Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  Two years later a longevity study, reported by television’s 20/20, revealed that people who live to be ninety or a hundred do not do so by eating a high-fiber diet of self-denial. A “sense of humor and an active life” were actually the factors that made for a healthy life. While the country was yo-yoed from fear to reassurance by the press, Julia kept the middle ground of moderation.

  Scare tactics, intolerance, and headline fads only fed the American fear of good food, good wine, and good times. Fearful reports only comforted the lazy cooks (66 million boxes of Hamburger Helper were sold the year Julia published The Way to Cook) and those who viewed food as just a necessity of physical survival (food as intravenous drip), not as essential to the spiritual, aesthetic, and social life. “Cooking is not a chore, it is a joy. Dining is not a fuel stop, it is recreation,” she exhorted. Her book sold 300,000 copies that first year, but she believed that no book would change the country’s eating habits. She was enough like her father—John McWilliams served on school and hospital boards for decades in Pasadena—to approach the problem through education. She continued to lobby for advanced programs in gastronomy, but she also envisioned the American Institute of Wine and Food as playing a key role in educating the public. She had been busy completing her book and promoting it during the “Gatsby years” that led to the “revolution” (Dorothy Cann Hamilton’s terms) among the ranks of the organization. Julia was now ready to spend a year traveling and reviving the enterprise that she, Mondavi, Graff, and Huttenback founded.

  With a bottle of rare Chenin Blanc from his Chalone Vineyard, Dick Graff talked forty-year-old Dorothy Cann into taking over as chair of the board of AIWF because “she was a good businesswoman.” Cann was fair-haired, sophisticated, and literate, owner of the French Culinary Institute, and of Slavic heritage. She, George Faison, and Clark Wolf, along with the revolution of key local chapters, forced the AIWF to face its deficit and reassess its mission. In three years, while she was chair of the board and David Strada was executive director, they would reduce by half the bank debt and all the current, payable debt by cutting administrative salaries and staff, eliminating the Newsletter and the Journal of Gastronomy (“I was called a philistine,” says Cann Hamilton, “but we were bleeding financially”), cutting back on office space, and sending Julia on the road to organize or revitalize chapters during 1990. “She saved it,” said Clark Wolf of Cann. The concept of an educational center had been replaced by a chapter-centered organization, and the Simon-Lowenstein books were finally divided between the University of California at San Diego and the Schlesinger Library of Radcliffe College. Henceforth, the synergy of the institute would lie with its local chapters.

  “Julia supported the revolution,” says Cann Hamilton. “She came down firmly on reducing the debt and insisting that we were not dilettantes.” Several on the board of directors, including Julia, Dick Graff, Robert Mondavi, and Dorothy Cann, guaranteed the $650,000 bank loans (there was also a debt of $300,000 in payables): “No one wanted this to fail.” That first year they paid down $300,000 of the debt as well as meeting office expenses and articulating a new manifesto.

  Initially, Julia and the AIWF planned an eight-city tour from March through July 1990, beginning in New York City and ending at the Fetzer Vineyard in California. With her “indefatigable” and “unflappable” spirit, Julia continued through the following year as well, from Cincinnati to Carmel, from South Beach to Seattle. When she was in Phoenix, Barbara Fenzl, the local organizer and chapter president, arranged with the chef at Main Chance (vulgarly known as a fat farm) to have her stay in their luxurious surroundings, where the Founders Banquet would be held. As Barbara walked her to a four-room house usually housing a President’s wife or a Vanderbilt, they passed numerous women dressed in fluffy pink bathrobes. Julia politely said nothing and soon dismissed the four servants who were unpacking her bag, ironing her pink towels, and offering a manicure and beauty treatments. She had to leave for meetings in town. The next evening when the chef asked how she was enjoying Main Chance, she blurted out, “What do those women DO all day?!” Not a surprising question from a woman whose good friend Pat Pratt says, “I’ve never seen her do nothing.” She told Simca that Main Chance was “interesting, but not my type of place at all—very ladylike, pastel pink, and subdued.”

  Wherever she went, membership bloomed. In 1989 there were 5,500 members; at the end of 1991 there were 6,900. Julia even wrote in her alumnae quarterly that the AIWF offered “great fun and serious seminars.” She swayed many, but when the time came for renewal of their membership she was not there, and too many dropped out. It would take a year or two for the national headquarters in San Francisco to figure out why there was such a high attrition rate (52 percent in 1992). Nevertheless, after expenses, the profit from the 1990 Julia tour came to $170,435. In part through her efforts in 1991, twelve new chapters were opened, almost doubling the number. She called herself “window dressing” for the chapters.

  Julia championed education for herself as well as others. There was never time enough in life to learn everything, but she attended the annual IACP conferences and in September flew to London with Nancy Barr to the Oxford Symposium on Gastronomy, a scholarly conference she tried never to miss. She sought out producers, scientists, and conferences, eager to learn, especially about the raising of veal. Mary Risley, who learned to cook using the two Mastering books and now owned the Tante Marie Cooking School in San Francisco, remembers how amazed she was during a Food Writers workshop in her city in 1992 when Julia enrolled in a class to study writing techniques with those less than half her age.

  Julia allowed a short piece from one of her television shows to be used in the background of a Nike commercial and sent the money to the AIWF. “I wear New Balance,” Air Julia informed them frankly. “This is not an endorsement of Nike.” But the largest block of money for the AIWF was promised from the Norwegian salmon industry, which gave $100,000 to sponsor “A Taste of Norway with Julia Child,” an hour-long tape made for WGBH and produced and directed by Russ Morash. With additional backing from SAS airlines, they left in mid-July 1991 for a nearly two-week shoot in Oslo, visiting all her favorite places, including the home where she and Paul had lived. The American Embassy gave a big party in her honor, and she dined with the Egges and the Heyerdahls (the latter sent gravlax to Paul). One journalist reported that Julia called Paul three times a day, at the hours she usually called, regardless of her schedule or the time difference. “The Norway video nearly killed us,” says Morash. “The crew started at 7 A.M. and we worked until 10 P.M. with intense filming. Julia had the most energy and would call at night saying, ‘Let’s step out and get a bit to eat.’” The film, which would be edited by Morash and shown the following year during her birthday celebrations, shows her fly-fishing for salmon, knee-deep in icy water, hopping a helicopter, looking out over Oslo from the Olympic ski run, and declaring, “I am at heart a Viking!”

  Almost immediately after returning home from Oslo, she took a trip to Prince Edward Island and Halifax. While she was gone, Elizabeth Bishop, who was vacationing on a boat with her husband in waters not far from Julia, lay down with a headache and died in her sleep of a brain aneurysm. Julia lost a good friend and manager in Bishop. The posse still had Susy Davidson and Nancy Barr. As a former member of the posse noted: “Julia likes to have a lot of girls around.”

  Whether she was attending a dinner honoring René Vernon (the former White House chef), or the Aspen Food and Wine Classic every June (she drew audiences of 2,500), or doing a benefit for the San Francisco Public Library, she was a guiding spirit, revving up the celebration and speaking out. Even when she spent a week in France in November 1990—where she had not been in four years—she sat for an interview with Simca and Susy Davidson. Simca reinforced every point that Julia made about good eating habits. The only place she did not give interviews was during the family gatherings in Maine each August.

  Julia tasted the cooking of the best chefs in Americ
a as she traveled. In an interview in 1990 she commended Stephan Pyles in Dallas, Rick Bayless in Chicago, Alice Waters in Berkeley, and in Los Angeles, Herbert Keller, Joachim Splichal, and Patrick Healy. The best restaurants in New York were French: Boulud, Bouley, Côte Basque, L’Espinasse, and Le Cirque. She criticized the fussiness of contemporary chefs, but in fact her dining experience sometimes differed from that of other diners: when she walked in the door each chef sent his or her best and most elaborate dishes. By the mid-1990s the food on plates was being stood on its side to create vertical, architectural structures. “Food should have a natural look … I would rather cut my own quail, not have it fanned out for me.” Her philosophy of “balance, moderation, variety” was sorely tested by these travels, especially moderation.

  Controversy about what Julia said sometimes heated up into the news. “Julia Child, Boiling, Answers Her Critics,” read the story about the Aspen Food and Wine Classic in the New York Times, which noted that she had been called the Cholesterol Queen. Her outspoken support of Planned Parenthood continued to bring controversy, but her commitment was unwavering. She and Ella Brennan (the mother of New Orleans’s restaurants) would vote for “Hillary’s husband.” When they were watching the Clintons defending him against charges of philandering, Julia was overheard saying, “At least we know he’s a man.” Responding to Vanity Fair’s “Proust Questionnaire” in 1996, Julia answered that the woman she admired most was Hillary Clinton. It was an anointing as if from the great Eleanor Roosevelt herself.

  Much to Julia’s delight, almost thirty years to the October day she published her first book with her partner, Simca’s last book, Food and Friends, was published in America. “My Chérie: Memories …!” she wrote Simca, enclosing several photographs Paul took of them presenting their Reine de Saba cake to a group of women at the Chicago Tribune. Suzanne Patterson had done the writing on Simca’s book and Peter Kump’s group tested the recipes. A European journal criticized the “Americanized colloquial style,” but it won a prize at the Beard Awards the next year. At eighty-seven, Simca was not able to come to the States to promote her book. Thirty-four years before, Julia had written her tightly wired partner that she should take care of her blood pressure the way Julia’s mother had: “always take a half-hour nap” or lie down with a book. They “both must live past eighty years old,” she had insisted as early as 1957. Julia promised her dear “sister” Simca she would return again this winter of 1991 for a visit.

  In the meantime, plans were thwarted when Julia went into the hospital to have her knee operated on—her fourth or fifth knee surgery. She had taken anti-inflammatory medicine for six years until her legs were numb, then stopped taking the medicine and tried living with the pain. At the moment Julia was making plans to enter the hospital in Boston, Simca fell in her room on the top floor at Bramafam and was not found for two hours. She came down with pneumonia and died on December 20. I have lost a “fond and generous sister,” Julia mourned. Mary Frances died the following June. Part of her association with France died with them, but after the tears she would typically not allow herself to dwell on what was lost of the past.

  “MERCI, JULIA”:

  STILL COOKING AT EIGHTY

  Julia stayed busy and surrounded by young people. Her eightieth birthday almost took her by surprise. Never one to look back or bow to her years, she would have preferred to ignore the ugly fact of age. Indeed, she did not think of herself as old. For example, when she had flown to France more than a year before with Susy Davidson and arrived at Orly airport to take a cab to the Gare de Lyon, they looked in vain for a porter to carry their bags to the train bound for Provence. Ever one to bouter en avant (barrel on through), she seized her bags and dragged them up and down stairs until they were in the train. Once settled, Julia exclaimed how terrible it was that there was no one to assist them. “What do old people do?!” she wondered. When Nancy Barr ordered an electric cart at another airport, she settled beside Julia, each holding their portable computers, and remarked how she had always wanted to ride “one of these.” Julia announced, “I’ve always wanted to drive one of these!”

  Julia returned to La Pitchoune in 1992 to pack her pots and pans and vacate the house, which was to go back to the Fischbacher/Thibault families. She was filled with the memories of Paul and Simca at every noise and aroma. Her niece Phila, Bob Moran, and their little son Nicholas were there to help. By the end of June she was packed to leave for good, saddened only by the loss that initiated her leaving Provence. “Without Paul and without Simca much of the heart has gone out of it,” she wrote Peter Kump. Much had also gone out of the country: Plascassier no longer had little shops, and the narrow roads were crowded with cars. Paul predicted in the 1960s that the place would someday look like Southern California, but it was worse. “It is 1920 France with an undigested appliqué of the year 2000,” she told Bill Truslow. “I left France this time with no regrets whatsoever.” Boutez en avant!

  She came home to a steady stream of press running through her house with television cables and steno pads, all covering the birthday story. For some time now, her home had been a public place, with no sense of privacy; everything from the coffeepot to the toilet had notes stuck up with instructions for visitors. Julia would spend the actual day of her eightieth birthday celebrating with the McWilliams family at her brother’s home in Vermont, and later that month celebrating with the Child family in Maine. She also agreed to participate in a series of birthday dinners as a financial benefit for the AIWF. When she agreed she did not know she would have more than 300 appearances over the coming year. Her only regret about the coming plans for birthday parties all over the country was the realization that ninety-year-old Paul could not share it with her. He no longer knew where he was or recognized most of his family. She went to see him one to three times every day, and a nurse’s aide fed, walked, bathed, and put him to bed from four until eight. When Julia was not there, longtime friends, including their butcher Jack Savenor, visited him. The body that had sailed the seas on freighters and hauled logs with Charlie to build the family’s summer home in Maine, kept on living after the memory was gone, eventually even the memory of the voice now soothing him with loving endearments.

  When asked by the president of the Unitarian Universalist Association about the difficulty of Paul’s deterioration, she answered, “Well, it’s part of life…. As it is [with Paul in a nursing home], now when I go to see him, I go full of love and help and everything else.” When asked if they had living wills she replied affirmatively. “We also belong to the Neptune Society. Our funerals are paid for—$600 each—and when we’re gone, you just call them up and they pick you up and cremate you.”

  As she arrived at the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington, DC, at the end of July, nearly two and a half weeks before her birthday, a crowd of protesters was gathered outside. “Animals, beware! Julia is Hungry” read some of the placards. Inside, chef Jean-Louis Palladin and other prominent chefs in the area were preparing a feast with a finale of three cakes that took the pâtissiers three months to prepare. Atop the first cake were likenesses of her five books, the second the seal of L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes and a wire whisk, and the third a sugary painting of her Cambridge house.

  Despite the fact that fifty free-range chickens from Iowa were missing from the kitchen, lost by the airlines and found rotten three days later, the party went on smoothly. The loss of the chickens, had the protesters outside known, would have punctuated their outcries about cruelty to animals. Julia, one magazine said, “made hash of the protesters” by announcing, “I am a card-carrying carnivore. I’ve got to keep my strength up.” Her objection was as much to their methods (trying to force their beliefs on her) as to their philosophy. In her experience, particularly in French gastronomy, there was never a consideration of the issues articulated by the protesters.

  At times the carnivores and vegetarians were intolerant of each other, including Julia, who apologized in 1987 for a flip remark she made abou
t “hating vegetarians.” For decades she received letters about her cruelty to oysters, to lobsters, to rabbits, pigs, and calves (“You shrill-voiced shrew—you would skin your grandmother and eat her if you could get her into your mouth,” one anonymous letter said). Paul Prudhomme called it the “Bambi Syndrome.” Peter Kump called protesters outside the Washington party “vicious vegetarians” and said they reminded him of the right-to-lifers. Julia’s paternal grandparents would have read Romans 14:3: “Let not him that eateth despise him that eateth not; and let not him which eateth not judge him that eateth: for God hath received him.”

  When Julia left the Washington, DC, gala, and was walking past the protesters, a journalist asked her how she kept up the pace of her travels and she replied, “Well, you know, dear, I eat well.” She was “having [her] génoise and eating it too,” another reported, adding she had no immediate plans to retire, but would “move permanently to California when she turns 86 [in 1998].”

  She wanted David Letterman to emcee her Boston birthday party, but he was busy. This second memorable birthday celebration, at the Copley Plaza Hotel on November 2, 1992, was given by her hometown and WGBH, which filmed the event for PBS. Her neighbor John Kenneth Galbraith sat at her table and gave a tribute. Dun Gifford sat at her right hand. Robert Hastings came from Los Angeles to remind her of their good-times gang in Pasadena before the war. Her office staff and television cooks paid tribute. Because gastronomy reconciles all the arts—painting, religion, theater, and music—it was fitting that at her local eightieth birthday party the Boston Pops played music on pots, pans, and whisks. Arthur Fiedler would have been delighted by “Fanfare with Pots and Pans.” When Diana Rigg read Paul’s poem to his “Cook and nifty wench,” the camera caught Julia wiping a tear from her cheek.