Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  On August 6 she took him to see an exhibit of some of his paintings at a “Salute to Paul Child,” planned by the Southern California Culinary Guild and hosted by the Santa Barbara Winery. According to Karen Berk and Mitzie Cutler, who led the organization, Julia brought him in before the crowd arrived and walked him slowly around to see these paintings capturing the Venice, Provence, and China scenes they had shared. She took him back to the nursing home and returned herself before the crowd arrived. The Los Angeles Times did a feature in its food section on the party for Paul, but few knew how much she had already lost of Paul or of the second decision she made to take him out of the Santa Barbara facility, which she decided she did not like, and back to Cambridge.

  As her friend Maggie Mah said: “Julia doesn’t twist herself inside out or waste time agonizing when making a decision; she just does it. She is a deeply compassionate and generous person with the ability to balance her own needs with the needs of others. She has a certain moral toughness that is very well illustrated by her competence and devotion in taking care of Paul.” The best description of Julia’s own feelings was expressed nearly eight years before in a letter she wrote to Fanny Brennan. Julia observed Alice Lee Myers, Fanny’s mother, who had dementia and was living with them. She wrote to tell Fanny she had to put her mother into a home: “You must get her into a senior citizen place … so that she can be taken care of, and so that you can be at peace and lead some kind of normal life. I am sure she herself would be horrified if she knew [your suffering]…. You will feel guilty, as everyone does, but you have, Fanny, been a generous, loving and caring daughter.” Then she added a few words about “the agony of being tough about it.”

  Bill Truslow walked across the street from Julia’s Santa Barbara condominium to sit in the garden and read the latest copy of The Atlantic Monthly. He turned a page and saw a full-page drawing of a thistle and a poem written by his brother-in-law Peter Davison about the death of his wife, Jane. Truslow sat silently, swept by the old grief at his sister’s death. Eventually he walked back to the Child apartment and found that Julia’s galleys of The Way to Cook had arrived. When he saw the dedication to Bob Johnson, he told her about running into Peter’s poem. They talked quietly about Bob and Jane, as they did about Paul, and then fell silent, both grieving. “I suddenly felt I knew why I was so at home with Julia. Yankees do not indulge themselves. No keening or verbal analysis. Yes, Julia can weep, but she will not beat her breast. She is open, but she never spills.”

  To avoid the traffic in Los Angeles, they got Paul from the nursing home and left at 4:30 in the morning. As they flew to Boston, Paul asked where they were going, and Julia reminded him of what the doctors told them in Santa Barbara. When they drove to the nursing home in Lexington, Paul asked the same thing. He wanted to go home. Julia never lied to him. The tears were streaming down her cheeks as they left the Fairlawn Nursing Home. It was the most painful thing she ever did.

  Chapter 26

  NOTRE DAME DE LA CUISINE

  (1989 – 1993)

  “She’s the nation’s energy queen.”

  JIM WOOD, San Francisco Examiner, 1991

  “SIGN YOUR OLD name and address,” Mary Fran Russell said, opening her copy of The Way to Cook and giving Julia a hug. “Julia McWilliams, 1207 South Pasadena Street,” her former classmate wrote on the first page of her five-pound book. Vroman’s bookstore in Pasadena was jammed with admirers. Standing patiently in the snaking line that ran out the door were several of her now gray-haired friends from the Polytechnic School and the neighborhood. “Oh, Bill, are you still alive!?” Julia called out as he leaned down to kiss her on the cheek. They all remembered her old address and reminded her of childhood events they had shared. Julia was home, and her buddies were there to celebrate her great success.

  PROMOTING THE WAY TO COOK

  She began the late-1989 press tour for The Way to Cook in San Francisco two days after the October earthquake and never considered not going. Knopf’s West Coast publicist, Pamela Henstell, was pregnant and not certain she wanted to be there, especially when they felt a strong aftershock. Nothing deterred the seventy-seven-year-old author from her demanding two-month promotion tour and the moving line of book buyers greeting her at every stop. Too many years and solitary hours had been spent writing the book, and she also felt the responsibility of an enormous advance. Pre-Christmas sales should be remarkably strong. For the first time a cookbook was given the coveted position of main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. The editors there were not intimidated by the $50 price.

  Her talent was an offshoot of her vigor. She and her team traveled the country, sometimes taking five meetings or interviews a day with press, radio and television. She made crêpes for David Letterman, who tossed them to the audience. She signed books at the November AIWF Conference on Gastronomy in Chicago. She signed 300 books at a Boston bookstore, attended a reception at the Schlesinger Library for French women chefs, participated in a champagne tasting at the Meridien Hotel, then fed eight people for dinner that night because old friends Sally [Bicknell] and Leonard Miall were visiting from London. Her only bow to time was the dessert, store-bought ice cream over which she poured bourbon and sprinkled ground coffee beans. One journalist observed that she “maintains a schedule that might exhaust a teenager.” Another called her “the nation’s energy queen.”

  She had a particularly crazy travel schedule because she insisted on going home at least once a week to see Paul, whom she phoned every day. When she first put him in Fairlawn, she visited him three and four times a day, especially if he called her to come. With his short-term memory gone, he was not certain when he last saw her. Hanging up the telephone, she never knew if he recognized her loving voice.

  “This was her last big tour,” said Janice Goldklang, Knopf’s publicity director for the tour, “Crowds and sales were incredible.” It was her magnum opus, and everyone came out. “Such a show and outpouring of love. Local publicity people are not prepared for the crowds and that is why we travel with her. We can get a line going and organize it, insisting on signatures only, nothing personal.” Henstell, who accompanied her in the West, reported that people would stand in line an hour and then demand a personal message (“To my favorite cook” was one). “Somebody else has to play the bad guy, and I would step in and say that there is not enough time.” There was a limit to how long one person could sit and sign, she said, but “Julia always continued to the last person.” In addition to the Knopf staff, Susy Davidson occasionally accompanied her in the South, Sara Moulton (with the most professional experience) helped out in New York City, and Liz Bishop in Boston. “I don’t know how she does it,” says Davidson, remembering a spiraling line of hundreds in a hotel in Dallas. “It’s my job,” she would tell those exhausted women trying to keep up with her. She was, as John Updike said of one of his characters, “an athlete of the clock.”

  The press either wrote profiles of her or reviewed the book with several other books by heavy hitters that fall and winter of 1989–90. At the annual Beard Awards in May 1990, her book came in third after Anne Willan’s La Varenne Pratique (the winner) and the Silver Palette’s New Basics Cookbook (officially she tied for second). She reported to Simca the inside results (only the winner was ever announced at the Beard Awards), adding her usual Tant pis pour moi! The IACP also awarded Willan first place, with Julia tying for second place. Classic techniques with contemporary style was her approach. She informed the press that her book was written for “someone who wants to learn to cook but already knows the basics … a lot like learning backhand in tennis.” Which explains why Mimi Sheraton said five years later, “She taught the basic techniques best in The Way to Cook, which, with her first Mastering, is her best. I have given The Way to Cook as a gift more than any other book because I subscribe to the philosophy that you learn to cook the basic techniques and then you adapt them.”

  Before she began the tour Julia entertained journalists who flocked in for profiles
to run upon the release of the book. As she was driving Molly O’Neill to the train after one interview, she backed her car across the street and into the neighbors’ station wagon. “Oh, dear. I’ve really done it this time,” she said, and O’Neill closed her New York Times profile with this incident. The accident was carried around the world when the piece was picked up by the International Herald Tribune. “At seventy-seven, she’s so Julia!” O’Neill exclaimed.

  If she had not been Julia Child, her book would have been lost in the crowd of giant primers or reference books that appeared between 1988 and 1990: new editions of Larousse Gastronomique, Better Homes & Gardens New Cook Book, and The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, as well as the books by Rosso and Lukins, Willan, Pépin (The Art of Cooking), Craig Claiborne, and others. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt called it “a magnificent distillation of a lifetime of cooking.” Florence Fabricant, reporting on all these books for the New York Times, said they indicated that “after years of takeout, many are returning home [to learn the basics].”

  When the tour was over Julia hired a secretary named Stephanie Hersh from the Katharine Gibbs School (she was the only one in her class with a culinary background). Julia hired her on a part-time basis only, fearing she was just trying to get into her kitchen, as Stephanie had a college degree as well as a two-year degree from the Culinary Institute of America (1985) and had worked as a banquet manager and a private family chef. The only thing Stephanie faked was her computer skills. She had word-processing training at the business school, but had never seen a computer mouse. She typed Julia’s letters on a typewriter, took the computer book home for the weekend, and came back to master the machine. It was that quick intelligence and bravura that Julia needed. “I have office gridlock,” Julia confessed. But Stephanie realized when a forgotten Canadian Public Television crew showed up that first day to film “A Day in the Life of Julia Child” that more than computer skills were needed in the Cambridge office.

  Someone needed to see the entire picture for Julia: “She had kitchen people, book people, television people, a part-time typing woman, a cleaning lady … [but] no one seemed to have the full picture of Julia’s needs,” Stephanie remembers. Within days she urged Julia to replace her longtime assistant (who had a drinking problem and worked only when Julia was around), took the schedule book and coordinated publishing and AIWF demands (Julia did not need to go to Chicago twice in one month), requested first-class flight arrangements and pickup, saw to it that she got frequent-flier miles, and drove her to local events. When she told Julia she was a bad driver, Julia responded, “Okay, then, I will get a Volvo,” and purchased a fire-engine-red Volvo, which she also backed into the neighbor’s car across the street. When Julia was out of town Stephanie visited Paul and took him for walks until it was no longer possible for him to leave Fairlawn. Some friends and family would resent her organization of Julia’s life, but Julia was soon pleased with the humor and organizational skills of her young office manager. They were both at a local AIWF event at Locke-Ober’s restaurant, unaware they were standing almost back to back. Stephanie heard someone ask Julia if her new secretary was on an apprenticeship. When Julia answered, “No, we are together until death do us part,” Stephanie leaned her head back and asked impertinently, “Whose?” Julia laughed and said, “Time will tell.”

  THE BULLY PULPIT

  Julia Child was a formidable preacher. With her national stature as a television personality, the unquestioned trust people had in her integrity (Anne Willan called her “the voice of reason”), and her physical height and stage presence, everyone took notice and listened. She knew how to sound-bite (newsman Jim Wood called her “always quotable”). She became, in Newsweek’s words, “our leading national symbol of gustatory pleasure.” Her message was her philosophy of life: life is to be joyous, and joy comes from sensory pleasures shared with others. The Gospel According to Julia: Good food and wine are central to health and pleasure. The table she shared with others was her altar. “Le carillon de l’amitié” Paul had called out when wineglasses rang together. “I don’t think pleasure is decadent,” she said in a 1992 article entitled “Julia Child, the Pleasure Shark”: “It’s part of life, it’s the juice of life, it’s the reason for living, for everything we do.”

  She “reopened the American kitchen as an arena of Old World sensuality and pleasure,” one food writer asserted. She could have preached the importance of sexual pleasure—as Paul did in a 1975 cover story of their marriage in People when he spoke of “eating, drinking, and love-making”—but she was New England and of a certain generation. Privately she had a bawdy frankness. It was not just that food was her profession; it was central to health, nourishment, and happiness. “I want to be healthy and well fed up to the end. What will prolong my life is eating well and enjoying it,” she asserted.

  She seemed at times to be proclaiming the message of variety, balance, and good taste to a dark and puritanical country, which feared ecstatic tastes (“sinful” and “to die for” were common adjectives) and good wine. Years earlier, she had lifted her glass at the end of her first program in 1963 in front of families who (except for those in ethnic neighborhoods) had no wine bottles on their shelves. Thirty years later, more families were drinking wine with their meals, but as wine critic Frank Prial asserted, America is a country that will never become wine drinkers. Beer and hard liquor, but not (as Julia believed) the basic food group (wine) that should be enjoyed with meals.

  The least well-attended Conference on Gastronomy was held in February 1991 in Los Angeles: “Wine in American Life,” with workshops full of medical doctors, professors, and wine specialists from around the country. The conference was elegant and groundbreaking, but it took AIWF a year to pay the Biltmore and American Express bills (staff members had their personal cards revoked by AmEx) because the cash-poor national office used most of the $100,000 conference income to pay office expenses. The educational influence of such conferences is difficult to measure (nonmember registration cost $590). The next year Julia appeared before a congressional hearing to have wine regulation taken out of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and placed in the hands of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

  If suspicion of the pleasures of the table undermined the furthering of good cooking, certainly the pace of contemporary life also undermined the goals of Julia Child. (Burger King was selling two million Whopper hamburgers per day.) Food writer Paul Levy called Julia a “scholar-cook … like Elizabeth David, Alan Davidson, and Jane Grigson,” who “has taken on the unenviable task of civilizing the cooking and eating habits of the Junk Food continent.” Julia cautioned one journalist, “I think snacking is a terrible, terrible habit,” adding that Americans snack because they do not have balanced diets. Filling up on one-calorie sodas, “Healthy Choice nutritious frozen entrees,” and “rubbery fat-free cheese” inevitably leads to a binge at Häagen-Dazs, says Michelle Stacey in Consumed: Why Americans Love, Hate, and Fear Food (1994). Numerous columnists joined her. Erma Bombeck: “I’m with Julia Child; we’re sick of ‘lite.’ Frankly I’m bored to death with lite, non-fat … no flavor, taste-like-the-bottom-of-a-clogged-drain food…. Neither Julia nor I is saying good nutrition is not a good thing. We’re saying, just eat less of the real stuff.”

  If the 1970s had been marked by a craze for home cooking, with the Cuisinart and the proliferation of cooking schools, and the boom of the 1980s brought people out to restaurants, especially those with celebrity chefs, the 1990s featured takeout food. “Time and money dictated,” says Mimi Sheraton, who gave up restaurant reviewing. Worried by recession and violence, perhaps even sated by restaurants, people cocooned. They cooked a few dishes, but brought prepared food home from supermarkets and takeout from some of the finest restaurants. Julia predicted in an article in the Boston Globe that “home cooking is slowly making a come-back.” If she had her way, the basic food groups would no longer be take-in, eat-out, frozen, and canned.

  Julia used the bully pulpit of her
beloved status to preach the pleasures of home cooking. The message was reinforced in the films of the mid-1990s, which celebrated the connection between home cooking and its sensuous and communal associations: Like Water for Chocolate (1993), Eat, Drink, Man, Woman (1994) and Big Night (1996)—all art films drawing wide interest and attendance.

  As Julia had rejected her ancestors’ corpse-cold Presbyterianism as life-denying and judgmental, so she fought the food puritanism so ingrained in America: the embarrassment with too much talk about food, expressions about “wasting” too much time preparing and eating food, and the fear of food impurities by those who grew up in the 1960s. Ideas of hell and damnation found secular expression in bad cholesterol, high blood pressure, and fat. Julia was one of the first to champion fish inspection in Boston, but she believed crusaders injected fear into the heart of already inhibited eaters. Food Nazis came in many forms by the 1990s, and the large number of competing periodicals led to both food faddism and headline scare tactics: pesticides, Alar sprayed on apples (Meryl Streep testified before Congress, in fear for her children’s lives), cruelty to calves—in her words, “animal-rights people, screwy nutritionists and dietitians, neo-prohibitionists” and “the health police.” She restated her opinions frequently: about pesticides (“in moderation, we have to feed millions”); about cholesterol (“If we do not eat at least two [the number varied] tablespoons of oil each day our hair will begin to fall out: it is a basic food group;” “Chimpanzees fed less cholesterol are meaner and more violent than others”). She preferred one bite of a great dessert to a box of Entenmann’s fat-free tasteless sugar concoctions. Entenmann’s fat-free line (“This is chemistry, not cuisine,” declared Laura Shapiro) was introduced in 1989.