Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child

by Bob Spitz

  Her hunger for new experiences overrode any fear that would stymie any otherwise sensible person. Somewhere between the gawky, awkward Smith grad who fumbled her way through New York and the person offered a leap into the unknown ether of television, Julia had become confident in her ability to excel. It might be too simplistic to conclude that cooking gave her all the tools. But she had defied the prejudices of a tyrant like Madame Brassart, and, through hard work and countless hours in front of the stove, had transformed herself into someone who could hack apart a duck with her bare hands and turn out a poulet rôti à l’estragon as routinely as if it were a grilled-cheese sandwich. She had delivered the American bible on French cooking.

  Pat her head and rub her stomach under the hot lights of a primitive television studio? Piece of cake.

  Of course, it was harder than it looked. Julia and Paul rehearsed for hours in their Irving Street kitchen. “We broke our recipes down into logical sequences,” Julia recalled, “and I practiced making each dish as if I were on TV.” Over and over, they worked on those three recipes. She made very detailed notes describing every step of the process—the ingredients, the sequence of events, the logistics, the state of her delivery—while Paul stage-managed the performance, timing it with a stopwatch. It all had to be choreographed, right down to Julia’s expressions. And, yet, she realized that sometimes things were better left to chance. “All the material within each section has to be pretty ad-lib, as one never quite knows what’s going to happen on the stove,” she explained. “The least one can say is that the shows will have a definite informality and spontaneity!”

  But there were rules to follow—and words to the wise. “You’ve got to understand the way television works,” Russ Morash warned her. “That metal box and piece of glass is your best friend. And you really want to let that person know that you care about them.”

  Morash had his own ingredients and logistics to worry about. There was no time or money to have a kitchen set built, which meant finding a suitable space already rigged up with appliances. “I had heard of a temporary kitchen the Boston Gas Company used to show contractors how to operate a gas flame,” he recalled. It was in an auditorium in the Salada Tea Building, downtown, right off Park Square. What a find! Morash thought, while taking a tour around the place. It had a terrazzo floor at one end, ample cabinets, and a handy center island with a cooktop cut into it. The gas worked, of course, but there was no running water. With a little window dressing, it could be a perfect set.

  The show also needed a title, something “curt, clear-cut, and concise”—not more than three words, one of which had to be French—that would fit into a single line in the TV Guide. That limited the choices somewhat to gourmet and cuisine. Among the thirty that Paul suggested, Kitchen Matisse was downright awful and Table d’Hôte too hoity-toity. They also rejected Cuisine Magic, Kitchen à la Française, The Chef at Home, Savoir Faire, and Gourmet Kitchen. Cuisinavision—really!—seemed almost too goofy to consider. It was either Russ Morash or his assistant, Ruth Lockwood, who came up with The French Chef. The simple, straightforward phrase seemed to say it all. There was nothing pretentious or off-putting about it. The French Chef. It had a nice ring to it. “Getting Julia to agree wasn’t very hard—at the time,” Morash says. Later, she objected that it wasn’t appropriate, as she was neither a chef nor French. “But our relationship was budding, it made a lot of sense, and she accepted it.”

  So did the honchos at WGBH. In a memo to everyone involved, the station manager proclaimed: “Let us call it The French Chef now and forever!”

  Preparations for The French Chef ran through the spring of 1962. In addition to Julia’s ongoing rehearsals at home, a small group of WGBH volunteers—mostly wealthy young women with time on their hands—saw to incidentals on the set, like putting up curtains on the fake kitchen window and choosing napkins and candles that would appear on each show.

  In the midst of all this excitement and upheaval, Julia learned that her father’s health was failing. Pop had never really recovered from the virus that had sidelined him during Julia’s last visit. He complained constantly about shortness of breath and exhaustion. In the interim, he developed pneumonia and “a form of leukemia” that the doctors believed could be controlled for “five or six years.” Lately, however, “he had lost forty-eight pounds” and taken a turn for the worse, which didn’t bode well.

  In Cambridge, the news stirred more melancholy than grief. Julia shared her feelings with her sister-in-law Freddie. In a rambling letter she said Pop was “a terribly generous father financially. Spiritually, however, something happened.” He never forgave her for rejecting his way of life; the path she ultimately took was, in his eyes, “villainous.” And he regarded her accomplishments with stony indifference. Still, Julia had never stopped angling for her father’s approval. She sent updates of her exploits and clippings from her tour, cards on all the holidays. In the end, however, the alienation had been too great and she had cut off communications with him. He had forced her hand, first by his undisguised contempt for Paul, and finally when it became clear that she could no longer express herself openly, to share her “innermost thoughts” without risking his wrath. In any case, “old eagle beak,” as she called him, would probably outlive them all—if not for love, then out of spite.

  But by May, Pop’s condition took another downward turn, and by the time Julia arrived in Pasadena, only hours remained in his life. Now there was no opportunity for anything but vigilance, no chance to reclaim precious years. Julia’s feelings were mixed, as she joined her brother and sister at his hospital bedside. When it came to her father, she would always be conflicted. He was someone she admired for his success and generosity, and someone she deplored for refusing to accept who she was. He was never there for her when it mattered—never. Never in her corner, never on her side. She had lived her adult life without a parent she could turn to for advice.

  “Frankly, my father’s death came as a relief more than a shock,” Julia said. As she and her siblings strewed his ashes at sea, along with those belonging to her mother and grandfather, an odd calm took hold. She felt something akin to closure. It was almost liberating. What Pop’s oldest daughter was thinking only Paul, shortly afterward, was willing to admit: “That chapter of her life had finally ended”—just as a new one was ready to begin.

  ON JUNE 18, 1962, Julia Child entered the Television Age. Having edged into the spotlight and savored its warm glow, she shelved the solitary art of cookbook writing and stepped out into the public eye, where she would no doubt rattle the spirit of John McWilliams.

  Despite her adolescent flirtation with performing on the stage, Julia was a complete novice when she stepped in front of the cameras in the auditorium of the Boston Gas Company. What she lacked in experience, however, she made up for in determination. “I came prepared,” she said later, reflecting on that day. “All the equipment and food was laid out where I’d find everything, I knew my lines, and Paul had mapped out a master plan, like an Arthur Murray dance diagram.”

  Before filming began, Julia fanned out her notes on the island with the cooktop. The pages were meticulously detailed, much like the recipes in Mastering: all her stage directions and dialogue ran down the right-hand side of the page, directly opposite what the camera would be showing, on the left. “Simmering water in large alum. pan, upper R burner.” “Wet sponge in L top drawer.” Paul, who would be operating behind the scenes, had his own set of notes. “When J. starts buttering, remove stack molds.” “When Julie switches to ready-made pipérade: take off the hot no-stickum frying pan and its copper cover.” It was an intricate pas de deux they’d worked out which, when performed, couldn’t miss a beat.

  There was a short rehearsal so that Russ Morash could give his crew a preview of what to expect. None of his technicians knew their way around the kitchen, so he had to lead them by the hand and walk them through the maze. From his command post in the mobile unit, the ancient Trailways bus parked out
side, he whispered crisply into his headset, “Camera two, she’s going to move from left to right, and when she does, please get a shot of the garlic press.”

  Over earphones, the cameraman replied: “What the fuck is a garlic press?”

  It was that primitive. And to make matters worse, they were going to shoot it “live,” straight through on tape, without stopping for glitches or retakes. There was no other alternative. Time was as tight as the show’s meager budget; they had the cameras only for a fixed number of hours before the equipment was needed to cover the symphony orchestra. “We were too stupid to know how dangerous an undertaking this was,” Morash says now. But at the time, he remembered seeing a segment of Playhouse 90, where Hamlet was downstage, reciting “Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio,” while upstage a stagehand walked across the scene; when he finally caught sight of the camera, the stagehand grinned and backed out the way he came. “Things like that happened all the time,” Morash says, “and when they occurred there wasn’t much you could do.” So here he was relying on Julia, a rank amateur, to steer steadily through heavy traffic.

  For all the uncertainty, for all its flouting of Murphy’s Law, The French Chef proceeded along its course without a whiff of congestion. In fact, the show’s intro was about as fluent as the lesson it hoped to convey. It opened on a tight close‑up of butter blistering in a small, dark pan. An emulsion of egg was lapped in and coddled with a fork, and twenty seconds later a gem of an omelet was turned onto a plate. “It takes less than thirty seconds to make,” a warbly female voice declared. “It is lovely to look at—soft and creamy inside—delicious to eat.”

  When the camera pulled back, the woman looming over the counter couldn’t have seemed more inviting or reassuring had one’s favorite aunt been in her place. “Hello. I’m Julia Child.” The voice was as arresting as it was neighborly. “I’m going to show you how to make French omelets. They go like lightning, as you just saw.”

  And for the next twenty-seven minutes Julia was as good as her word. In a flash, she turned out herb omelets, cheese omelets, chicken liver omelets, pipérade omelets—a riot of omelets, each a masterpiece of eggdom. But her trick—and this wasn’t an illusion or special effect—was the feeling that she was talking just to you. Not master and student, not performer and audience, but two gals chatting over the back fence. She let you know, right up front, that she’d been where you were, shared your fears about the calculus of cooking, the prospect of an all-out omelet debacle.

  “If you’ve ever tried to make omelets in a sticky pan, you know what an impossible mess it is.”

  Not an “old” or “uncooperative” pan, but a sticky pan. Well—exactly. And nothing “untidy” or “ill-managed,” but an impossible mess. This woman apparently knew what went on in our own cranky kitchens and she was here to help. Plus she made it look so damn simple!

  The show on soufflés came off just as swimmingly. “Ordinary soufflés scare many people,” Julia admitted, and no doubt the audience was nodding in agreement. “The timing is tricky, they fall before you’re ready to serve them.” Uh-huh. But Julia assured her skittish viewers that soufflés were a snap—and not only a snap, but “we’ll go into all the little details so you can’t miss on this.” Can’t miss on this. She made it sound like she was throwing together a bowl of cornflakes.

  As for the sauce—a béchamel. French, but simple. And wouldn’t you know it—Julia’s béchamel came out thick and pasty, just like everyone’s always did. Don’t worry. “We’ll thin it down and enrich it with cream. It coats the spoon lightly, see.” See.

  Afterward, Julia sauntered over to a table set beautifully for two. Pulled out a chair, sat down. Poured herself a glass of wine! “It’s hard to believe, but here it is,” she said as the steamy soufflé appeared at her elbow, on a trivet. “I want to cut this soufflé so you’ll see it’s real!” Not some TV prop, but an honest-to-goodness soufflé that she just made. We just made. Together. And she took a bite, savored it, smiled. Not only took a bite, but followed it with a nice slug of white wine. It was a bold move for TV, educational or otherwise. No one drank on live television back then, unless it was part of a drama, in which case the wine was a colored-water prop. Drinking for pleasure, as part of a meal? It just wasn’t done in polite public, especially so casually, as an everyday treat. Not that Julia gave it a second thought. To her, wine with food had deep roots and a wonderful payoff. She couldn’t imagine eating something delicious without a lovely glass of wine—and she wanted Americans to discover that pleasure for themselves. Having a meal along with wine was the perfect way to end the show.

  Before she signed off, she looked directly into the camera, and uttered a line that Paul had written for her: “This is Julia Child. Thank you. Bon appétit!”

  Bon appétit! For most viewers, that phrase was a complete mystery. It wasn’t customarily said at tables—or anywhere, for that matter. The audience could only guess at its meaning, an expression for which there was no correlation in English. And, yet, it had such an exotic sound to it. Bon appétit! There was something musical about it, festive, something merry and playful. And when it rolled so exuberantly off of Julia Child’s tongue, it felt as comfortable as a warm hug.

  “This is Julia Child. Thank you. Bon appétit!”

  Russ Morash thought “Julia sailed through the pilots.” Rather surprisingly, “she was a joy to work with because she was so organized and efficient.” There was a general feeling among the crew that Julia had acquitted herself capably, although they refused, to a man, to taste her omelets. Even so, the omelet show was such an enormous success that, right afterward, Russ rushed home and practically tackled his wife, Marian. “The omelet was terrific,” he said, “and … here, let me show you how to make one.”

  A day or two later, Morash showcased the pilots for Bob Larsen, the program manager at WGBH. A shy, unflashy, cautious man out of the university setting, Larsen viewed new programs with considerable trepidation. Optimism meant obligation, and he was ever wary to commit the station’s resources to something as experimental and precarious as a series. As Larsen watched Julia’s tape with an impassive mask, Morash went slack with hopelessness. But when it was over, Larsen reran it—and reran it again. “She’s terrific,” he said, with deadpan enthusiasm. “I think we should go for a series.”

  On Irving Street, however, the scene was very different. The pilots ran in August 1962, and Julia watched the first two at home on her brand-new TV with a sinking dread. “There I was in black and white,” she said, “a large woman sloshing eggs too quickly here, too slowly there.” She felt oafish, like “Mrs. Steam Engine” the way she careened across the screen, “panting heavily.” Mannerisms that were endearing in person appeared exaggerated and grotesque on screen. “There was a sense of breathlessness,” Paul noticed, “due to her habit of gasping when she’s self-conscious.” Julia’s erratic way of breathing functioned as a kind of pause or punctuation between phrases. “Also her habit of closing her eyes from time to time” drew attention to her inexperience with the medium. There was so much room for improvement, she thought. She was a long way from anything resembling professionalism.

  The public couldn’t have agreed with her less. Letters to the station professed their delight in her offbeat style. “Loved watching her catch the frying pan as it almost went off the counter,” a viewer wrote. “Loved her looking for the cover of the casserole. It was fascinating to watch her hand motions, which were so firm and sure with the food.” Another viewer wrote: “I loved the way she projected over the camera directly to me.”

  Morash knew almost instantly they had a hit on their hands. “I heard it at parties, people called me about it,” he said. “We occasionally got invited to people’s houses where they were trying Julia Child dishes. And we heard she was funny and entertaining from our Cambridge neighbors, which is where the money was.” When WGBH got contributions, people wrote a note mentioning the shows they had seen with Julia Child. “That’s what got t
he station’s attention.”

  Should everything come together as expected, they planned to begin production in February 1963. But because of the station’s paltry budget and its inability to come up with a viable sponsor, it meant conforming to “a blitz-type operation,” taping four shows every week. The preparation that went into that was almost unimaginable. Aside from writing the script and planning new recipes, sequencing each step of a dish required timing much like air-traffic control.

  “We knew very early on that we would have to prepare multiple copies of each dish,” Morash says, “so that each stage of the recipe would display its progress so far.” For bœuf bourguignon, the debut show, they got a fairly good idea of the maneuvering it would take. Julia needed to begin by braising a skillet of stew meat, which, at five or six minutes, took too much precious airtime. Off-camera, someone had to ready a second batch in an identical pot, so that when Julia came back and said, “Let’s see how our bœuf is doing,” it would be browned perfectly, leading to the next step—and so on. So bœuf bourguignon number two was only partially cooked, bœuf bourguignon number three needed another six minutes to cook and would be finished in real time. At the end, she would say: “Now, here’s one that I’ve already cooked,” and boeuf bourgignon number four had to look positively mouthwatering.