Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child

by Bob Spitz

  In any case, Louisette would continue to glean income from Mastering’s strong legs, and now from another source, as well: The French Chef Cookbook. Knopf had decided that launching a tie-in with the TV series was too good a publishing opportunity to pass up and rushed a compendium of its recipes from the 119 shows into print. Most everything in the book had a familiar provenance: they were simplified versions of the lessons in Mastering, and Julia felt an obligation to Simca and Louisette, cutting them in for a piece of the royalties. It would be a cushy payday for everyone concerned. Julia got an advance of $25,000—ten times what she received for Mastering—more than enough to spread around. Even Ruth Lockwood and WGBH were given a modest cut.

  Knopf had an idea of the book’s potential. For one thing, it had a built-in audience; there were now more than a million viewers who tuned in regularly to the show. And for another, a brilliant spokesperson to sell it: Julia Child. It was the perfect combination to assure its success. Judith Jones had extremely high hopes as she made her presentation to Robert Gottlieb, Knopf’s new editor-in-chief. They were on their way to lunch to discuss the book’s marketing plan when Gottlieb hesitated at the corner of Madison Avenue and Fifty-first Street. “How many copies are you printing?” he inquired offhand. Jones, a product of Knopf’s conservative approach, was reluctant to admit that she’d gone for broke. “Forty thousand,” she mumbled, hoping he’d somehow approve. Gottlieb wheeled on her. “Are you insane?” he bellowed. Jones hung back. Unyielding, Gottlieb bore down on her. “That’s not nearly enough. Look at what we’ve got.”

  They were in a new era, influenced by television and publicity, he explained. It was essential, critical, they take advantage of all the elements. Gottlieb, who’d come to Knopf from high-rolling Simon and Schuster, had his sights set on a bolder publishing model than the cautious one his new boss had employed. “Bob was a publisher of this world,” Jones deduced, “while Alfred was a publisher of the old world.” Over lunch he boosted the initial print run for The French Chef Cookbook to 100,000 copies, with the presses poised to reprint without delay.

  Julia had emerged as a powerhouse on Knopf’s list, joining John Updike and V. S. Naipaul among their surefire bestsellers. This wasn’t small-time publishing anymore. A six-figure print run put her in the same league as Arthur Hailey, Ira Levin, and Helen Gurley Brown. She could sell books merely by staying on TV and cooperating with all the requests for interviews. The Time article had, in Paul’s words, “blasted Mastering off the pad,” and now The French Chef Cookbook was set to launch into the stratosphere.

  Julia had also taken on another culinary book project. With great fanfare, Time-Life announced it would publish Foods of the World, a series of eight lavishly illustrated volumes, each tied to an international cuisine. If Knopf’s take on the business was either old or new world, this model was out of this world, with a projected print run of half a million, and a budget that knew no bounds. Money was no object. They’d hired the best food writers, cooking teachers, and experts in the field to give the work a prestigious as well as an authoritative glow, polished by Time-Life’s resources for presenting stylized spectacle.

  The publisher’s resources also made it difficult for the culinary world’s brightest stars to refuse its extravagant fees. Everyone signed on for a piece of the literary pie: James Beard “staged cooking classes for the Time-Life production team and acted as a general adviser”; M. F. K. Fisher, whose gorgeous prose, witty and sensual gastronomical books, and nuanced columns in The New Yorker earned her John Updike’s designation as “a poet of the appetites,” promised to write copy; the British kitchen diva Elizabeth David provided recipes and technical guidance; and the prize catch in the team: none other than Julia Child. Julia, who was basically lured by the $1,500-a-month premium and her gratitude to Time, agreed to act as consultant for the first volume, The Cooking of Provincial France, with the understanding that she “only had to read over everything,” “to make sure what the writers have written is correct”—nothing more. The heavy lifting would be done by the book’s editor, Michael Field.

  Field, after all, had made quite a name for himself as the self-styled gastronome-of-the-moment on the New York food scene. He’d toiled as a concert pianist of some renown; had proved himself socially and politically clever; was an exceptional cook; had a fat Rolodex of top-shelf connections; and, best of all, knew James Beard, who had recommended he be appointed to the post at Time-Life. Even though he wasn’t rooted in cooking, there was plenty on Field’s résumé to vouch for his standing. Advocates like Beard considered him “serious” and “passionate,” “an uncompromising traditionalist,” with “a knowledge of cooking that was encyclopedic.” He had a Manhattan-based cooking school whose pupils became devoted acolytes. And his gravitas landed him a column at The New York Review of Books, where he lionized cookbooks and their authors in arch academic tones.

  But his prominence, however, had nothing to do with natural gifts. It had to do with ambition: Michael Field was as slick as they came.

  “He had a flair, he was dramatic,” recalls Judith Jones, “and ruthless.” There was nothing he wouldn’t do, no string he wouldn’t pull, to throw a spotlight on his ascending star. No one wanted a position of power and influence more than Field. “He had to be Mr. Food, the authority, the ultimate word,” says Michael Batterberry, who, with his wife, would eventually launch Food & Wine. Very intense, the way a panther was intense, Field made sweeping statements that were often meant more to provoke than to inform. “Cooks are not creative,” he told a journalist from Time, “they’re simply brilliant technicians.” Needless to say, that didn’t endear him to his peers, who bridled at his swollen theories. “He was an arriviste, another difficult spider,” says Batterberry, “brilliant but ultimately so damn destructive.”

  Julia, to her credit, saw right through his act. She had heard from Judith Jones that “Field was kind of crazy” and tracked the rumblings from his cooking-school classes from one ado to the next. “They were wild,” according to a reliable observer. He was hyperkinetic in the kitchen, doing demo after demo at warp speed, prompting students to plead, “Please, please, just do one thing at a time.” Another commentator said “he was almost fascistic” in his approach to hands-on culinary technique. Field “did not sentimentalize or romanticize food.” Unlike Julia, he urged his students not to wash mushrooms, devein shrimp, or press garlic. She sensed he was “a romantic who got himself into the big-time before he was quite ready.” Still, despite these misgivings, she signed on as his consultant for Volume One and let him move into La Peetch while he edited the book.

  The Time-Life project got the culinary community excited. On the one hand, it was confirmation that their discipline had finally catapulted into the big time. Such attention elevated serious cooking from a quaint niche to a runaway trend, with a corporate imprimatur and corporate resources to fuel it. First the Time-Life media monolith put Julia on the cover of Time and now it was primed to launch her colleagues, as well. “They pumped so much money into this thing,” says Michael Batterberry, “and everyone was feeding off it, financially as well as professionally.”

  But it also created rivalries and, with them, internal politics. “Alliances were being formed,” says Barbara Kafka, who was writing culinary articles for Vogue and Ladies’ Home Journal. Movements such as cooking required articulate spokesmen and characters to fire up the public enthusiasm. “Big personalities with big ideas began to surface—cooks and cooking experts, but also visionaries and self-promoters—and how one advanced often depended on who one’s friends and mentors were.”

  There were two primary camps that vied for power: “the Jim camp and the Craig camp—and they were far apart,” says an informed observer. There was no love lost between James Beard and Craig Claiborne. Onetime friends, there had been a gradual falling-out over real and imagined slights. Beard had helped Claiborne get his first job at Gourmet and introduced him around the scene to the heavyweights who could he
lp his career. But after Claiborne rose to power as the Times’s indomitable food critic, some say he “minimized Jim as an unsophisticated cook” and often claimed Beard took credit for recipes that weren’t his. Personally, they had vastly different styles. They were both gay, both gentlemen who craved a loyal coterie. “But there was something cold and southern WASPish about Craig,” says an acquaintance. “At parties, he restrained himself until he had enough to drink, and then he could get quite nasty.” James was “a larger than life personality,” says a colleague, more outgoing than Claiborne—but also more volcanic. “He could be a monster, just beyond the pale, but he loved people who were complex, difficult, and did something differently.”

  In the end, their incompatibility came down to cooking styles. Claiborne, who had been trained at L’École Hôtelière de la Sociéte Suisse des Hôteliers in Lausanne, thought “French cuisine was not simply a taste preference but the gold standard of food against which everything might be judged.” Beard was the acknowledged “dean of American cookery.” They were as different as quenelles were to chicken potpie.

  Even so, one had to choose sides. Jim’s inner circle was Helen McCully, the influential food editor at McCall’s; José Wilson from House & Garden; Sam and Florence Aaron, the owners of Sherry-Lehmann wines; Jacques Pépin; Barbara Kafka; and Madhur Jaffrey, whose upscale Indian cuisine was attracting huge attention. Craig’s camp was Pierre Franey; writer Bryan Miller; Mexican chef Zarela Martínez; and Dorothea Elman, a Brazilian designer who cooked wonderful Latin-inspired recipes.

  Julia was careful to straddle both scenes. She was fond of Jim Beard, whom she described as “always just darling,” and continued to teach, every chance, at his cooking school in New York. “Their affinities for honest food transcended differences in their styles,” wrote one Beard biographer, and to some extent their styles coalesced. In addition to trading the latest culinary information, Jim and Julia shared a love of gossip, which they practiced almost as much as essential knife-work. Craig Claiborne, on the other hand, eluded her. “He is sort of hard to get at,” Julia explained in an interview. “He’s kind of a loner. He’s not helpful, but he’s not inimical at all.” In fact, it was a reckless statement, considering “he was the most influential voice” in the media and his review of Mastering practically launched her career.

  Coincidentally, it was Claiborne and Julia, the two francophiles, who first became disenchanted with the Foods of the World series. From almost the get-go, Julia regretted committing to the project, which seemed “totally commercial,” more flash than substance. “I wish I hadn’t said I would act as consultant for the Time-Life books with Michael Field!” she wrote to Simca, as early as June 1966. To Avis, she wrote, “He is a dabbler, I think, a charmer, a wordmonger, a butterfly, and ambitious.” Her “misgiving tremors” were confirmed by others watching from the sidelines. According to M. F. K. Fisher, who had ensconced herself at Bramafam during the research for the book, Field, now at La Pitchoune, was in over his head. The number of volumes under his stewardship had ballooned from eight to eighteen, making him “terribly high-strung and somewhat unstable,” she feared. Meanwhile, there was every indication “he seemed to have a cooking block.” Fisher, “because she was nosy,” had stolen across the lawn to gauge his progress and found the refrigerator at La Peetch practically empty. “How can you allow someone to edit cookbooks who doesn’t cook?” she wondered. Especially when it was Field’s job to test all the recipes.

  By November 1966 Julia had her own sad proof. “The recipes for the Time-Life French cookbook arrived,” she wrote to Simca, and the verdict was in: “They are awful.” The recipes were riddled with “an inordinate number of errors.” Most, she felt, were a “hodgepodge,” demonstrating “tremendous incompetence and incomprehension,” while many were lifted outright from Mastering and others. Perhaps an even greater offense, the book “had no zing.”

  Aside from the evident disappointment conveyed by letter to her usual pen pals, Julia was tightlipped on the subject. She followed the same rule of conduct that guided her through cooking disappointments: to never acknowledge or apologize for them. Claiborne, however, exercised no such restraint. In his New York Times review of The Cooking of Provincial France, timed to appear on the very day of its book-launch party, he excoriated Field for his slipshod work and called the book “the most dubious sample of the regional cooking of France.” Field, who’d ceded much of the project to consulting editors, responded in kind in an article for McCall’s, trashing Claiborne’s beloved French restaurants. Back and forth it went like that, each response turning up the pitch, while the food community looked on with glee.

  Months later, it was announced with great fanfare that Pierre Franey, the former chef at Le Pavillon, had signed a deal with Time-Life to provide a volume on classic French cuisine for the Foods of the World series. Claiborne let it be known that he wished to be Franey’s collaborator, an unusual request considering the long paper trail of criticism he’d left. Pundits saw it as strong-arming the publisher; in effect, they “had no choice but to agree.” A generous contract was signed, and outlines were approved, before they introduced Claiborne to his editor: for this volume they were bringing back Michael Field.

  In the ensuing food fight, Julia Child remained above the fray. There was plenty for her to enjoy in the political intrigue, but there was plenty to distract also. She let the food community’s shenanigans amuse her, but with all the recognition she had received—from her loyal fan base, the magazine profiles, the Emmy, the Time cover—she saw a different role for herself, not scrapping with colleagues for notice and stature, but as an authority, the cooking authority, someone who was doing this for the greater good rather than for fame or wealth. She kept her eye on her public, letting them see that she was serious about the food, but also about herself. Trust became an issue: for her audience to maintain their trust in her, as a teacher and entertainer but also a public figure, she couldn’t push an agenda, she couldn’t profit from endorsements, she couldn’t pick fights. Her authenticity depended on it. Not only would she win the respect of the public, but the respect of the food community as well.

  The culinary world had found its star.

  Twenty

  A Household Name

  By the end of 1967, the Mastering II sweepstakes was off and running, with Julia and Simca sprinting through recipes at a breakneck pace. Their respective Bramafam kitchens, organized like laboratories in a research compound, were always cauldrons of enterprise, with big, heaping platters of meats and vegetables covering the counters and six stovetop burners perpetually chugging away. Dishes in various stages of deconstruction teetered on windowsills and chairs and atop one another, leading one visitor to describe the scene as “the spoils of a gastronomic orgy.” Through clouds of steam at La Pitchoune, a leggy, hulking figure in a grimy apron, a pencil stub poking out from behind an ear, conducted a raucous symphony of pots and pans that sputtered and hissed like a Bruckner motet. Usually, Julia had three or four preparations going fortissimo at all times. She would concentrate on one recipe, while the others simmered, unattended, on their way to pulsing finales. For instance, in one pot she might begin boiling the tails and claws from a half-dozen lobsters for a main dish, homard à l’américaine, while in a stockpot, the chests, legs, and assorted “trash” parts were infusing a lobster bisque. In a frying pan, a mound of chopped shells in fat might sizzle for—what?—she hadn’t decided yet. Even the Waring blender provided percussion, grinding a solution of tiny legs in a reddish-yellow froth that would develop into lobster butter. All represented only the first movement of testing. During an initial run, she might ignore the trace amount of meat from the legs, while the next day reconsider, cutting through them and squeezing out every last fleck with a rolling pin. Every recipe, fanned out like a conductor’s sheet music, would be cooked and recooked umpteen times. Julia worked through each set of instructions quickly but methodically, sampling and seasoning and making notes as she went.<
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  With (from left) Jean Fischbacher, Simca’s cook, Charlie Child, and Simca outside La Pitchoune (Photo credit 20.1)

  Julia had always worked that way. Her earliest marginalia for Mastering II illustrate the struggle between recipes and technique, between instinct and precision. She wasn’t about to subordinate her reliance on fundamentals to the unpredictable whims of the stove. The perfect recipe depended on what she called the operational proof. Trial and error, error and trial: there were no shortcuts.

  However, in the burst of cooking that kick-started the book, Julia confronted an old problem. “I cannot trust Simca’s recipes at all,” she lamented. Once again, her co-writer’s approach to the kitchen work was formless, erratic. Simca used the very methods—“unscientific, instinctive, verbal, and almost totally unbelieving in research, notes, order, [and] classical sources”—that Julia fought hardest to suppress. “Simca pays no attention to anything Julia tells her about all the researches she’s done, the findings of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or the careful scientific comparisons she’s made,” Paul grumbled in a letter to his brother. Indiscriminately he added: “She drives me nuts!”

  Julia, who never edited his missives, resented his stinging characterization of her partner and asked Paul to modify his remarks. It was true that Simca’s cooking technique frustrated her no end. They even set the new book’s schedule back weeks, if not months. But she reminded him that Simca, while infuriating, wasn’t incompetent; she was a “real half” of the Mastering team, with her own indispensable contribution. No partnership was perfect. Simca might have “zero interest” in the research, but deep down Julia knew that Simca was a pure cook—which she was not.