Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (51 page)

In June, Avis visited the Childs there, and she confided to Bill Koshland that she was “a bit taken aback” by Julia’s appearance. He agreed that when he had seen her in mid-May she was just beginning to come out of it. No one ever talked openly about mastectomies until Mrs. Nelson Rockefeller and Mrs. Gerald Ford were publicly candid several years later.

Julia’s decision to stop smoking was reinforced in the spring of 1969 when Bob Kennedy was operated on for lung cancer and continued to smoke. A damned fool, Paul called him. He had the same opinion of Cora DuBois, who kept smoking after a diagnosis of emphysema. Three of their friends, all heavy smokers, died in 1969.

That year, Julia retreated even further to work on recipes for their second volume, which she and Simca constructed and tested for three years. The following year in Cambridge she wrote most of the book by retreating to the stove and typewriter. The deadline was moved again and again, but finally met in March 1970.

Chapter 20
C
ELEBRITY AND
S
OLITUDE
(1968 – 1970)

“There is really no such thing as an original
recipe…. But cooks must feed their egos as well
as their customers.”

M. F. K. FISHER to Julia Child, October 4, 1968

A
T THE INTERMISSION
of the Boston Symphony, after Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 and Debussy’s Rhapsody for saxophone and orchestra, Julia and Paul walked up one flight to see the little art exhibit (Paul called it “the usual second-rate painting exhibit”) and were once more reminded, as they were in their walks about Cambridge, of her growing fame. Julia Watchers, as Paul called them. Would she just sign their music program? You have changed my life! They sent her gifts (and would for decades), and she would give most of them to friends or charity. In a letter to Charlie, Paul quoted one reviewer of her
The French Chef Cookbook
speaking for her fans: “We will march with Julia, our banner an impeccably clean towel, and
‘Bon Appetit!’
our cry, as our soufflés rise higher and higher. We will conquer new Malakoffs and let our apple charlottes fall where they may.”

Mary Frances wrote to tell Julia that her own fan mail often told her she had “a lot to learn, mostly from JC. You are mostly called ‘Julia’ … their husbands can’t keep their eyes off you for one thing and … there seems to be no overt jealousy … just a general amazement!” Even in her own Boston, Julia received honor. She was fast becoming an eccentric and lovable icon who, without pretension, brought honor to their city. The man who refinished her copper pots would not allow her to pay. And she was sought out socially by Stan Calderwood (a neighbor and vice president of Polaroid), Frank Morgan
(Newsweek
bureau chief), Tom Winship (editor-in-chief of the
Boston Globe)
, and Louis Kronenberger (theater critic) when he retired to Brookline in 1970.

T
HE PUBLIC JULIA

Julia could not help but be aware of her public persona when she was stopped at the A&P, at the intermission of the symphony, or on the streets of Boston, or (by American tourists) in Paris. She was aware of it when the national journalists and photographers came for interviews and pictures. But the articles often came out when she was working with Simca in France; during the six months after her
Time
cover, she was out of the country and again in the months after her operation. She guarded her private life and did not need to stay around for the early edition displaying her face for the public. “She’s very reserved,” says restaurant consultant Clark Wolf. “If her physicality matched her voice, she’d be Soupy Sales.”

“She had become a mover and shaker like her father,” her sister said. “He would have been proud!” Even when she was in France, she remained in the public eye. Television reruns and journal articles fed the public image, while the private Julia was testing recipes with Simca or typing long letters about their recipes in her office.

When she was back in Cambridge, Julia was at ease with the press and, though she preferred cooking demonstrations, gave an occasional public speech. She was becoming a better speaker, Paul noticed. During an interview with Frank Morgan of
Newsweek
, Paul told Charlie, he became aware of a quality in Julia after she had several vodkas (only gin or vodka had this effect) that reminded him of the description of Tallulah Bankhead, who died that week, as “a personality as much as a star. Her vibrant energy, explosive speech and impetuous behavior seemed at times a phenomenon better suited for study by physicists than by the journalists who chronicled her antics. I simply do not know her,” Paul added, “no blurring of speech … [but] up go the decibels and the big swooping gestures. Interruptions-by-the-yard. The law is laid down, decorated by cuss-words, jokes, stream-of-consciousness …” In other words, Paul did not get a word in edgewise.

Her name appeared in several
Newsweek
articles in 1968 as well as in
McCall’s, New York
magazine,
TV Guide
. (“The only national television female of real authority is Julia Child … because her opinions are confined to the natural and universal passion, Food. Nobody can knock a woman Doing Her Thing in the Kitchen. And nobody cares if she doesn’t look like Raquel Welch or have her hair done by Kenneth. In fact, quite properly, they care for her more because she is, simply, herself,” wrote Marya Mannes.) In dozens of articles about other food professionals, Julia is always the one with whom they are compared or contrasted.

Vogue
came to interview her in Plascassier, where she and Paul spent the 1968 holidays with Bob and Mary Kennedy. The
Vogue
interviewer was one of Judith Jones’s authors, as were several of the chefs chosen for Julia’s later cooking-with-Julia books in the 1990s. A more welcome guest was Beard, whose visit led to two grand meals, at least in terms of cost, at L’Oasis and the Casino in Monte Carlo. Together they watched (via satellite from Houston to Madrid) the astronauts return to earth on Apollo 8. In 1969 it was journalists from
McCall’s
and
House & Garden
who came to Pitchoune for interviews to be published in 1970.

Julia and Paul were always interested in national and international arts and politics. He was going to vote for Humphrey, but she, despite Kennedy’s “kiddie spawning,” was voting for Bobby Kennedy. She was devastated by his assassination, which they heard on their tiny transistor as the church bell was tolling in Plascassier in June 1968. She felt personally let down when Jacqueline Kennedy married Onassis, and was disturbed by the violence at the Democratic convention that summer.

American produce was a political issue as well. Julia took on fish as a cause when she was back in Boston that fall. She privately blamed in part the Catholics for the reluctant consumption of fish by the rest of the country (their traditional obligatory Friday fish regimen made many equate fish with penance and privation). With James Beard she planned a cooking demonstration for thirty newspaper food editors, asserting the need for government support for better boats and docks. Their efforts, she informed Simca, were “a public service involving our educational station, the fishing industry, the government and the press.” As important as the issue itself was what she learned about fish from the demonstration (she informed Simca that “individually peeled and flash-frozen shrimp are tough, but nonpeeled, block-frozen shrimp are better”).

Nixon was a “very dull man, self-righteous, ambitious, solemn, [with] no interest in food, no cultivated tastes,” said Julia: a litany of qualities she most disliked in people. She repeated her opinions—and the same fish recipe—for the Chamberlains, who came to lunch on election day, and for the Brooks Becks the following night. She may have been perfecting her recipe, but she really wanted to talk about the dangerous “swing to the right” with the election of her fellow Californian, the man her father had helped enter national politics.

She and Paul were swept up in the political unrest that defined Harvard student life and the streets of Cambridge that fall (“hippy-cum-Panther-cum-drug” scene, Paul called it). There were riots in Harvard Yard, numerous break-ins in the neighborhood, and at the deSola Pools’ next door (he was head of MIT’s Center for International Studies) two bricks flew through the front window with a note attached: “Down with all Fascist Imperialists!” Paul had his own idea of fascists (“God alone can’t get rid of J. Edgar Hoover,” he lamented). In February 1970, Paul put in unbreakable plastic windows on the ground-floor windows and installed an elaborate alarm system, informing Charlie that their house was now “an illuminated monument to fear and to greater safety.” (For aesthetic balance, he had a new wine cellar built, just for red wines.) In April the antiwar violence became familial when a second cousin of Julia’s named Diana Oughton blew herself up accidentally (while making bombs) at a Weatherman house on Eleventh Street in Greenwich Village. “We are all swole up w/pride. Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh,” Paul wrote cynically to Charlie.

Their letters reveal the Childs as classic liberals. “If you eat right, you vote right,” she told a journalist in Northampton. Their old friends were now part of the establishment—Abe Manell was an assistant to the President, former Washington neighbor Stuart Rockwell an ambassador—but they themselves were sometimes antiestablishment. Each position was nuanced. They opposed the violence at Harvard, yet were in favor of abortion rights and the peaceful opposition to Nixon and the Vietnam War. She believed many students were in college “to grow up,” much like her own academic career at Smith (“Somebody like me should not have been accepted at a serious institution”).

With the pressure on to complete Volume II, Julia resented every interruption and longed for solitude. If she had to travel she continued her experiments with friends and family. She worked on puff pastry
(pâte feuilletée)
in Maine in August; pâtés and terrines on Martha’s Vineyard while visiting Bob Kennedy; beef and fowl in Dublin, New Hampshire, with Helen Kirkpatrick Milbank for two Thanksgivings; and cakes on Long Pond beyond Plymouth at the Howes’ summer home. One tradition was always honored: once a week she and Paul went across the Charles River to have Julia’s hair washed and set and to dine together at the Ritz Grill (where women had to be accompanied by men). Another ritual was always to shop for groceries together, as much for companionship as the need for two people to transport their voluminous purchases.

Every dinner guest was a guinea pig for the book, whether it was Sybille Bedford when she came to Cambridge to research her biography of Aldous Huxley; Gay Bradley or Rosemary Manell from California; or Alfred Knopf himself, to whom she fed her
mousse de poisson
. She never wasted time on a meal preparation that did not relate to her research. If the recipe was less than perfect, she said nothing. Their guests ate informally but well around the large Norwegian table in the kitchen.

C
OMPLETING
MASTERING II

“Rushing from stove to typewriter like a mad hen,” she described herself midway through their final three-year push to complete the second volume of
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
. She worked seven-day weeks during the first five months of 1969, went to France to cook with Simca—though Simca was there only part of the time—then returned for the final eight months (until nearly April 1970) for more seven-day workweeks. She even worked that Christmas, bemoaning only that they were missing for the first time the winter foie gras and truffle season in France.

“I think we are the English-language Saint-Ange,” Julia confided to Simca. This book must be “better and different,” they agreed, for the competition is now greater, and “people expect to get the absolute word of the lord from us.” Because they had a great responsibility to live up to, Julia tested some recipes fifteen or twenty times if necessary. She was disappointed to learn that her beloved James Beard used his assistant to test his recipes and that there were errors in his
Theory and Practice
(1969). He is “doing too much else,” she confided to Simca. Then she heard that Michael Field signed on for twelve 150-page booklets, one to be published each month. By contrast, when Simca suggested they include couscous in their volume, Julia spent a full month researching the origins and ingredients and testing recipes until she finally rejected it.

If a name or recipe was not French, they made note of the fact, as in
filet de boeuf en croûte:
“Whether the English, the Irish, or the French baked the first filet of beef in a crust we shall probably never know, but [it] is certain that the French would not have named it after Wellington,” she wrote. Also, in a passing reference to sour dough, Julia wrote, “Sour dough is an American invention, not French, and you adapt your sour dough recipe to the method described here for plain French bread.” Later, food writer Karen Hess, who believed that the beef Wellington should not have even been included, disagreed with Julia about the origins of sour dough.

Julia checked every recipe with the French classics. “We cannot use tomato in bisque,” she said, “because neither Carême or Escoffier or others give tomatoes in their bisques, therefore to protect ourselves from criticism by knowing types” she said no. They also remade some classic dishes too briefly described in the older texts and occasionally found inspiration when they ate out. After eating a delicious
loup de mer en croûte
at L’Oasis, Julia and Simca tried to copy it, revising and refining it several times over two months. Because she had all the French classic texts and subscribed to current French
(Cuisine et Vins de France
and
La France à Table)
and English-language food periodicals, she checked their recipes carefully for originality. “It cannot be copied—if close it must be improved,” she told Simca. And if it was improved, they must acknowledge its origins. While making
pain d’épices
, Julia discovered it was an adaptation of one in Ali-Bab that had too much liquid. “We cannot copy an Ali-Bab classic,” she said, and did not use it. When Simca suggested adding orange marmalade to
pain d’épices
, Julia said she did not want to add ingredients that echoed “ladies’ magazines and English additions.”