Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  After all the guests had left, the family walked to the rocky cliffs to scatter Paul’s ashes to the sea. Jon had transferred the ashes into a colorful clay pot. Here, on the land where forty-six years ago Julia first met his family and she and Paul decided to marry, they took turns sprinkling a few ashes—the younger people from the rocks below where the tide was coming in, the older from the grassy cliff above. Betty Kubler took several photographs, thinking how much better Paul’s photographs would have been.

  “So long, old boy,” Julia said as the wind caught the ashes and blew them toward the sea. Her nephew Sam heard her say “Goodbye, Sweetie.”

  A thousand letters and calls poured in, including one from “the gentleman who always brings you three roses at your book signings at the [Harvard] Coop,” who reminded her that the Dear Lord “must have a greater job for Paul in Heaven.” But, like Paul, Julia did not believe in the afterlife. “There are no mooring hawsers in the sea of time,” Paul had concluded in his poem “Everything Is Go.” Julia’s dislike of her father’s “cold, unforgiving religion” was reinforced by Paul’s strong hatred of organized religion, instilled in him by his harsh treatment at St. Joseph’s Academy near Wellesley. His mother had come from Methodist stock but was a Theosophist who sent them to Quaker meetings to learn about the Bible. To the president of the Unitarian Universalist Association (“That’s a fun religion, isn’t it? Not like those ‘evil’ Presbyterians!”) two years before, Julia had said: “If I wanted a religion, I’d be either a Jew or a Catholic…. But I think if you have a good personal philosophy, you don’t need them.” Yet, on the “Proust Questionnaire” in Vanity Fair’s March 1996 issue, she gave as her life motto “Love the lord your god with all your heart, and soul, and mind—and thy neighbor as thyself.”

  When it is her turn to die, she says, “I do not care at all what happens [to my body].”

  THE FOOD CIRCUIT

  At the end of September 1994, Julia flew to Europe with Pat and Herb Pratt, as they had for so many years. This time, with no worry about being suddenly called back to be with Paul, they flew first-class. And as usual, they visited Anne Willan and Mark Cherniavsky near Joigny. After a full week of rest in Fiesole, in the Tuscan hills above Florence, they drove to Venice for Julia’s classes at the Cipriani Hotel. Wherever she went she felt a profound sense of loss; though she had missed her husband’s companionship for years, no longer being able to call Fairlawn dramatized her irrevocable loss. But giving in to that melancholy was beyond Julia. She would go on with the responsibilities of her career.

  The fall of 1994 was filled with appearances on Good Morning America, articles for Food & Wine magazine, demonstrations (often with Jacques Pépin) at Boston University, cooking classes at the Mondavi vineyards, and numerous appearances for the AIWF at board meetings, chapter meetings, the annual wine auction, and the annual Conference on Gastronomy. In May 1995 Julia accompanied Joan Lunden and Charles Gibson on Good Morning America’s “Passport to Europe: Burgundy” filming in France. The annual pattern always included the Greenbrier Food Writers’ Conference in March, the IACP conference in March or April, the Aspen Food and Wine Classic in June, the Cipriani Hotel in October, and the AIWF conference in October or November.

  La Varenne’s Greenbrier cooking classes, demonstrations, and writers’ conferences were a regular extension of Julia’s long involvement in the work of Anne Willan and Mark Cherniavsky. Willan remembers complaining about how sticky her shoes became when she and Julia were cooking together in the Greenbrier kitchen. Take them off, Julia said, and then proceeded to clean the bottom of Anne’s shoes.

  In 1994 at the Greenbrier, Julia awakened in the night, tripped over a chair, and landed on her face, cutting her mouth so severely that she had to have stitches in her lip and cancel her plans to attend the annual AIWF conference in Monterey. As the doctor was stitching her up, he asked, “Other than this, how has your stay at the Greenbrier been?” The food was “terrible,” she said animatedly, forgetting her pain. Just days later, Walter Scheib, the head chef at the Greenbrier, was appointed by Hillary Clinton to head the cooking staff of the White House.

  Although unable to be as fully involved with the AIWF as she was in 1990 and 1991, Julia annually attended five chapter events chosen by the executive director, Roberta Klugman. (Julia maintained her primary involvement in the Boston chapter, often hosting cocktail parties at her house.) She continued to attend national board meetings, an annual conference, and a glittering wine auction as well as special events honoring the eightieth birthdays of Robert Mondavi in 1994 and Chuck Williams of Williams-Sonoma in 1995. In a gesture of great generosity, Mondavi liquidated the debt (of nearly $200,000) of the AIWF in 1994. Of the Mondavi money, $40,000 was assigned to provide AIWF support for the Mondavi Center in Napa, then in the planning stages. A year later, with an additional grant of $250,000, he revitalized the Journal of Gastronomy, which was to be linked to promotion for the Mondavi Center. The journal was transformed into a large and beautifully illustrated book, retitled Wine, Food & the Arts (edited by Betty Fussell), and published in 1996 and 1997. In exchange for the grant, the AIWF reaffirmed its commitment to move its headquarters to the Mondavi Center in Napa when the conference center and wine museum were constructed. The $40,000 from his 1994 grant was used to print additional copies of the journal.

  The AIWF continued its original focus on education. “It has come back toward my idea of the Institute with the school lunch program and nutrition for children,” says Alice Waters. Those who were not happy with the change wanted the wining and dining atmosphere back, feared the “domination by nutritionists and dietitians,” and pointed to what they called the politically correct Monterey Conference on “Children’s Education: Feeding Our Future.” Others criticized the growing bureaucracy and lack of vision. Yet the working relations with the Dairy Council, School Lunch Programs, and the Olive Oil Council, begun under Wolf and Cann Hamilton, were restored. The power base of the AIWF shifted from New York City to San Francisco with the appointment of Roberta Klugman as executive director in 1992 and the election of Maggie Mah as chair of the board (the second woman chair) in 1995. Sandra McCauley succeeded Mah in 1997.

  Julia coordinated her board meetings, conferences, and charity work with the promotion of the television series and book In Julia’s Kitchen with Master Chefs in the spring of 1995. Whether she was demonstrating at her last Long Wharf Theater benefit for Betty Kubler, attending a Planned Parenthood benefit, doing a PBS, Boston University, Smithsonian, Radcliffe, or Smith College benefit, receiving the Blue Ribbon from the Cordon Bleu in Paris, or doing a fund-raiser for the Boston Public Library or the Boston Art Institute, her publisher provided discounted books for sale. “She works hard when she has a book come out,” says Goldklang. Her one truly commercial appearance was a windfall: on QVC, the television shopping network, she sold 10,000 copies in just moments, and was as delighted with the new technology for selling books as she was with the numbers. The following year she won the daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Service Host at the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences ceremony in New York City. Her producers, Drummond’s A La Carte Communications and Maryland Public Television, received an Outstanding Service Show award as well.

  When Julia arrived in Seattle to promote In Julia’s Kitchen with Master Chefs, her hotel room had a large fruit basket with cheese, but she was hungry. Ordering a juicy hamburger from a nearby hamburger joint, she began signing books. This was one of those three-day multiple events, including a meeting with Microsoft and an AIWF founders dinner. At Sur La Table, a Seattle cookware store where she had signed 600 copies of The Way to Cook in 1989, people began lining up at 6:30 A.M. to be one of the 250 persons promised a meeting and signing with Julia. The first woman in line had flown in for the occasion from West Palm Beach, Florida, but there were a thousand more who wanted her signature. The Pacific Northwest AIWF held a Taste & Health workshop, Julia spoke to a full house at the Washington Athletic Club,
and Sur La Table held a $1,000-a-plate dinner for sixteen. The weekend netted $25,000 for the AIWF. One news reporter compared her arrival in Seattle to a papal visit.

  MARTHA STEWART

  AND THE ELECTRONIC FUTURE

  “Every age gets the house-hold goddess it deserves,” wrote Margaret Talbot in a New Republic cover story on Martha Stewart: “The Tyrant of Taste.” Half the first page was devoted to Julia Child, our first “house-hold goddess”: “sophisticated … as permissive as Dr. Spock … anti-snob … [with] an air of Cambridge eccentricity—faintly bohemian and a little tatty.” The contrast was easy. Julia was “something of a sensualist, a celebrant of appetite as much as a pedant of cooking;” Martha was the “corporate overachiever turned domestic superachiever … in earth-toned Armani … [who] generates some $200 million in profits a year.”

  Stewart, who started on Wall Street, then became a caterer, was rapidly building an empire that included cooking, home decoration, and gardening. She sold taste and beauty, or what was called “lifestyle,” and published her own very successful magazine, Martha Stewart Living (circulation 1.5 million). She was a resident of Westport, Connecticut, and her energy rivaled Julia’s—indeed, she was called “a bullet in flight.”

  The difference, of course, was style. When Julia left Seattle for a two-week stay in Santa Barbara, she had signed 1,400 books; the press called it a “marathon” signing. She never left anyone at Sur La Table with an unsigned book. In contrast, that December in Buffalo, New York, Martha Stewart was at a fund-raising luncheon for the Lupus Foundation of America and had to leave before signing all the 1,000 books purchased by her fans. When she was criticized by some outraged fans and the Buffalo News, she wrote a letter that was published: “I promise I’ll think long and hard before I accept another invitation to your chilly and downright unfriendly city again.”

  Julia did agree, after some vacillation, to appear on Martha Stewart’s pre-Christmas special. Other guests included Miss Piggy and Hillary Clinton. Strange bedfellows. In one segment, with Julia at her side, Martha put the finishing touches on a gingerbread house that looked remarkably like Martha’s home. As she created delicate and glittering spun sugar icicles, Julia offered comments and asked questions. When the complicated creation was finished and they both marveled at her creation, Julia exclaimed, “Aren’t we terrific?!” More than a few in the audience collapsed in laughter.

  Their energy and administrative talents were indeed similar, and perhaps Julia professionalized home cooking the way Martha professionalized housekeeping. Thus one Boston journalist asked Julia, “Did you create Martha Stewart?” Julia answered, “I’m not driven…. I’m enjoying what I do and I don’t have any great ambitions. I feel I’m lucky to be in this profession that I adore and meeting all the people I like. I’m just very fortunate.” But Talbot calls Stewart “the anti-Julia” (though she does not fully carry through the contrast). Julia, who came from money and New England stock, cared little for the show of wealth (though she enjoyed the comfort it provided). Stewart, with humble bloodlines, made her own money and sold class-consciousness. Julia appealed to all classes and could talk to Presidents and governors as well as a poor student she had invited to dinner or a Sudbury man who raised dozens of varieties of potatoes in his backyard and invited her to the annual neighborhood blind tasting of his harvest. James Beard had a different persona for each class of people he associated with, says biographer Robert Clark, but Julia was always herself. Any adventure that would bring her a new experience was irresistible.

  Julia made her special appeal to the middle class who shopped the supermarkets, even when food professionals criticized her compromises. She was the first to marry California and France, which in part explains her cross-class appeal. She had aristocratic manners and connections, but talked to the middle class, trying to change its attitudes toward food and cooking. She would never criticize Stewart, though she would muse about whether “Martha would ever be happy.”

  More important than the contrast between the two women (who admire each other) is what this contrast says about the changes in America. Julia emphasizes the priority of taste and pleasure; for Martha Stewart pleasure takes on “the qualities of work”—not unlike the use of a sex-advice manual, says Talbot, quoting from Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism. Martha’s didacticism and implied “moral up-lift of a well-ordered home” makes her a throwback to the nineteenth-century home economics movement, with its “commitment to painstakingly elegant presentation, [its] concern with the look of food even more than its taste,” and its zealous home ec curriculum. American puritanism lives, and “Americans have lost confidence in their own judgment.” If Martha Stewart’s appeal is “saturated with nostalgia,” Julia is moving as fast as she can toward the twenty-first century. “Julia is so hip. Julia is tomorrow,” exclaimed Russ Morash.

  THE MASTER TEACHER

  Julia’s view of herself as primarily an educator is documented by her numerous commencement addresses at culinary institutes (Johnson and Wales University and the Culinary Institute of America) and in her support of the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe, Boston University, and Smith College (she attended the inauguration of the new president, Ruth Simmons, in the fall of 1995). Shortly before she received her honorary degree from Harvard, Julia became actively involved in demonstrations and fund-raising for Boston University’s two-year graduate program as a Master of Liberal Arts degree with a Concentration in Gastronomy. At last her dream of a degree in gastronomy was realized, and much to her delight it was in her hometown of Boston. In 1996 she would see a full four-year academic degree with a focus in gastronomy inaugurated in the Napa Valley at the California branch of the Culinary Institute of America (a two-year program in Hyde Park).

  During her promotion for In Julia’s Kitchen, the CD-ROM for Cooking with Master Chefs was released by Microsoft. The compact disk was called Julia Child: Home Cooking with Master Chefs, and retailed for $39.95. She had been the first on her block to be computer literate and was eager to take on the latest media tools. The compact disk for computer, which contained all sixteen segments of her first Master Chefs book as well as a tour of her kitchen, wine cellar and pantry, was underwritten by Microsoft. It had the same disadvantage as the video series of Dinner at Julia’s, more than a decade before, in that few kitchens have computers (they once did not have televisions). But the compact disk had a distinct advantage because it was interactive, meaning it could be stopped and the user could move around to any part, find all the recipes using carrots (for example), recalculate the proportions of a recipe, hot-link an ingredient to an illustrated dictionary, or print off the ingredients for a shopping list. The cursor turned to an oven mitt when it hit a hot spot.

  Microsoft for Windows was fairly new technology and sales grew slowly, but the disk was included in new computer sales packages. Meantime, Julia and her book were all over the Internet on dozens of home pages and on-line food chats, including the Cooking Club. A pioneer in the fight against bad food and cooking since the early 1960s, she continued the crusade on this medium of the twenty-first century. Her ideas and recipes were on thousands of computers, but so were those of lesser lights, with recipes using Velveeta, Jello-O, Tang, Cool Whip, and Shake ’n Bake chicken nuggets. Just as they had corrupted the printed pages of home magazines eighty years before, now Kellogg, Campbell Soup, Kraft (owned by Philip Morris), and other packaged food companies established their interactive sites on the World Wide Web. Instead of Ed Herlihy’s mellifluous phrasing of “Kraft Jet-Puffed Miniature Marshmallow,” now clicks, beeps, and whistles filled American homes.

  COOKING IN CONCERT

  If her favorite public cooking partner of the 1960s was Jim Beard, in the 1990s it was Jacques Pépin. “It is easier not to rehearse with Julia,” says Pépin. “It is much better to just go with it. She is natural. There is no fakery or pretense.” Growing out of her involvement at Boston University, where Julia and Jacques both taught, came a plan for Geo
ffrey to tape the cooking duo for a PBS special. The crew worked three days building a set and preparing the machinery and cameras. When Julia arrived on the day of taping, she placed her wooden cutout of a cat somewhere in the backdrop of pans, fruit, and flowers as she had done since the beginning of her career. She was too practical to call it a lucky charm, but she never forgot it. The first taping was called “Julia Child and Jacques Pépin: Cooking in Concert,” filmed on March 28, 1994, and first aired in its two-hour edited version that August.

  On their first televised concert, if not before, they established their shtick. “Jacques and Julia sizzle,” wrote one journalist. They casually set up dramatic tensions for their Boston University and PBS audiences: he wanted to add more garlic, she wanted to add more liqueur or butter. When she turned her back, he slyly added extra lemon; when he turned his back she added vanilla. Together they prepared a four-course meal with the audience applauding Julia’s one-liners and Jacques’s virtuoso knife techniques (“You can certainly tell who is the professional chef and who is the home cook,” she noted).

  During preparations for the second filming, two years later on Boston’s Patriots’ Day (also the day of the Boston Marathon), Julia wanted plain glass bowls, not white ones, for her English pudding. A staff member navigated police blockades and closed stores to find her what she wanted. Instead of putting her boiled potatoes in a Cuisinart, she pressed them through the enormous German potato ricer she had bought in Bonn in the 1950s. While Jacques, who had published Simple & Healthy Cooking the year before, prepared the veal, his eyes widened as she added more and more butter to the potatoes. She seemed to delight in quoting Alice B. Toklas: “We don’t want nutrition, we want taste.” When there were friendly disagreements of style, he usually deferred to her or did it his way when her back was turned, much to the delight of the audience. When he suggested putting garlic in the fourth dish, a sauce for the salmon, she tapped her head in despair and exclaimed, “You’re a real garlic freak, aren’t you!” It was delightful theater.