Laura Shapiro (14 page)

Mistakes were bad enough at a dinner party for friends, but when she fumbled on television, the moment was captured forever on tape—and shown over and over in reruns. She knew audiences cherished the near disasters, but she longed for more control; she longed to present a more polished performance. “If we had more money, it would be so useful to overshoot and be able to edit out with dissolves to indicate time lapses—and no pretense that it is a live show,” she told Ruth Lockwood.
The French Chef
never progressed to that level, in part because the production team was determined to keep the show from becoming too slick, although with the advent of color and a new studio kitchen, the show looked far more dressed up by the time the last programs were taped in 1972. With the two series that followed—
Julia Child & Company
and
Julia Child & More Company
—Julia was able to move a good deal closer to the image she preferred. These programs, produced on a bigger budget with all the benefits of technology, were staged in a bright, chic kitchen without a trace of home to it: the sheen was pure television, and Julia herself seemed to revel in the artificiality. Perhaps because it was possible at last to do retakes, she was more relaxed and never looked as though she were lunging for her next words. Her relationship with the food remained as high spirited as ever—shaking a pan of cucumbers, slapping the dough on the counter, admiring the teeth on a gigantic monkfish, adding “homemade chicken stock, as you can see” as she poured it from a can. But if the tension that often marked
The French Chef
was gone, so, alas, was the gratifying sight of the unpredictable, leaping out of a bowl or skillet to test the mettle of the heroine.

For reasons nobody seemed able to explain, the
Company
series didn't make much of an impact when they were first aired. WGBH admitted later that it had done a poor job of promoting and distributing
More Company,
which wasn't seen at all in New York until it went into re runs. Julia had been a familiar presence on television for more than fifteen years and was considered a national treasure, but while critics and many of her fans were happy with the new shows—and the reruns went on forever—the initial ratings and publicity came nowhere near those of
The French Chef.
“I am quite aware that there comes a time when one is frankly out of style, out of step, and had better fold up and steal away,” Julia had acknowledged years earlier, as she foresaw
The French Chef
drawing to a close. “However, I shall certainly hang on with full vigor for the time being.” She was still vigorous, but the experience with
Company
persuaded her that if she wanted to keep going, she had to take her television career in a different direction. Like any artist, she was far more interested in the future than in settling back to read her old reviews. In 1980, she withdrew from the shelter of WGBH and began a long association with
Good Morning America,
her first regular commitment to commercial television. The two-and-a-half-minute cooking segments were enormously popular, and she relished the format for its efficiency, as well as for the huge new audience it delivered. By 1983, when shooting began on her next public television series, she had established her own production company, which meant she could exert much greater control over her own programs than she ever had before. She still thought of herself primarily as a teacher, but she was convinced that she had to package herself with far more glitz if her message was going to get out.

The idea for the new series, which she developed with director Russ Morash, was to offer not a cooking school show but a television magazine, glossy and expensive. Julia would do a bit of cooking, but she would also visit fisheries, farms, cheese makers, and vineyards, chat with guest chefs, and welcome guests to a luxurious party that would conclude each program. Home base for the show would be a twenty-five-acre ranch near Santa Barbara, and Julia would have hair, makeup, and wardrobe professionals outfitting her for each program. As a coproduction of WGBH and Julia's own company, the new series would be, as her business manager put it, “quintessentially Julia's own show.”

Dinner at Julia's
was a disaster, the only real embarrassment in her long career. Julia looked grotesque, her hair frizzed and her makeup garish, dressed up in caftans and evening pajamas, or rigged out for a barbecue in jeans, a vest, and a purple ten-gallon hat. Though she was never ill at ease, she had little of substance to do in her long stretches of time on camera. As she stood there listening to a winemaker or chocolatier describe how various products were made, she looked as if she were a cardboard replica of herself, deployed to lend the symbolic presence of Julia Child to an alien landscape. With the food, as always, she was restored to life, but the cooking sequences were designed to show only quick highlights from the preparation of a dish, not an entire recipe. Nothing that happened on-screen was alive or spontaneous; nature itself had been banished. Even the chanterelles in the mushroom-gathering sequence had been carefully tucked into the ground by hand, before the cameras arrived. The sumptuous mansion, the Rolls-Royce pulling up to the door, the staged parties with their make-believe guests pretending to have fun—it was a painful spectacle, and Julia's fans were appalled. The reviews were lacerating, and the letters were worse. “To see this darling, feisty, gifted lady dressed up in cowboy clothes, tottering around in boots, swishing among rather wooden-looking ‘guests,' and above all to see her modest, perfect little show given the Beverly Hills treatment, the ostentation, the waiters, the gratuitous free plugs for restaurants and grape-growers, cheese factories, and what not, well, it's awful!” “I miss my old friend Julia.” “We want you to be human.” “How
could
you?”

Julia never apologized, any more than she did when she had to serve a soufflé fallen flat. “We had such a good time making those shows” was all she would say when a reporter asked her how she felt about the debacle. But it was another ten years before she returned to television with a new series, and this time she stayed on the sidelines.
Cooking with Master Chefs
featured sixteen chefs preparing meals in their home kitchens, and Julia—who called herself Alistaire Cookie and wished the series could be named
Masterpiece Cooking
—introduced each show. The only complaints about the program were that people wanted to see more of Julia. After that, she made sure to share the screen with her guests, acting as a personable interlocutor as they cooked; and the last three series she made—
Cooking at Home with Master Chefs, Baking with Julia,
and her duet with Jacques Pépin,
Julia and Jacques: Cooking at Home
—were all taped in the kitchen at 103 Irving Street. It was the right formula: old fans were satisfied, new ones were smitten, and
Dinner at Julia's
faded from public memory.

Back in 1942, when Julia belonged to a team of volunteers who watched the skies over Southern California for enemy aircraft, a story in the local paper noted that members of the group habitually called each other “Mr.” or “Mrs.,” with one exception—“Julia McWilliams, whom everybody addresses as Julia.” Decades later, people were still addressing her as Julia. In person or on-screen, her whole countenance invited familiarity; barriers dropped away as if she had been a friend forever. Paul used to marvel at a phenomenon he witnessed again and again while they were living in Paris: he called it
“la Julification des gens”
—“the Julia-fication of everybody.” She had a way of hypnotizing people, he once said, “so they open up like flowers in the sun.” Nobody was insensible to her effect: one of the themes that ran through the piles and piles of mail was pure gratitude. “Thank you for being such a pleasure.” “Many thanks for bringing so much pleasure.” Or, as a thirteen-year-old put it, “I don't know why, but whenever I see you it makes me feel good.” Hard as she worked on her image, in the end it was irrelevant. “You are so utterly real, I feel as if I know you,” a fan wrote. They did know her, perfectly.

J
ULIA LOVED
P
AUL
, and she also loved their marriage, which seemed to her the highest form of life. “We are a team,” she often said. “We do everything together.” To be part of a team was her favorite way to work—she always referred fondly to the “team” of cooks and technicians involved in her television series, or the “team” of editors and artists producing a cookbook—and the team at the heart of it all was Julia and Paul. Whenever she talked about her career, she said “we,” not “I,” and she meant it literally. Paul attended all business meetings and participated in all decisions, helped rework the recipes for television, hauled equipment, washed dishes, took photographs, created designs and graphics, peeled and chopped and stirred, ran errands, read the mail and helped answer it, wrote the dedications in all her books, accompanied her on publicity tours and speaking engagements, sat with her at book signings, took part in most of her press interviews, provided the wine expertise, baked baguette after baguette during the French bread experiments, and in general made a point of being at her side on all occasions, professional or social. Yet he was self-sufficient. When he wasn't needed—because Julia was at work in the kitchen with Simca, for instance, or rehearsing with Ruth Lockwood—he disappeared happily into his own world, painting and photographing and gardening. In the firmament of useful, devoted spouses who serve celebrity without a trace of malevolence, he was one of the few husbands.

Paul had no qualms about living with powerful, independent women. His mother had been a singer and soloist who worked for a living; and the first love of his life, Edith Kennedy, was a single mother some twenty years older than he who regularly attracted acolytes to her Cambridge salon. Julia had no such distinctions when he met her, but she was certainly bigger, and far more skilled at relating to people. Being married to a woman who outranked him physically and personally never bothered Paul, and he was deeply grateful for what Julia gave him. He knew he had a streak of grouchiness, that he tended to be solitary, and that Julia had warmed and gentled him. “I am continuously conscious of my good fortune in living with her,” he wrote to his brother from Paris in 1953. “I hate to think what a sour old reprobate I might have been without that face to look at.” Occasionally, after a taping of
The French Chef,
while Paul was collecting dirty dishes and the audience was crowding worshipfully around Julia, he thought back to their foreign service days. “It was, ‘Monsieur Child, l'Attaché Culturel des Etats Unis!'—and some minutes later: ‘ah oui, et voilà aussi Mme. Child.'” (“Mr. Child, the U.S. Cultural Attaché! Oh yes, and here's Mrs. Child, too.”) He enjoyed the reversal, he told his brother: “I feel Nature is restoring an upset balance.”

The fact that the world paid little attention to his art, his poems were consistently rejected by magazines, and most of his published photographs were of Julia didn't appear to trouble him. Standing by at a book signing with nothing to do while “Julia's adoring public” swarmed over her, he felt he was providing a service just by being there. “It demonstrated that Julia is part of a combination rather than a lone operator,” he explained. “I remember how horrid it was for Edith. Financially & sexually rapacious men were constantly trying to take advantage of her. My plan is
never
to have Julia appear anywhere in public without the very evident husband.” For Paul to experience such a rush of masculine satisfaction in this role—self-appointed protector of a giant—says much about the confidence he brought to his marriage. He called her “Joooolie” or sometimes “my little wifelet,” created the witty, loving Valentines they sent out every year instead of Christmas cards (“Wish you were here,” read one of them, showing Paul and Julia in a bubble bath), and considered her the most remarkable and delightful creature on earth. Every morning they liked to snuggle in bed together for a half hour after the alarm went off, and at the end of the day, Paul would read aloud from
The New Yorker
while Julia made dinner. “We are never not together,” Paul said once, contentedly. One evening after the dishes were washed, Julia stayed in the kitchen and made an impromptu batch of blueberry muffins. When they came out of the oven, Paul opened a bottle of vintage Veuve Clicquot for a late-night celebration. What was the occasion? Just life. Or as Paul explained it, “Iced champagne and hot blueberry muffins!”

Paul was one of the few men of his generation who found it natural, even admirable, for women to have careers. It wouldn't have occurred to him to object to his wife's passion for work, even as it swept her from cooking school to teaching to writing to national television. But during their years in Europe, both of them took it for granted that Paul's job came first. As a foreign service couple, they were expected to socialize and entertain a great deal, and Julia's participation counted heavily. More important, at least from Julia's point of view, was the fact that Paul worked extremely hard and needed all the moral and logistical support she could give him. This posed no problems for her during the first years of their marriage, when her only obligation was to be Mrs. Paul Child—a job she treasured, especially in the entrancing new surroundings of their life in Paris. “The husband comes home for lunch,” she told Avis. “I love that!” But the more deeply involved she became in the cookbook project, the more she resented being pulled away for consular events, tea with the embassy wives, and Paul's occasional trips. He hated to travel without her, and she hated to make him unhappy, so she often went along despite a kitchen full of eggs or mushrooms pleading for her attention. “My first job is wifedom,” she said resignedly, in the midst of an unwanted burst of official travel right after they moved to Marseille. When she couldn't bear to leave the book, she sent him off alone and felt horribly guilty about it. “If I was able to put in as much work as I would like to, we would soon be having a divorce, I fear,” she told Simca, exaggerating the potential for divorce, but not the painful sense of conflict. Though she was sorry to leave France for their posting in Germany, she welcomed at least one aspect of the new assignment. “Paul doesn't come home for lunch, and I shall have almost the whole day to work in,” she reported to Avis. “Thank heaven!”

Much as she cherished wifedom, it was impossible for Julia to be Paul's helpmate and nothing else. And much as Paul believed in her career, what he really wanted was to have Julia with him at all times. To be pulled in such implacably opposite directions was a source of constant distress for her. Again and again she vowed to be a more dedicated diplomatic wife, only to find herself back in the depths of the manuscript, reflecting mournfully, “I am a cook book.” So when Paul began planning his retirement from the foreign service, they decided what would suit them both best would be a quiet, companionable future in Cambridge. Paul would paint, Julia would give cooking lessons—perhaps two a week. If the book became a success, maybe she could break into magazine food writing. Paul could take the photographs for her stories. Life would be simple and harmonious. Then came
The French Chef,
and any dreams of domestic balance shattered as Julia's new career crashed like a meteor into the center of their marriage. New roles sprang up and grabbed them—she the star and he the support staff—but they were determined to maintain what Julia called “that lovely intertwining of life, mind, and soul that a good marriage is.” She knew the TV schedule was hard on Paul, who missed concerts and art galleries and dinners with friends, as well as time for his own pursuits. In 1965, her royalties from the book enabled them to build La Pitchoune, the little Provençal house on Simca's property near Grasse; and they retreated there often for a cozier, less pressured daily life. But the real reason their marriage flourished despite the frantic demands they placed on it was that they came up with a very traditional arrangement, albeit with a twist of their own. Paul and Julia agreed to live one life, and that life would be Julia's.

Despite, or perhaps because of, this arrangement, Julia sometimes professed loyalty to old-fashioned gender assignments. “I think the role of a woman is to be married to a nice man and enjoy her home,” Julia told the
New York Times
in 1966. “She must have something outside to keep conversation going and herself alert, but I can't think of anything nicer than homemaking.” Even the reporter was unconvinced—she called it a “simplistic” viewpoint—and it certainly lacked any roots in Julia's desires, beliefs, or experiences. Apart from cooking, housework bored her, and she was appalled by the Pasadena wives who lounged on their patios and played bridge all day. But she identified so strongly as a wife, she barely noticed that it was Paul who played that part in their marriage. At the time of this interview, moreover, the women's movement was gathering steam; and Julia worried that cooking might be jettisoned, especially her kind of labor-intensive cooking. Betty Friedan had made it clear in
The Feminine Mystique
that women had responsibilities in the world, not just in the kitchen. Julia didn't disagree, but she wanted to make sure the kitchen received the time and respect it was due. She was also aware that she still had something of a housewife problem. Her recipes could seem very intimidating, especially in print, and she relied on book sales for most of her earned income, not the nominal fees of public television. Associating herself with ordinary domestic life was an important aspect of her image. In later interviews over the years, she gave firm support to women with careers and spoke out vigorously in favor of abortion rights; nonetheless she always insisted she wasn't a feminist. “I just think that women should be treated as people,” she said. So do feminists, but Julia was constitutionally unable to be a camp follower, no matter what the camp was.

If her proclamation of faith in homemaking rang a bit false, her faith in marriage did not: this was a belief at the core of her being. Julia changed much more than her name when she married: she changed her very identity, from an individual to half of a couple. She was Julia of Paul and Julia, fundamentally incomplete on her own, one piece of a two-part jigsaw puzzle. And once she became a wife, it was from that perspective that she viewed the world. People belonged in pairs, she felt—male and female together, marching through life as if they were streaming aboard the ark.

For this reason, she found homosexuality outlandish—not immoral, and certainly not to be criminalized, but a rude disruption in the natural order of things. Homophobia was a socially acceptable form of bigotry in mid-century America, and Julia and Paul participated without shame for many years. She often used the term
pedal
or
pedalo
—French slang for homosexual—draping it with condescension, pity, and disapproval. “I had my hair permanented at E. Arden's, using the same
pedalo
I had before (I wish all the men in OUR profession in the USA were not
pedals
!),” she wrote to Simca. Fashion designers were “that little bunch of Pansies,” a cooking school was “a nest of homo-vipers,” a Boston dinner party was “peopled by 3 fags in an expensive house…. We felt hopelessly square and left when decently possible,” and San Francisco was beautiful but full of
pedals
—“It appears that SF is their favorite city! I'm tired of them, talented though they are.” The opposite of homosexual, in her terminology, was “normal” or “well muscled” or “very masculine!” Or, as she often put it, “real male men.” Lesbianism was less of an affront to her, though she felt sorry for women so sexually benumbed that they were not attracted to men. (“Can't be much fun.”)

It appears never to have struck Julia that she was talking about homosexuals the way her father talked about Jews, blacks, foreigners, intellectuals, and artists. All her adult life, his prejudices had sickened her, especially because he was so contemptuous of Paul, who represented several categories of humanity that John McWilliams despised. Her father's ugly convictions threw Paul into such a rage that he finally stopped visiting Pasadena with her. Yet she was able to detest her father's bigotry while her own remained a blind spot. During the McCarthy era—the period when her liberalism was forged, mostly out of sheer outrage—Paul himself was summoned to Washington from Germany, on suspicion of being a Communist and a homosexual. He was interrogated for a day, then cleared. (The only evidence for the first charge was his acquaintance with a couple of other people whose politics were under investigation. As for his supposed homosexuality, the most damaging evidence seemed to be the fact that he was married. As his interrogators pointed out, many homosexuals were married and had children.) Paul laughed outright at the accusation, and Julia did the same when she reported the incident to Avis. “Homosexuality. Haw Haw. Why don't they ask the wife about that one?” Even the knowledge that McCarthy, whom Julia regarded as evil personified, was using the specter of homosexuality as a deadly weapon, didn't raise any alarms in her own conscience.

For all her prejudice, however, when she met homosexuals whose appearance and body language were what she called “normal,” or straight, much of her disapproval evaporated. What she really disliked was effeminacy in men—a caricature that made it clear how they spurned the male-female differences and rituals she so relished. “My, I hate being a widow!” she exclaimed to Avis when Paul was summoned away from Germany for the investigation. “And I have finally had to admit to myself that if I were a real widow, I'd probably have to take to the streets. It's just no fun; it is not only the physical male, but the mental male. Thank god there are two sexes, is all I can say.” Julia's whole being was ignited by proximity to men: they were at the center of her world view, and their presence lent energy, authority, and dignity to all undertakings. The very idea of a social or professional event designed around women was offensive to her. “I hate groups of women,” she said many times, flatly and without apology. No matter the occasion, if it was only for women, she was convinced it would resemble a Helen Hokinson cartoon in
The New Yorker:
silly clubwomen dithering over their agendas. As a foreign service wife, of course, she was invited to countless ladies' luncheons and tea parties; they drove her wild with boredom, especially when the cookbook manuscript was waiting back home. “I just cannot stand to waste a day like that anymore,” she told Simca after an endless afternoon of female socializing. “And if there is anything I HATE, it is a ladies tea parlor.” The only women's events she approved of were meetings of Les Gourmettes, because everyone was busy with the important work of cooking and eating. Otherwise, “Cackle-cackle…sounds like a hen house” was her invariable reaction to being in a room full of females. In 1973, she was one of a dozen Women of the Century honored at a lavish dinner and spent the evening talking with Lillian Hellman, Marya Mannes, Louise Nevelson, and Pauline Trigère, among others. It was very nice, she remarked later, but they should have invited some men. She said the spark was missing.