when Bob Huttenback was charged with “embezzlement, insurance fraud, and tax evasion” at the university in the spring of 1987. Julia was as shocked and saddened as she was sure he was innocent and would be released. An ambitious district attorney, the New York Times’s purchase of the local paper, and a faculty that was out to get him were the explanations bandied about by his friends. In addition to his own political naivete (he did not even have a lawyer), his support of the AIWF center may have been involved. When the charge of using university money to renovate his private home (he failed to have the renovation written into his contract, as the last chancellor had) was published, much was made of a presumed $104,000 cost of his new kitchen (apparently a particular sore spot for the students). By July, he was indicted and forced to resign (he was convicted and sentenced to community service). Without him, the center seemed doomed.

  The next month, in Larry Wilson’s “Julia Child’s Crusade” in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, she is quoted staunchly defending Huttenback as the victim of a witch hunt. Her dream was still to have the AIWF center in Santa Barbara and to recruit 20,000 more members to the organization. The article also talks about her thoughts on another television series, in which she would visit the sources of food production (a frequent theme only partially fulfilled in the Dinner at Julia’s series), and AIWF plans to videotape great chefs in action for posterity (they taped Beard before his death). The most interesting revelations in the well-researched article deal with the real problems of the building plans of the AIWF: the Huttenback scandal; the resistance of students and faculty; Vice-Chancellor Michaelsen’s statement that the university would probably “need that land in the future;” and an East Coast-West Coast schism in the leadership of the AIWF. An Easterner called it a “sleepy, backwater California institute, filled with deadwood and supported by rich ladies from Santa Barbara.” Nancy Harmon Jenkins, the new editor of the Journal and a Boston area resident, was quoted as saying she would resist the attempts of Drescher to trim the financial fat by asking her to do more than her job description, which was to edit the Journal. It was not a pretty picture, and was discouraging for Julia, who had invested her image and money for five years.

  In November 1985 the Newsletter listed Julia as offering a $100,000 matching grant for the building fund and placed her name in the $100,000 donor category. She wrote Ross that it was time they straightened out her financial situation and removed her name from the list of donors in that category. “We do not have a formal pledge,” only a charitable trust with money reserved for the building fund if the association “ever manages to get itself on a sound financial basis.” In the meantime the money was accruing interest, but she “had no intention of releasing” the funds into operating expenses for the national office. She would not rise to their bait. “I don’t want that cash to go down the faceless maw of general expenses,” she wrote on February 23, 1988. Ross sent a copy of her letter to Graff, along with a yearly listing of her donations. Graff, who poured a great deal of his own money into the AIWF as well, saw the figures that showed that her giving already exceeded that amount, if they counted her founders’ fee, her quarterly gift of a thousand dollars, her special underwriting for a new director, then the journal, and finally the corporate fees she diverted to them. She was generous, tolerant, even lenient in allowing professionals to do their job, but when she straightened her back on an issue, she could be brutally frank and stubborn. When she told a couple of friends she was tired of “being used” by the AIWF, the word got back rapidly to headquarters.

  Julia was extremely busy trying to complete her book, which was long past deadline, to tape her regular Good Morning America spots, and to care for Paul, who in early 1987 slipped from her grasp and fell down a flight of wooden stairs, injuring his ribs and wrist. He was growing weaker and she more concerned for him. Those who met him for the first time in the 1980s believed him to be sullen, distracted, or acerbic. Except for those trips to New York City for ABC, she isolated herself most of that year in Santa Barbara with her computer, missing her cooking gang. She was only halfway through the third chapter early in 1987, she told Mary Frances. By the next spring she was midway through the meat: “I never feel I know enough, and have to keep going out looking at chops, cooking them, etc. A book is so final, even though I keep saying ‘in my experience,’ to show that I am not stating eternal truths as I see them.” The “quite presumptuous title” intimidated her, but
Mary Frances encouraged her to write “pure Julia” and not be cut down “into corporate wastebaskets.” Julia may have been counting on Judith to cut and edit, but, from the receding deadlines, it was clear to Julia and Mary Frances that Julia was indeed writing her magnum opus.

  PROFESSIONAL COMMITMENTS

  “Julia was always the first one to put on her badge at a convention,” many of her friends point out. Patricia Wells noticed that she always wore her badge throughout a conference. It was a signal of her camaraderie with the professional circle and an instinctive democratic impulse. It echoed her opening of every television program: “Hello, I’m Julia Child.”

  Though her primary professional commitment was to the AIWF, she was a very active member of what would eventually be called the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP). In particular she worked with the organization to construct standards and certification procedures. When they established an examination (Certified Culinary Professional: CCP), she insisted on taking it herself. Whereas the IACP was practical, the AIWF was supposedly more scholarly.