Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  Fourteen chefs cooked New York City’s dinner for Julia in the Rainbow Room on January 24, 1993. The three hundred guests (sixty more were on the waiting list) paid $200 and more to hear Jean Stapleton read a poem and Joe Baum deliver a tribute, to see clips of Julia and those who best imitate her, and to feast with Julia on a menu that began with sweetbreads and ended with baked Alaska topped with sparklers. The room overlooking Manhattan was filled with votive candles and lavish floral arrangements topped by eighteen-inch whisks with a single red rose inside each wire cage. When Julia was given a four-foot whisk festooned with flowers and dripping with pearls, she placed it on her shoulder and marched around the room.

  If New York’s birthday party was the most elegant, Los Angeles gave the largest and, at $350 a ticket, the most expensive. Five hundred people dined at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Marina del Rey on February 7. Michel Richard of Citrus organized “Merci, Julia” with nine great chefs from France who had never cooked together before. They were thanking “La Dame du Siècle” for introducing French cooking to the middle-class American home. “After so many years of Julia Child, Americans have improved their taste,” said Jacques Cagna, owner/chef of the restaurant that bears his name. In addition to Cagna, with his two stars in the Michelin, were Roger Vergé, Paul Bocuse, Marc Meneau, Alain Ducasse, and Michel Rostang, among others. A favorite pastime of the evening was counting the number of Guide Michelin stars on what was billed as the “Dream Team.” Moët’s Jean Berchon said, “Even in France if we wanted to gather so many chefs, we couldn’t [do so].”

  Sixty hors d’oeuvres preceded the sit-down meal, said Merrill Shindler. “This was not a feed for amateurs, the faint of heart, or those watching cholesterol. It was an exercise in excess, in the midst of an era of lowered expectations.” Assisting the dream team were forty-four of the best French chefs from Los Angeles (Ken Frank, Michel Richard, Patrick Healy, Joachim Splichal), New York City (David Bouley, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Alain Sailhac, André Soltner), and Washington, DC (Jean-Louis Palladin). Jacques Pépin, Anne Willan, Drew Nieporent, and others assisted, as did about twenty sous-chefs brought by the big-name chefs (Bocuse sat in his tuxedo next to Julia). The French sponsors were prominent: Air France, Moët et Chandon (who put up $100,000), and Nestlé. The only sour note was the paucity of women chefs, a few invited at the last minute. “Thanks, Julia, but Where are the Women?” asked the Los Angeles Times Book Review. When the women’s anger at their exclusion escalated, Julia called the feminists “tiresome.” Madeleine Kamman declared that all these men chefs were “going to … cross their arms on their chests and put perfectly disgusting food on the table.” However, Ruth Reichl said afterward, “Dinner took five hours—and it was terrific.” When Kamman said, “Good old Julia is going to be with all these male chauvinists. The mere fact that I haven’t been invited is absolutely grotesque,” Marian Burros of the New York Times wondered “why Mrs. Kamman, who has been saying unkind words about Mrs. Child for years, would want to be invited.”

  “Merci, Julia” was really a celebration of the French chefs in America—an effort she gladly assisted. French restaurants were in trouble, and Julia could help them. More than a year before, Newsweek writer Laura Shapiro had announced that formal French restaurants were “almost extinct” in America. “Our love affair with French food is over, done in by new passion for our own chefs and ingredients.” Those that have survived and thrived, she noted, were the French chefs who had evolved “California French” cooking, such as Los Angeles’s Joachim Splichel (Patina) and New York’s Vongerichten (Jo-Jo). Pépin agrees that the best French restaurants surviving were “French with a twist,” those that adapted according to the produce of the region. “The temples of haute cuisine are an anachronism,” said Marian Burros, and Faith Willinger (an Italian chef) called it “Americans’ sweet revenge” for being treated as unworthy. Michel Richard frankly admitted before the “Merci, Julia” event, “We want to be loved again.” The evening was their way of saying, “I’m all right, Jacques!”

  Because Julia’s fame went beyond her French Chef persona, she did not seem to be affected by the waning influence of French cuisine and the rise of Italian cookbooks and restaurants. Chef Roger Fessaguet (Pavilion) said she “created a generation who understood and appreciated French cooking. She did more than any of us.” George Faison, co-founder of D’Artagnan, importer of foie gras and other specialty foods, says, “She sparked a transformation of American gastronomy, … articulated the flavor, smell and texture of exotic ingredients…. Because of Julia, everything changed.” She was the grande dame of all cuisine, the name synonymous with cooking in this country, as trustworthy as Walter Cronkite, as beloved as George Burns, as recognizable as the Pope.

  BONFIRE OF THE VAINGLORIOUS

  In February 1992, before the official birthday parties began and in between the AIWF conference in New Orleans and the IACP conference in Miami (at which Julia was the keynote speaker), the AIWF executive committee was interviewing potential candidates when the following headline appeared in the Los Angeles Times: “Julia Child ‘Rabidly Homophobic,’ Lawsuit Alleges.”

  Daniel Coulter had filed a three-million-dollar lawsuit against Julia Child, the AIWF, and its directors for denying him the job as executive director of the AIWF because he was gay. The Boston Globe the next day carried more details of his charges: that his friend Richard Graff had suggested he apply, and that Dorothy Cann (chair of the board) told him their founder was “rabidly homophobic” and would undermine his effectiveness if he won the job. Speaking for the executive committee, Graff said that Coulter was not hired because he did not have fund-raising qualifications. Cann made no statement. Julia publicly (and accurately) said she “had nothing to do with the selection…. I haven’t heard of Coulter or any of the applicants, so I don’t have any comments at all.” In the New York Times’s coverage, she was quoted as saying “I don’t care who he or she is as long as they have the qualifications.” In the spring issue of The Advocate, a reporter for this gay journal said Julia was “incredulous that ‘someone named Daniel Coulter’ is blaming his own homosexuality—or rather her homophobia—for having been passed over.” This line was the only negative comment in an otherwise positive article about her. Privately, Julia called the lawsuit “silly” and observed that there was “very little backlash.” Her chief concern was that the AIWF was going to have to spend money on lawyers just when it was almost in the black. Dorothy Cann privately denied the charges (“No, I do not believe that Julia is homophobic. I believe she is a product of her age”) and was disappointed that she never received a personal word of support from Julia.

  Neither Child nor Cann was ever deposed, for Coulter’s flimsy suit was settled immediately after his own deposition when he agreed to a small settlement from the AIWF. He had left them a $195 room service charge on the hotel bill when he was in town for his interview, according to two members of the executive committee. One of the men on the executive committee, who himself was gay, said, “Julia was the target because she had money. It was green mail, extortion, and it was slimy. It had nothing to do with Julia as a person because he had never known her. But the lawyer told us not to respond.”

  Julia’s place in the food world seemed to be unaffected for several reasons: her almost untouchable stature with the public, the fact that she had close working relations with gay men, and because people knew that there were gays on the AIWF board, among the founding members, and working in the national office (including the man who did get the job). What Julia may have paid in bad public relations is difficult to assess.

  The response from some in the gay community was dismay. One man gave away all of his beloved cookbooks when he mistakenly heard she had “fired someone on her staff for being gay.” Another shrugged and said, “Like any other fag sophisticate, I’ve always been rather a fan.” A few contacted her directly:

  My God! Julia—

  You’ve been the goddess of the gays for 20 years!!! I�
��ve got a shelf full of your books! You are mentioned at every gay dinner party (with great affection). How could you get this reputation as a homophobe!!?

  [signed] Martin

  Her response was not ringing. She spoke of unjustified claims. Whatever prejudice she shared with her generation and possibly with Paul—who occasionally expressed antihomosexual views, according to his family and friends—she would never have acted upon it. The evidence of her private attitude is mixed. On the one side is her close friendship with many gays, including Cora DuBois, Sybille Bedford, James Beard, and the children of some of her closest friends, as well as several passages in letters (one encouraging a friend for being “out of the closet at last! Makes things easier all around”). She did, nevertheless, pick up the slang expressions for male homosexuals and in writing once (a decade earlier) expressed (to a close friend) her displeasure that gays seemed to dominate the food business, particularly the cooking schools, thus discouraging women and heterosexual men. However, the letter can be read as an argument for inclusion of others rather than exclusion of gays.

  “It’s a world of self-generating hysteria,” Nora Ephron quoted Nika Hazelton as saying about the food establishment more than twenty years before. Ephron, who was then reporting on the Michael Field versus Craig Claiborne feud when Field’s first Time-Life book was published, added that it was a “bitchy, gossipy and devious” world. Olney’s plagiarism suit in 1984 may have exposed the corruption of recipe stealing, but nine years later, when Christopher Hitchens reported Martha Stewart’s lifting of a Julia Child recipe for chaudfroid sauce, he almost passed it off with the quip: “To be a culinary plagiarist is to be no more than an omnivore.” Hitchens called the “foodie world … a bitter and competitive one, roiled by great, passionate gusts which it is given to few to understand.” When Evan Jones’s new biography of James Beard stirred up a veritable cat fight among the New York Beardians who were “fighting over [his] remains,” Newsday described it as a “bonfire of the foodies.”

  One potential scandal that never reached the press, perhaps because it is so pervasive in the food world (as it is in the academic world), is the use of work done by one’s assistants. James Beard is probably a prime example, for he leaned heavily on the work of assistants. Few have written about the hardworking second tier of writers and editors who actually wrote the books for the stars, pinch-hit prepping and washing their dishes, chauffeuring them and carrying their suitcases. They did all this out of love or learning or both. For her later books, Julia Child used assistants for writing, food design, and demonstrations. But unlike some, she acknowledged her assistants by name in each book and paid their expenses and salaries. The public at large, however, never fully knew the indispensable role that Rosemary Manell played in designing the dishes for every photograph, helping to develop recipes, and proofreading.

  Julia was no longer hurt by the criticism of others, specifically the Hesses and Madeleine Kamman. And she seemed almost oblivious to the private embittered attacks by Richard Olney, who was stung by Julia’s recommendation years before that he was not qualified to edit the Time-Life series (she was echoing Beard’s judgment). His letters to Simca and Julia were friendly, however. After the death of Simca, who had many photographs of him on her wall, Olney asserted that the two authors of the Mastering books were just after money and fame, did not like to eat or to cook, and could not do the latter.

  Julia was fortunate that she was in her eighties and a national treasure when the full impact of others’ money and vainglorious ambitions were at their peak. She occasionally got enmeshed in the tensions among the national food organizations and in what has been called the food world’s “log-rolling” and “mutual back-scratching” (the flip side of its feuding)—because her first instinct was not to suspect the motives of people (“She sometimes is not the best judge of character,” several of her friends insist). The conflicts within the AIWF and her own staff and entourage reveal something of Julia’s management style and means of dealing or failing to deal with conflict. The “head girl” never wanted to play the “headmistress,” preferring to avoid controversy and bitterness. According to her family and closest friends, “she had learned to deal with Paul’s occasionally disagreeable nature” by creating a pleasant atmosphere “as a form of control to keep the negative away.” If pushed to do so, she might write a letter, but she always backed away from confrontation. If she scheduled two friends into one of her vacation homes, she asked them to resolve the conflict. One day Stephanie Hersh was left on the porch with her suitcase when another assistant accompanied Julia on tour. It was sometimes difficult for Julia to set limits. She could not ask a slothful boarder to leave or fire anyone. “She has trouble confronting relationship problems. Paul always took care of this,” notes one friend. “She wants to be loved,” adds a family member. Another associate believes she played people off against one another to promote her own autonomy.

  Others, particularly her men friends, saw her management style as a wise executive skill. By virtue of the confidences each group gave her, she could watch the infighting of employees and assistants, food groups and academic institutions, while maintaining power and interest as she evaluated her own opinion and position on the issues. Dun Gifford compared her executive style with others he had worked with, especially the Kennedys. She tested her position by listening to the warring sides, maintained chaos control by being the only person who knew the entire story, and kept the social interaction intellectually stimulating for herself. Gifford also compares her to Ronald Reagan in her willful resilience that does “not forget to smile.”

  Another woman executive cynically analyzes this interpretation of the Child administrative style as one of a “Teflon leader … who stays above the fray.” It is “her and Bob’s [Mondavi] institute, but they get none of the blame for its fiscal irresponsibility”:

  It is cunning: she listens to every side, but does not take sides. Here she is in the cattiest, back-bitingest industry and she has risen above it; nobody is mad at her. Her personal generosity is second only to the Pope’s, yet she is a guarded, complex woman under the guise of a simple one. She has all this warmth, yet I do not know her after years of working with her…. I have a hard time talking to her. She knows just what she wants and come hell or high water, she is going to get it. She has played all her cards right, yet the simplicity and bumbling make her no threat to anyone.

  She was an executive who had direct control or influence over millions of dollars. In December 1989 The Nation’s Business featured her in the “Lessons of Leadership” series. She told Anne Willan if they had gone into business they would have made millions. She sought out professional expertise in her personal and professional life and played good cop to her assistant Stephanie Hersh’s bad cop. Because she had the assistance of Stephanie, plus an accountant, lawyer, editor, and publisher’s public relations staff, she could keep to a demanding personal schedule and serve on the board of directors of several of her favorite causes—like any successful CEO. The woman who once told Smith College’s personnel bureau that she was looking for a position “being someone’s general and all-purpose assistant” became her own general, directing a group of assistants.

  COOKING WITH JULIA

  Geoffrey Drummond, who made New York Master Chefs in the mid-1980s and was working in France, approached Julia through Jacques Pépin and Rebecca Alssid (head of the Boston University culinary program, where Julia occasionally demonstrated). Drummond was a producer, director, or executive producer for A Prairie Home Companion and Going Home. Now he wanted to do a series on master chefs for Maryland PBS to be hosted by Julia, who had not made any new series with Morash and WGBH since 1984 and whose work at Good Morning America was now only occasional. His original intention was to film the chefs in action, as he had for his New York Master Chef series, but this time he would send her the tapes and she could provide the opening commentary in her own kitchen. “There was no way she was going to let me go off and w
ork with the chefs and not be there. She wanted to be involved…. Ultimately she became my collaborator and partner.” Drummond, a young and personable producer, serious but sensitive to others’ needs, was a collaborative director (though compulsive about his work) and perhaps suited to her experience, as Russ Morash was to Julia’s inexperience. This time, it was Julia who was pushing to be part of the action, a real partner in the venture, working with her laptop from 6:30 in the morning until 11:30 at night.

  Drummond packed his cameras and crew, Julia her suitcase, and on March 12, 1993, they began flying from city to city, taping sixteen prominent chefs for a new series entitled Cooking with Master Chefs. She had talked to Drummond, co-owner of A La Carte Communications, and Maryland Public Television for two years about hosting a sixteen-part series featuring American master chefs. Though this was a new stage in her career, it was an old idea for her. From the very beginning, after every series she talked to the press about having guest chefs on her program. From her list of sixty names and a list from Drummond, they consulted and chose sixteen chefs who were available and represented variety (location, race, gender, food type, age). Now she proudly announced she was going to play the role of Mrs. Alistair Cooke or Alistair Cookie, an allusion to the august host of PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre.

  When they finally had the money for sixteen shows and a book contract from Knopf, they traveled to New York (André Soltner), Washington, DC (Jean-Louis Palladin), New Orleans (Emeril Lagasse), Houston (Robert Del Grande), San Francisco (Jeremiah Tower), Los Angeles (Michel Richard), and Hawaii (Amy Ferguson-Ota) to film these chefs and others in their own kitchens. She also visited Jacques Pépin, a Connecticut neighbor of Drummond. It was not difficult to stand in the role of the viewer, for Julia took great delight in learning from each chef. She loved their “nifty knife work” and was fascinated to learn from Alice Waters, who turned a fork, tines down, and rubbed a naked garlic clove over the tines for a quick puree. After filming with Lidia Bastianich of New York’s Felidia, Julia declared she “finally understands” risotto. She was especially proud that ten of the sixteen chefs were American, and of that ten, half were women. They returned to Cambridge and filmed Julia’s introductions to each segment at her kitchen table, the produce from the recipes of each chef displayed in front of her.