Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child

by Bob Spitz

  Julia approved of the tradition, but she wasn’t happy. Her friends Richard and Thekla Sanford were up in arms about Kendall-Jackson’s activity in the Santa Ynez Valley. According to Sanford, “They bulldozed nine hundred ancient oak trees to make way for a new vineyard.” The Sanfords had appealed to the the Environmental Defense Center, hoping to win an ordinance to protect the woodlands, but in the meantime they appealed to an even higher authority: Julia. Wasn’t there something she could do for them? Thekla wondered. Perhaps if she rejected Kendall’s sponsorship, it would bring enough pressure to end the deforestation. Julia suggested that she call Geof Drummond.

  “It’s too late—way too late,” Geof told Sanford. “We’re on our second-to-last show. Besides, Jess Jackson and his wife are personal friends of Jacques’. I’d love to help you, but it’s out of my hands.”

  Julia, whose hands were bigger, had other ideas.

  The day of the sponsor visit, Julia and Jacques were preparing a Mediterranean seafood stew, a saffron-infused broth on the order of bouillabaisse, with a variety of shellfish and chunks of meaty halibut and swordfish. It was a bold, flavorful dish sure to entice the onlookers, who were clustered in Julia’s dining room watching the action on video monitors. When it was finished, Jacques placed the steamy tureen prominently on the counter, while Julia set out bowls and spoons. The soup was ladled out, after which Jacques uncorked two bottles of Jess Jackson’s best wine, which he had been saving for the occasion.

  “Julia, this lunch would be perfect with a nice chilled sauvignon blanc from the Santa Maria Valley,” he said into the camera, careful to follow PBS rules not to mention Kendall-Jackson by name.

  “No, Jack,” she said, “we’re not having wine. Today we’re having beer.”

  Whaaaat? No one had ever seen Julia drink a beer before; she loved wine, sipped it passionately at every meal. It was unlikely she’d even had beer in the house.

  The dining room gang surged toward the monitor in disbelief as Julia reached under the counter, where she had stashed two bottles of Sam Adams beer.

  Jacques’s face became visibly panicked. “Can’t we have beer and wine?” he asked, a note of desperation in his deep, French-accented voice.

  She looked at him as if he were her fourteen-year-old son. “No, Jack—we’re having beer.” End of story.

  No opportunity to humble the powers-that-be went unturned. Even when Julia felt drained and depleted, she was willing to take on any comers. “Rules—she didn’t like rules,” says Eric Spivey, a fan who had befriended her in Santa Barbara.

  But by the end of production on Julia and Jacques, she was ready to play by a whole new set.

  IN THE SUMMER of 2001, just weeks before her birthday, Julia stunned Stephanie Hersh with an announcement. “I’m going to be shifting to California permanently,” she said. “I’ll be eighty-nine. I should start thinking about my future.”

  Julia later said that she decided to make the move many years before, when she was still in her seventies, with a stretch of time ahead of her. It was a typical Julia Child decision: brusque, pragmatic, irreversible, and utterly lacking in sentimentality. Her reasons were fairly uncomplicated, stemming from her Pasadena upbringing. “In her heart, Julia was always a California girl,” say her niece, Phila Cousins. “She loved Santa Barbara, and had great memories of it as a kid. All along it was the place she knew she’d eventually end up.” She had a close circle of friends there, from her childhood as well as the culinary world. There was family nearby, just miles from the Casa Dorinda, and the move offered her a chance to live close to Dort, who was not well. California was also an escape from the past, a place where she could go and leave ghosts behind. “Paul was gone,” says Hersh. “There was no longer anything holding her back.”

  Once the decision was made, Julia put the plan immediately into motion. There were many loose ends that needed tying up, preparations she’d laid the groundwork for long in advance. It had always been Julia’s intention to give her belongings away to deserving institutions and finally she did it, clearing everything out at once. Her house, 103 Irving, was being donated to Smith College; all of her private papers and vast cookbook collection went to the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe, on the Harvard campus. Even that famous sanctuary, her kitchen, had a destination; she’d promised it to Copia, the American Center for Wine, Food, and the Arts in downtown Napa.

  Robert Mondavi had started Copia with $20 million of his own money and a promise from Julia for similar funds. It was housed in a gorgeous modern facility surrounded by incredible gardens, with a restaurant, Julia’s Kitchen, where the public would dine. “It was the only time Julia ever put her name on anything commercial,” says Clark Wolf. “But its downfall was that they didn’t cook her food.” Be that as it may, Julia loved the concept: a cultural foundation to promote everything she held dear that would mirror and complement the Beard Foundation back East. “She was so impressed with the architecture and the building,” says Richard Sanford, who took her to Napa for a groundbreaking tour. “On the spot, she decided to give her working kitchen to Copia, whenever the time came to move out of Cambridge.”

  Stephanie Hersh called Copia to give them a heads-up. “How do you want to handle the transfer?” she asked. They told her to pack everything up and send it west. “No, you don’t understand; this is Julia Child’s kitchen. You need to preserve it. Come up with a better plan.” In the meantime, Hersh called her friend at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and said, “The kitchen belongs with you. Do you want it?” Indeed they did, but so did Copia, which intended to hold Julia to her original promise. It took some fancy footwork to untangle the mess. In the end, Copia had neither the space nor the manpower to handle the transfer. As a compromise, they’d get Julia’s copper pot collection; everything else would go to the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History, where it would be part of the permanent exhibit.

  Plans continued to close up the house. Julia instructed Stephanie to send a letter to her closest relatives asking if there was anything special of hers they’d like to have; otherwise, all her personal belongings would go to various charities. She intended to hold an auction and split the proceeds between the American Institute of Wine and Food and the International Association of Culinary Professionals for fellowships in her name, with the rest destined for Planned Parenthood. “Instead, all the relatives wrote back asking for details,” Hersh recalls, “like how many pieces of silver were available, or if the artwork was valuable.” Together, Julia and Stephanie inventoried the house. The relatives could have it all, Julia decided. “You handle it,” she instructed Stephanie. “I don’t want anything to do with it. Just make sure nothing leaves the house before I’m settled in California.”

  In a matter of weeks, mostly everything had been arranged, with the house in the final, topsy-turvy stages of moving. Julia was expressly focused on relocating out West—she couldn’t wait to get out there—and she had decided to take Stephanie along with her. They already had their plane tickets, an American Airlines flight to Los Angeles, leaving from Boston’s Logan Airport on Tuesday, September 11, 2001.

  LEAVE IT TO Geof Drummond to bollix up the plans. Drummond had agreed to shoot a short video of Julia in her kitchen that would play as a loop at the Smithsonian exhibit. It required only the smallest possible crew, but the only day everyone could make it was that Tuesday. Julia instructed Stephanie to reschedule their tickets for the end of the week.

  That morning the house was in chaos. Before any filming could begin, the moving boxes had to be dragged out of the kitchen so it would resemble the room as it looked on people’s television screens. Julia, who had been doing makeup upstairs, asked Tommy Hamilton, the gaffer, if he could help her get HBO on her bedroom set. She wanted to be able to watch a rerun of The Sopranos and was having trouble with the cable connection. “Tommy flipped a switch on the back of the TV,” Drummond recalls, “and that’s when we saw the planes hit the Trade Center.”

  Julia watc
hed with a familiar sense of horror. “This is just like Pearl Harbor!” she exclaimed. She was convinced the attack was only the first spark; all hell would break loose in the coming hours. Drummond wasn’t sure whether to continue their session. “Let’s get this done now,” Julia advised him. “We may not have another chance.”

  Stephanie helped bring Julia down to the set. There was so much to do amid so much uncertainty. No one remembered whether or not they were aware that the tragic flights had originated in Boston. “In the confusion,” Stephanie said, “I forgot to tell my parents we’d changed our travel plans. They were sure Julia and I were on that plane.”

  SANTA BARBARA GAVE Julia everything she wanted: peace and quiet—no tension, no TV crews, no deadlines, no harsh weather, no Woman from Newton, no unwanted guests barging into the kitchen all hours of the day. There was an immediate sense of serenity—of relief—of starting over, in a charming and manageable place. Santa Barbara “was always magical” for Julia. It was provincial and coastal, with wonderful palm trees and nectar-filled flowers, a fusion of her childhood with an inflection of France. Casa Dorinda added to the overall charm. It was a perfect hideaway—small but perfect: she had a sun-filled one-bedroom corner apartment, with a view of the mountains, off a private garden where she planned to raise herbs among the riot of flowers. She put in an apple and a pear tree. The Sanfords brought her a birdfeeder; within days, a stray cat showed up, which she named Minou and took in. The only real drawback was the galley kitchen, a cubbyhole so minuscule that barely two people could stand in it at the same time. Tant pis: so be it, Julia thought. Her splashiest cooking days were comfortably behind her. Besides, retirement brought with it a retiring way to eat. She’d make simple meals from now on, a kind of French classic lite, to complement a sensible eighty-nine-year-old’s diet. Julia was open-minded, flexible, unopposed to change. One key adjustment had already occurred since moving west: grudgingly, she’d begun walking with a cane.

  Her knee was acting up again. The old infection kicked up from time to time, but it was nothing that would keep her from getting out and about. Julia had an agenda. “She was going to take it easy, enjoy herself,” Stephanie says, “go to the movies a lot and have dinner with friends.” In her spare time, she might even tinker with a memoir. Her nephew Alex Prud’homme had spoken to her about collaborating on something to honor Paul, and Julia was intrigued. But at a slow and comfortable pace, not on any kind of a deadline.

  “There wasn’t a day when I didn’t see her get up and do something,” said Eric Spivey. Mostly, she connected with childhood friends. “She was very concerned about getting involved with the wrong social crowd,” says Richard Sanford. “The wealthy Pasadena transplants irritated her—the robber barons. She thought they were boring; she didn’t like their politics.”

  “But she loved going out,” says Thekla Sanford. “She wanted to be around people, wherever the excitement was.”

  Julia still championed liberal causes and also, to her credit, revised some of her earlier opinions. She came to appreciate movements she’d rejected in the past. “She supported the organic farmers in Santa Barbara,” says Eric Spivey, who took her religiously every Saturday morning to the local open-air market, where she commiserated with the organic zealots. Vegetarians? They remained a work-in-progress, although Julia condescended to hear their appeals. Afterward, she always spent a few minutes talking to Tab Hunter, “a real he-man,” who lived in the area and never failed to look for her. Then, for a treat, she’d head to Costco for two hot dogs, with mustard and kraut.

  For the first year or so, Santa Barbara was pure bliss. A rotation of visitors showed up from the East, but sporadically—just enough to provide a needed lift. Julia loved hearing the latest gossip. There was still plenty to glean from the go-go culinary world, which had grown more competitive and contentious since she’d stood at its nucleus. And revolutionary! Food—cuisine—had developed into something strange and extraordinary, something exotic, something else. These days, everything that appeared on her plate in a restaurant was sculptural, innovative: unrecognizable. The young chefs had taken her beloved Escoffier and attached wires and electrodes to his balls. Scallops came to the table clouded in foams and gels, chiles relleños were stuffed with goat cheese, pork loin was dressed with oysters and kimchi. And bacon-and-egg ice cream—imagine that! How far food had come since her first bite of sole meunière. But was it better? Her taste memory could still access each flavor of that life-affirming dish: fish, butter, and lemon as pure and unadulterated as they were meant to be savored. She still considered that lunch in Rouen “the most exciting meal of my life.”

  But the rest of it—the experimentation, the home-cooking sensation, the public’s obsession with food—was simply thrilling. Everything she’d worked toward and hoped for had come true. Beyond her dreams! Wherever she went to dinner, whether in an ordinary restaurant or someone’s home, the food was made with so much care. Even at McDonald’s, where she put away the occasional cheeseburger. “It’s tremendously impressive what we have to eat at our disposal,” she said. “You just can’t argue with real food. It’s remarkably satisfying.”

  The restaurant scene in Santa Barbara was interesting enough to indulge her. The food wasn’t fancy, but good, solid fare. “There were five or six restaurants that she frequented on a regular rotation,” says Eric Spivey. Her favorite, Lucky’s, was an old-fashioned steakhouse on the site of the original Montecito bungalows, where she could have her rib-eye rare, her asparagus well-cooked, her corn creamed, and her cheesecake extra dense. The Paradise Café was her burger joint of choice, and for Italian she headed to Olio e Limone. Any of those places would do nicely—or not at all. But the one meal she never missed was breakfast at the Casa Dorinda.

  For Julia, it was a daily trip back in time, back to early mornings in “the Res” at the Katharine Branson School where, at a long wooden table, the girls would gossip and argue over steamy plates heaped with pancakes or eggs. Like the schoolgirls, a group of women at the Casa had formed a breakfast club at a sun-streaked corner table of the dining room, where they bantered about their doctors or other, often feeble, residents who wound up in “the Ga-Ga House,” as Julia called the Casa’s infirmary. Julia’s buddies were a feisty gang of octogenarians—Dorothy Heightman, Betty Kelmer, Peg Wright, all Smith grads, and Jo Duff, who had lived around the corner from Julia in Pasadena. “We were all very copasetic,” says Duff, “even though our opinions were occasionally at odds.” Julia never missed an opportunity to provoke one or another of the women, who were fairly religious and vehemently Republican. “Go ahead—explain the war in Iraq,” she’d sneer, or swipe at her favorite punching bag, George W. Bush. Some mornings, it looked as though an attendant might have to separate those women, no thanks to Julia, who fed the fire with liberal rhetoric.

  Periodically Julia disappeared from their huddle each morning to scan the buffet table just minutes before closing. It was a ritual. “When no one was looking she’d stuff dozens of pieces of bacon into her purse,” says Richard Sanford, who came often with his wife. “It would reappear magically at lunch, when she made us bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches.” This happened practically every day. “She lived off that bacon,” recalls Eric Spivey, “until Stephanie eventually banned it from her diet.”

  More and more, Stephanie had to keep an eye on Julia, who was beginning to feel the weight of her years. Age was catching up with her. She had turned ninety in 2002, and with it came the breakdowns and repairs that bedevil an old chassis. In November, she developed another knee infection that put her in the hospital, this time with grave concern. “It was worse than the last time,” Stephanie said, “and at her age it was almost too much to bear.”

  “Julia was in horrible pain,” recalls Thekla Sanford, who came to help out during the crisis. “The infection was deep; they couldn’t get rid of it. We all worried that she wouldn’t make it through.” Julia stopped responding to the medication and refused extreme pro
cedures. Eventually, the doctors took her kneecap out and let the knee drain before putting everything back together again, and gradually she began to come around, her old self. “I knew Julia was going to recover when she got interested in eating,” says Thekla Sanford. “The problem was, she was living off the Casa’s crappy food. So I brought her an egg salad sandwich and vanilla malt, and she sucked that malt down like there was no tomorrow. Then she made me promise to take her to Lucky’s.”

  Getting there, however, wasn’t going to be easy. Her legs were riddled with pain that had confined her to a wheelchair and her diet was being drastically restricted. No more rich foods, no tomatoes, no wine—they were out, along with a half-dozen goodies on a list Stephanie kept. “It was a thankless task policing Julia’s eating habits,” Stephanie recalls, “not that Julia ever helped the situation.”

  Rebellious as ever, Julia convinced friends to take her out for dinner every chance she could. “She liked to go where she wasn’t supposed to,” says Eric Spivey, one of her frequent companions. “And getting past Stephanie was no easy doing.” Against Stephanie’s wishes, Julia would plead with Spivey to pick her up at the Casa, where Julia would wheel past her jailer, announcing: “We’ll be going! Don’t wait up!”

  Stephanie, unable to intervene, watched murderously from the porch as Julia, with much difficulty, was folded into a car by her accomplice. “And don’t let her have any alcohol!” she demanded.

  Most nights, they made a beeline for Lucky’s, where Julia was friendly with the sommelier. Richard Sanford remembers meeting her there one night, as she was uncorking a split of champagne. “I knew Julia wasn’t supposed to drink,” he admits, “though I was more worried what Stephanie would do to us if she found out.” He’d already told the maître d’ not to send over the wine list, but somehow a bottle of pinot noir appeared. “She can’t have it!” Sanford objected. But he wasn’t about to try taking wine out of Julia Child’s hands. “She was already pouring, so I just said, ‘Screw it!’ That’s how it went on any given night.”