Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child

by Bob Spitz

  Even Sara Moulton had to pay her dues. Despite the fact that Moulton had graduated from the Culinary Institute of America, worked two cooking jobs in Boston—as the manager of a catering operation and chef at a restaurant called Cybelle’s—and had served as executive associate for Julia Child and Company, Julia was convinced she needed more formal training if she were to get anywhere in the professional culinary world. She never came out and told Moulton as much. Instead, she said, “Dearie, everybody should go to France.” Next thing Moulton knew, Julia had consigned her to an apprenticeship with a French two-star chef. “Her idea was that I go over and do a petit stage,” Moulton recalls. “He would pay for my room and board, and I would work for free. At the time, I was a chef at a restaurant in Boston, and he wouldn’t even let me work the line. And he chased me around on my day off.” Didn’t mean a thing to Julia Child. When Moulton complained later on that she’d been fed to the lions, Julia replied, “Dearie, what did you expect? They’re all like that. Get over it.” In her eyes, it had been a wonderful opportunity for a young, ambitious woman to learn, learn, learn.

  Years later, Julia would refer Sara to a job at Chez Panisse, but in 1982 that restaurant was well off her radar. Still, she loved the fact that young people were interested in cooking. “No one was more encouraged by the new young wave,” says Anne Willan. “Julia was their greatest and loudest cheerleader, even if she was unconvinced that their experience was sufficient.” Despite the few talented artists who caught her attention, Julia suggested wannabes take up classic French training—advice that left most aghast. While their brash creations brought public attention, they reinforced Julia’s impression that California cuisine was a craze that would stay fresh only as long as a squash blossom in July.

  In the ensuing upheaval, Julia retreated to the sidelines. Rather than grapple with the new young upstarts, she became the food editor of Parade, the Sunday magazine supplement in hundreds of newspapers, where she proposed to blend French technique with “free-style American cooking” for the new generation of eager home cooks. The position served two burning purposes: the creative urge and visibility. First and foremost, Julia considered herself a teacher, and at last she had the forum to deliver a detailed and methodical weekly lesson. Space was not an issue; she could write as long and as freely as she wished. And a team of first-rate photographers was on board to capture every step of the process. The layouts were beautiful, attention-getting. Best of all, Parade delivered the kind of weekly audience that most writers only dream about. “They have, at present, a circulation of twenty-one million!” she reported to Simca. It would do more than keep her name in the spotlight—it would sell books! Recently, both Masterings had “fallen off in royalties.” A weekly column would go a long way toward reviving the franchise and keep Julia Child a top-flight brand.

  But it had never been entirely about the money for Julia. Visibility meant power, the power to make a difference by using her persona for broader concerns, beyond the world of books and television. The election of Ronald Reagan had rekindled her political activism. His well-marked agenda echoed her father’s arch-conservatism, but it was more than that. “It was her deep-rooted liberal disposition,” says Judith Jones, often privy to Julia’s political tirades. “She hated where the Republicans were taking the country, driving a stake between the left and the right. And she blamed Reagan for widening the divide.” It gnawed at her insides. Everything about him seemed like a slap in the face, not the least of which was his immediate reach. The Reagans had a getaway, Rancho del Cielo, in the hills behind Julia’s apartment in Montecito and Nancy was, of all things, a Smith grad.

  The final insult came when Reagan stepped up his opposition to abortion. For the past few years, Julia had been supporting her favorite charity, Planned Parenthood, through a series of appearances and demonstrations. Her reasons for aiding the organization are difficult to assess. “To me, it’s always been about the wanted child,” she said. And yet it wasn’t as though she had been around a lot of impoverished people who couldn’t handle their kids or around anybody whose life was ruined by having kids. For Julia, this conviction that she had was a purely intellectual one. She believed in a woman’s autonomy, in a woman’s having control of her own decisions. She had always made her own decisions, and from a young age she had always charted her own course, often in defiance of expectations and her father’s wishes for her. She strongly believed that women, in general, knew what was best for themselves and had the right to control their own fates. “If we really supported Planned Parenthood,” she said, “we wouldn’t have need for abortions. People would be educated and think a little before they had a child.”

  In any case, the more the opposition to abortion mounted, the more engaged Julia became. In April 1982, she staged a three-day fund-raiser at the Holiday Inn in Memphis, holding cooking classes to benefit the local chapter. This was the first time she’d ever met opposition. Each day, as she arrived at the hotel, a small group of protesters, women holding babies in their arms, converged around her. They chanted and waved signs that read if you had your way i wouldn’t have been born. Julia was too startled or too tactful to confront them. “It was not the place to make a scene,” she said, although she later described the encounter as “pathetic and infuriating.”

  She wasn’t naïve. She knew abortion was a controversial issue. But Julia didn’t give a damn about what other people thought. Instead of letting the matter die quietly, as most prominent figures would, she went on the offensive, taking it public. On July 15, 1982, a letter appeared nationally in the syndicated “Dear Abby” column. In it, Julia explained the situation in Memphis and her contempt for the women who picketed the event. “I did want to ask them this,” she wrote. “ ‘What are your plans for these children once they are born? Are you going to help provide, for instance, for the child of a retarded 13-year-old daughter of a syphilitic prostitute? Or what of a tubercular and abandoned welfare mother who already has six children?’

  “These are extreme cases, of course, but there are plenty of them, and these are our future citizens who, for the most part, end up in our juvenile courts and in our jails. If you insist on their birth, you must also assume responsibility for their lives.”

  Dear Abby’s response was spineless to a fault. “Dear Julia,” she wrote. “For the world’s most famous cook to have whipped up a world-famous controversy is a case of just deserts!” Julia Child deserved more than that—and so did Abby’s readers, right-leaners or lefties. The firestorm it provoked was impossible to ignore. In the days that followed, a deluge of letters poured in to the columnist, with each side duly represented by its advocates. Some papers, like the St. Petersburg Independent, printed only the right-to-lifers’ responses, which detailed instances about children who endured grave circumstances and went on to lead fulfilled lives. Others, like the Eugene (OR) Register-Guard and the Indiana (PA) Gazette, included letters that supported Julia’s outspokenness. “Three cheers for Julia Child!” one wrote. Another responded, “I would like to commend her for her guts and integrity.”

  Either way, this type of publicity could have proved devastating. In the past, political controversies had wounded the careers of Benjamin Spock, Anita Bryant, and Jane Fonda. Supporting Planned Parenthood, which encompassed the abortion issue, was playing with fire. Still, Julia took her celebrity and used it for something she believed in. It was ballsy, but potentially lethal, a terrain studded with landmines, yet a measure of her popularity that people let it slide.

  By 1982, Julia had moved on, devoting her time to an issue closer to her area of expertise. The food frenzy in California had reawakened another facet of her activism. She became convinced that any serious cook needed to be an educated cook as well. Compared to her decades of hands-on study and scientific approach to gastronomy, the new generation’s grasp of culinary arts was rudimentary and piecemeal at best. They had no connection to history or theory. She was frustrated about the lack of source material in the Unite
d States, that no academic institution paid it much attention. She’d received an honorary degree from Boston University in 1981 and yet there was no culinary degree program in force at the school aside from a few dissociated cooking electives. Or anywhere else, for that matter. It underscored how far the profession still had to climb, not just to achieve a level of respectability, but for basic knowledge, which would go toward developing a more sophisticated American cuisine.

  In 1981, during a dinner in Montecito, Julia grumbled anew about academia’s lack of support. A man named Robert Huttenback, who was seated across from her said, “Well, why don’t we do it out here, at the University of California?” Huttenback was more than a casual observer; he was the chancellor of UC Santa Barbara, with land, a building, and an endowment to offer. Dick Graff, who also attended the dinner, volunteered to enlist important winemakers and restaurateurs, which ultimately set the table for an exploratory group.

  The American Institute of Wine and Food, as it would come to be called, was born of noble intention. It was high time the kingpins of American cookery establish a professional alliance that would not only unite chefs and winemakers but set standards for cooks and schools, while establishing qualifications in all fields. A preliminary meeting at Julia’s in July brought together an impressive core group: Huttenback, Robert and Margrit Mondavi, Alice Waters, Jeremiah Tower, Marion Cunningham, who had revised The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, and Graff. Julia hoped to attract her influential buddies, but “people like Jim Beard,” she found, “have been very much against the whole thing.” M. F. K. Fisher, for the most part a social hermit, was also reluctant to join, but eventually relented after some gentle arm-twisting. The old guard was coasting on the vaunted legacies. Instead, Julia focused on a new wave of younger faces, the up-and-coming chefs, who were edging into the scene.

  Within the next few years, Julia would forge a personal relationship with virtually every rising star of the American food movement: Alice Waters and Jeremiah Tower, of course, but also Michael McCarty, Wolfgang Puck, Paul Prudhomme, Larry Forgione, Jimmy Schmidt, Jonathan Waxman, Mark Miller, Bradley Ogden, as well as an impressive group that was infiltrating Boston—Lydia Shire, Bob Kinkead, Jasper White, Bruce Frankel, Monsef Meddeb, and Jody Adams—all emerging as inventive artisans at the forefront of a neoclassical, sexy, American cuisine.

  Like Julia, thirty years earlier, they were about to change the way Americans ate. She recognized what their contribution would mean. It was everything she wanted: new blood, fresh ideas, real commitment, forceful personalities, ambition, youth.

  She may have been seventy, but old age be damned. Julia was looking forward, not back.

  Twenty-three

  Enough

  Basic recipe shows were old hat, boring. Since 1963, Julia had done hundreds of them—hundreds—all within the same basic format, lurching ahead. They were straightforward how-tos and tightly scripted, no surprises. “Hi, I’m Julia Child, and today we’re going to be making blah blah blah.” She’d roll out the ingredients, mix, sauté, roast, whatever, then pull the completed dish out of the oven for the big finish. And frankly, that didn’t intrigue her anymore. Besides, television had come a long way since she had first hit the airwaves. More than just cooking lessons, it needed a strong entertainment value, an arresting diversion; throwing ingredients into a pot was no longer going to cut it. If Julia were ever lured back to TV again—a big if, considering she’d sworn off the tube—she’d need something more exciting to match the excitement that was fomenting in American food.

  Enter Russ Morash, who was like the pitchfork-bearing Goofy on Mickey’s shoulder. He tempted her every few years with another new offer for a series. WGBH wanted her back. Oh, sure, sure, the station had its fill of Julia. But that was then, after fifteen years and umpteen reruns; absence made the heart grow fonder. She’d been off the network since 1980. They felt the void and so did she.

  “You know what would be fun?” Morash posed one evening, as the Morashes and Childs finished a casual Cambridge dinner. “A series based on events rather than simply a recipe. Something that would be appropriate for a birthday party or a dinner with the boss. What about doing a whole menu for a significant event?”

  With Jim Beard at the market in place aux Aires, June 24, 1972 (Photo credit 23.1)

  Menus were only the bait on a hook. Morash had more on his line. He suggested they shoot the series in Santa Barbara, ostensibly to facilitate Julia’s schedule during the winter months, but his ultimate angle was pure showbiz gloss. California as a backdrop would give her a glamorous new look. They could shoot outdoors, heighten the production. “We can even take you on some adventures,” he said.

  Adventures was one of those words that never failed to tickle Julia’s follicles. After all, this was a woman who had flown off to Ceylon during World War II, married a Renaissance man of the highest order, hopscotched through unending new and unusual experiences throughout Europe, and appeared on TV without a stitch of training. Adventures were religion to Julia Child. Adventures? She was listening. What did Morash have in mind?

  Now he was really cooking himself, improvising really. “How about if we have you forage mushrooms in the oak groves and make cheese in Atascadero?” he said. “We can go to Seattle for salmon.”

  Julia loved it. “She was game for it all,” Morash recalls. “Going on location was like heroin for her. She had terrible knees and other medical issues, but she was living life large and wouldn’t be denied.” As for cooking, Morash proposed they open up the format to include local chefs and winemakers she admired and wanted to introduce nationwide.

  Julia was hooked, but Morash continued to reel her in. “And let’s finish off each show with a grand glittering dinner party. You can invite all your pals, Judith Jones, M. F. K. Fisher, anyone who comes to visit the set. And we’ll all sit down to a sumptuous feast that shows off whatever was made on that program.”

  Julia’s only hesitation was over a lingering squabble with PBS. Her previous series, More Company, was the victim of such erratic scheduling—on the air in Boston and Chicago one month, New York three months later. Who could keep track? Even worse, stations broadcast it in the daytime, which appalled her. Daytime labeled it a housewife show. She insisted it appeal to everyone.

  “I’ll take care of that,” Morash promised. He had a title already in mind that dared the network to show it anytime but in the evening. And that’s how Dinner at Julia’s was born, as a high-concept, magazine-style format designed to change the structure of cooking shows.

  Dinner at Julia’s, which premiered in the fall of 1983, predated the Food Network by a good ten years, but it contained all the ingredients that established the future phenomenon: a strong, super-personable host, travel and exotic locales, instructional cooking, celebrity guests, a reality-type atmosphere, slick production values, and the practice of taking viewers behind the scenes in each jam-packed episode. It opened up the TV kitchen to the culinary world at large, expanding the basic recipe Julia had practically originated.

  “It was a fairy-tale production,” Morash recalls. Everything came together rather quickly for television. WGBH signed on the moment it heard Russ’s pitch, and Polaroid followed with an underwriting grant of a million dollars. The perfect set was located: an enormous mansion in Hope Ranch, an exclusive twenty-five-acre Santa Barbara suburb wooded by tall oaks on a hill overlooking the Pacific coast. The kitchen was “a chef’s dream,” a professional set-up, with restaurant-quality equipment, dual counters the size of the runways at LAX, and a fireplace to warm those toasty seventy-degree winter days. There was plenty of room to board the crew so they could live and work on site. Russ’s wife, Marian, stepped in as Julia’s executive chef, with a crew of kitchen assistants that was familiar and trusted. And Julia had an idyllic commute: the set was a mile from her place in Montecito.

  Not everything, however, progressed smoothly. The bubble of friction began vaguely during preproduction when, in the interchange over parti
culars, Julia’s lawyer, Bob Johnson, cross-examined Morash about every detail. Already peeved by his previous experience with Johnson, Morash, the Ayatollah, was hostile and dismissive. He didn’t want any land sharks circling his tightly run ship. When he said as much to Julia, she put her foot down. “I need somebody to represent my interests,” she insisted, “and Bob has agreed to come out to be with us and help out.”

  Come out and be with us. Help out. It sounded like a recipe for disaster.

  A few weeks later, Johnson showed up on the set of Dinner at Julia’s determined to exert his influence on the look and feel of the show. Naturally, Morash didn’t want Julia’s lawyer around, undermining him, trying to call the shots. Johnson was a flamboyant figure, “aggressively assertive,” Morash says. Russ was surprised Julia was so devoted to her lawyer, because he’d often heard her say homophobic things and he knew Johnson was gay. “He was promiscuous; it was legend around town. The stories that you heard about Bob Johnson and his proclivities—he was notorious! I wasn’t going to have any part of it.”

  It was an epic contest of wills. Morash refused to give an inch, and so did Johnson, who attempted to move into the Hope Ranch mansion. Morash effectively blocked the door. It was High Noon: Morash drew first. He confronted Julia with an it’s-either-him-or-me ultimatum. In twenty years of their mutual work-lovefest, they’d never exchanged so much as a single cross word. Russ was certain Julia would cave.

  But he was wrong. “I love Russ, but I am loyal to my lawyer,” Julia replied in a note to would-be peacemaker Marian Morash. She had no intention of sending him home. Nor did she want to hear any more bickering. They had a show to do and she expected Russ to deliver it. “Bob,” she said, “will deal with my personal matters and the staff.”