by Bob Spitz
After the two years in Oslo were up, another posting in Europe was out of the question. Either way, they weren’t leaving anything to chance. On December 12, 1960, Paul officially tendered his resignation. He’d been on the road since 1932. “After Avon, Cambridge, Washington, New Delhi, Kandy, Chungking, Kunming, Washington twice, Paris, Marseille, Bonn, Washington” again, and Oslo, he was headed home to America.
It was Julia’s turn to bloom.
* * *
1 At the time, Cameron was editor in chief of Little, Brown.
Sixteen
Taking Everything in Stride
There was no formal ceremony or brass band on that unseasonably warm afternoon, September 28, 1961, when the postman rang at 103 Irving Street. Boxes of furniture bearing the solemn state dept. seal were stacked around the doorway, still unopened, still waiting to be unpacked. The entrance hall was like an obstacle course. An old cracked urn lay upturned, headed for the dumpster; a battered screen door leaned off its hinges. Shouldering a hamper out of the way, Julia wedged her big frame awkwardly in the doorjamb and signed for the package, commiserating with the broad-jawed postman over the abominable humidity.
Gratefully, the moment was hers alone. Paul was in the basement, transforming a closet into his personal wine cave. A battery of carpenters buzzed around a shed in the backyard. The house was otherwise a silent tomb. Julia carried the package to a chair in the low-ceilinged living room, turning it over in her hands a few times. She felt anxious, the anxiety a prisoner might feel as the judge prepared to deliver sentence—someone ready to confront the inevitable. Her lips bit inward concernedly. The package was heavier than she’d expected, unadorned, unmarked. She ran her hand over its rough well-traveled surface. Nice, it felt nice, she thought. Without further ado, she ripped the covering away and let its contents fall into her lap.
Voilà!
Simca and Julia on Cavalcade of Books, Los Angeles, November 16, 1961 (Photo credit 16.1)
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
by
Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle, and Julia Child
It was almost as if a nurse had purred, “Congratulations, Mrs. Child, you have a daughter.” Instinctively, Julia tended toward a holler, but her throat produced a half-strangled gasp instead. Her book. Their book. It seemed hard to believe.
It was beautiful, just a beautiful thing to behold. For the first-time author, the feeling is almost indescribable. First you stare at the book, drink it all in. Then you run your hand over the cover a few times as if it were worsted wool, check out the spine, feel the heft. Inevitably, you trace your name with a respectful finger. A smile unfurls.
The book was “perfectly beautiful in every respect,” she declared.
And such a healthy little critter—732 pages, longer than the Boston phone book. It “weighed a ton,” she thought, hoisting it like a trophy.
Julia sat admiring it for some time, unable to let go of the satisfaction she felt. The overall impact was more than she’d bargained for. Just look at it! The cover was eye-catching, engaging, so strong in its design that it guaranteed to pop out on the shelves of a bookstore. The title vibrant, in black and red, was as distinct and resonant as they’d intended, with a reading line on the book jacket that left nothing to chance: “The Only Cookbook That Explains How to Create Authentic French Dishes in American Kitchens with American Food.” Below, there was a drawing of a mouthwatering roast surrounded by a halo of sliced vegetables. And plenty of decorative fleurs de lis, just in case the French angle failed to connect. It obviously galled Julia that Louisette’s name appeared equal to hers and Simca’s, but she could live with it. For now.
Julia thought the jacket looked “handsome and distinguished.” The way the publisher constructed the binding was admirable. The book could be opened to any recipe so that it lay flat on the table, allowing a cook to work without having to weight down the pages. They also had the good sense to waterproof the cover so that splatters didn’t turn it into a Jackson Pollack painting.
The interior of the book was just as innovative. A so-called revolutionary cookbook demanded a revolutionary layout, new ways of presenting recipes, as a teaching tool instead of brief sketches. A cook should work the way any technician worked, Julia believed—methodically and logically. So in developing the recipes, she had used a “two-column” style, with the procedure, the practical application, annotated on the right-hand side of the page, and directly opposite the ingredients, as they were needed, on the left. This eliminated a lot of tiresome page-turning. Simple, but completely unprecedented, the design set a standard that became an enduring influence on successive generations of cookbook writers. But influence only counted for posterity. Mastering’s visual appearance was more immediately alluring. Its elements of beauty and style reassured inexperienced cooks, with ridiculously wide margins, a crisp, easy-to-read Granjon typeface, and detailed line drawings depicting intricate steps that eluded mere description.
Perfectly beautiful in every respect.
Julia couldn’t wait to share it with Simca. But she hesitated—why? At first she wasn’t sure. Simca was her inspiration, her guiding star, her compadre, her chère chérie. No one taught her as much about cooking as the Norman nonpareil. Without Simca, there would be no Mastering. They complemented each other, like strawberries and cream. But leading up to publication, the cream had curdled.
Julia had spent most of March and April 1961 in Oslo, reading the galleys of Mastering—answering editorial queries and keeping an eye peeled for errors. It was a painstaking, exhausting, “perfectly horrible job.” Julia was up to her eyeballs in page proofs. The copy, she discovered, was loaded with mistakes, necessitating rewriting and correction ad infinitum. Certain passages that had looked fine in typescript appeared flawed and confusing on the printed page. Occasionally measurements were way out of whack. In one case, the recipe called for ¼ cup instead of ¼ teaspoon of an ingredient; in another, a scrambled number instructed readers to bake a cake at 530 degrees. More often, Julia simply hated her prose. The proofreading filled entire days on end. Julia stopped cooking and discouraged visitors. When she found a spare hour, instead of packing for the trip home, she sequestered herself at the embassy library, fact-checking in the reference stacks. “She was obsessed,” says Judith Jones, “with getting things right.”
If cooking brought out Julia’s longing for perfection, Simca eventually brought out her rage. “I am just going WOOOOBIS with our dear old friend, Simca,” she wrote to Avis in late April. With plenty still to do before deadline, the letters from France grew fraught with tension. Simca became difficult, demanding, downright perverse. According to Julia, “she was inclined to rush at things without half reading them, to forget what she has pronounced previously, and to act, in general, enragingly French.” For instance, Simca insisted that almonds be deleted from a recipe for tuiles; otherwise, it would no longer be tuiles françaises. Never mind that Julia worked from a typescript of Simca’s called “Tuiles Classiques with almonds.” The same occurred with a half dozen other recipes. “Pas du tout français” Simca slashed across the margins.
“That old goat!” Julia fumed, when she saw the response.
In another instance, Simca wrote: “Why add a slice of bread to the pistou soup?”
“This was HER SUGGESTION, god dammit.”
Still, long letters of comments and corrections continued to arrive daily from Paris. “This is not right. That is not right.” “Ce gâteau—ce n’est pas français. On ne peut pas l’avoir dans notre livre.” In effect, she wanted everything changed, including the title, which she’d already approved.
Julia deftly put down many such insurgencies, but the Battle of Cassoulet nearly rent them asunder. Judith Jones demanded they include a recipe for the hearty southwestern meat-and-bean casserole, which, like bouillabaisse and barbecue, boasts as many versions as there are cooks. Julia collected twenty-eight recipes, all claiming to be authentic, even though they were as dif
ferent as fraternal twins. Three towns in the Languedoc were especially certain that their cassoulet was the genuine article. So it goes: in the “pure” version served in Castelnaudary, the beans are cooked with chunks of fresh pork, a ham hock, sausage, and fresh pork rind. In Toulouse, they add either confit of duck or goose, and the cooks of Carcassonne throw mutton into the mix. Could Julia and Simca agree on a master recipe that would represent a classic cassoulet?
Not a chance. Simca insisted that no dish could be called cassoulet that omitted preserved goose. Without it, all you had was beans and charcuterie. Stubbornly, Julia conducted massive research, reams of evidence, documenting how cassoulet throughout the southwest was made regularly without preserved goose. Meanwhile, where did she expect American cooks to find goose confit? Instead, she offered a recipe that represented a perfectly respectable cassoulet. Simca dug her heels in. “We French,” she argued, “never make a cassoulet like this.”
“Ce n’est pas français.”
“This is not correct!”
“Non! Non! Non!”
“Fundamentally,” says Judith Jones, “she didn’t believe that an American could possibly have the finesse, the taste, the discretion, or the sophistication to cook French food with competency. And she became impossible. She drove Julia nuts.”
Following a particularly scrappy exchange, Julia crumpled up one of Simca’s letters, threw it on the floor, and danced a gavotte on it.
She was beside herself. “The big boob has had all this stuff for years, she has OK’d everything, again and again and again and again and again.” The French, Julia huffed—why did she ever get involved with the French? “Reason has no effect, they have no memory of what they have done or said before, everything just comes out of the stomach and the top of the head at the moment—and with tremendous dogmatism.”
Convinced that Simca was trying to sabotage publication, Julia decided not to send her the final galleys of Mastering. Instead, she dashed off a “pull-up-your-pants-for-god’s-sake letter,” urging her colleague to enjoy the publishing experience and to cool her jets. In any case, she refused to allow the bickering to scuttle their relationship. Julia was “far too fond” of Simca to let that happen. “Without her,” she acknowledged, “the book would be nothing at all.” Not only was Simca a masterful cook, “she works like a Trojan.” They were a team, almost sisters.
Besides, her almost-sister was arriving to celebrate the publication. It wouldn’t do if they weren’t on speaking terms as the big day approached.
Judith Jones wasn’t leaving anything to chance. She’d been working overtime to ensure the occasion would be memorable, beating the jungle drums up and down the avenues to stir up interest in the book. Novels and biographies were hard enough to promote. It seemed an absurd endeavor to create buzz for a cookbook. “There wasn’t much of a food community,” Jones says, “and I certainly didn’t know anybody.”
The most influential voice on the scene belonged to Craig Claiborne, the honey-tongued food editor of The New York Times. Jones didn’t know him, nor did anyone at Knopf. But, in those days, if you wanted to reach Claiborne you just called him up. It was that simple. Jones told him, somewhat brazenly, that she had “a really remarkable book” that she’d share with him if he agreed to have lunch with her. And in those days, he would—as long as she was buying.
They went to a little French joint on the West Side, near the Times, where Jones made her pitch. “Craig didn’t buy things easily,” she said. “He was gentlemanly but tough, not easily influenced.” And, for a while, it seemed she was getting nowhere with him. “He drank heavily, and I could see it was taking its toll.” But during the course of the meal, she mentioned that her husband, Evan, cooked rather elaborately on a grill on their penthouse terrace overlooking East Sixty-sixth Street. Nowadays, that’s as common a sight as satellite dishes and cell towers, but in 1961 it was quite a phenomenon. Claiborne proposed a little quid pro quo. “Tell you what,” he said. “If you let me come up and do a story about you and your husband cooking, I’ll look at this French book of yours.”
On a sweltering August afternoon, she came across with her part of the bargain. Jones and her husband roasted a lamb on their terrace, while traffic blared in the streets below. Shortly thereafter, an article about it appeared in the Times, and a month or so later Claiborne wrote to Judith about Mastering. “He said the book was going to be a classic,” she recalls. “He was as sure as I was.”
THE PUBLICATION, ON October 16, 1961, was only the first but perhaps least dramatic in a series of events that spun Julia’s life in another new direction. Two days after the book’s launch, a review appeared in The New York Times that made the skeptics at Knopf “sit up and take notice.” Written by none other than Craig Claiborne, it conferred heavyweight status on Mastering the Art of French Cooking, calling it “the most comprehensive, laudable, and monumental work on [French cuisine] … the definitive work for non-professionals.” Claiborne was effusive—and then some. Its contents, he said, beheld “an embarrassment of riches.” Everything was set down in easy-to-follow detail, the directions meticulous, infallible, eminently satisfying. “The recipes are glorious … written as if each were a masterpiece, and most of them are.” Later on, in the Saturday Evening Post, Claiborne’s pen ran wild with praise. “This work is brilliant,” he declared, “the most lucid volume on French cuisine since Gutenberg invented movable type.”
Julia was elated. “Once the Times had its say, everyone else jumped on the band-wagon,” she told an interviewer long afterward. “It was so exciting, to be received that way.”
But excitement didn’t sell books. The Times catered to a rather concise, cultured, upscale readership. For Mastering to succeed in a meaningful way, for it to land on every Formica kitchen counter across America, it needed to find a more diverse national audience. The breakthrough came with an offer to appear on the Today show. Even in 1961, with a daily following fixed at around four million viewers, Today was an influential outlet for anyone with something to sell. Julia and Simca recognized its value to their cookbook, even though neither of them owned a television set, and they decided to make their appearance something to remember.
Interviewing a couple of authors, two middle-aged women, was boring, Julia decided. TV demanded something more animated, more dramatic. It needed energy, action, to create a little tension. Two authors making an omelet—that was more like it. Julia and Simca would do a demonstration so that someone watching at home could cook exactly like they did.
The day before, they crammed into a galley kitchen at Julia’s niece Rachel Child’s apartment on the Upper West Side, to practice in front of a pretend audience. If all went according to plan, they’d have slightly less than two minutes to answer questions, make the omelet, and plug the book, which meant everything had to be orchestrated with split-second precision. To make matters more difficult, there’d be no stove in the studio—only an electric burner. So Paul and Rachel sat on garbage cans, eating the spoils, while the women whipped through three … four … five dozen eggs, trying to cook while playing to the camera.
It was unfamiliar territory for these culinary countesses. Simca was nervous and “basically incoherent.” Her usual exemplary English sounded like French-accented Ukrainian. Julia was forced to cover, taking over the narrative. There were moments when Simca looked lost, diminished. She rubbed her friend’s shoulder in a soothing way. “Just stay calm,” Julia said reassuringly. “We’re going to get this done in the time allotted.” For some strange reason, the thought of a television camera didn’t intimidate Julia. It was a prop, nothing more, just another tool, like a whisk or a cleaver. She understood the illusion it was trying to create. What’s more, she showed herself to be an intuitive, accommodating actor. The object was to relax, just be yourself.
The next morning, before sunrise, they marched into the RCA Building on West Forty-ninth Street and took the elevator up to Studio 3K. Today’s longtime host, Dave Garroway, had just
been replaced by John Chancellor, the political correspondent for The Huntley-Brinkley Report, and it was clear he was uncomfortable in the new, more casual role. Julia let him know instantly that they had things under control.
The mood was set and the spot dominated by Julia’s cool aura. Once the cameras began turning, she fell into a natural rhythm, instructing millions of viewers with the same intimacy she taught six in her kitchen. Her voice was arresting, encouraging, her instructions careful and deliberate. She took the reins and engaged the audience, while Simca melted into the background. “She just dominated the spot,” recalls her niece, Rachel. “Almost immediately, she was so comfortable on TV.”
The camera may have served Julia well, but it wasn’t comfort she was experiencing. She told several friends after that first brush with television that the episode had been “simply terrifying.” Afterward, when she stood back and thought about it, the two-minute spot had whipped by in a blur; she must have been “on automatic pilot.” That may have been so, in which case she was lucky. Nevertheless the new medium changed everything overnight. It took her out of the dark bookstore corners where cookbook authors languished and cast her in a new spotlight. Suddenly, you could preach the culinary gospel to the masses and gauge an immediate impact. The day after the appearance on Today, a cooking demonstration at Bloomingdale’s, which normally drew a handful of curious shoppers, attracted several hundred women who clamored for the book.
By the end of that first week, Julia was encouraged. “The old book seems, for some happy reason, to have caught on here in New York, and our publishers are beginning to think they have a modest best seller on their hands,” she wrote her sister. “They have ordered a second printing of 10,000 copies, and are planning a third of the same amount.”
The book’s performance had actually caught Knopf off guard. “I thought if we sold 10,000 books the first year we’d be ahead of the game,” says Judith Jones. “Maybe, in a few years we’d hit 25,000.” The publisher’s credo was “slow and steady”—to sell just enough copies year after year to earn the book a place on its backlist. That was how you established a classic, Jones says. Keep the book in print, sell a continuous, respectable amount. Slow and steady. “With any luck, it might last forever.”
