Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child

by Bob Spitz

  Outwardly, Julia basked shamelessly in the spotlight. Wherever she went in the days after the article appeared, people stopped her to express how much they enjoyed what she did and who she was. Complete strangers called her by name—always “Julia,” an instant familiarity. After all, she came right into their homes, looked them squarely in the eye, steered them through their family dinners, held their hand. She’d established something personal with them, a bond, a relationship, something more. Encountering her, people felt they could ask her anything—and did. “How do I roast my chicken to a deep golden glow?” But also: “How can I encourage my husband to participate in the family meal?” “How can I please my husband in other ways?”

  Occasionally there would be a hiccup. The roast suckling pig show touched off a landslide of indignant outbursts reflected in the weekly mail. From the opening scene, viewers were startled by the lifelike little creature stretched out, peaceful and cozy, on an oval cutting board. It looked like the household pet was taking a little snooze, and Julia kept patting it affectionately as she described how she cleaned out his ears and nostrils and brushed his teeth. Stuffing it with vegetables seemed like a ruthless crime. Things got more gruesome later, when she hacked it apart with an electric knife. “I’m sure we shall get some angry letters from squeamish people,” Julia wrote Simca, “as the little pig looks very much like a naked baby while he is being prepared.”

  Even that, however, couldn’t dim Julia’s halo. The fan mail at WGBH increased tenfold through the year. A mountain of letters poured in after every show, thousands of requests for the recipes. The station “has to turn away hundreds of people weekly, each willing to pay $5,” Boston magazine noted, “for the privilege of watching the show backstage on tiny monitor screens.” No matter. Everyone wanted to cook what Julia Child was cooking. A “horridly bulky envelope” reached Irving Street soon after Thanksgiving, stuffed with Time covers that collectors requested Julia sign. Collectors! Whatever that meant for posterity, it touched off a fresh run on Mastering; the book’s sales tripled in December 1966 and quadrupled the next month. Wisely, Knopf boosted its next print run from the usual ten thousand copies to thirty thousand, but it was anyone’s guess where the demand would stop. Certainly not at the country’s borders. There was new interest in licensing The French Chef throughout Latin America and as far off as Australia and New Zealand. These offers could have meant a small fortune for Julia. Since there was no educational TV in countries other than the United States, she was free to negotiate a commercial deal. There was no telling what a private broadcaster might pay! Reruns, she heard, were where the real money was. But, true to form, she decided to leave it up to WGBH and donate her percentage to the station’s development fund, much as she’d been doing with the $500 she now received for public demonstrations.

  The program’s last season had been another runaway triumph. There were already 134 shows in the can that were being rerun in 106 cities across America, with plans under way for a fresh new stash. In appreciation, Julia had gotten a raise: she was now making a princely two hundred dollars a show instead of the fifty-dollar pittance allotted since her debut. And the production itself had gone big-time; the size of the crew shot up from five to a twenty-five-man regiment, with a dedicated auxiliary staff of volunteers. None of which really mattered to Julia. It was all just numbers anyway, not too earthshaking in the overall scheme of things. What she really cared about was how it looked, how she came across to the folks at home.

  “I’m not going back until we get color,” she protested, “so that we can at least get better looking food.”

  Julia firmly believed, as did most perceptive broadcasters, that by the end of the 1960s, just a few years off, most TV transmissions would be done in color. Black and white was still the norm, but homes were crawling with newfangled sets that turned drab two-toned images into brightly hued, if not garish, tableaux. The technology was changing and Julia wanted to change with it; otherwise, she feared competitors would leave her in the dust. A few months earlier, in fact, WGBH had tested the waters by taping a ten-minute segment of The French Chef in color. A thousand tons of highly specialized equipment were imported from New York, so-called experts converged on the set; several hundred NET “big-wigs” from across the country were invited to attend. Julia prepared a veal stew just for the occasion, along with a strawberry tart because, she said, “real strawberries look so much better than gray lumps.” Two cameras—one color, the other black and white—shot the performance side by side, as the crowd watched the monitor, utterly fascinated. “They kept switching from one to the other, and it was like night and day.” Julia was sold—and ultimately threw down the gauntlet: no color, no Julia.

  “She was a tiger,” says Russ Morash. “When any big change came along like that, Julia was out in front of it.” She put pressure on cash-strapped WGBH to update its equipment sooner rather than later. With uncharacteristic aggressiveness, she went public with her point of view, offering interviews to “the right places” where opinion could be made. With few exceptions, columnists echoed her outlook that black and white was passé. The Los Angeles Times noted that The French Chef was “handicapped” by its outdated format. Cleveland Amory, in TV Guide, struck the same judgmental tone. “Lately they’ve been rerunning old tapes,” he said, espousing an urgent upgrade to color. In the meantime, Julia Child was “a holdout.”

  The uproar was more a ruse than a demand. Julia needed time—to breathe and to lighten the insane schedule that was pressing around her. She had just wrapped up a taping blitz of twenty-two new shows, while consulting on the “difficult” pilot for a WGBH Chinese-cooking series with Boston restaurateur Joyce Chen. Now Knopf was after her to publish a paperback of some sort to tie in with The French Chef. Her Globe column was always on deadline; there were interviews galore, pleas for more demos. It was all too much to digest at once. Julia was swamped, exhausted. Paul worried constantly that she was “falling apart at the seams.” She pulled any number of muscles, spent long, excruciating nights on a hot pad, nursed saucer-sized blisters, fended off cystitis, “the trots.” Only recently, she had “busted her toe for the second time,” this latest instance due to kicking their venal dishwashing machine. Besides, Julia had to get serious about Mastering II, which she and Simca had begun outlining in earnest. If it was to be anything like their initial blockbuster, it would have to be thorough, momentous—another monster.

  By the time the clamor for Julia’s attention reached its crescendo, however, she and Paul were tucked snugly away at Bramafam, in Provence, where they were consumed by a far more demanding concern: the building of their dream house.

  IT HAD BEEN an ongoing process. Back in 1964, Simca’s husband, Jean, had managed to unsnarl the entails that obstructed their claim on the family property. It had been left to him and his sister by a quirky cousin, along with a pile of debts that had accrued over the years. By paying off the creditors, Jean not only shrank the debt but increased his share in the estate until his sister, much to her chagrin, was entitled to spend only one month a year, in the summer, at Bramafam.

  “So Jean and Simca became lords of the manor,” says Jean-François Thibault, who, with his mother, felt like an interloper during their annual monthly stay. “Simca and Jean moved into the main house and basically did what they wanted with it. Simca redecorated without consulting my mother and made plans to develop the property as she saw fit.”

  Part of her objective was to offer a patch of land on the olive-tree terraces to Paul and Julia, where they could build a small house to use “when they need to get away from it all.” The offer was generous—and complicated. Legally, the Childs would not own the property, but they would pay for all building costs and maintenance of the grounds. “The house will be ours, but revert to them,” Paul explained. If Julia and Paul decided to move on—or if, for whatever reason, the Fischbachers wanted them gone—they’d leave their investment behind.

  Initially, Jean’s sister disapproved
of the arrangements, which he conducted behind her back, but once she was brought into the discussions, she relented. “My mother decided to let Julia build,” recalls Jean-François Thibault. “It was going to be a small house, just for them. We knew the builders, a local family, and we were assured the house would be constructed with old stones and covered with old tiles and would not protrude on the landscape.”

  After much back-and-forth, a blueprint emerged. The structure would be a one-story cottage with French doors that opened onto front and back terraces situated a stone’s throw from the old mas. Shutters on the windows, two fireplaces for warmth. A few olive trees would remain along the gently sloped yard, fortified by new plantings—roses and bougainvillea—“which would be gorgeous in a year or two.” Everyone—the Fischbachers, the Thibaults, and the Childs—signed off happily on the plans.

  “The agreement was made with a handshake,” Julia recalled. “It would be a house built on friendship.”

  Ground was broken in the winter of 1965 and continued, French-style, at an infuriating snail’s pace, throughout the rest of that year. When they saw it in the spring, the foundation was only roughed in—“a shell of cinderblock, concrete, plaster and stones.” Still a work-in-progress, it looked bigger than what they had anticipated, and gave off “a feel of comfort and good proportion.” Even unfinished, Julia thought, the house was “a little jewel.” The setting was pastoral, spiritual, a “psychological island of safety,” and the weather a welcome relief from New England’s glacial constraints. Spring had come early that year thanks to the warm escorting winds off the Mediterranean. “Mimosa trees are in full flower everywhere,” Paul observed, “as are violets, narcissus, quince and almond trees, broom bushes, and blue iris,” which carpeted the berms like a Bonnard landscape.

  Lovely but modest, rustic but enchanting, they decided to call it La Pitchoune—“La Peetch,” for short—which translated loosely as “the little thing.”

  Now, in 1966, it was finished, at last. Julia and Paul had rented a car at the train station in Cannes, and as they came up the winding drive that led from the N-85 into Plascassier, they could see the house in the distance, its lights ablaze to greet them. In their absence, Simca had taken care of everything—everything. There were curtains on the windows made from an old design from Les Baux, lovely bedspreads turned down just so for the night, old French table linens laid out, antique faience plates on the mantel, a wardrobe made from weathered oak door panels. It was everything they had dreamed of, and more, so much more.

  Two days later, just as the mimosas were beginning to bloom, Charlie and Freddie Child arrived to celebrate the Provençal housewarming, and the brothers got Julia’s kitchen up and running. Their first order of business: installing her trademark floor-to-ceiling pegboard with outlines of each object in bold detail “for permanent placement.” The appliances were already primed for cooking. A great old iron Cornue stove with removable rings churned like a locomotive. It gave off a loud, indignant pooooof when first turned on, so forever after Julia referred to it as the Poof. “I cooked a poulet on the Poof,” she would say with affection.

  In the garage stood a Citröen Dix Neuf with automatic transmission that Simca had bought them as a special house gift. A thoughtful and gracious gesture, except that the Childs “absolutely hated it.” It was an ugly metallic-beige color and shaped like a mollusk, which prompted another nickname. “There goes old Clam Face,” Julia would say on the rare days when it was taken out for a drive. But Simca insisted it was “a great car for them,” much as she insisted on all their major decisions at Bramafam.

  “She was a very authoritative woman,” says her nephew, Jean-François, “bossy and inflexible and persistent, like a gendarme.” There was a thoughtful and caring side of her—and a domineering side that ruled like a despot. Julia and Paul were just beginning to appreciate her particular nature. Gradually they came to realize that Simca the pen pal was an entirely different creature than Simca the neighbor. “She knows everything about everything,” Paul complained, soon after taking possession of the new house. He took every human effort to sidestep her blustery conceits. But day in, day out, she busted his chops, issuing instruction after instruction indicating he “knows nothin’ about nothin’.” Julia had encountered some of this behavior before, in the days when the Mastering manuscript was coming down the home stretch. But no matter how overbearing Simca seemed, no matter how infuriatingly arrogant and French her asides, Julia could tolerate her. Paul, on the other hand, was thin-skinned and easily provoked. Steadily, ceaselessly, she began to grate on his nerves. “She’s rather like a French female version of General Patton,” he said. “I can take her for about ten minutes, then my dander begins to rise and I want to shout (you have to shout to be heard above the riveting machine of her voice), ‘In the first place you don’t know what you’re talking about, and in the second place shut up!’ ”

  It would be a house built on friendship.

  Julia both resented Simca’s tenacity and fed off it. She considered Simca an “opinionated French tyrant,” according to a letter written to Avis DeVoto, and became exasperated with her pushy behavior. But their cooking partnership took precedence, and as 1966 lapsed into 1967, they needed to pave the way for Volume II of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Julia had managed to divide the three months at La Pitchoune between settling the house and cooking. Simca was spending more and more time at the little cottage, and from the kitchen surged “a jolly, pleasant symphony—sounds of frying, boiling, chopping, laughter, commingled with the staccato sound of French sputtering out in the air.” It was so essential to keep everything copasetic; no need to scuttle the Mastering juggernaut.

  As weeks passed, as recipes evolved, Paul observed how Julia and Simca “carry on a running battle about food and cooking, but are mutually admiring, appreciative, and non-jealous.” He was astonished by their ability to butt heads over procedure in a way that allowed creativity to prevail. Julia remained the team’s incorrigible scientist, insisting they test and test and retest the variables, but she allowed for Simca’s instinct and spontaneity to make their marks. “Simca knew what to do, last minute, to pump up a dish,” says Judith Jones. “She was always putting one more clove of garlic into a recipe; her food was pungent, lustier. Julia reined her in.” Remarkably, their approaches complemented each other, even as far as temperaments went. “Somehow they manage not to tear out each other’s hair,” Paul concluded, “probably because—in the end—both have their eyes on the target rather than on themselves.”

  The target couldn’t have been any clearer. During the weeks after the New Year, the cooking began in earnest. “The Mad Women of La Peetch,” as they were called, started experimenting with a new vegetable soup recipe and talking, always talking, about the shape of the book. Based on detailed notes that Simca had submitted, Julia had already done “a tentative chapter list” for the book, as well as rough outlines so they had “something concrete to work on.” Rather than meandering all over the culinary spectrum as they’d done in the days before Volume I, this new version would be broken up into seven clearly defined sections: soups, breadmaking, meats, poultry, charcuterie, vegetables, and desserts. “Julia was determined that it contain entirely different dishes from the original book,” recalls Judith Jones, “but with the same basic premise: a realistic approach to French classics for the American cook, with an emphasis on theme and variations.” While Volume I, however, reflected the traditions of French cuisine, Volume II was intended to drag it into the modern era—if necessary, kicking and screaming.

  This time around, the work felt more focused, especially with Louisette comfortably out of the picture. They’d come to appreciate the old axiom: two’s company, three’s a crowd—especially in this case, where each cook’s contribution was critical to the success of the book. For many reasons, Louisette just hadn’t been up to the challenge, and her cooking, alone, was enough to exclude her. Julia always put a more gracious spin on it, sayin
g that Louisette’s tumultuous personal life required that she devote her time to family. In fact, as Julia and Paul moved into La Pitchoune, Louisette’s personal life roared anew.

  As Paul recounted it, “her monster of an [ex-]husband piled up debts of some 90,000 francs and then skipped the country to avoid payment. He’s now living in Spain where he’s already fathered several bastard children.” The scandale might have ended at Paul Bertholle’s doorstep were it not for French law, which mandated that a husband and wife who own joint property are jointly or singly responsible for accrued debts and taxes from the marriage. The very day Julia’s Time cover story hit the Paris kiosks, fiscal agents descended on Louisette to grill her, her concierge, and her friends about L’École des Trois Gourmandes—the purpose of the school, the number of students, and the fees earned by the teachers.

  Under no circumstances could she declare her Mastering royalties, all of which would have been seized by revenue agents as collateral against the debts. So Julia paid Louisette’s share into Simca’s account and cash was passed secretly to their erstwhile colleague.

  Unfortunately, that wasn’t the extent of Louisette’s troubles. “Her hands are so twisted by arthritis,” Paul recalled, “that she can hardly lift a glass of water, much less a casserole.” She was due to get married for a third time, in March 1967, to Count Henri de Nalèche, making Louisette une comtesse, but the titles were deceiving. Count Henri had property near Bourges where woodsmen would assemble to hunt pheasant or take part in the sport of la vénerie, or stag hunting, but according to Paul, he had practically no money to his name. “They are both lonely, not too well, and reaching out for the dying embers of love before it is too late.”