Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  Julia encouraged women culinary professionals within a sorority of good cooking schools, such as Anne Willan’s La Varenne. She spoke out also in support of Dorothy Cann’s excellent French Culinary Institute in lower Manhattan. (Both Willan and Cann taught French cuisine, not coincidentally, but Julia welcomed dozens of other home cooking schools around the country.) She both visited schools and encouraged individuals. When they had met at La Varenne, Julia informed Susy Davidson: “You know, you are in the right place at the right time for a woman.” (Susy would henceforth follow her anywhere.) Another woman, the first female graduate of the Ritz-Escoffier cooking school, wrote to complain to Julia about the terrible way she was treated and the insistence of the director (Gregory Usher) and chefs that there are no good women cooks. Julia always lent a sympathetic ear and words of encouragement to the women and the schools, filing all the letters for later recommendations.

  She helped to found the Women’s Culinary Guild of New England, attended its meetings as well as those of the Les Dames d’Escoffier, Culinary Historians of Boston, and the IACP. She continued to support the Beard House by allowing them to use her name as a founder. Her donations went to the AIWF, but “her name was magic,” declares Kathleen Perry. Julia did not cotton to competition among these groups, only joint efforts toward the goals in which she believed. She loved the lectures, sessions, and camaraderie of every culinary conference. She waited in line with everyone else, Patricia Wells remembers, except once when there was a huge line for Dungeness crab, which Julia adores, and she went directly to the head of the line in a rare moment of pulling rank.

  During this decade Julia had several broad commitments: professionalizing the craft, educating the public about food, and the practical improvement of food, specifically the quality of mass-produced food. As she said in her “We Happy Few” letter: “With 250 million mouths to feed, we have to mass-produce.” She refused to have her name on any board on which she was not active, and turned down several honorary degrees. She chose her charities carefully (refusing a request for a large donation to her Katharine Branson alma mater in the spring of 1980, for example). As a favor to AIWF executive board member and old friend George Gruenwald, Julia was his guest star at the annual PBS board meeting in San Diego in 1989. Bob Johnson had once encouraged her to cut back on giveaways, believing that every time she did a demonstration for Planned Parenthood, she was chipping away at her image. She disagreed, and wrote a lengthy appeal to the new First Lady, Barbara Bush, on November 28, 1988, asking her, as a Smith sister, to plead the cause for having only wanted babies. She feared for Planned Parenthood under the Reagan Supreme Court.

  Two institutions of higher education in the Boston area would become major projects occupying her devotion and time during the coming decade: Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library and Boston University. When she and Paul returned to Cambridge for four months toward the end of 1988, she was feted on two occasions by the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America (named for the parents of Julia’s neighbor, the famous Kennedy historian). To their large collection of women’s history, Julia added most of her own cookbooks and her papers, including her correspondence with Elizabeth David, M. F. K. Fisher, and Simone Beck. That fall she was elected an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa, and in December she was there for the dedication of and the party for the renovated Julia Child Research Area, housing 5,000 cookbooks and study carrels. She did not miss an opportunity to talk to Barbara Wheaton, honorary curator, and Barbara Haber, curator of printed books, about her desire to see an academic program in the history and writing of gastronomy. Haber and the library were featured that fall in a Newsweek article celebrating “a classic women’s library,” mentioning Julia’s papers and Louise Nevelson’s sculpture.

  Two days after the dedication ceremony at the Schlesinger, Julia was in front of a packed audience at Boston University teaching a seminar in the culinary arts. For years, Julia and Jacques Pépin (who had a graduate degree in literature from Columbia University) had advocated a Department of Gastronomy, but were as yet unsuccessful. A year before, the acting president refused a direct written appeal by Julia. But the university had a four-month certificate in Liberal Arts and, under its Seminars in the Arts, included seminars in the culinary arts. Julia gave her first one on December 3, 1988. Paul was in the front row and Elizabeth Bishop was assisting. As Julia was preparing steam-roasted goose, she noticed the extremely large back cavity of the bird and tried to disguise it with parsley, then discarded the idea with a caveat about pubic hair. It was a lively seminar.

  Though she would devote nearly five years to writing her last book, leaving her with the feeling she did nothing else seven days a week, she did in fact do a great deal to develop the profession. Anne Willan and Mark Cherniavsky, who see the AIWF “as a kind of albatross” for her, best describe Julia’s relations with all these professional organizations: “She will give any help within reason that she can give, but she does not want to run things for other people.”

  THE LAST BOOK

  From 1985 through 1988, Julia focused on two tasks: caring for Paul and completing her final book. The food world rose and the professional organizations boiled and coagulated around her, but she was often too preoccupied to turn on the blender and smooth out the sauce.

  Projected deadlines came and went as she kept to the course she believed in, a thorough compendium of teaching techniques. She kept Mary Frances up-to-date on her progress. As early as 1987 she was telling people she was no longer tricoastal and would not be getting over to France, a decision based on the failing strength and awareness of Paul. She took Paul to the conferences and to the taping of Good Morning America, but one of her gang of young women assistants sat next to him to act as babysitter.

  As Julia was finishing her meat chapter, she received a letter from Ruth J. Robinson, whose former husband had worked with Nathan Pritikin at his Longevity Centers. The issue of fats and cholesterol was already a long-standing issue which Julia addressed in her form letters sent out by WGBH over her signature. Copies of Mrs. Robinson’s letter, accusing Julia of gross promotion of obesity and heart disease, went to Polaroid and Trader Joe’s (her television sponsors). The accuser, a resident of Santa Barbara, said she saw Julia at the farmers’ market on Saturdays and friends saw her eating large salads at the Biltmore Hotel, so why could she not advocate healthy foods? Before his death Pritikin had been disturbed by Julia’s promotion of wine and fat. Julia sent her answer immediately, including an AIWF brochure and her recipe for a healthy and happy life:

  Moderation in all things—

  A great variety of food—

  Exercise and weight watching—

  And, most important of all,

  PICK YOUR GRANDPARENTS.

  “I must say,” she added, “after learning something about the severity of his diet and knowing not only of Pritikin’s long illness but of his relatively early death, I have often wondered if a good meal once in a while might have kept him going a little longer.” No response came except from one of her sponsors, who said he would add a bottle of wine to that “good meal.” “We are proud and happy to sponsor you,” he ended. In her cover letter to the sponsors, she tucked in a postscript: “Letters like this are fun! Remember the Pope’s Nose?”

  When the National Enquirer called because they got wind of the Pritikin letter exchange, Bill Truslow informed them there was “no story.” Julia, used to frankness, said no more at his suggestion. The American public agreed with her, for its consumption of fat per capita went from 52.9 pounds in 1970 to 62.7 pounds in 1990. Had he still been living, Pritikin would have noted, however, that deaths by “heart attacks” dropped from 226 to 104 for every 100,000 Americans between 1950 and 1992. An AIWF Newsletter at the end of that year quoted Julia: “What we have is panic at the table. We’re afraid of fat, meat, pesticides. Going to the dinner table has become more a pitfall than a pleasure.” The following year Molly O’Neill quoted her in the
International Herald Tribune: “[America has] a fanatical fear of food…. I still insist that an unhappy stomach is going to curdle your nutrition.” After a speech by Julia on this theme at a Santa Barbara AIWF Taste and Health Conference, her friend Marshall Ackerman followed her as panel chairman and introduced himself: “I am Marshall Ackerman, former publisher of Prevention magazine—we created the fear of food.”

  “It’s like taking care of your car,” she liked to say to reporters. “If you don’t give it enough oil, it breaks down.” Her stand on “rich creamery butter” (waiters were told to remove margarine from her table) was vindicated in 1994 when studies were released showing the dangers of margarine (because of the hydrogenated oils) and that the price and calories were the same as for butter. Scientists were also saying, “There are 120 flavor components in butter, and the taste is impossible to duplicate,” the New York Times reported.

  However, when a local food writer in Boston several years later tried to set up a meeting, at Julia’s request, between her and Tufts president Jean Mayer, “the affable French war hero and nutritionist wanted no part of her,” because her rich desserts had undone what he was working to change in American diets. In 1996 the go-between revealed the incident: “Hélas! Jean Mayer, who could never say no to another pat of butter, is now dead of a heart attack … and Julia … is the thriving and still disciplined mistress of small portions.”

  Julia fell over her computer cord in Santa Barbara that spring and broke her hip (“I was plunging around, and I caught my foot in it and lost my balance”). Governor Dukakis’s letter of sympathy arrived at the Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital. His great supporter, ever a Democrat, Julia replied it was like a “shot in the hip” to hear from him. In fact, she was furious at what she had done and the time lost, and immediately got busy on therapy through the summer. Rosemary came down to help during her recovery. The injury made Julia realize that Paul could not manage on his own and she must consider future organized care for him. She told one journalist who was interviewing her for a McCall’s feature on their “recipe for love” that their only regret was not having children. “I would have been a complete mother,” she said. “I would have liked to have had grown children and grandchildren. But we do have wonderful nieces and nephews, and we’re close to them.”

  Discouraged about the setback from her broken hip and questioning whether people wanted to do any more real cooking, she decided at the end of May to cut down The Way to Cook in order to meet her July deadline. She wrote to Mary Frances in late May that she was “about to start on what I think is the last chapter of my book! I have decided to omit EGGS AND SOUFFLÉS, since I have nothing new to say about them, and MAIN COURSE MISC.—to hell with that. There will be slogging through to tighten up the early chapters, but I shall make that deadline in July—perhaps not July 1st, but it will be done before we leave here July 22nd.” However, she could not exclude eggs, and her deadline unfortunately moved back again.

  She had said for several years that her own cooking changed, as she had, but she included several recipes (with small changes) that remained successful and beloved to her readers, such as her “famous Queen of Sheba cake” (she used now both sweetened and unsweetened chocolate and less sugar). With variations through the years, this Reine de Saba cake had appeared in the first Mastering and in The French Chef. This final volume, after all, was her magnum opus, an oversized book that would number 511 pages and have eleven traditional chapters, from soups to cakes and cookies. There would be 650 photographs (given her by Parade), for she believed one learned best by seeing. Julia emphasized her debt to her cooking gang, naming in the introduction those who worked with her on Parade, Good Morning America, and the Dinner at Julia’s television series, including “our friendly ayatollah” Russ Morash. The collective effort also shows up in the narration of the recipes. She includes “Rosemary’s classic pizza dough,” a fillet of salmon braised with a mousseline of scallops, which she and Marian Morash created when Julia was working on-line at the Straight Wharf restaurant, Maggie Mah’s grandmother’s applesauce fruitcake, and the grated potato galette Sara Moulton made when she was sous-chef at La Tulipe in New York City.

  The Childs returned to Cambridge in September 1988, not only for the Schlesinger and Boston University appearances, but to complete the final work on her book and confer with Judith Jones on the layout. There would be three columns per page, thus six columns with the book opened. Julia agreed to lower her royalties to 7 percent on the first printing of 60,000 in order to keep the price down. Knopf would ultimately earn back far more than their nearly half-million-dollar advance with future printings and serial sales. It seemed as though she had done “nothing else for the last five years at least,” she wrote Simca. “This is certainly my last book—too confining.” And, in a familiar refrain, she told Anne Willan, “Never again.”

  In an article in the December issue of the Radcliffe Quarterly, under the title she would have preferred for her book, “Cooking My Way,” Julia expressed doubts about writing to an audience in the 1980s: “Are they interested in real cooking anymore, or is it all pasta salads? I personally love the pure mechanics of the art, including the chopping, the shredding, the sautéing, the butchering, even the cleanup. And I am fascinated by the basic principles, and what you can do with them once mastered.” In a letter to Simca praising Anne Willan’s new illustrated encyclopedia of cookery, Julia said, “Our Masterings still sell, but classic French cuisine is ‘out’ because of health and cholesterol fads.”

  IN THE END IS THE BEGINNING

  Because Paul was unhappy in the Cambridge winter, waiting around while Julia corrected proofs, she took him back to Santa Barbara in February 1989. For the next six months he could walk on the beach in balmy weather. This was a turning point in Julia’s life, the end of her last, long book and looking ahead to months of promotion in the fall and winter. Again bowing to the necessities of modern television and photographs, the suggestion of professionals, and her own practicality (“If you look old and gray, you feel old and gray”), she had more facial surgery. The result was wonderful, her friends believed and photographs confirmed. If any friends were disappointed in her, they said nothing. She was largely recovered when Jean Stapleton first performed Lee Hoiby’s Bon Appétit, a musical theatrical rendition of Julia’s chocolate cake recipe (gâteau Victoire au chocolat, mousseline, from Julia Child & Company). It was first performed in Washington, DC, then at California State University, Long Beach, and finally Santa Fe. They sent her tickets and she went to see it on opening night with the Gateses, but says, “I did not think of it as being me.”

  By 1989, the AIWF’s debt was over half a million dollars and both D. Crosby Ross and Dun Gifford resigned. First (during 1987 and 1988) came the revolt of the AIWF chapters, which had been gaining power for several years, especially the New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco chapters; second was what some saw as betrayal by Dun Gifford, who quietly organized his own competing company, Oldways, an educational group focusing on diet and culture. When Child, Graff, Mondavi, and Michael McCarty confronted Gifford at the Four Seasons Hotel in Chicago with his conflict of interest, he resigned from the board. He also took the backing of the Olive Oil Council with him and the AIWF remained “very bitter” toward him. Julia was hurt and incredulous, but rarely talked against him (one of her best friends said, “Julia did not want to hear about it. She is loyal to the end”). He was gone only months when he hired away Gregory Drescher (Program Director) and Nancy Harmon Jenkins (editor of the Journal).

  David Strada had already been hired as AIWF executive director (“I was appointed to clean up and turn around”), with a salary commensurate with the income of the organization, and now Graff talked Dorothy Cann, who was AIWF board secretary and managed her own French Culinary Institute, in to being chair of the board of directors. Though disappointed by the betrayal by Gifford, Julia would remain his friend and neighbor. Soon she would give more time to helping the revolutionaries re
invent the AIWF and pay its debts.

  Julia lost two dear friends in early 1989. Ivan Cousins, the husband of her sister, Dort, finally succumbed to prostate cancer in San Francisco on January 2. They had known for more than a year that he would die and she had grieved with her sister. Then on March 8 her beloved friend Avis DeVoto died of pancreatic cancer at the age of eighty-four. The obituaries mentioned her marriage to the well-known historian and columnist, her office management at Bread Loaf for decades, and her job as a secretary at Harvard’s Lowell House and then at the office of the Dean of Students at Radcliffe. But as far as Julia was concerned, Avis’s greatest claim to fame would be her championing of Mastering the Art of French Cooking and taking the manuscript to Knopf. Julia grieved the passing of her proofreader and editor, lively correspondent (and clipping service), loyal friend, and pinch hitter.

  Confronted with the most difficult decision of her life, one that would change her life irrevocably, Julia told Simca in the summer of 1989 that she believed Paul’s “days are numbered.” Since his heart bypass and strokes in 1974 and the slow return of only part of his memory, Paul had had two prostate operations and carried a slow-growing tumor. Unable to care for himself, he was confused and incontinent. When he was hospitalized in June, she called her lawyer and friend Bill Truslow and then met with the doctors for “a big medical pow-wow” on the twenty-third. She would listen to the experts, as she always did. They advised putting him in a medical care facility in Santa Barbara, and on good days Julia would bring him home or take him out for a short time. She assured one friend in mid-September, “He has had a good and interesting life.” His family believed she kept him out of long-term care far longer than she needed to or should have. Friends like Margrit Biever (Mondavi) admired Julia’s commitment to Paul: “They stood by their commitment to each other; there was a point of honor there. It was love, but beyond love.”