Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child

by Bob Spitz

  Once again, Julia Child was at the forefront of American food.

  BUT SHE WAS at the backside of exhaustion. The production had turned her home into a makeshift TV studio: the kitchen served as the set, with monitors and equipment clogging the dining room, and a full-scale prep kitchen spread throughout the basement, crawling with cooks and assistants. “The work was nonstop,” recalls Stephanie Hersh. “Julia would get up at five in the morning, do hair and makeup, start filming at six, break twenty minutes for lunch, finish filming around four, work on the book for an hour, have dinner with the crew, work on the book for another two hours, sleep for five hours—then do it all over again. It was go go go go go!”

  Often, after they broke for lunch, Julia would announce, “I’m going to take a nap,” and Drummond would shut down production until she was rested. In the past, her stamina would have carried her through the day, but she was running out of steam. “I’m fine, dearie,” she insisted to anyone voicing concern. She refused to let anyone see the fatigue. There were too many people involved in this enterprise who depended on her. Physically, the work was draining, but the excitement recharged her battery.

  The cooking was exhilarating. She marveled at how Jean-Georges Vongerichten merged Asian ingredients with Alsatian cuisine. All those layers of flavor—lemongrass, coconut milk, and curries—lay outside her expertise. What sounded exotic and overwrought was anything but in his hands. Everything he made was simply prepared. Jody Adams’s stuffed veal breast played right to Julia’s sympathies, with its elaborately conceived braise in wine and aromatic vegetables. Nothing pleased her more than watching Daniel Boulud, whose technique was “as good as any chef [she’d] ever laid eyes on.”

  Julia insisted that Jasper White make his pan-roasted lobster. It was his signature dish, steeped in cognac and butter, and a perennial favorite of hers, perfect for the home cook, but there were problems before filming even began. Weeks before, during a cooking demonstration on Today, Katie Couric shrieked when a chef killed a lobster. It brought media attention to the process of killing lobsters and PETA jumped on it right away. The organization’s power made Geof Drummond nervous. “He prefers we don’t kill it on television,” Julia explained to White, sitting in her garden during a break.

  “That’s fine,” White said. “We can kill it before we start filming.”

  Julia shook her head. “Then we’re not teaching them anything.” She got up and walked around the yard.

  “Julia, there are other lobster dishes to be made. I could do lobster quenelles that start with cooked meat.”

  A decision had to be made in the next couple of minutes. Finally, she said, “Fuck ’em! We’re going to teach people the right way to do it. Fuck PETA, fuck the animal-rights people!”

  Together, they concocted a way to sidestep a possible outcry. As the lesson began, Julia stood gazing at White and his lobster. “So, dearie, how do we start the dish?” she asked.

  “First we cut up the lobster,” he said.

  Everything had to do with the expression on Julia’s face. She kept it glassy-eyed, completely impassive. For all anyone knew, she might have been watching a mother diapering a newborn, as White dispatched the crustacean. He had a Chinese cleaver the size of a scimitar and he wielded it like a cartoon character. His hands were a blur—swoosh, swoosh, swoosh! Presto: the lobster lay in pieces on the cutting board.

  No one uttered so much as a sigh.

  BY MAY 1994, Julia needed a break. The unbroken stretches and incidents like the one with Jasper White had convinced her that a month off would help to conserve her energy for the rest of production.

  She’d wrapped the last show with the chefs from Al Forno in Providence and heaved a sigh of relief as the crew broke down the set. It had been a long haul, perhaps harder than her other series. There were so many stages to the cooking, multiple cameras, much more editing—twenty-six shows! The book was behind schedule, as usual. But the month off would give her time to catch up.

  That day, May 12, after filming had ended, she went to see Paul, changed her clothes, and went out to dinner. She took Geof Drummond, Nancy Barr, her lawyer Bill Truslow, and her nephew David to Jasper’s, for—what else?—pan-roasted lobster. It was a double celebration—the start of her vacation and David’s graduation, which was two weeks off. They’d already had a pitcher of Julia’s reverse martinis and handfuls of Goldfish; everybody was in a festive mood.

  At 9:45, Drummond got called to the maître d’s station. Stephanie Hersh was on the telephone. “Has Julia eaten dinner yet?” she asked him. Drummond demanded to know why. She said, “Because she won’t finish eating, and I need to make sure she has food in her stomach.” Drummond told her they were working on dessert. Stephanie took a deep breath and said, “Paul has died.”

  Geof broke the news to Julia as gently as possible. “We have to go,” she said to her nephew. “Now.”

  David McWilliams drove her out to Lexington. “In the car, we talked a bit about Paul, and Julia was very matter-of-fact,” he recalled. “She didn’t cry and wasn’t deeply emotional. I sensed she knew this was coming.” She told David that when she had visited Paul earlier that afternoon, he hadn’t recognized her. It wasn’t her Paul anymore. He was somewhere else, but mostly in her memory.

  She remembered a letter he had written to Charlie about death, how he feared being recycled “to the common microbial and atomic pool.” He was vehement, defiant. “I am P. Child, painter, photographer, lover boy, poet, judo-man, wine-guzzler, and Old Sour Ball, and it’s taken me 70 mortal years to sculpt this masterpiece.” Dust to dust, Julia thought; no one gets out alive.

  “We got to Fairlawn and walked quickly into the room,” David remembers. He was spooked. Julia had never let him visit Paul, and he had never seen a dead person before. “She stood very quietly over the bed and was very businesslike about what needed to be done. For her, Paul had died a long time ago.”

  * * *

  1 In the end, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) determined that “long-term exposure to Alar poses unacceptable risks to public health.”

  Twenty-six

  The Beginning of the End

  The flowers started arriving at Irving Street by noon the next day. Word had spread of Paul’s death, and the community of friends and fans rallied to express their sympathy. Great bouquets of chrysanthemums, daisies, and lilies filled every inch of the living room and most of the library. “I could open an FTD outlet,” Julia told Sally Jackson, a publicist who worked the Boston restaurant scene and had come to help with getting an obituary ready.

  “How are you doing, dearie?” Jackson asked, co-opting Julia’s trademark pet name.

  “Well, I’ve gotten over the Kleenex phase,” she replied.

  The evidence was unmistakable on Julia’s face. She looked haggard, her eyes red-rimmed and sunken. Stephanie Hersh, who hadn’t left Julia’s side since she’d arrived back from Fairlawn, was alarmed by what she perceived as her lack of emotion. “She didn’t cry,” Hersh recalled. “I couldn’t believe it—she didn’t cry! More than anything I wanted her to release that pent‑up grief.” But it was clear that Julia had shed plenty of tears, but only in private, as had always been her way.

  Thoughts of the past, of Paul, sardonic yet supportive, must have collided with the artifacts he had left behind. Everywhere she looked there were lovingly framed canvases he’d painted in Paris and Maine, the dark, brooding cityscapes and street scenes, the seaside vistas with blue-black waves breaking over the surf. Moody photos he’d taken lined the mantel and bookshelves: the checkerboard of rooftops seen from out the back of Roo de Loo, the horseshoe harbor in Marseille, his nieces at play on the rocks in Lopaus, various markets in French villages, Julia piloting an ancient gas range. Paul’s presence was everywhere and the memories collapsed around her. It was unthinkable that Julia Child could have been the person she was had Paul not been by her side. He had shaped her—an empty vessel, a social butterfly, adrift—given her pur
pose and strength and encouragement and love. My God, they had had love in spades! When it came to he-men, Paul was top of her list, in a class by himself. There was no one like him.

  Julia and Jacques Pépin, cooking in concert, 1999 (Photo credit 26.1)

  There were arrangements to be made, all kinds of matters to be settled. Sally Jackson was scheduled to chair an AIWF reception at Julia’s house the next Monday. “We’ll just cancel it,” Jackson said, slashing across a memo on her punch list. Julia, tapping into some secret reserve of energy, bolted upright. “Absolutely not!” she said. “It’s $150 per person for AIWF. Business as usual.”

  Jackson thought Julia was being unrealistic, but the night of the event, Julia greeted a crowd as they arrived at her door, then slipped out the back with Nancy Barr and went to a movie.

  WITH PAUL’S DEATH, Julia began thinking about how to make use of the time that was left to her—what was important, what wasn’t, what took precedence in her life. As always, she chose not to wind down, not to live in her memories but to charge full-steam ahead.

  The remainder of shows for In Julia’s Kitchen would help to take her mind off her loss, with plenty of appearances mixed in to keep her face in circulation. Good Morning America was a constant source of pleasure and relief. She looked forward to those trips to New York, which, since 1987, had become ever more meaningful. That February, Charlie Gibson had taken over the show’s anchor from David Hartman, and from day one of his tenure Julia was smitten. “She was a great flirt,” Gibson recalled. “I was the new guy, an unknown, and extremely nervous. But when I walked on the set, she took me by the hand and said, ’I’ve been looking forward to this, dearie. And let me tell you, we’re going to have so much fun!” She was right. Julia and Gibson formed a mutual admiration society, chatting endlessly between guest spots, enjoying the occasional dinner in a favorite New York haunt where conversation invariably turned to politics. “Reagan was president,” Gibson recalls. “Julia hated him. She couldn’t wait to tee off on him.”

  After Paul died, Gibson went out of his way to console Julia any chance he got. “We went out to dinner one evening soon afterward, and all she wanted to do was talk about the kitchens Paul had set up for her,” he recalled, “all the design elements he’d brought to them, and how he’d taken such good care of her over the years.” She confessed that, from the beginning, Paul had been much more interested in television than she was. He’d encouraged her to pursue it, and once she agreed to appear on TV, he had coached her, got her to relax, convinced her to just be herself. There it was in a nutshell, Gibson thought. That was the secret of Julia’s success—allowing the idiosyncratic part of her character to come through. Most television personalities, in Gibson’s experience, were what he called “cookie cutters”—bland, nondescript, indistinguishable from one another. “There was nothing average or ordinary about Julia Child,” he says. “Her enthusiasm and humor made her instantly attractive and memorable; there was nothing unapproachable about her. All the qualities that made you think that she was not going to be good on television are what made her very very good on television.”

  Occasionally, Gibson found he needed to cover for her. “Julia’s age began to catch up with her,” he recalls. “There were days, when she arrived to do her segment, that she was not up to it. She’d forget ingredients or where she was in the recipe.” Sara Moulton would cue Charlie that Julia was “off her game that day,” and he’d conspire with the producer to cut her segment short.

  But she’d have great days, too, when everything just clicked. No matter what, Julia refused to let up. In fact, she undertook more guest appearances during her visits to New York, turning up regularly to tangle with David Letterman, another he-man in her little black book. Talk shows showed off her wacky brand of humor, as long as the host was game.

  Sometimes, however, Julia and her hosts were not simpatico. Stephanie Hersh recalled an appearance Julia made on Live with Regis and Kathie Lee, on behalf of McCall’s magazine, which was celebrating an anniversary. Stephanie had prepped the segment the night before, making meringue disks and ganache for a special cake so that the mise en place was ready when she and Julia arrived. Regis Philbin and Kathie Lee Gifford would help assemble the dish on the air. But minutes before the spot, Kathie Lee balked. “She said she didn’t want to get dirty,” recalls Stephanie, “so she wasn’t going to do it.” Regis made it unanimous. “Then I won’t either,” he said. “We’ll let Julia do it alone.”

  Julia was beside herself with fury. “Absolutely not, I refuse,” she said intransigently. “You promised to do this so we could talk about McCall’s anniversary recipe. I’m doing this with the two of you, and that’s how it’s going to work.”

  To Stephanie, under her breath, she said, “Make sure that the car is ready.”

  Come airtime, Julia was announced to great applause. She beckoned the hosts to the demo table, where three stations were decoratively arranged with the ingredients and enough ganache for each to do his or her own version of the recipe. A finished cake was waiting in the wings. But Kathie Lee, as promised, refused outright to cooperate. She simply stood by, not about to touch the food.

  Julia turned a violent shade of red as she began putting the recipe together. Any trace of geniality drained from her face. “I’d never seen her that angry,” Stephanie recalls.

  Halfway through, the cameraman signaled for a commercial break. “Stay tuned to see how we finish this,” Regis announced.

  As soon as they were off the air, Julia said to Stephanie, “We’re leaving now.” Without a word, the two women scooped up their equipment, stormed out the stage door, and slipped into the waiting car. They had no idea how Regis finished the show.

  Mostly, however, Julia’s TV work was pure pleasure. In May 1995, she was invited to spend two weeks on location, gallivanting across Europe with the cast and crew of Good Morning America. “We went on live, from a different city every day,” recalls Joan Lunden, “and travel was pretty difficult, by rail and bus.” Because of her age—she was nearly eighty-three—Julia was offered a shortened schedule and lifts to each city by private plane. According to Lunden, she was having none of it. “She spent the entire time with us and handled her own baggage. Any special treatment was immediately refused.”

  By the time they reached Burgundy, Julia was as giddy as a schoolgirl. She was thrilled to be back in one of her favorite provinces of France and delighted to share some memories of earlier excursions there with Paul. The stories of gay picnics and life-changing meals flooded back with crystal clarity. Although “obviously wistful,” Julia seemed particularly aroused. When the crew set up at Clos de Vougeot, a legendary vineyard along the Route des Grands Crus, something—the thought of Paul’s romance with wine or just sentimentality—propelled her toward the cave, where the proprietors were pouring from their finest reserves. GMA went on the air back in the States at seven o’clock in the morning, Eastern time, which meant that they went live from France at 1 p.m. “We’d arrived at eight that morning, which is when Julia started sampling the wine,” Gibson recalls, “and by the time we were ready to go she was just blotto.”

  Fortunately, the script called for Julia to make an omelet, her old standby, which she’d done hundreds of times; she could do it with her eyes closed, if necessary. Come air time, however, she was “just reeling” from the wine. She babbled gleefully through the introduction and fought the eggs for domination of the pan. “They just wouldn’t congeal,” recalls Joan Lunden, who stood by, wondering how to save the spot. Leave it to Julia, who pummeled those eggs unmercifully with her whisk. “And when they don’t become omelets,” she said, mugging comically into the camera, “you just make them the best scrambled eggs ever.” Simple as that.

  There was nothing else for her to do until the end of the show. “We thought it would be nice, when we signed off, if Joan and I were on bicycles and rode off down a path through the vineyard,” Gibson recalls. Someone handed Julia a burgundy-colored flag an
d suggested she wave it to start them on their way. The whole affair, from start to finish, would last fifteen seconds. Gibson could tell instantly that Julia was in an unusually merry mood. “She wore a glazed, almost deranged grin when she began waving us along,” he says. She waved that damn flag like it was the last stand at the Alamo, continuing the entire time Lunden and Gibson were bumping along, still waving it when they walked the bikes back, long after the show had gone off the air. Gibson was unable to contain his laughter at the sight of Julia Child behaving like a coed on spring break. “I’m convinced she’d be waving it today if we hadn’t taken it out of her hands.”

  WHEN JULIA GOT back to the States, John McJennett was waiting for her. He’d been looking forward to her return, having sorely missed her. Their relationship may not have reached a level of transcendent love, but it had sustained them both through personal upheavals and readjustments. John had good reason to be thankful; no one was more eager for fascinating company, even if Julia resisted something deeper. Her world captivated him: the creativity, the spotlight, “all those young women doing their thing!” He was an affectionate man; he enjoyed Julia’s kisses, sisterly though they might be, and would take what he could get—more, if the situation availed. Dorothy Hamilton encountered him late one evening in the kitchen of 103 Irving. “Are you staying here tonight?” he asked her. “I am,” she said. “So am I!” he replied, and winked lasciviously.

  But by the fall of 1995, his health became an issue. “He suffered from heart failure,” says his daughter, Linda. “He was on oxygen, toting a tank, when Julia returned from Europe. And he’d had various cancer operations, which left him with a colostomy bag.”

  “He’s a sick man,” Julia lamented the next time she saw Rebecca Alssid. She had cared for Paul through years of infirmity and that was enough, she seemed to be saying. The relationship with John had given her enormous pleasure. He was courtly, energetic, and attuned to her professional needs. But he couldn’t be those things for her anymore. Despite these deterrents, Julia still clung to their relationship, but between John’s health and her demanding schedule, the end was imminent. “I could tell she was prepared to move on,” says Linda McJannet (she reverted to a more Scottish spelling of the family name). “Julia was, if anything, a very pragmatic person. Dad appreciated that quality in her. But pulling away from him would break his heart.”