Paul, when he first met Julia, in the O.S.S., described “her slight atmosphere of hysteria.” No doubt he was referring to Julia’s almost operatic vocal tonalities, the here floating, there plunging falsetto she seems to have been born with. Hers is one of the distinctive voices of 20th-century entertainment, and it has known myriad descriptions: “a flutey schoolmarm tone,” the “Edwardian inflections of Lady Bracknell,” “like a great horned owl,” “two parts Broderick Crawford to one part Elizabeth II.” Yet the voice is only half of it, the other half being her silence as she kneads the dough or wields the knife, the intervals of rigorous quiet, pure concentration, that give the show a spellbinding inner rhythm, an almost medieval sense of heat and light. For Julia Child, French cooking was a guild art requiring a committed apprenticeship, years of practice. And it required courage, too, or as she said to viewers after she muffed the flip of a potato cake, which fell in pieces on the stovetop, “You see when I flipped it I didn’t have the courage to do it the way I should have.” She proceeded to press the cake back together and uttered one of her most famous lines: “But you can always pick it up, and if you’re alone in the kitchen, who is going to see?”
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The French Chef officially premiered on February 11, 1963, and ran through 1973 (Julia did many other television shows, and won three Emmys). As the show caught on, a whole cult of Julia stories sprang up. That dropped potato cake soon became, in the retelling, a dropped chicken, a roast, a whole salmon on the floor, which she picked up while saying (not), “Your guests will never know.” And because Julia used wine in her cooking and toasted viewers at the show’s end, people thought she was drunk on-camera, not knowing her glass of wine was really Gravy Master mixed with water. In 1978, Saturday Night Live presented a Grand Guignol spoof of The French Chef, co-written by Al Franken and starring Dan Aykroyd as Julia, who slices off her thumb while making poularde demi-désossée, bleeds copiously, and then passes out crying, “Save the liver.” The skit is still aired today and still funny, a testament to Julia’s continuing stature in the culture. (She herself loved the skit, and kept a videotape of it under the television in her kitchen.)
In the 10 years that The French Chef aired, Julia’s subtext was not out of sync with the era’s counterculture or its overt message of psychosexual liberation. Julia wanted her viewers to loosen up, get physical, not with controlled substances but with food, not through a glass darkly but at table, with delight. Hers was a civilized sensuality, the integration of the senses that she’d learned in France. This is why her following was legion—Julia’s appetite appealed to young and old alike.
“Americans didn’t come over on the Mayflower trusting food,” says Laura Shapiro. “Julia’s whole thing about food was that you had to trust it. That, to me, is her great message. Getting your hands into it—touch it, breathe it, smell it, live it. If we as Americans have overcome to any degree our fear of food, our weird neurotic thing about the body, it starts with Julia.”
“I felt very related to her,” says Judith Jones, “because we were both released from very traditional, middle-class American values. And it was France that released us. She wanted to bring this message to America—that we were still steeped in the Puritan attitude towards food, and what the food industry had done to make us feel that food was not for the modern woman. It’s what an artist does: you want to express it so that you awaken sensibility. And she really did that.”
“Her favorite point in her life was the years in France, that period of discovery and awakening,” says Alex Prud’homme. “As she said, ‘I felt myself opening like a flower.’ It was a lovely phrase. And I think one of the reasons that—this is my personal theory—she wanted to write all these recipes down and transmit them to Americans is it was a form of distilling experience, almost like a short story or a poem. She used the recipe as a way of talking about France and its values, which are so different from ours. You know, doing things correctly and taking the time to get it right, and to work hard and learn your technique, and also to have fun.”
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Paul Child died at the age of 92, in 1994. Ten years later, in 2004, Julia Child died two days short of her 92nd birthday. In the last year of her life she suffered knee surgeries, kidney failure, and a stroke. On August 12, when her doctor called to say she had an infection and would need to be hospitalized, she chose not to be treated. The meal that turned out to be her last, before she went to sleep and never woke up, was Mastering’s recipe for French onion soup.
“Her birthday was August 15,” says Alex Prud’homme. “And we had people from all over the country and around the world coming for this big party in Santa Barbara for her 92nd birthday, and she died two days beforehand. And I’ve always wondered, Did she do that on purpose? We’ll never know. But it would be a very typical Julia move, knowing that all her favorite people were coming from all over, and wouldn’t this be a nice moment for her to, as she would say, ‘slip off the raft.’”
Did they still come?
“Everybody came. And it turned into a sort of three-day Irish wake, everybody telling stories and laughing and crying and eating and drinking. I think she felt very lucky to live the life she did. I think she loved it.”
GLORIA STEINEM
DECONSTRUCTING GLORIA
By Leslie Bennetts | January 1992
Well manicured and well modulated, the lunchtime crowd at the Four Seasons hums discreetly with the usual heady mixture of business and gossip. Only the barest flick of an eye betrays interest as each new arrival is checked out by the power brokers already at their seats. But when a tall, frazzled-looking woman hurries over to my table, there is not so much as a glimmer of recognition from anyone in the vicinity. Indeed, as she struggles out of her coat, even I do a double take: who is this pleasant-looking matron, with her brown jacket and brown pants and mousy brownish hair pulled back into what looks suspiciously like a bun? Although I’ve known her for nearly twenty years, it is several long moments before I realize that the nondescript brown wren in front of me is one of the most famous women in the country, not to mention my tardy lunch date, Gloria Steinem. The last time I saw her, at a party some months ago, she seemed her usual glamorous self: a miniskirt riding outrageously high over those spectacular racehorse legs, a glittering gold tunic that made her stand out instantly in a crowded room, that radiant face partly obscured by the ever present curtain of blond-streaked hair. In fact, this is the first time I’ve ever seen her without that trademark shield carefully arranged over her cheeks. “As she has pointed out, she always hid behind her hair,” says Stan Pottinger, a close friend and former longtime lover. “Now she’s pulling her hair back and she’s cut it short. As a metaphor, it definitely does represent a change. The question is, why was she hiding before? And why is she not hiding now?”
Her friends are all talking about the change in Gloria. Even Gloria is talking about the change in Gloria, albeit guardedly, with her usual mixture of easy charm and reticence. Within a few weeks, a whole lot of other people will also be talking about the change in Gloria when her new book—a dense and wide-ranging synthesis of politics, sociology, history, psychology, science, cultural anthropology, New Age experimentation, and personal exploration called Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem—hits the stores. In many ways, this is Steinem’s first book, the one she has been waiting all these years to write; despite a journalistic career that has spanned three decades, it is her first full-length statement of her philosophical take on the world.
For a woman who has lived an almost entirely public life for close to a quarter of a century, Gloria Steinem is the most private of household names—not only loath to bare her innermost feelings before the world but, in many ways, a stranger to those very feelings herself. Ever since she started to attract attention and commentary, she has been described in countless articles as remote, as lovely and cordial but someho
w distant and seemingly impervious to the emotional storms that buffet ordinary mortals. It has finally occurred to Steinem, at the age of fifty-seven, how much she had to repress to achieve that preternatural poise, how much the anguish and shame of a blighted childhood had to be buried to permit the emergence of the dazzlingly self-possessed icon who won fame and admiration all over the world. If Steinem is just starting to open the door a crack to others, it is because she is just starting to open it to herself.
Not that you could tell from her demeanor, of course. “Writing this book helped me a lot, and it changed me a lot,” she says, as low-key and matter-of-fact as if she were discussing the weather, her expression the same as when she was studying the lunch menu and deciding on the swordfish. “This has been a funny, shaky, full-of-tendrils-to-other-places kind of bridge into some other country for me. Partly the country has to do with age, but that may actually be the least important part of it.”
Aging is definitely on her mind these days, but she leavens any discussion with her usual wry humor. The good part? “You don’t have to worry about how you look, because you’re past the time when it really matters,” she says with a grin. On her worst day, Gloria Steinem couldn’t look bad, but I have to admit there are faint spots on the front of her baggy beige sweater, and the whole getup lacks a certain Steinem-esque jolt of sex appeal.
Whatever the changes in her outward persona, however, the internal ones are far more profound—although even these Steinem describes with characteristic restraint. “In the past, I think I was being falsely cheerful much of the time,” she says brightly. This realization did not come easily; it was only after a disastrous love affair with [real-estate mogul, investor, and publisher] Mort Zuckerman, a serious depression (well, maybe not by anyone else’s standards, but certainly a low point by her own), and the terror of life-threatening illness combined with a devastating professional fiasco that Steinem began, slowly and laboriously, to explore new ways of approaching her own life. She had spent months researching and writing the first version of this book, but when she presented her magnum opus on self-esteem to a close friend who happened to be a therapist, the reaction was a writer’s nightmare. “I don’t know how to tell you this,” said Carmen Robinson, “but I think you have a self-esteem problem. You forgot to put yourself in.”
It took Steinem a while longer to come to terms with the fact that she’d been forgetting to put herself in for about fifty years. Slowly, however, “I began to understand with a terrible clarity that we teach what we need to learn, and write what we need to read,” Steinem explains in the introduction to Revolution. “I had felt drawn to such a book not only because other people needed it, but because I did. I had come to the burnt-out end of my ability to travel one kind of feverish, productive, but entirely externalized road—but I had no idea why.”
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It took Steinem another three years to produce a different kind of book, one that is decidedly unconventional in its category-defying form but that most definitely includes its author. Her growing understanding of her own psyche has both amused and touched her intimates. “Once that process began, she got as excited about it as a kid,” says Robin Morgan, a friend for twenty years and the current editor of Ms. magazine. “She would fall upon platitudes with great excitement; for her, they were totally new. She would call me up and say, ‘Have you read Alice Miller? Do you know that all of us, no matter how old we get, carry around the baggage of our childhood?’ She was always fiercely smart, but the emotional intelligence had been so sacrificed to the intellectual intelligence.”
Until recently, the idea of getting herself a good shrink seems never to have occurred to Steinem despite the obvious traumas of her impoverished childhood. Her parents separated when she was ten, and Gloria was left alone to care for a mentally ill mother who was subject to terrifying hallucinations and was rarely able to assume any kind of parental responsibility. Gloria had to become not only a premature adult but the mother to her own incapacitated mother. Steinem’s lifelong way of dealing with pain has been a pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps-and-don’t-complain stoicism that some friends attribute to her Ohio origins. “She used to say it amazed her that everyone in New York had a psychiatrist, when in the Midwest, if you had a mood, something was wrong with you,” says Pottinger, a lawyer and investment banker who also comes from the Midwest. “The ethos is the tradition of the pioneers: You get the job done, and all the handwringing and moaning—you just don’t do it. You grease the axle and put the wheel back on and get the horses moving—but the price you pay for that is less self-awareness than you have in some other cultures. Gloria, like a lot of us, came to the values of self-awareness late.”
For a long time, Steinem apparently believed her childhood hadn’t had any lasting impact. “I had a midwestern bias against therapy,” she admits, “a kind of survivor’s pride. I understood it for other people, but to me it just always seemed sort of unnecessary.” Or even harmful, since she was all too familiar with the damage inflicted on many women by the rigid sexism of strict Freudian analysts. “I solved everything through acting, through being an activist. You go on believing that if something hits a bruise from the past it’s really painful in the present, rather than understanding that there’s another reason why it’s so painful.” She pauses and then adds softly, “It’s difficult for a neglected child, because it isn’t that there’s something wrong—it’s that there’s nothing. You experience it as a lack of reality, as invisibility. So I set about making myself real by being useful.”
And so the years whirled by in an unceasing blur of activity. For two decades, Steinem spent at least three or four days a week on the road, traveling and organizing, fund-raising and lobbying, endlessly bringing the clarion call of feminism to campuses and benefits, women’s conferences and community groups. Anywhere the movement called, Gloria was there to answer. It didn’t even have to be the movement that beckoned. “She meets someone on a plane, he asks her to speak at his daughter’s Bat Mitzvah, and she goes,” says Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a feminist author and close friend. “She does not say no to these things, and they eat her life away.”
Steinem deflected any questions about these habits with her usual charming self-mockery. “She used to say fliply, ‘The examined life is not worth living,’” recalls Suzanne Braun Levine, a longtime editor at Ms. magazine who is now the editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. “I think a lot of her courage came from forging ahead without letting herself ask questions. If you know you have to keep pushing, it would be smart not to look too deeply into your own needs.”
The brownstone apartment where Steinem has lived since 1967 was a pit stop to change clothes before running to catch another flight, a crash pad which was always open to friends from all over the world but which, with its notoriously empty refrigerator and the eternal piles of cartons stuffed with books and papers littering the floor, indisputably lacked a certain domestic appeal. Not that Steinem had ever been exactly renowned for her homemaking skills. “I had lived in the apartment for at least four or five years before I found out the oven didn’t work,” Steinem admits. “She can make the world’s greatest tuna-fish salad, and after that, forget it,” Pottinger attests.
These days Steinem is able to recognize her apartment as “a symbol of the self,” and with the help of a decorator friend, she has finally made it into a cozy and welcoming place, full of kilim rugs and overstuffed furniture and big pillows in rich colors and textures. Such domestic comfort was “something I didn’t experience growing up, so it felt foreign to me; it didn’t feel like home,” muses Steinem, who grew up in a dilapidated, rat-infested, virtually empty farmhouse a few feet from a major highway. “I don’t know why it took me so long to realize you need to have a home,” she adds, a trifle sheepishly. “I guess I thought it was just something other people had.”
Just as it was other people who had marriages, families, children. S
teinem’s avoidance of such norms has always been an irritant for many observers. For thirty years, the commentary on Gloria Steinem has reflected an almost Manichaean duality, a schizoid seesawing between white and black as various analysts described her either as a Gandhi-esque saint who cared only about saving the world or as a cunning opportunist who used a succession of causes as a smoke screen for her own overweening ambition. Even before she became an international symbol of American feminism, Steinem was a lightning rod for an extraordinary degree of malice from friend and foe alike, and that has never changed; it has always been apparent that a lot of people—feminists and liberals at least as much as right-wing chauvinists—were waiting to see Steinem fall on her face.
For so many years, even as she was presenting herself as a spokesperson for Everywoman, she seemed impossibly superior: whippet-thin and gorgeous, as glamorous as a movie star while maintaining impeccable credentials as a relentlessly earnest social activist, free of the burdens of domesticity but perpetually surrounded by brilliant, powerful men who doted on her—and she didn’t have to wash their socks or clean up a nightly mountain of dinner dishes. Her very existence was enough to make other women feel inadequate. Would she ever repent her refusal to marry, regret her decision not to have children, end up old and alone in belated penance for a lifetime of thumbing her nose at other people’s most cherished conventions? Would the paragon finally get her comeuppance? When the facts of Steinem’s life have failed to provide such a satisfying dénouement, people have invented them, and the inventions have become as immutable a part of her mythology as anything that ever happened in real life.
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