Backstage with Julia (2 page)

With a passion she sustained for over forty years, Julia continued to shape and influence the new order she had created, never allowing it to become stagnant. In addition to her monumental two-volume set,
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
, which provided a definitive education in traditional French techniques, she wrote nine more cookbooks that guided us through the application of those classic techniques to all good cooking of any ethnic genre. She headlined nine television series that followed the same progression from learning the proper foundation to applying it to "plain, good cooking." Over the course of her culinary life, she weighed in publicly and consistently with common sense and pithy wit on every food fad and culinary trend that caught our attention. She was the single most influential figure in the culinary world.

Her death was indeed the end of an era.

Like countless chefs, food writers, good home cooks, and even feckless pot-burners who would that day mourn her loss, I grew from cooking infant to adult culinarian in the age of Julia Child. Long before I began to work for her, I was already steeped in the era she created. I owned a large copper egg white bowl and an oversized balloon whisk, a conical fine-mesh
chinois
strainer, and a freezer full of homemade stock. I knew how to bone a whole chicken and how to make an omelet three ways. What I didn't know was what it took to be the kind of person who could define an era.

Julia always credited her success to timing: "I just happened to come along at the right time. If it hadn't been me, someone else would have done it." Perhaps. But could someone else have done it as well for so long? Could anyone else have made it as much fun to generations of audiences of all ages and interests, culinary or not? Would another person have devoted the time to developing the professionalism of gastronomy and provided such generous, personal mentoring to generations of culinary professionals?

Julia was right about her timing, though. At the beginning of the sixties, America was ripe for a new culinary age. After World War II, air travel to Europe was more accessible and affordable than it had ever been. Travel to France became increasingly popular with Americans who came face to fork with food the likes of which they had never tasted at home. The Kennedy's were in the White House and Americans became so enamored of their lifestyle that the First Couple became the country's standard for style. Jackie Kennedy brought a previously unseen elegance to state dining and entertaining and she did it with the aid of a French chef, René Verdon. French food became synonymous with fine dining, and the next best thing to hiring a Gallic cook was to learn how to make the dishes yourself. Julia was there to show us how. She was right: her timing was perfect. Still, she was not without precedent. James Beard and Dione Lucas had each published popular cookbooks, and Beard was on television with his
I Love to Cook
, while Lucas had her show,
To the Queen's Taste
, and could even occasionally be seen flipping French omelets in Bloomingdale's display windows.

So why Julia? Because more than the right time, she had the right stuff—what it took to go beyond simply filling a need and become synonymous with cooking itself. She had what the entertainment industry simply calls "it." On television her particular style of "it" told audiences that she was just like us, and if she could transform a large, unwieldy fish into dinner and turn common chunks of beef into a sophisticated Boeuf Bourguignon, then we could too. It was a masterly act of convincing, because in truth there was nothing common about Julia Child.

Everything about Julia was exceptional, from her strapping height and warbling voice to her zest for life, dauntless constitution, and interminable energy. To borrow a combination of phrases from George Carlin, she was "super-sized, long-lasting, high-definition, fast-acting, oven-ready, and built to last." She was unselfconsciously outspoken, smart, witty, and by her own admission a natural ham. Her discipline, work ethic, and organizational skills made me weep with envy, and her decisiveness and strong will sometimes just plain made me weep. She was curious and thorough, if not to a fault, at least to the point of making me beg her not to tell me another fact about the difference between sweet potatoes and yams. She was exceedingly practical, a trait that reflected her stern Presbyterian ancestry, and exquisitely nonjudgmental, which probably contradicted it.

Backstage with Julia
is a memoir of the years I spent with Julia, years that showed me what kind of person could launch a culinary era. This book does not pretend to be a chronicle of her life and work. A detailed biography already exists; more may well follow. Neither does it explore Julia's culinary awakening. She told the definitive story of that time in
My Life in France
, the last book she wrote. These are my memories of the Julia who was my mentor, my colleague, my friend; my story of what made her so special.

That August morning, I lay in bed a long time thinking about Julia. I thought about the last time I'd seen her. It was a few months before the call, when I visited her in California. She knew I was writing a culinary novel loosely based on the television work we had done at
Good Morning America
, and she wanted to know all about it. I filled her in on the details of what I had written, and she thought it was a hoot. The events sparked memories that made us both smile. "That's wonderful!" she said with genuine glee, and then she rested her hand on my knee. "We had such a good time. Didn't we?" she said. Oh, yes. Indeed we did.

Chapter 1

You live but once, you might as well be amusing.

—Gabrielle ("Coco") Chanel, French couturier

"It's an honor to have you on board, Mrs. Childs," announced the handsome flight attendant neatly clad in midnight-blue slacks, white shirt, and logoed tie. Bending over our seats, he whispered conspiratorially with a Texas drawl as broad as the state itself, "I'm such a
huge
fan. I have all your cookbooks."

Julia smiled demurely, tilted her head in acknowledgment, and said, "Thank you," without mentioning the erroneous addition of an
s
to her name. In the thirteen years that I had been working with her, the faulty pronunciation happened with curious regularity, and some years before, I'd remarked how odd I thought it that so many people put an
s
at the end of her name.

"Not really," she responded. "Before I was known at all there was a popular New York eatery called Childs. People knew of it and it helped them remember my name."

On that March day in 1993, three decades of public fascination with Child, the French Chef, had eclipsed whatever fame Childs the eatery had once enjoyed. That eclipse began the moment in 1963 when, from the display kitchen of the Boston Gas Company, she trilled her first WGBH-TV "Bon appétit." Cooking enthusiasts became dedicated fans, and even viewers who would never make friends with their stoves tuned in religiously to catch the antics of this Lucille Ball–like character with a rolling pin. I watched all—was it 134?—episodes of
The French Chef
for the cooking, but I reveled in her humor. Spontaneous humor—such as the time she pulled a bouquet garni out of a bubbling stock and said of the used bundle of herbs, "It looks like a dead mouse," and the time she announced, to cover for a bell that inadvertently rang during taping, "That must be the plumber!" Unable to resist, she licked a rich chocolate batter from her spatula and told us with a smile, "That's not part of the recipe." I laughed out loud when the long, slim baguette of French bread she planned to slice for onion soup slumped lazily in the middle when she held it up, so she declared it pathetically lacking in character and flung it dismissively over her shoulder.

She peppered her instructions for proper, classic techniques with frequent, amusing soupçons of sound:
blump, blump, blump
as she quickly sliced through mushrooms,
whomp
when she smashed her knife down on a clove of garlic, and a throaty, crackling sound when she broke off the claw of a lobster. In a distinctive voice that became one of the most recognized—and most imitated—voices in the country, she told us to be prepared to "shoot the wad" on buying the best ingredients and "go whole hog" in fearlessly cooking them. The combination of her off-the-cuff, madcap quirkiness and her deeply serious commitment to things culinary made watching her addictive. She catapulted to fame. When, in 1966,
Time
magazine featured her as its cover story, dubbing her "Our Lady of the Ladle," they wrote that her shows "have made her a cult from coast to coast and put her on a first-name basis with her fans."

Her name, sans the
s
, was unlikely to be forgotten.

"Want something to read?" Julia asked, reaching into her carry-on and pulling out an impressive stack of current magazines.

I held up the spy novel she had loaned me. "No, thanks. I'm just at the good part." Julia and I shared a passion for thrillers, mostly the ones that involved espionage. I could trace mine back to the Hardy Boys mysteries that I discovered when I was eight. Julia honed hers during World War II, when she worked with the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. She had just loaned me
The Spy Wore Red
, and although she insisted that during the war she had only typed and filed, I knew the government had cleared her for high-security work, and my overactive imagination kept plugging her into the role of undercover agent depicted by the heroine of the nonfiction book. Julia admitted that she had wanted to be a spy, but the "Oh So Secret," as she called the OSS, rejected her. "They said I was too tall," she would sigh. But of course, that's the sort of thing a spy would say.

I felt something brush by my foot. "Here comes the deluge," I said in a singsong voice.

"So much useless stuff," Julia said as she discarded several scented inserts, subscription forms, and coupon offers onto the floor. She didn't make neat piles; she unselfconsciously tossed the "useless stuff" around our feet. We were seated behind the bulkhead; there were no seats with pockets in front of us, so the floor was the only available receptacle for the mounting trash. I'd seen her do it often when in flight and, being infinitely more self-conscious, I always felt a compulsion to stand up and make a general announcement that we would pick them up before we left the plane. But Julia had no such compulsion. Delightfully uninhibited and completely comfortable with herself, she didn't worry about what other people might think.

"Do you know how many people actually pay attention to all that?" she asked pointing to the pile.

"No, I haven't a clue."

She cited an impressive statistic. "Isn't that amazing?"

"Amazing," I agreed, but more amazing to me was the fact that she was interested enough to find out. But then, after so many years with her, I was used to being amazed by her.

She continued to thumb through the magazines, paused intermittently to read articles that interested her, tore out several pages to read later, and tossed the pillaged remains into a heap on the floor. The litter at our feet was growing in scary dimension.

"Would you like me to take those?" the flight attendant asked, eyeing the mess and slipping a navy-blue apron over his head.

"Not now," Julia replied.

He looked at the pile at my feet and gave me a questioning look.

"It's
her
mess," I said with a shrug.

When he walked away, Julia gave me a quick, playful poke in the arm, and I responded as though she had broken it. I wasn't traveling with Julia Child the star—I was in the company of Julia McWilliams, the slightly naughty schoolgirl who took to elbowing and horsing around. Biographies, television programs, and articles about Julia often allude to the fact that in her youth she was a mischievous cut-up, a prankster, a party girl who loved to stir things up. But that fun-loving, mischief-causing character with a wicked glint in her eye was always very much there, elbowing and stirring up a little trouble whenever she felt like it.

We began our approach to Dallas, and the flight attendant returned to our seats. "We'll be getting ready to land soon, Mrs. Childs." And then, with a hesitant look at the clutter around our feet, "Shall I take these away now?"

"That would be very nice. Thank you."

"Is there anything else I can do for you?"

Julia gently patted both her knees with open palms and said, "We're supposed to have an airport cart pick us up. Where will that be?" Overall, Julia was blessed with remarkably good health, but stiffness in her knees often caused her extreme pain. "An old skiing injury and all that basketball in school," she'd say. Although bad knees are just in the cards for some people, all that jumping on her long, slender legs may well have compromised the joints. I'd realized just how long those legs were some years before, when a fan sent her an enormous box of Vidalia onions that contained the instructions "Store well ventilated in a cool place." When I asked her how she suggested we should store them, she handed me a pair of her pantyhose, saying, "These should do it. We'll hang them in the basement." The entire box of sweet Georgia onions fit into the one pair of her stockings.