by Bob Spitz
The skit was an immediate hit and a tape copy eventually found its way to 103 Irving Street. As a rule, Julia wasn’t inclined to like parodies. For one thing, she took her cooking seriously, and for another, she didn’t think she sounded unusual. Because any mimic immediately went for the voice, her reaction was usually unenthusiastic. But something about Aykroyd’s performance struck her funnybone, most likely the darkness of it, the blood and twitchy death.
“For years she played that tape for any guest who visited,” says Stephanie Hersh, who later became Julia’s personal assistant, “or pantomimed it herself while preparing a roast chicken.” Time and again, Julia would hold up a giblet, yell “Save the liver!” and collapse across the counter, writhing in laughter.
WORK SEEMED TO energize Julia’s spirits, and at sixty-seven there was no evidence of a slowdown. She was constantly on the go. If she was thwarted by the crush of obligations it didn’t show. In fact, when WGBH offered to renew Julia Child and Company, she jumped at the chance, even though it required a staggering amount of work.
Before production on the new series, More Company, could start, Julia had to create enough menus to fill thirteen shows. She could no longer rely solely on Simca’s family dishes or simplifying the contents of Mastering I and II. This necessitated developing her own mouthwatering recipes, which “meant much research and testing,” too much work even for one tireless dynamo. It literally became a function of Julia Child and Company—a team of semiprofessionals she assembled to streamline the process. Two women were holdovers from the first series: Rosie Manell, a talented painter Julia knew from the early days in Paris who did what was now called styling, arranging food artistically on the plate; and Liz Bishop, the staff’s resident “wild woman and party girl,” whose outrageous tongue and infectious laugh kept things lighthearted but on track. Unfortunately, neither of the women cooked, so “two professional chefs joined the team,” Julia noted, although professional was a bit of a stretch. Sara Moulton “had no formal training” other than a degree from the Culinary Institute of America and two years of prep work at “dusty, old, not-great restaurants” in Boston. And her co-worker was none other than Russ Morash’s once-cooking-illiterate wife, Marian, who, through Julia, had become an inventive, resourceful cook.
“There were no pros back then,” Moulton recalls. “You were either good or you weren’t good. You learned on the job, and we were competent, we were professional enough.”
As a cook, Julia could be a taskmaster and perfectionist; as a team leader, she was an incorrigible mother hen. Each morning, as her crew assembled in the studio kitchen, she’d say, “Let’s start with a little apéritif,” pouring out tumblers of white vermouth “to steady the hands.” After the little apéritif—or two—they’d get down to work. Julia began by providing a template—say, a vegetarian menu—and sketched out scenarios for appropriate dishes. She had a notebook just chock-full of half-formed recipes that she gathered from years of travels, and from these sketches a dish began to emerge. For instance, she might say, “I’ve got this idea for a gâteau of crêpes with vegetables and cheese.” There would be some discussion about it, and everyone would contribute to build the dish. Gradually a recipe would evolve.
“We’d all work on it separately,” recalls Marian Morash, who was given the title of executive chef. “It would go through many incarnations. Then we’d go give it a shot, we’d make it together, and finally taste it with the rest of the volunteers.”
“There was a chocolate bombe cake that we did thirteen times before we even liked it,” recalls Sara Moulton, elevated in the hierarchy to executive associate. “But ultimately Julia would have the last word.” She’d usually say, “You know, dearie, I like it, but it still needs … ” and she’d name a few ingredients that brought everything into sharp focus. “She always had a vision,” Moulton says. “There was just one way to do it, and it had to be the best way. She was an absolute perfectionist. She knew what she wanted, or she found out what she wanted in the process.”
Julia Child and More Company was an all-out group effort. The team worked on a breakneck schedule—cooking four, sometimes five, days a week in time to make the rigorous shoot, which taped at WGBH on Wednesday afternoons. There was always added pressure weighing on the production, the result of a tyrannical imperative imposed by Russ Morash, whom Julia nicknamed “the Ayatollah.” In the intervening years Morash had flourished at the station, bringing in The Victory Garden and This Old House among other hits, and the status made him a demanding stickler. But the kitchen atmosphere was never anything but relaxed. Julia reveled in the new group experience. “This past week we did cassoulet,” she wrote Simca halfway through the run, “and we all had so much fun cooking together to get everything ready.” Having help took the pressure off, allowed her to concentrate on the script for the show.
Besides, she practically had her hands full with Paul. He was doing well, she acknowledged, “he gets along, he functions,” but, alas, “he was not,” as she put it, “remarkable in the head.” It was futile, in the long run, to expect much improvement. “Mentally, he is no better, and never will be,” she realized. The stroke had destroyed key elements of Paul’s personality, but he was also seventy-eight, old and fragile. The evidence was everywhere now: his buckled posture, the way he lost his train of thought, nodded off at the table, intimidated guests. Physically, he was thinner, his gait an unsteady shamble. He was less able than ever to care for himself. “Up to now, Paul had looked after everything for Julia,” says Anne Willan, “the business, the travel, the what-restaurant-should-we-go-to, the finances. From one day to the next, she took over all of that.”
She couldn’t afford to take her eyes off him for a moment. Even with all the work piling up, Paul’s welfare was a full-time job. “After that,” says Willan, “Julia always had a minder, always a friend enlisted to stay by his side.” Julia understood what the situation called for: she needed someone nearby who could turn a blind eye to his afflictions but also handle the frustration that ensued. “It was always a happy person who could jolly him along,” says Sheryl Julian, “someone who, after a particularly rude outburst, could laugh and say, ‘Oh Paul, you are such a character.’ ”
Whether Julia admitted it to herself or not, Paul was becoming a liability. During the shooting of a TV segment for “Summer Dinner,” he flew into a rage, demanding to taste the salmon she was making and walking into the frame. Later that spring, at a dinner with important California winemakers, he stormed out of a restaurant in Santa Barbara, shouting, “This place is too dark! I can’t see the menu!”
Nevertheless, Julia refused to let the difficulties with Paul slow down her professional life. Julia Child, as a phenomenon, was growing bigger and bigger, even as her personal life was growing more fraught. And yet, despite widening opportunities, she was determined more than ever to keep Paul at her side. “He had brought out something in Julia that she never dreamed was there,” says Marian Morash, “and I had the feeling she was eternally grateful and would never abandon him, no matter what.” A thirteen-city tour for Julia Child and More Company in the winter of 1979–80 was scheduled strategically to provide significant downtime for Paul. But as Julia’s appearances ballooned from drawing hundreds to several thousand, more events were added, booked back-to-back, with local talk shows and newspaper interviews sandwiched in the gaps. The schedule was punishing, but irresistible. Paul was just going to have to cope. More publicity meant bigger book sales, which had become the Childs’ sole means of income.
Recently, Julia had grown concerned about maintaining her clout, which drew sharply into focus in the aftermath of More Company. The trouble had begun before the show went on the air, when WGBH first announced it to the PBS affiliates. If it had been commercial TV—CBS, NBC, or ABC—they would have demanded the show be run by local stations on a specific day and time—or else. PBS, however, didn’t work that way. Their affiliates in the educational network were independent to a fault, and th
ey’d broadcast Julia’s program whenever they damn well pleased. And that wasn’t limited to which day of the week they showed it. “Often, a particular market might put it on a month or two later,” says Russ Morash, “a detail that Julia never understood.”
The way she saw it, she and her entire team were on the road, promoting the hell out of it, and the show wasn’t on the air in key markets. “We just killed ourselves,” she fumed to a reporter covering the tour. “But PBS—I don’t know whether they forgot we taped it or what, but it never even got on in New York, and if you’re not on in New York, you ain’t nowhere.” She was hopping mad that several stations made out their seasonal schedules without adding Julia Child and More Company. She’d put in long days and weeks getting the series on the air. “I’m not going to go into that kind of thing and have it just lay an egg. That’s a damn good book, and they were damn good shows and very original recipes. So I’m through, frankly.”
In fact, New York and every major market eventually ran More Company, but too late, too late, as far as Julia cared. That was it for PBS! She made nothing for doing those shows, “not so much as five bucks” she could bank; whatever budget they gave her went toward food and expenses. She earned a living selling books; it was quid pro quo. The show sold the book, simple as that. Knopf certainly wasn’t happy about the turn of events. “I’m not even sure we would have done the book if we’d known there was no TV,” Judith Jones says in retrospect. “In any event, its sales were a bit of a disappointment.”
PBS, as far as Julia was concerned, had let her down, left her vulnerable. After all she had done for it! Loyalty issues aside, the economics alone galled her. While she earned virtually nothing from WGBH, she had given the station 20 percent of her companion cookbook royalties out of the goodness of her heart. Knopf, her publisher, underwrote the subsequent tour. The least WGBH could have done was made sure she was on the air. Something wasn’t equitable, that much was for sure. In a year or so she’d be seventy. She needed to take better care of herself, to look to the future. The way she saw it, PBS no longer had her best interests at heart. “This is THE END, finito,” she groused to Simca.
Julia Child, supernova, was headed elsewhere.
ON A SPRINGLIKE afternoon in April 1980, George Merlis was sitting in his cubicle overlooking Broadway when his boss, Woody Fraser, poked his head inside.
“What do you think of Julia Child joining the Family?” he asked.
Merlis bolted upright in his chair. “I think it’s the greatest idea ever,” he replied. “Can we get her?”
Merlis was in charge of expandng the Family, and, no, he wasn’t reporting to Carlo Gambino or Vito Genovese. His family was a ragtag group of noted personalities who made weekly appearances on Good Morning America, ABC’s news-variety entry that ran head-to-head against the almighty Today show. Since 1978, when GMA first went on the air, they’d been recruiting Family associates like greedy dons. So far they had enlisted Rona Barrett, who contributed Hollywood gossip; author Erma Bombeck, who did a twice-weekly humor segment; Dr. Tim Johnson, who was beamed in from Boston whenever there was medical news; F. Lee Bailey, “who would stagger onto the set drunk as a skunk” for a legal briefing; Alvin Ubell, who instructed viewers on home repair; and Arthur Miller from the New York University Law School.
Merlis, GMA’s executive producer, salivated over adding Julia to that mix. Whatever pizzazz the Family brought to the show, Julia Child, he thought, would bring more, and in spades. He mentioned the possibility to Joan Lunden, who had recently been elevated to full-time host.
Lunden felt it would be a real coup for the show. “We were looking for star power,” she says. “As well known as David Hartman and I were, Julia was that times a thousand. She was someone who would help put us over the top.”
In any case, Good Morning America needed to spruce up its food segments. Over the last few years, the country had whetted its appetite for good, inventive cooking—or, at least, a reasonable facsimile of what they imagined it to be. Food—cuisine—was storming the mainstream culture, and television was, in large measure, carrying the flag. You could turn on any channel at any time in the morning and encounter a chef demonstrating a picture-perfect dish. GMA had already featured a dozen or so visiting cooks, but no one who measured up to Family standards. They’d used a couple of promising unknowns—Wolfgang Puck and Emeril Lagasse, for example, who, at that point in their careers, lacked TV personalities without the payoff of a permanent spot. “And they were nervous,” says Lunden. “We had to walk them through their segments. Whereas Julia was a wonderfully funny personality and radiated more confidence than anyone I’d ever met.”
But could they get her? The question lingered. A weekly appearance was out of the question. Julia couldn’t commute from Boston to New York with that kind of frequency; it would exhaust her and there was Paul to think of. She refused to consider the job without him by her side, so convenience would have to be in the details. Merlis had the logistics all worked out. He suggested she come in once a month, do a live segment, and tape four or five others, which they’d spread over the intervening weeks; they’d have her back to Boston on an afternoon plane. Physically, Julia could handle that, but it wasn’t humanly possible to prep six dishes in one day. Six dishes meant cooking each recipe at least three or four times so that viewers would be able to see every stage of the process: assembling the raw ingredients, cooking them, and the finished product. GMA rehearsed at 6:30 in the morning and went on the air at 7 sharp. To be ready, she’d have to start cooking just after midnight.
There was a solution for that, too: Sara Moulton. She was young, ambitious, and extremely capable. They’d put her on the payroll to take care of the prep. That way, Julia could walk into the studio at 6:15, ready to roll. As for payment, they offered a king’s ransom—that is, compared to Julia’s take at WGBH. She’d get $605 per appearance, plus expenses. And think of all the books it would sell! Julia was still haunted by the hardest fact of celebrity: “As soon as you’re off television, in a few months nobody will know who you are.” This was network, coast-to-coast, five times a month.
Julia Child had been gotten.
IF JULIA HAD been seen as slightly wacky on her PBS shows, she really let it rip on Good Morning America. She came to cook and teach, her parallel raisons d’être, but also to polish and promote the Julia Child persona. It was no secret, especially to Julia, that her audience loved the “unintentional” humor. They still talked about the time she held up withering baguettes, referring to them as “limp ones” as they began to droop and shrivel. “You really want a stiff one,” she said, winking. Or tossed things over her shoulder that she deemed shoddy. And now she was prepared to play it for all it was worth. If there was anything she hated more than dour, pretentious cooks, it was taking herself too seriously.
“I don’t think we were prepared for how funny she was,” says David Hartman, who often served as Julia’s on-screen foil. “She’d blurt things out that had the whole place in stitches, and we were never sure whether she knew what she’d said.”
But she did. There was method to the madness. “Julia loved the double entendres,” says Moulton. “She went out of her way to make them. Above all, she knew what would get a laugh and how to milk it. And she was always aware where the line was drawn so as not to cross it.”
Joan Lunden sensed something was up almost immediately after Julia joined the Family. In the midst of a Thanksgiving demo, Julia’s eyes developed a mutinous gleam. “She grabbed that turkey’s legs and she just spread ’em for the camera,” Lunden recalls. It was wonderfully obscene—and funny as hell. A subsequent eggnog segment devolved into a raucous wing-ding when Julia’s heavy hand laid on the rum. All morning through rehearsal she kept lavishing the bottle so that by the time they went on the air everyone was “incredibly giggly.”
“Whenever we did spots that used any kind of alcohol, she just grabbed that bottle and poured,” says Hartman. “And then poured more—more. The
re was no stopping her.”
You couldn’t tame Julia Child. “Americans, as a race, are too timid,” she told Lunden, “especially when it comes to what they put in their mouths.” One of her pet peeves was the country’s phobia regarding fat. Real butter and cream were essential to good cooking, irreplaceable, and critics be damned. Despite the health and exercise revolution currently in high swing, “Julia would come into the studio and pour a whole pitcher of cream into a recipe.” Or bind a sauce with three or four tablespoons of butter. No matter how often one of the hosts admonished her, she would argue, “A little fat is not going to hurt you. In fact, we need it in our diet.” And when they didn’t outwardly endorse that message, she’d cock an eye and add: “You could use a little yourself, dearie.”
The audience loved her “wicked ways,” and so did the network. “No one here minded that her act bordered on the risqué,” says George Merlis. Still, they assigned a special line producer “to keep a rein on her—just in case.”
Sonya Selby-Wright was a “tough, hyper-efficient Brit” who was in charge of Family and ran her segments the way a drill sergeant might run a squad of new recruits. She was a short, reed-thin woman with a laser stare that gave her face the waspish cast of a Gothic gargoyle. One well-placed look could snap the entire crew to attention. Although intensely dedicated to the show’s split-second timetable, Selby-Wright’s measured, orderly hand brought composure to the everyday chaos. “When it came to Family,” Merlis says, “she knew innately how to juggle those trained seals.”
Selby-Wright had one rule she stood by: no one came on GMA unprepared. The segments were relatively short—three, four minutes at the most—and every second was precious gold. By contrast, Julia’s on-air persona was fly-by-the-seat-of-her-pants, hoping things came together at the last moment. But Selby-Wright knew the best performers gave that impression while knowing their material cold. As a result, she and Julia hit it off from the get-go.
