Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child

by Bob Spitz

  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.”

  Marketing wouldn’t be a factor. Knopf had no master strategy to promote the book other than “to put it out and hope to get Julia into a few bookstores.” Such was the extent of the publicity machine. Avis helped by bombarding the press and the heavy-hitters in Benny DeVoto’s Rolodex with copies of the book. But Julia and Simca had ideas of their own. They had a network of friends and family across the States with whom they made arrangements to stay for a few days that fall. Then, while in each city, they could promote Mastering by contacting newspapers and giving demos wherever possible. A book tour—although no one was calling it that. Nor paying for it—Julia would pick up the tab. Even so, their excursion would take them to Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., dragging bags filled with cooking equipment and groceries.

  In the meantime, Julia and Simca were being drawn into the small culinary community that was beginning to emerge as a force in New York. There was an elite coven of influential food editors at McCall’s, House & Garden, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Gourmet; there were a few innovative restaurants emerging, important chefs, creative cooks, food professionals, entrepreneurs. Most prominent among them all was James Beard, the king-sized, flamboyant, pleasure-loving figure whose penchant for self-promotion made him the master link in the food chain.

  Beard’s persona was inescapable. Twenty-five years before Julia Child sliced, diced, and grinded her way into America’s kitchens, Beard had already begun sowing the seeds of gastronomy across the landscape of American food. “He was a man with great appetites, great intensity, and great passions,” says Clark Wolf, a Beard acolyte in the mid-seventies. A self-created personality of “voracious charm,” Beard fostered the idea that food and cooking were culturally significant, and that, together, they inspired the good life. “Food is very much theater,” Beard once told a reporter, and his life, like his cuisine, was propelled by high drama. An early foray into opera (he studied with Caruso’s vocal coach) ended in bitter disappointment; he lusted after stardom as an actor, appearing in notable federal theater productions and, later, DeMille and von Stroheim epics. But his size—a Bunyanesque physique whose weight careened between 250 and 325 pounds—precluded the meaningful, longed-for roles that sustained a career. He stemmed these setbacks by cooking, plying recipes acquired from his hotelier mother that relied on indigenous, fresh, American ingredients.

  Beard’s reputation as a talented cook skyrocketed among the denizens of café society. His food was elemental, but full of imagination—and delicious. No one cooked on a grander or more ambitious scale. He coupled kitchen savvy with his most abundant ingredient—charisma—and cultivated an image of flamboyance and sophistication. As a raconteur, a bon vivant, no one was in greater demand. He could hold a table of dinner guests in thrall with cultural and political commentary, laced with generous helpings of show-business scuttlebutt. “Jim was a very mischievous guy,” Michael Batterberry recalls. He loved gossip and imparted it shamelessly, with great panache. But he could also be eloquent and thoughtful in his musings about food.

  It was in this pivotal role that he made his greatest contribution to American cookery. Expressing himself on the page, Beard found, was easier than emoting from the stage. In a series of casual but wholly practical and indispensable books—Hors d’oeuvre and Canapés (1940) and Cook It Outdoors (1941)—he established himself as an advocate for basic American food. Great meals, he argued, most often derived from “native cuisine” via fresh, local ingredients. Such was his innate gift that, despite volumes of recipes in magazines and newspapers, an entire post-war generation of fledgling cooks was converted to Beard’s culinary gospel.

  In the spring of 1946, with television emerging as a major modern entertainment medium, Beard seemed like the natural choice to become its first culinary star. What better combo than an actor who cooked to engage a national audience with recipes and repartee? The show, a fifteen-minute spot on NBC called Elsie Presents: James Beard in “I Love to Eat!,” was sponsored by Borden and debuted on August 30, 1948, at 8:15 p.m., as a lead-in to boxing from Madison Square Garden. Beard, however, wasn’t exactly a knockout. For all his theater training, he was nervous, grim in front of the camera. A viewer’s opinion summed up the general reaction: “He always seemed a little cross and petulant.” In any case, “he wasn’t any good on TV.” But the show served to burnish his name.

  James Beard became synonymous with good food. He wrote monthly articles for Gourmet, taught glamorous cooking classes, churned out myriad cookbooks, promoted endless products, hosted a daily radio program, syndicated newspaper columns, and developed menus for New York’s toniest new restaurants, including the Forum of the Twelve Caesars, Brasserie, and The Four Seasons.

  No one appreciated the power of Beard’s enormous personality more fully or was more attuned to it than Julia Child. She had been following his exploits since returning to the States—his theories about food, his cooking techniques, the way he utilized the media. Beard was no hack. His recipes were well conceived. He had artistry, taste. Clearly, she recognized a fellow traveler in the struggle to elevate the way people cooked and ate.

  Exactly when they first met is difficult to pin down, but it was sometime during the week before Julia and Simca left on tour to promote their book. Judith Jones arranged an introduction at Beard’s town house on Tenth Street in Greenwich Village where he greeted the new authors with effusive charm. He laid out drinks and a little spread—a “Smithfield ham sliced so thinly you could breathe through it, Italian mustard fruits that made your eyes cross,” and a purée of spinach—just in case anyone felt like a nibble. “Jim made sure that he didn’t neglect anyone who might later become important,” says Clark Wolf. He had respect for Julia and Simca’s status, if not entirely for their book. “I only wish that I had written it myself,” he told them. But privately, soon after Mastering was published, Beard’s enthusiasm was more reserved. “He wasn’t particularly excited about the book,” recalls Barbara Kafka. “He’d seen all those recipes before. They didn’t impress him.” To his friend Helen Evans Brown, a respected food writer based in California, he wrote: “I think the Knopf book is wonderful, until they get into the chicken and meat department. The idea of cooking a piece of American boiling beef for four hours is insane … And I think all the chicken recipes are overcooked. Otherwise, it is a great book. Nothing new or startling, but a good basic French cookery book.”

  In any case, Beard kept any gripes mostly to himself and treated the authors with the same respect he reserved for culinary insiders with whom he was personally and professionally involved. Besides, Beard saw something in Julia that intrigued him right off the bat, even if he couldn’t immediately put his finger on it. “Jim and Julia were meant to be friends,” says Barbara Kafka. “If you looked at them next to each other, they were built on the same scale. It wasn’t just that they were tall—they were big, with big bone structure and big personalities.” They shared a West Coast sensibility, neither aggressive nor slick, and a background in classified military surveillance (Beard trained as an army cryptographer, focusing on codes and secret ciphers). Using intuition rather than powers of detection, he got an inkling of Julia’s vast potential and decided on the spot to form an alliance with her. “He rallied colleagues” to her cause, Beard’s biographer noted, calling Helen McCully, the excitable editor who had revitalized McCall’s food pages, and Cecily Brownstone of the Associated Press, on her behalf. Julia recalled gratefully how “he took us right in hand, introduced us eve
rywhere,” opening doors for them throughout the New York food world.

  One door led to the Egg Basket, a kitschy French-provincial café on Fifty-ninth Street, where Dione Lucas presided.

  If Lucas was “the grande dame of the American cooking scene” through the 1950s, she was also one of its most divisive figures. An immensely talented chef with what Jim Beard called “the most wonderful cooking hands I have ever seen,” she almost single-handedly created the American bistro menu. Still, her traditional heart remained with Le Cordon Bleu, where she had studied with Henri-Paul Pellaprat before opening an annex in London. By the mid-1940s, Lucas was haute cuisine’s liaison to the small but growing community that craved French technique, conducting “Cordon Bleu” classes in midtown New York, much to the chagrin of Madame Brassart and others, who felt she had “fraudulently appropriated” its name. She also had a cooking show, To the Queen’s Taste, that aired on CBS-TV, but like James Beard, she “wasn’t a gifted performer.”

  What she had, however, was expertise—“hands of gold”—and phenomenal skill. Lucas cooked like a musician who composed on the piano, not on the page—by touch, without recipes or notes. “She was encyclopedic,” according to Paula Wolfert, who studied with Lucas and fell in love with cooking as a result. She believed cooking was an art form, a way to express oneself by creating subtle, simple, but gorgeous meals using flawless ingredients. Each plate was presented like an artistic composition. Michael Batterberry remembers her standing behind the omelet bar at the Egg Basket, “turning out a dish of scallops with mushrooms and tomatoes the way Renoir turned out a masterpiece.” She performed, he said, as opposed to cooked. And sometimes those performances rivaled Lucia.

  “She was a serious head case,” recalls a restaurant consultant familiar with her behavior. She approached life like a warrior attempting to do battle with demons. Her life, according to a profile in the Chicago Tribune, was chaotic, “a veritable soap opera of eccentricities, feuds, dramatics, migraines, temperamental outbursts, rumored addiction to alcohol and pills.” Others describe her as “impossible,” “bossy and not very nice,” “very neurotic,” “a bitch,” “off her head,” and “downright nuts.” James Beard, perhaps, summed her up best. He called her “sad and great,” the kind of purist who reminded you how good she was each time out before throwing herself over a cliff.

  Julia owned several of Lucas’s cookbooks and was eager to meet her. She had learned an enormous amount from the recipes. And Lucas was another pillar of the food community to whom Julia was inevitably drawn.

  Their meeting was cordial if not particularly warm. Lucas, a wiry pinch-faced Englishwoman with innate hauteur, seated Julia and Simca at the bar in her restaurant while she bent over a gas grill tossing off flawless omelets the way Bob Turley tossed off fastballs. The women were forced to watch her in a mirror hung theatrically over the stove, inasmuch as Lucas never made eye contact through the entire lunch. Even so, she delivered several “pointers on doing cooking demonstrations for an audience,” and promised, at Jim Beard’s urging, to host a launch party for Mastering in mid-December.

  In general, New York’s culinary stars were starting to align behind the new cooks on the block, and the French-tinged sparkle they gave off reflected outward, from coast to coast. Mastering ignited a budding interest in gastronomy, to be sure, but other factors contributed to the allure. The election of John F. Kennedy in 1960 has often been cited as a great watershed moment for French cuisine. The Kennedys embodied cultural sophistication at its most glamorous. They were arbiters of taste at a time when Americans were searching for taste. They advanced a fashion sense that celebrated haute couture, and fine dining—“food that could claim to be not just cooking but cuisine.”

  Stories abounded about Jack Kennedy’s prejudice for good food. A fervid patron of the New York restaurant scene, he turned up frequently at Chambord and Lutèce and occupied a regular booth at La Caravelle, which not only catered to his preferences but had also plied his campaign staff nightly with refreshments such as vichyssoise and chicken in a creamy champagne reduction. And on April 7, 1961, Craig Claiborne announced in an article on the front page of The New York Times that the White House had hired René Verdon, a classically trained French chef de cuisine, to supervise its kitchens. Today that might be blasted as elitist, unpatriotic, but in 1961 it was the height of chic.

  “People were reading about what the Kennedys were eating,” Julia pointed out. “And I happened to come along just at the right time.”

  That was putting it mildly. By the time she and Simca hit Grosse Pointe, Michigan, the first stop on their whirlwind promotional junket, public interest had already reached a lofty pitch. The leading bookstore sold out its entire stock of 125 copies, and the same again in Chicago, where even the jobber’s cupboards were bare. Their appearances in the Midwest were SRO affairs. “We are giving demonstrations twice a day for audiences of two- and three hundred!” Julia marveled, grateful that she and Simca had resolved to put their differences aside. It exhilarated her, especially in San Francisco, where a spot at the City of Paris department store turned into nothing short of a melee.

  All over the country, anywhere Julia and Simca went, women were turning up in droves. Who were they? What were they doing there? Nobody was expecting them in any kind of number. There hadn’t been that much publicity. There wasn’t any sign that indicated such an interest existed, nothing to indicate that anyone would be interested in these two oddly matched women—one with a thick French accent, the other with a hilarious swooping voice—presenting recipes with all the complexity of the genetic code in this era of packaged food.

  It was tapping into something women weren’t doing—but something that, deep down, they wanted to do, which was to express themselves, to do something special. They’d been told again and again: live your life the easy way, the quick way, the ordinary way. They were like workers on an assembly line who took no pride in their jobs, just cranking it out like everybody else down the block. They bought the same appliances, wore the same housedresses, performed the same routines—the cleaning, the shopping, and the cooking, such as it was. They were ignoring one of the most essential human urges—to be creative, to be special. And suddenly, here were two women who could tell them how to do that, how to take themselves out of their constricting little lives. So at dinner, when they slapped down a duck à l’orange instead of Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks, people might look at them in a new, admiring way. “You’re somebody special, somebody talented.” And even if nobody else said exactly that, they could look down at that duck and know it themselves.

  In the same way that the space race tapped into Americans’ desire to achieve something glorious in the realm of science, Julia tapped into a housewife’s desire to expand the boundaries of her own world. Nobody knew American women were out there hungering for this, but out there they were. And Julia offered them an outlet for that pent‑up ambition.

  Not even the blaze of public attention could impress her father, however. Around Thanksgiving time, the Mastering delegation rolled into Pasadena, where the media was churning for the hometown author. The schedule was thick with luncheons, interviews, and book signings. In Los Angeles, there’d even been a television spot, seven minutes on The Cavalcade of Books. Friends competed to invite them to dinner, to toast their unfolding success. Instead of taking pleasure in the praise, however, “Big John” McWilliams hardly acknowledged Julia’s accomplishment. A cookbook. His daughter had written … a cookbook. It wasn’t as if she had rid the government of Communists or intellectuals. At eighty-two, Pop had more important matters to contend with. He was already recuperating from a strange virus that had kept him bedridden for weeks. He didn’t have the time or the energy for such artsy-fartsy nonsense. A cookbook! Besides, he was preoccupied with damning society’s ills, “tossing verbal stink bombs” at those atop his soaring enemies list. Paul kept a running account of “the old idiot’s” favorite targets: “ ‘the chosen people’ (he hates an
d distrusts all Jews), ‘those people over there’ (he hates and distrusts all foreigners), the labor unions (he hates and distrusts all unions).” Most of all, Paul realized, “he hates and distrusts his son-in-law,” although they’d managed to carry off the visit without spilling any blood.

  Even so, there was plenty of tension in the air. (Julia, as usual, was caught in the crossfire.) Pop’s disgust was always visible on his face. And no doubt Paul contributed his own share of contempt. He hated Pasadena, the place gave him “the willies.” He had just finished reading Lewis Mumford’s The City in History, which held that art, culture, and political purpose—not numbers—defined a city. And in those areas, Paul was convinced that Pasadena was bankrupt. The people he’d met there were self-involved and unenlightened, their conversation frivolous, their lives “wrapped up in nothing much.” The gift of nature had been ruined by “unrestrained commercialism.” He couldn’t walk anywhere, always fearful either the cops or “the John Birchers” would scoop him up. The whole West, to him, was alien; he felt like a stranger in a strange land.

  Paul’s mood, his dislocation, wasn’t confined to California. Ever since returning to America, his letters to his brother and others were dark, pessimistic chronicles of a nation gone soft, of “an atmosphere of aggression, anarchy, and slackness of moral tone, wedded to ignorance and hedonism.” He had little patience for Americans or for their lifestyles. Perhaps he’d been living abroad too long, he theorized. Admittedly, he was “nostalgic” for places like Norway, “with its simple life, its good sturdy folk … its un-spoiled nature … its non-hectic rhythms.” The Americans he’d encountered seemed oblivious to politics and culture, “most of what makes life significant and interesting for us.”