Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child

by Bob Spitz

  Her humor was extemporaneous, droll and playful, occasionally blue. “But she had a black side, too,” Russ Morash explained. “She was quite wicked, and she knew she was being wicked.” He recalled a gala segment they planned for roast suckling pig. During a dry run, they went over the recipe to sequence the necessary camera shots. “When I show the suckling pig,” Julia told him, “I will say something like, ‘It’s a bit like burning babies.’ ” Morash advised her against making such a remark, but he held his breath during the show, unsure whether or not she’d actually cross the line.

  Morash knew he had a humorous personality on his hands, “but not nearly as funny as the audience thought she was.” They caught on very quickly that Julia was a real character. She wasn’t packaged or following anybody’s script—not even her own—and that made for an anything-goes kind of show. You’d learn how to cook, but you’d also bask in her company. And, so, word spread that The French Chef was a different kind of educational TV—it was entertainment. But it was also different from entertainment as it was known on TV. It was real, it was unorthodox, it seemed spontaneous. It was a hoot.

  Not only had Julia forged a vivid identity; she had broken through into a new dimension of success. Within a relatively short time, The French Chef had moved from a local novelty to form the tent pole of educational TV’s amorphous network. In the first half of 1963, she taped an astounding thirty-four shows, two a day, with twelve-hour rehearsals—“the hardest work I’ve ever done,” she wrote to a Pasadena acquaintance—that “went off like successful rocket launchings.” She had become Boston’s “fairy godmother,” a high-profile presence who couldn’t be ignored in a city where the prominent strove to keep their profiles low. The Boston Globe offered her a weekly column, featuring recipes and advice. And only a year after the rejection at Houghton Mifflin, her visibility had pushed the Mastering book sales over the 100,000 mark. Charlie Child, Paul’s twin, who had watched the steam build from afar, wasn’t off the mark when he quipped, “Julie could get to be a legend.”

  Even the nascent culinary community began to take notice. Fellow cooks like James Beard, who had considered Julia as, at best, an eccentric, Ivy League upstart in the trenches of haute cuisine—a former Cordon Bleu grad with a TV show—were suddenly obliged not only to acknowledge Julia, but to court her as an advocate who could give their projects credibility. That spring, Beard invited Julia to join the visiting faculty at his cooking school in New York, where she taught classes every few months, whenever her schedule allowed. And in no less than The New York Times, Craig Claiborne crowned her “the doyenne” of NET and allowed that Mastering “may be the finest volume on French cooking ever printed in English.”

  Everywhere the wheels of celebrity were turning. But in late July, Julia’s chassis began to creak and sputter. The prodigious obligations piled one atop the other were “too much slogging work” for even the doyenne to cope with. She needed a break; so did Paul, who experienced a series of severe chest pains that he attributed to “a sort of pleurisy or inflammation of the something-or-other.” In any case, it was enough to scare them into an urgently needed holiday, and without much advance planning they took off for Europe.

  It had been almost two years since they’d been on the continent. Eager to revisit all their old haunts, the Childs mapped out a trip of grand scope—reunions in Oslo and Plittersdorf; a pilgrimage to London to meet Elizabeth David, “the foremost British food writer of her day,” whom Julia considered “a kindred spirit”; a shopping spree at Dehillerin in Paris, where, according to half-joking Paul, Julia intended to “buy 10,000 more cooking vessels”; and restaurant-hopping at every locale and everywhere in between. But their primary destination was the village of Plascassier, a patchwork of rural farms in the southeast corner of Provence, the arrière-pays near Grasse, where Simca was quartered at a family retreat.

  For Julia, the reunion with her old friend and collaborator capped off a year of startling success, both for their book and its glitzy half-cousin, The French Chef. The long separation from Simca had been hard on Julia. She missed the camaraderie of the old days, the creativity they shared in the kitchen, fine-tuning recipes and plotting book deals. But those had been simpler times, and much had happened in the interim. Julia had become the spokesperson for, if not the face of, Mastering the Art of French Cooking and an emerging force on the American culinary scene. Her celebrity at home had sprung in no small part from the success of the book. But Julia knew how much it all owed to Simca Fischbacher. Most of the recipes, after all, were heirlooms of Simca’s family. And she had taught Julia everything she knew. The conceit of cuisine bourgeoise, the technique and the little trucs—a lifetime of Norman experience was absorbed into Julia’s repertoire.

  How her fame would affect their relationship Julia didn’t know. Simca was a proud woman who knew her worth. Hands down, she was the better cook. But Julia was the better communicator—and the bigger dreamer. The concept of the cookbook may have been Simca’s, but unless you knew how to package and sell it, all you had were some nice family recipes. Julia was clever. Her persistence and sacrifice had turned a pipe dream into a legacy, inspiring the show and the myriad perks it generated. She had courted the spotlight, and she had earned it. And it may well have thrown her relationship with Simca out of balance.

  Stabilizing it was a focus of Julia’s concern. For one thing, Julia loved Simca, whom she referred to variously as “my darling cuisinière,” “mon adorable amie,” “ma tout à fait très chère and dearest Simca,” and “my dearest grande chérie et sœur.” Simca was a tough old bird, but she was Julia’s bird all the same; they’d come through the cookbook wars together and, despite all the bullets they’d dodged, all the mines they’d stepped on, their bond was solid, invincible. Julia wanted nothing to interfere with that.

  She also had business to discuss with Simca. At several points during the editing of Mastering, they’d eliminated reams of material in order to trim the book’s monstrous girth. “We always said, ‘We’ll do that recipe in another book,’ ” recalls Judith Jones, “as a way of letting go of some things.” At the time, it was more of a device than a realistic expectation. But that was before Mastering became a runaway best seller. Now, those discarded recipes were like gold chips, ready to be melted into Mastering, Volume Two. “Financially, it made great sense,” Jones argued in favor of a follow-up. Besides, there were plenty of other recipes that no American had ever tackled in a book, like making French bread, stuffing sausage casings, and roasting a suckling pig. Simca’s family vault still contained dozens of worthy candidates. And it seemed prudent, reputation-wise, to finish what they’d started. At some point during the visit, Julia intended to gauge Simca’s appetite for a sequel, but only after they’d had time to sink back into the comfort of their friendship.

  Thankfully the sinking didn’t take so much as a second. The moment the women laid eyes on each other, they fell into outstretched arms: two hearts in true-waltz time. No mention was made of The French Chef. Since the show was virtually unknown in France, Julia thought better of discussing it with Simca, lest her chérie et sœur feel jalouse and resentful. Besides, it was impossible to raise a flap in such a gorgeous setting. The family property—called Bramafam, which meant “the cry of hunger”—was the jeweled eye of a landscape dominated by nature. After a wondrous drive along a hilly weave of switchbacks, the effect of the homestead, a pastoral five-hectare enclave ringed by nodding olive trees and soldierly cypress, could not be more picturesque than if one were to blunder around a turn into the Deep Old South. The place was serene, enchanted. There was an eighteenth-century farmhouse—Le Mas Vieux—with its drapery of wisteria, a slim thread of woodsmoke unwinding from the stone chimney, and an immense garden. Everywhere the lavender was in bloom. A blush of roses twined along a fence, and a bouquet of pink mossy mimosa perfumed the air with a coarse sweet odor.

  “Bramafam was very beautiful, but very simple,” recalls Jean-François Thibault, Simca’
s nephew. “The house was rustic, with very few amenities, and everything was still done by hand.” A local man cut the grass with a scythe; the Niçois olives were gathered with nets by family members and taken to a moulin in nearby Châteauneuf-Grasse. “Spending time there was like stepping back into an earlier century.”

  Julia and Paul were enthralled by it. They had visited several times before and considered it “paradise.” There was their own little apartment in the back of the mas, from which they could see the distant snowcapped peaks of the Alpes-Maritimes, majestic yet foreboding like “a row of icebergs against the blue sky.” Sun streamed in through an old timber-framed window, and at night they slept to the nonstop croaking of the frog-filled woods.

  Everyone indulged their passion at Bramafam. In the mornings, Paul roamed the scrubby hills with his treasured Rolleiflex and, when the sun cooperated, painted landscapes on the shaded terrace. Simca’s husband, Jean Fischbacher, gardened. Naturally, Julia and Simca cooked. Later, after a long, extravagant lunch on the porch, they would climb crazily into one of Jean and Simca’s cars and zigzag along the country roads, antiquing and collecting things for dinner. Those trips were hair-raising, pure “torture,” according to Paul’s letters written from France. Simca, who had been brought up in the thirties when there was no one on the road and had the attitude that the road belongs to me, drove like a “madwoman.” She was “wild and aggressive” behind the wheel: “head-turning, brake-slamming, up-curve-on-hill roaring, through-marketplace-slaloming, talky-talky-talky (with high stridency), balling-out other drivers.” If someone got in her way, she careened blindly around them, passed cars by fishtailing onto the shoulder. It was no surprise that “several of her friends had died on the road.” It was an ordeal to be in the car with her and provoked silent prayer, as close to actual praying as Paul and Julia ever did.

  But there were many pleasures on terra firma. Back down the Grasse–Cannes road, only ten minutes by car with Simca whipping through the gears, the leafy simplicity of Plascassier gave way to the gilt-edged Mediterranean, where yachts and sailboats crisscrossed lazily in the bay. Julia loved the Cannes markets with their surfeit of fresh fish, the sidewalk cafés, and her standing hair-do appointment at Elizabeth Arden. Or a few miles further east, above Mougins, the tiny commune of Mouans-Sartoux, where she found the kind of French butcher who would prepare a haunch for roasting in the classical way. Or the circuit of narrow trails leading from Bramafam up into the rock-ribbed hills that the Childs hiked with regularity. From a perch looking out over the verdant valley, cities seemed as far away as the business back home. A few days later, when a letter from “the TV people” arrived with the breathy news that The French Chef syndication was “catching, like measles,” Julia and Simca were “up to their triceps in pastry” and didn’t even respond.

  No one was the least bit surprised when, a week or two after their arrival in Provence, Julia and Paul were already looking for land of their own. They’d always dreamed of owning a pied-à-terre in Paris for those leisure years ahead, but the idylls of Provence had an especially soothing appeal. In no time, they stumbled across “ten acres of long slope” with a copse of mature olive trees a mile or so from Simca’s that “was especially attractive” for its serene exposures. “I could already imagine spending my winter months here, curing the olives from our trees, and cooking à la provençale, with garlic, tomatoes, and wild herbs,” Julia recalled.

  Could they afford it, considering their finances? They already owned houses in Cambridge and Washington, D.C. Paul’s government pension was a pittance, it hardly made a dent in their expenses, and Julia’s French Chef stipend was a pitiful fifty dollars per episode, which also covered the food! In fact, before they left the States Paul had laid down the law that her demo and lecture freebies had to cease. All such inquiries were now rerouted to Ruth Lockwood, who’d been instructed to quote a nonnegotiable $250 fee for Julia’s services, “even for charitable considerations.” Still, another property in Provence was not out of their reach. Julia had a bit of money left from her mother’s bequest; she’d come into $100,000 from her father’s estate; and her Mastering royalties had increased tenfold since the TV show aired. They could afford it.

  But even before they crunched numbers, cold reality took hold. Julia was in the throes of scripting eight new shows as well as a month’s worth of future Globe columns. Add to that an informal agreement with Simca to tackle Mastering Deux—they were already working on a recipe for it: pâte feuilletée, puff pastry—and the headaches involved with building a house felt positively suffocating. A day after their house-hunting, Julia and Paul came rudely to their senses. “We have decided not to invest in any land or property!” Paul reported to family back in the States. “It’s terribly expensive (more than in the USA!), but mainly because of the horrendous complications involved.” Besides, Simca and Jean had put a fanciful bee in their bonnets. Perhaps—just perhaps—if family entanglements could be unsnarled, there was an outside chance that some land on Bramafam might accommodate the Childs. There was an abandoned outbuilding about 150 yards from the house that Simca had long flirted with turning into a guest cottage. If they all agreed to combine resources, perhaps—just perhaps—the place could be shared.

  “To be in Provence next to Simca would be a dream come true,” Julia thought, ignoring the age-old warning to be careful what you wish for.

  AFTER ELEVEN WEEKS in Europe, Julia was eager to resume her TV career: taping four shows a week, along with “extras,” such as a Thanksgiving feast and bûche de Noël specials. Enthusiasm was growing for another new season of The French Chef, whose audience was expanding as fast as WGBH signed licensing agreements. By 1964, the show was seen in more than fifty U.S. cities, with the largest expansion west of the Mississippi—places like Ogden, Utah, and Norman, Oklahoma, where classic French cooking was about as common as bagels.

  To everyone’s delight, Julia sailed through a second series of twenty-six shows at her usual—puny—fifty-dollar fee. The process was becoming second nature to her, and she appeared “infinitely smoother, more integrated and more relaxed”—more professional—with a hoofer’s flair for sidestepping potential disasters. “Her pacing is steady, rather than rush-here and hold-there,” Paul reported. There was no more of the breathless vertigo that had paced her debut. As a crutch, she’d learned how to read Ruth Lockwood’s “idiot cards,” reminding Julia during demos what to say and do—start heat under #2 burner with large frying pan or asparagus. set timer. front burner hot—without tipping the audience, aside from the times she inexplicably grinned into the camera, when Ruth held up a card that read: smile.

  Word filtered into the mainstream that The French Chef had caught fire, thanks in no small part to Julia’s infinite charisma. Audiences loved her; they couldn’t get enough. That loopy voice, those mannerisms, the outrageous bons mots—there was a campiness about her that partly explained her appeal, but people recognized there was substance behind it too, and that kept them coming back. It became clear that a new star had emerged, and soon enough “the Madison Avenue hounds” started baying at her kitchen door. The big agencies scrambled “to line her up for some sort of commercial deal.” They dangled all sorts of “baited hooks”—offers to act as national spokesperson for a supermarket chain, to do a TV commercial for a detergent, even to jump ship to the ABC network. Posthaste, all suitors were turned away.

  From the get-go, Julia had made up her mind to preserve her independence, “the freedom to plan her programs any way she wants, using any products that she feels are worthy or interesting,” not just those that she was beholden to for an endorsement. “I just don’t want to be in any way associated with commercialism,” she informed a colleague. This was a noble gesture, virtuous, one that certainly defied accepted practice. The temptations, after all, were too delicious, too great. Every manufacturer and purveyor salivated over product placement on The French Chef. Was there a better arena in all of America to display new culinary ware
s, a more identifiable voice than Julia Child’s to promote a new line? Really, how hard would it be for Julia to praise a Robot Coupe food processor or Waring blender, considering she used them in her demos week after week? Who would it hurt if she slipped in a word that her olive oil was Berio or her skillet Revere Ware? The fees for such plugs wouldn’t hurt the Childs’ pocketbook. Paul had let it be known: “We do not eschew cash!” But Julia, defiant, stood her ground. “We run the show to suit ourselves,” she chastened a journalist who questioned her motives. “Nobody tells us what to do. There’s no interference. What’s the point?” This was educational TV after all, a cut above the commercial feed trough; to raffle off endorsements, she resolved, would degrade its purity. Besides, Julia had watched with distaste while a first-class cook like James Beard sold himself to any corporate overlord that dangled a buck before his eyes. Over the years, Beard shilled for Kraft, Corning, Borden, Spice Islands, Skotch Bonnets, Omaha Steaks, you-name-it, justifying it by saying he needed the money. It was crass, Julia felt, and demeaned him in the public’s eyes. That wasn’t going to happen to her.

  Without much ado, products were banished from The French Chef’s homespun mise en place. Olive oil was poured from a simple glass cruet, dried herbs shaken out of bottles whose labels lay obscured in Julia’s palm. The wine accompanying each dish was described in generic terms—a mountain burgundy, a nice crisp white. Even Hills Bros. Coffee, one of the show’s early sponsors, never had its packaging displayed on air.

  No, endorsements were out of the question, but Julia wasn’t averse to the payoff of good publicity. By 1964, the media came a-calling, writing endless magazine and newspaper profiles that would ultimately frame her mystique. While not everyone appreciated Julia’s elaborate menus, they were undivided over her gifted “sense of theater.” In TV Guide, Judith Crist observed how Julia was “a law unto herself.” She especially appreciated her endearing inartificiality, the way Julia “rattles saucepans, grunts when she lifts a heavy pot, mutters anachronistically about the ‘icebox,’ ” and generally behaved in front of an audience the way Crist herself might act in her own house. Louis Lapham, then a mouthpiece for the Norman Rockwell bourgeoisie of the Saturday Evening Post who held out against the allures of fussy French food, suggested that viewers came to Julia as much for “her ingenious wit” as for the cooking. “Each of her cooking lessons,” he wrote, “has about it the uncertainty of a reckless adventure.”