Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child

by Bob Spitz

  Getting Knopf to publish it, however, would take considerable effort. The house was a very fraught little family business. “Alfred and Blanche were scratchy with each other, quite quarrelsome, and incredibly competitive,” says a publishing colleague. They “liked their editors to be subservient” and kept them off-balance. “You could be up one day, and down the next.” The Knopfs’ moods were that unpredictable. But Koshland was something of a grand vizier, someone who knew how to work the margins by being diplomatic and cagey. “He could make things happen by being very circuitous—and playing Alfred and Blanche off one another.” So instead of giving the manuscript to either of the Knopfs, he began testing the waters—seeing if there was a young editor who would feel as enthusiastic as he was and would go to bat for it.

  Two agreed quickly to join his team. Alfred had recently hired Angus Cameron, a legendary editor who had fallen on hard times. An outspoken political gadfly, he had been fingered by McCarthy in a sweep of the publishing business and had resigned his position,1 taking his family to live in the Alaskan tundra. Not only did he love to cook, Cameron had been an editor at Bobbs-Merrill for the launch of Joy of Cooking and knew what it took to market a cookbook. Koshland’s other compadre was a less conspicuous choice. Judith Jones was a junior editor attached to Blanche Knopf’s apron strings. At thirty-five, she should have been pulling her own weight, considering her accomplishments in the publishing business. She’d rescued the manuscript of Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl from the scrap heap, worked with the translators of Camus and Sartre, and was currently working with John Updike on a new novel, Rabbit Run, as well as editing several of Elizabeth Bowen’s books. But her editorial contributions were “strictly anonymous,” passed along to authors as Blanche Knopf’s ideas. Koshland knew Jones had two things on Blanche: she loved to cook and she adored French food. “Blanche wouldn’t know a flounder if it bit her in the bum,” while Jones would have pan-fried it in butter and white wine. But would she have the wherewithal to take a stand on Julia’s manuscript?

  It seemed unlikely at first blush. For one thing, she had no say whatsoever when it came to acquisitions. At Knopf, Judith Jones was “far too junior” to attend the “austere” editorial meetings, where book submissions were dissected and defended by one of the editors. And for another, she was a woman working in an old boys’ club. In fact, Jones was the only woman in editorial at Knopf aside from Blanche, and Blanche didn’t count because she ran the show. Still, they never failed to remind her of her lowly status. When Knopf moved to a new floor on Madison Avenue, it was announced: “Every office has a window—oh, except for Judith’s.”

  And, yet, Koshland believed she would help his cause. She was ambitious and young. Cooking was a passion with her. So he deposited the manuscript on her desk with little fanfare. “Take a look at this,” he said. “It came from Avis.”

  It hadn’t taken Judith Jones long to appreciate that French Recipes for American Cooks was no ordinary cookbook. “I was surprised by it,” she said. “I just couldn’t put it down.” It read “like taking a basic course at the Cordon Bleu.” After flipping through the pages several times, her culinary instincts were more than aroused. As a young woman, she had lived in Paris and was well acquainted with the vagaries of French cooking. She and her husband, writer Evan Jones, made a practice of cooking à deux, preparing careful, French-inspired dishes adapted from the meals they’d enjoyed in Paris. Budding amateurs, they thought nothing about spending all day at the stove if their efforts resulted in an elegant French dinner. It seemed only fitting that she should take Julia’s manuscript home so that she and Evan could work through the recipes.

  After a month of experimenting from the book, Jones was sold. “She goes home for lunch and blanches the vegetables the way she learned from you,” Avis reported to Julia, “then finishes the cooking at night.” Everything she attempted turned out a masterpiece. “It was revolutionary,” Jones says of the book’s expert approach. “It not only changed the language of cooking, it made the difference between ordinary cooking and cooking with finesse.” The book was jam-packed with so much useful information, information she’d never seen in an American entry. The author wasn’t just churning out recipes; she had “such an analytical mind.” In some way, Jones saw this manuscript as being as important a document as Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl. It would be revealing, life-changing—a potential classic. “This was the book I had been waiting for all my life,” she said. “I knew we had to publish it.”

  But first she had to convince Alfred Knopf. Although a lover of fine foods with a good palate, he endeavored to publish books that demonstrated more than good taste—they had to be profitable. And recently his cookbooks had performed miserably. He was “intensely gloomy” about business in general. At the moment, Knopf only had one best seller, Home from the Hill, by William Humphrey, which probably wouldn’t sell more than fifteen thousand copies. He was convinced the house was “publishing far too many books, and they are not selling.” Part of the blame he laid at Avis DeVoto’s feet. Unlike most women Knopf dealt with, Avis was unintimidated and forceful when it came to defending her opinions. She was persuasive about the books she recommended to him, but her record as a scout had thus far been dismal. “I got him quite a few books and they all lost money,” she recalled. Disgruntled, Knopf suggested it was time they part company, which is why Avis sent the manuscript to Koshland instead of to Alfred, as she normally did.

  It would be better for Judith Jones not to mention Avis’s name. Nor could she rely on Bill Koshland to make a strong case with Knopf. “Bill wasn’t one to go out on a limb,” she says. But Angus Cameron was. “He was a very persuasive man, and he enjoyed putting up a good argument for what he believed in.” As luck would have it, he believed in French Recipes for American Cooks. He considered it “a remarkable manuscript” and “foolproof. The best working French cookbook I have ever looked at.”

  The night before the editorial meeting, Bill Koshland phoned Avis with encouraging news. “Well, four of us have been cooking with this book,” he said. “We’ve cooked our way straight through it, and it works—and we’re going to tank right over the Knopfs.”

  It was a bold assertion, if not quite plausible. Alfred Knopf was no mean pushover, and his wife, Blanche, could level a statue with a stare. She “hated the idea” of a cookbook that would compete with the others on their list, let alone one that might slip Judith Jones from her clutches. The nerve of that young girl to aspire to such a project! Blanche had already given Bill Koshland her opinion: “I don’t think we need this, do we?”

  It would take more than a tank to level the Knopfs.

  Fortunately, Angus Cameron had time on his side. The weekly editorial meeting on Thursday, May 5, 1960, was a particularly long and weary one; it wore on and on before he raised the subject of acquiring the cookbook. It was getting toward lunch, toward martini time, and everyone had his or her eye on the clock. No one was up for a long, drawn-out debate. When Cameron finally launched into his presentation, the air got sucked out of the room. “This manuscript is an astonishing achievement and there is simply nothing like it,” he said. “What these authors have done has never been done before … ” Waving off superfluous discussion, Alfred Knopf relented. “Well,” he said, gathering up his notes, “let’s let Mrs. Jones have her chance.”

  For Blanche Knopf, it was the last straw. She had overlooked the fact that someone had “sneaked in” to her house and bypassed her with a cookbook submission. And she had overlooked it when Judith Jones responded to the manuscript with such unrelenting passion. But this was Knopf, her house, and being tanked over by underlings was more than she could forgive. She shot bolt upright and stomped out “in a snit.”

  Of course, none of that drama ever reached Julia Child. On May 9, 1960, the telephone rang in her Oslo living room. It was Avis, and Julia could tell something was up. Avis wrote. She never called unless there was trouble to report, like her last call, when her h
usband Benny had died. Please God, don’t let anything have happened to her sons! Despite the transatlantic connection, Avis was breathless, all aflutter. There was a letter that day from Judith Jones, she said, launching into it without further explanation. “I am writing hastily to tell you our publication proposal for the Child, Beck, and Bertholle has just been approved,” it said. “I can’t remember when I’ve been as excited about a project … ”

  Did this mean what Julia thought?

  Most of what Avis read to her zoomed by in a blur, but bits and pieces were unforgettable. “The enthusiasts around here are absolutely convinced that this book is revolutionary and we intend to prove it and make it a classic. We are hatching up all kinds of schemes … My everlasting gratitude for having brought us this creation.”

  Avis had done it—she had sold their book to Knopf!

  THE DEAL CAME together very quickly. Knopf offered the authors what they considered to be “a perfectly fair advance”: $1,500 for the book—twice Houghton Mifflin’s advance—and a standard royalty rate. The only snag appeared to be Alfred Knopf’s insistence that the deal be made with only one author, despite the three names on the title page. “It was unusual for Alfred to suggest such an arrangement,” Jones says. But his instinct, in this case, was to avoid a contractual dispute among collaborators should the friendship go sour.

  For Judith Jones, it was a foregone conclusion which author to sign up. “I realized while reading the manuscript that Julia was the driving force behind the book,” she says. “There was a strong voice translating everything, which French women couldn’t have done. I knew it instinctively—one woman had the vision for this book, and that was Julia. It was Julia Child’s book.”

  That was fine and dandy as far as Simca went, but there were still questions about what to do with Louisette Bertholle. The women had negotiated an agreement that gave her an 18 percent stake in the book, which, at the time, seemed fair based on her early enthusiasm. But, lately, Julia had second thoughts about the distribution of royalties. Louisette’s share galled her; it was “too damn generous,” Julia decided. In a letter to Avis DeVoto, she wrote: “I think it is crazy when she hasn’t done one single sentence of work on either of the two huge manuscripts we have prepared.”

  Amassing her greatest skills of diplomacy, Julia wrote to Louisette in August 1960 suggesting that before the contract with Knopf was signed perhaps she could consult her family and friends to come up with a more “fair and just” figure, something more in line with her contribution. Rather undiplomatically, she admitted, “We are quite willing to offer her 10% to shut her up, then have no further collaborations, and retain exclusive rights to ‘Les 3 Gourmandes’ as a trademark.”

  Otherwise, the remaining work was left to Julia and Simca. Throughout the summer of 1960, they cooked their way through the manuscript twice, refining details and fine-tuning recipes. Judith Jones requested that the size of certain portions be altered, especially in reference to recipes with meat. She had served bœuf bourguignon to a party of guests who adored it, but remained hungry after they’d killed off the dish. “Two-and-a-half pounds of meat won’t do for six to eight people,” she reported, particularly in America where beef was such a staple of meals. In any case, the book needed additional recipes featuring meat. She also appealed for “more hearty peasant dishes,” the kind she remembered eating in Paris, which were less time-consuming and expensive to prepare at home.

  Julia solved the meat problem by arriving at a formula—a half-pound per person—that became a standard in the food industry for the next fifty years. But as for peasant dishes, thank you, but non. “Neither Simca nor I are enthusiastic about including any more of these,” Julia insisted. That ground had already been well-covered in the book, with recipes for cassoulet, beef daube, veal sauté, and braised lamb with beans. “Perhaps Americans think French peasants are more peasanty than they are,” she argued. “Absolute peasants boil everything. But farm people, concierges, and policemen”—in other words, the middle-class and blue-collar populace—“cook like everybody else, with fricassées, à l’ancienne, blanquettes, Bourguignons, and Orloffs.” Her point was that all Frenchmen, regardless of class, cooked with tradition and refinement. Had Judith Jones asked for more bistro-type recipes, which is probably what she’d intended all along, Julia’s answer might have been different. But “peasant” dishes “set off something” that drew a line in the sand.

  In any case, there was still plenty of work to be done before the manuscript was due, on August 31—mostly nuts-and-bolts business, including proofreading and minor edits. The only critical outstanding issue was the title. “French Recipes for American Cooks is not nearly provocative or explicit enough,” Jones cautioned. A book of this importance demanded something classy and snappy, something immediately identifiable in the tradition of Joy of Cooking. Julia agreed. “The present title,” she said, “had no sale appeal whatsoever.”

  But Julia, for the life of her, couldn’t come up with anything better. God knows, she had tried. She and Paul had racked their brains, to no avail, for more than a year. They’d come up with forty-five potential titles, without a single winner. In fact, most were downright awful: How It Can Be Cooked French, French Magicians in the Kitchen, Love and French Cooking, A Map for the Territory of French Food (really!), You Too Can Be a French Chef, How, Why and What to Cook in the French Way—they went from bad to worse. Finally, she distributed a circular throughout the American embassy in Oslo offering a big bloc of foie gras to anyone who could come to the rescue. “All you have to do is think up a nifty title for the greatest French cookbook in the world today,” it said. There is no indication they actually gave up the foie, but by November the situation was critical. Julia was leaning toward La Bonne Cuisine Française, which Knopf rejected as being “too forbidding.” It wasn’t certain housewives would want to cook French, let alone be able to speak it.

  The folks at Knopf had “been talking about the art of French cooking, but even that seemed daunting,” Jones recalls. The title needed to convey something fun, not imposing. “I’m not sure when I came up with mastering, but the minute I wrote it down, things began to click. Mastering implied a continuing process, with an emphasis on skill.” Let’s see: The Master French Cookbook—no, there was no rhythm to it, nothing magical. The French Cooking Master, How to Master French Cooking, none of them really captured the spirit of the book. Jones continued to play with a pattern of words, rearranging them on her desk like a baffling shell game. Finally, in a letter to Julia, dated November 18, 1960, Jones wrote, “I think we have now found the solution by calling it: mastering the art of french cooking. What do you and the other gourmandes think?”

  They thought it was “a fine title.” Julia loved it the moment she laid eyes on it. “It has all the elements,” she said, “scope, fundamentality, cooking, and France.”

  The only thing left was to convince Alfred Knopf. He had the final say when it came to all titles on his list and was famous for being a difficult sell. Jones recalls being summoned to his office for the ceremonial presentation. “It was very old-world,” she says, “with floor-to-ceiling dark bookcases and glass fronts.” Knopf, who resembled the banker on the Monopoly Community Chest card, was seated behind a mahogany desk, with Sidney Jacobs, his production manager and fearsome hatchet man, in a chair to his left. Jones wasn’t offered a seat. “It was quite daunting and disturbing. The two men wanted to intimidate me, and it worked very well.” Even so, she believed in the book and decided to “stick to [her] guns” no matter how they responded.

  Summoning up every last ounce of courage, she delivered the title with an appreciable flourish: Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Even in that chilly, godforsaken office it had the right ring. Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Knopf and Jacobs cut glances at each other, then the boss turned to Jones with a fearsome scowl. “If a book with that title sells,” he bellowed, “I’ll eat my hat.”

  IN THE MEANTIME, Julia and Paul fina
lized plans of their own. They ultimately acknowledged the inevitable truth they’d surmised more than a decade ago—that Paul wasn’t much of a career diplomat. “He was an artist and an individualist,” says his boss, Fisher Howe, “which didn’t fly in a government bureaucracy. He was arrogant, he was prone to exaggeration. He was so much of a non-organization man, you were never sure what inappropriate thing he might say publicly. In Oslo, he put quite a few noses out of joint, including mine, and we had been acquaintances since Ceylon.”

  Paul saw himself as a soldier at war—“the endless war between bureaucracy and the individual”—and it was a battle he had been losing since he put in for Paris. He disdained “the crazy, intense, and hateful life of a bureaucrat,” disdained himself for putting up with it for so long. In twelve years of service, he’d only received one promotion, and that came grudgingly after a long, noisy, self-financed campaign. “This God-damn job of mine is theoretically fascinating,” he admitted, “but it should be done by three people, at least two of whom should be young, unshrunken, unwizened, and full of moxie.” That wasn’t Paul Child, at least not Paul as 1960 drew to a close. He was old, exhausted, bored—and cranky. “It affected him physically,” says Debby Howe. “His stomach gave him a lot of trouble and he was uncomfortable. We all thought the job was killing him.”

  Figuratively—and literally. Paul always fashioned himself as something of a hypochondriac, but in Norway his anxieties grew increasingly dark. “Scarcely a month goes by that I don’t believe I am dying,” he wrote, “and though so far it has proved to be wrong I still go through the cruel preliminaries, inevitable if one fears death as I do.”

  It eventually dawned on Julia that “Paul couldn’t take it any more,” and the only way to save him was to leave Norway. To leave the diplomatic service altogether. They’d saved up some money; Julia’s inheritance returned a fairly tidy sum on her investments. They had a new house waiting for them in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Julia could teach if things got tight. And who knew? Maybe the cookbook—Mastering the Art of French Cooking—might sell a few copies.