Julia Child Rules (18 page)

No one told Julia that middle-aged women weren’t allowed to hog the spotlight, or that if they did, they could only do it if they passed as someone much younger. Maybe it was all that time spent in Europe, where women aren’t rendered instantly irrelevant at the first hot flash, or maybe it was because Julia was
never the prettiest girl in the class, or even one of the pretty ones. “I learned the truth at seventeen/that love was meant for beauty queens,” Janis Ian crooned in 1975. The song won a Grammy and went on to top the billboard charts. Why? Because every record-buying girl between the ages of six and twenty-six knew this to be the Painful Truth of Life.

Except, it isn’t. Because one of the secrets of life, hiding there in plain sight, is that we’re “old,” i.e., not seventeen or eighteen or even twenty-two, for a very long time. So-called “mid-life” is the Sahara Desert of the human life span. It goes on for decades. If, like Julia, you were never a beauty queen—and who among us was, really? Consumer culture conspires to make sure pretty much every woman feels bad about her neck (thighs, hips, waist, hair, nose, lips, philtrum
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)—middle-age is the great equalizer. The older you get, the less the great female currency of youth and beauty is worth. Trying to look like a hot twentysomething when you’re fifty is the modern woman’s comb-over: No one is fooled. Indeed, if you did not spend your formative years as a smokin’ hot babe, where the world was your oyster simply because you happened to be born with good looks, middle-age is for you.

All you women who suffered for having “great personalities,” please step forward.

Julia did, wielding her eccentric personality and
joie de vivre
like the fright knife she waved over her head on
The French Chef.

Middle-age was the time of Julia’s life.

It was never easy for Julia to find clothes that suited her. Her height limited her fashion options; no jeans or fetchingly sloppy boyfriend cardigan for Julia. Until the end of her life, her style read “woman.” She wore skirts, blouses, and her famous pearls. In a little seen black-and-white photo taken just after the publication of
Mastering,
she’s wearing what appears to be a classic Chanel suit with bouclé jacket and iconic Chanel hat.

The early episodes of
The French Chef
are so dear because Julia looks like exactly what she was, a slightly frazzled home cook with flat hair in the back of her head and bags under her eyes. Dissatisfied with the way she looked, she realized quickly that if you wanted to succeed in this new medium, you better look good.

She didn’t wear much makeup, believing that her eyes weren’t made for mascara, and solved the problem in a rather badass fashion with plastic surgery.

She had an “eye job” in the late 1960s. In 1971 she had a face-lift, and another in 1977, and yet another in 1989. The last one made her look like someone wearing a Julia Child rubber mask, but she was determined to stay in it as long as possible, and she knew viewers would prefer to learn to cook from someone fresh and vital-looking, than from an old bag with one foot in the grave.

For Julia, to give up on her looks meant to give up on living life to its fullest, and if it took a plastic surgeon’s knife, then so be it.

In addition to the basic indignities of aging, the strange forearm flab where no fat exists, the suddenly chubby armpits and propensity for weeping at the National Anthem, life tends to get deadly serious, fast. It happens to us all, and it happened to Julia.

The first hit came in May 1962, while she and Paul were preparing to film
The French Chef
pilot episodes. John McWilliams Jr., Julia’s cantankerous right-wing father, died. He was eighty-two, suffered from myriad ailments—a pesky virus, emphysema, perhaps leukemia—and the end was prolonged enough so that Julia could fly from Cambridge to Pasadena for the bedside vigil. She had dutifully written Pop a weekly letter while she and Paul lived abroad, and she sent him clippings and updates about her doings once
Mastering
had been published to acclaim. She’d never failed to send the yearly birthday and Christmas cards. It had never mattered. Her marriage to Paul, whom Pop found to be beneath contempt, as an intellectual and thus a communist, had sundered him from his daughter forever.

Julia’s sadness was tempered, as always, by the pragmatism that drove her character. If her father had lived to be a hundred and two there was never going to be a chance of reconciliation, something she’d managed to make peace with long ago. She was grateful Pop had enjoyed a happy second marriage, and that his death was mercifully quick. Except when it came to finding the proper casings with which to stuff a homemade
saucisson,
or whether it was okay to substitute cream for butter, Julia never
overthought anything, and we are well-advised to do the same. She was saddened but was able to move on.

Then, a scant six years later, in 1968, while she and Simca were pushing to finish
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
,
Volume Two,
she discovered a lump in her left breast. The cancer wasn’t life-threatening, and the same diagnosis today would call for a lumpectomy. “Left breast off,” she wrote in her diary on February 28. The surgeon removed her lymph nodes, too. The surgery required a ten-day hospital stay, during which Paul, a lifelong hypochondriac, nearly required hospitalization himself. It is said that when it was over, Julia wept in private.
*

Even in these times, when open heart surgery is practically an outpatient procedure, ten days in the hospital is a long time for the average person; may we stop for a moment and meditate on just how long that must have been for Julia, who was, let’s be honest, a manic workaholic?

Her recovery was not as speedy as she might have wished. She had to wear a plastic sleeve on the left arm and spend time getting outfitted with “a false titty,” as she confided to a friend. Cooking was difficult, but she felt lucky it wasn’t her right arm;
that
might have really tripped her up. She was anxious to get back to work on
Volume Two,
and at her weekly post-op doctor’s appointment, her only question was, When could she return to France?

Find your passion.

One of the standard-issue life lessons, which I’m sure I’ve posited along with everyone else who thinks about these things, is that one’s life is enriched immeasurably if you’re able to find an abiding passion. You don’t have to be good at it, it just has to be something that would consume every waking hour if you let it. A good friend, a New York book editor, discovered surfing in her forties and now spends her vacations at a house she built in Costa Rica, and on the weekends, at her apartment in Manhattan, she gets lost in surfing movies, videos, and books. The walls of her office are adorned with big pictures of cresting waves.

There is another, less often mentioned, advantage to possessing a lifelong passion: When you’re getting on in years and your parents are dying, and your body is reminding you in the least dignified manner possible that it, too, will fail you sometime, perhaps in the not too distant future, having something you care about deeply gives you hope, focus, and a reason not to dwell on the bad stuff. We don’t discuss this much, I think, because what could be more of a downer?
Find your passion! It’ll keep you from jumping off a bridge when you’re middle-aged!
But a deep passion for something outside yourself is money in the bank.

In drawing up the contract for
Volume Two,
Julia’s editor, Judith Jones, suggested Julia and Simca include a recipe for French bread, which Americans simply could not find even in so-called French bakeries. The ingredients are flour, yeast, water, and salt. What could be easier? Everything, as it turns out.

After spending two years producing pale, gummy loaves at home, Julia went to Paris and apprenticed herself to French bread-making expert Raymond Calvel. “It was like the sun in all his glory, breaking through the shades of gloom,” she would later write in her Foreword to
Volume Two
. Calvel set her on the right path. Paul took pictures of his hands at work. Back home in Cambridge, they were able to copy Calvel’s moves, but alas, not the necessary dampness in his baker’s oven.

Julia dubbed Paul “M. Paul Beck, Boulanger” after he got into the act, baking his own loaves, experimenting with how much and what kind of yeast to use, how best to get the dough to rise and for how long, how large the loaf should be, and how to moisten it while it was baking. M. Paul Beck squirted the top of the baking bread with the sprayer appropriated from his nasal decongestant, and Julia used a wet whisk broom. They made
baguettes
(translated as “the stick”),
batards
(half the size of a baguette),
flutes
(twice the size of a baguette), and
ficelles
(a glorified bread stick that must be eaten as soon as it comes out of the oven, or else risk breaking a tooth). They would nail the recipe, leap around with glee, then discover they couldn’t duplicate it. Two hundred and eighty-four pounds of white flour later, Julia felt confident she’d mastered
Pain Français
.
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It was this kind of dedication and enthusiasm that kept her grounded and optimistic about the future.

I often wonder whether Julia ever experienced any dark nights of the soul. Paul was pretty much all dark nights, all the time, pessimistic and fretful and prone to depression. Did she ever sit in her kitchen with a cigarette—yes, she was a heavy smoker until after her mastectomy—and a glass of Beaujolais and remember her beloved mother, Caro, who died at sixty, not young, but certainly not old, and how she, Julia, with a bout of breast cancer behind her was only a few years younger? Did she think, I better make the most of this because who knows what the future holds, and wallowing about anything is pointless and a waste of time?

If at all possible, build an adorable vacation home in the south of France.

With Julia’s first two royalty checks
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she and Paul built a small house in Provence, on the corner of a plot of land owned for generations by the family of Jean Fischbacher, Simca’s husband, and where Simca and Jean lived in a three-story house made of stone. Plascassier is a small village on the winding road between Valbonne and Grasse. For Julia, it was heaven: She was in France, yet the diffused golden light, the rolling green-gray hills, the smell of jasmine, orange blossom, and lavender in the air, reminded her of her California. It was possibly the most perfect place imaginable: a place that evokes all the glorious
aspects of childhood, without the attendant traumatic reminders lurking in the actual place you grew up. For Paul it was perfect because he got to build a house to his specifications, using his flawless French.

The small house, called “La Pitchoune,” which Paul and Julia, those compulsive nicknamers, immediately re-dubbed La Peetch, was more or less a kitchen and a bedroom—Paul and Julia each had their own; Julia was a prodigious snorer—plus a living room. Then as now,
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the kitchen is warm but not fancy, with slightly higher counters and the cream-colored pegboard with its black utensil outlines, and a fine collection of copper pots.

Outside, on the terrace, they built a concrete patio table that resembled a mushroom. “You could get the measure of someone’s character, sitting at that table,” Julia used to say.

James Beard was someone whose character Julia approved of, and he visited her often in Provence. She never forgot the generosity he showed her upon the publication of
Mastering,
and even though they championed different cuisines, Julia and Jim shared the belief that nothing was more fun than working hard in the kitchen, and that making good food was not only endlessly interesting but also life’s highest calling. Beard was also fun and forgiving. Once, in Cambridge, when they were first
becoming friendly and Julia was enjoying Famous Cookbook Author status, she cooked him a terrible meal of flavorless veal scallops, underdone broccoli, and dusty-tasting chocolate cake, which he shrugged off with a laugh and an invitation to cook at his school. He descended on La Peetch the summer of 1969, where together they watched the moon landing.

The great advantage (and disadvantage) of living a stone’s throw away from Simca was living a stone’s throw away from Simca. Paul and Julia lived most of the year in Cambridge but spent the winter months in Provence.

Because Julia had been right on that awkward day in Boston when she tried to convince the people of Houghton Mifflin that cooking French food could fill several volumes, Julia and Simca had plenty of recipes to fill
Volume Two
. They restored some of the sauces and chicken recipes edited from Volume One, included more soups, bisques, and fish stews, and more vegetable recipes, including the “American vegetable” broccoli, of which Julia was quite fond, and more desserts, which were Simca’s specialty.

Fifteen years, give or take, had passed since Julia and Simca had met in Paris. They were not just older but significantly wiser, especially when it came to the highly specialized task of writing a cookbook of French recipes for American cooks. They’d made it up as they went along the first time around; now, with one book behind them, Julia was very clear about what worked and what didn’t and what needed to change. Her inner scientist was more finicky than ever. She demanded more operational
proof than ever, particularly when it came to using American ingredients, which had turned out to be more than a little different from those found in France. American flour had more gluten than French flour; American chocolate had more butter fat; American sole filets were thicker; American chickens tasted “less chickeny.” This made a huge difference, and she and Simca would have to make sure to allow for these differences. On and on it went. Julia was a mad researching fool, more obsessed than ever about why and how recipes
worked
.