Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child

by Bob Spitz

  It was clear, however, that her indulgence was taking a toll. One night that winter, toward the end of 2002, Julia showed up for a dinner party at Eric Spivey’s house. She looked exhausted. Her face was puffy and her breath came in short, labored gasps. Spivey asked casually how her day had gone. Julia looked at him for some time before answering. “Not well,” she said, her eyes distant, baleful. “This is really hard, and I’m not sure where it’s going to go.” It was a moment of vulnerability that she hadn’t intended to share, a momentary lapse. “But how was your day, dearie?” she asked, using a tactic that always served to deflect attention from her personal life.

  For the first time in Julia’s life she was surrendering to physical limitations. The wheelchair and diet restrictions were visible encumbrances, but other underlying resistance was impossible to deny. Most days, she felt run-down, depressed. Worse, perhaps, was a rising boredom. It was the first time in fifty years that she wasn’t immersed in a project, something that kept her mind engaged. More and more, Julia wanted to work again. As a way of keeping occupied, she began making notes—about her cooking, her marriage, her life in France.

  It was time, she decided, to start that memoir.

  On and off during 2003, Julia discussed such a book with her editor, Judith Jones. It seemed like a perfect idea to Jones, since both she and Julia had been roundly disappointed by a biographer’s efforts some years earlier. A contract was no problem; they could work out the terms based on performance in the past. As for a deadline, Jones said, “we can just leave that open.” Whenever the manuscript came in, she’d be happy to publish it.

  Julia’s nephew Alex was eager to be involved. “All right, dearie, maybe we should work on it together,” she told him. There were several preconditions, however, that he needed to accept. Long, ponderous interviews were out of the question. She just wasn’t up to it, her attention span short. And limiting the subject to France would narrow the focus. It would be therapeutic for her to reflect on Paul and those beautiful days, when all the pieces just seemed to fall into place.

  That July, she learned from her lawyer that she would be receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a prestigious award given to those who have made “an especially meritorious contribution” to the cultural or public interests of the United States. Past recipients had included Irving Berlin, Carl Sandburg, Mother Teresa, Norman Rockwell, and Nelson Mandela, all great, distinguished company. It was much deserved, considering Julia’s huge gift. Yet, it was uncertain that she would accept the award. After all, it was coming from George W. Bush, a Republican, her longtime whipping boy. If only Bill Clinton had stepped up during his term! “Julia loved Clinton,” says Rebecca Alssid, “She thought he was brilliant, ‘a real he-man.’ But for some reason, his administration didn’t respond.” George Bush: it was almost ironic. Nevertheless, he was her president. In the end, she found it impossible to say no.

  On the morning of July 23, 2003, the phone rang at the Casa Dorinda. Julia picked it up on the second ring. “Julia, I wish you were here,” the president said in that familiar folksy twang. It was almost surreal, George Bush come-to-life—the Decider himself—telling her how much he appreciated her, how as a kid he’d watched her on TV, as had his mother, Barbara. They’d made her recipes, bought her books. He giggled fondly at the memory. No doubt he’d seen Dan Aykroyd’s sketch, but if he had he wasn’t saying. The call didn’t last more than four or five minutes, but left her feeling conflicted, off her liberal guard. “I hate to admit it,” Julia said afterward, “but he was a very charming man.” Not that she’d ever go as far as voting for him. When Rebecca Alssid came to visit that summer, Arnold Schwarzenegger was running for governor, a bit of a political wild card to the folks back East. “I think I’m going to vote for him,” Julia told her matter-of-factly. “But, Julia, you’re a Democrat,” Alssid reminded her. “I know, dearie,” Julia said, “but I’m finding him very attractive.” Even at ninety-one, she’d cross the aisle for a hunky man.

  Men, hunky or otherwise, still figured prominently in her world. When her niece Phila took her to see Troy at a local movie theater that May, Julia almost leaped out of her seat. “My God, that Brad Pitt is certainly handsome,” she gasped, wondering what might lie under that tunic. The thought still excited her. Then, in September, Jasper White called on his way to a charity cook-off in Los Angeles. He hadn’t seen Julia since Boston and wanted to pay his respects. “Oh, that would be great, dearie,” she told him. There was only one hitch. He said, “I have my sous chefs with me.” There was a two- or three-second delay until she responded.

  “Boys?!”

  “Yeah, boys.”

  “Well, bring ’em along, dearie!”

  If old friends rarely stopped by these days, it was out of respect for her age and privacy. Julia seemed happy to live out of the limelight, but there were those who worried that she might be unwell. White couldn’t have been more relieved at what he found. “Mentally, she was a hundred percent,” he said. “She was wheelchair-bound and embarrassed about it, refusing to sit in that damn contraption a moment longer than necessary.” But others encountered a Julia who was weak and disoriented. Clark Wolf dropped by one afternoon that fall and was startled by her condition. “She seemed half-asleep on her feet,” he said, “completely lost in the conversation.”

  “It was clear that her health was failing,” says Alex Prud’homme, “although she was mentally acute.” To maintain the progress on the memoir, he tried to engage Julia regularly in reminiscing about the favorite years of her life. Throughout the early winter, between knee treatments and setbacks, they went over and over fond, familiar territory: her initiation at Le Cordon Bleu, meeting Simca and Louisette, writing Mastering. Paul. She lost herself in the romance of those stories, reliving some, unburdening herself of others. According to Prud’homme, “she would never complain. But the nurses told me later that she was in a lot of pain and sleeping hour upon hour.”

  That May 2004, during a stretch of two weeks, everything seemed to cave in around her. “She was in and out of the hospital a lot,” says her internist, William Koonce. “She was really losing her quality of life.” Julia developed congestive heart failure on top of another knee infection. If that weren’t bad enough, her kidneys started to fail. A regimen of serious medications was knocking her for a loop. Her doctor at the Casa called various family members. “We really don’t have much time left,” he advised.

  Alex and Phila helped Julia write a health-care proxy that clearly stated: “I don’t want any extraordinary measures.” They also made sure that everyone dear to her would be in Santa Barbara for Julia’s ninety-second birthday in August, fearing that it might be her last. They’d planned a bash to end all bashes at a local restaurant, and so far, more than a hundred friends had promised to attend.

  Later that May, Rebecca Alssid came to visit. “Julia was really getting disgusted with all the infirmary visits and I worried that she was just giving up,” Alssid says. “The worst part was that she had lost her sense of taste.” Julia blamed the medications, and her spirit swung between anger and despair. Her taste—it seemed like too cruel a joke. Without taste, she might as well be dead. Despite her condition, Julia sent Rebecca to the greenmarket to collect groceries for dinner that night. Julia remained behind, working with Alex, and afterward took a late-afternoon nap. When she awoke, she craved an artichoke and asked Rebecca to make a hollandaise sauce.

  “I’d never done that before,” Rebecca recalls. So she opened a copy of Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything and gave hollandaise a test run, for better or worse.

  “Let me taste it, dearie,” Julia called from the bedroom. Rebecca was anxious; this was Julia Child, after all. Julia’s face loosened gratefully as she licked at the leaves. “Umm, good. But it needs more salt.”

  That’s odd, Rebecca thought. She shouldn’t be able to taste that. At dinner, Julia devoured a half rack of lamb chops, cooing with pleasure after each bite. “That was so deliciou
s, dearie—so wonderful. I enjoyed every bite of it.”

  That’s when Rebecca knew Julia had gone off her meds.

  “I don’t care,” she said when Alex confronted her. “I have to taste the food, otherwise there’s no use sticking around.”

  And Julia seemed in no great rush to slip off the raft. A nephrologist promised her two good years, minimum, if she consented to dialysis three days a week. It was a brutal treatment that left her withered and nauseated. For all her expectations, there were few good days. More often than not, she was overcome with depression. Her family was outraged; she’d said no to extraordinary measures; the dialysis seemed to be pushing that to extremes.

  Dr. Koonce warned her about staying fit and healthy. Following a mild heart attack, he and Julia’s cardiologist visited her in the hospital. “You have to clean up your diet,” Koonce told her, “and you especially have to stop eating butter.”

  Julia struggled up on her side to look her doctors in the face. “Oh, such silly boys!” she said.

  “The cardiologist and I just looked at each other and laughed,” Koonce recalls. “We had fulfilled our responsibility as doctors to tell Julia Child to stop eating butter. And we really felt like such silly boys.”

  On her own she was able to enjoy a good meal. On August 11, two days before her ninety-second birthday, Julia decided to reach into the past. What she wanted, what she craved, was a good onion soup. “You must let the onions cook slowly and long, browning them in lots of butter,” she’d told her audience on an early episode of The French Chef. Following her own advice, she made a fragrant pot of soup and ate two bowls with abundant pleasure. “That’s a wonderful smell and a very appetizing one,” she declared in 1965; thirty-nine years later she couldn’t improve on that. She’d given American cooks a damn good recipe—a lifetime of recipes—that worked and satisfied.

  The next morning, however, she was sick—very sick. A visit to Dr. Koonce in the Casa’s infirmary confirmed the worst. The port for her dialysis had become infected; as a result she’d developed sepsis. “If it isn’t treated immediately,” he said, “you will die within forty-eight hours.”

  “You mean: kick the bucket?” she asked.

  Koonce nodded.

  Julia took the verdict stone-faced. “If we treat this and get rid of the infection, can you promise me that I’m going to get the energy level I had before this started?”

  “No,” the doctor said, without equivocation.

  “Then don’t treat it,” Julia said.

  Stephanie cried all the way back to the apartment. Throughout the long circuitry of corridors in the Casa Dorinda, Julia stared straight ahead, wordless, lost in thought.

  “I’m not ready for you to go,” Stephanie whimpered through her tears.

  Julia patted her hand stoically. “It’s time, dearie,” she said, her voice quavering. “If I can’t live the way I want to live, I’d rather not live at all. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m just going to take a little nap.”

  After Julia crawled into bed, Minou curled near her side, Stephanie picked up the phone and called everyone who mattered—Alex, Phila, David McWilliams, the Sanfords, the Spiveys, dozens more—and gave them the terrible news. They came from everywhere to say their goodbyes while Julia slept, peaceful, painless, at last. Even her friends at the Casa, the Breakfast Club gals, came through her room, held her hand, wept, said a few private words. Goodbye, Julia.

  EARLY THE NEXT evening, the phone rang in the kitchen at Olio e Limone. There was a full house in the dining room, mostly regulars who had just sat down, and it was hard for Elaine Morello, the chef’s wife, to hear above the din. She turned away from the crowd and cupped a hand over her ear, listening as best she could through the clatter and static.

  A few minutes later, she went to the front of the house and clanked a knife against a wineglass to get everyone’s attention.

  “Our dear friend and mentor Julia Child passed away today,” she said. A chorus of gasps and cries sifted through the room. “So we invite all of you to raise a glass in her honor.” With great vivacity, she sang out: “Cin cin! Salute, Julia.”

  Someone had the good sense to shout, “And bon appétit!”

  Sources and Acknowledgments

  The genesis of this book sprang from my amazing luck, traveling with Julia Child in Sicily in 1992. For several weeks, we crisscrossed the island, eating, of course, but talking every chance we got. She was already a beloved icon, larger than life in so many different ways, but perhaps the most down-to-earth celebrity I’d ever encountered. Inasmuch as I was writing about her for several magazines, we were on the record throughout the trip, but she never held back from speaking her mind, never shied from a tough opinion, never pulled her punches, never blinked. She was exactly like her TV persona: warm, funny, outgoing, whip-smart, incorrigible, and, most of all, real. If I have to admit to one prejudice confronting this book, it is that I had a powerful crush on her. Sorry. Deal with it.

  We began discussing a biography almost from the moment we got back, but in the intervening months I became involved with the Beatles. Work on that book ballooned from two to almost nine years, a span that included Julia’s death. The chance to collaborate had sadly eluded me. Yet the minute I finished my Beatles opus, I always knew what the next biography would be. There was no escaping her powerful hold, and if I were about to commit another ridiculous chunk of my life to a subject, it was going to be to a person whose life was a bottomless source of inspiration.

  Julia Child was that—and more. In the four years that went into this project, I was humbled by her contribution to our culture and our lives. The gift that she left us with is invaluable and undeniable.

  Crushes, inspiration, and humility are quickly dispatched, however, once the work begins.

  No matter how an author perseveres during years of research, a biography is wholly dependent upon outside sources: libraries, archives, foundations, and people who are generous with their time when it comes to sharing memories. Thankfully, my work was sustained by Julia Child herself. Before she moved out of Cambridge, Julia donated her entire vast archive to the Schlesinger Library on the Harvard campus, where it is catalogued in more than eighty-five boxes. Simca’s letters are also there, as are Paul Child’s papers—thousands of gorgeously evocative handwritten letters, including those to his brother Charlie that began in 1942 and continued on an almost daily basis until his health prohibited in 1974. Julia always intended her papers to be in one place, and the Schlesinger was an inspired choice. It is a scholar’s dream, the perfect place to work, and I owe a great debt to its staff, especially Ellen Shea and Diana Carey. I am indebted also to Mark DeVoto, who shared not only his mother, Avis’s, letters to Julia (similarly housed at the Schlesinger Library) but also an unpublished memoir she’d written in 1988 about their remarkable relationship.

  The Julia Child Foundation and the James Beard Foundation provided constant support. I wish also to thank the Smith College library, which yielded a trove of wonderful information stretching all the way back to Caro Weston, and its archivist, Nancy A. Young, for providing assistance. I am indebted, as well, to the Vassar College Alumnae Office, the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy (Edie Holway), the Pasadena Museum of History (Laura Verlaque, Bill Trimble, and Bob Bennett), the OSS Society (Charles Pinck and Betty McIntosh), and Cindy Eisenmenger at Gastronome.

  I am grateful to everyone in Pasadena, Cambridge, and Santa Barbara who opened up their doors to me and shared countless stories about Julia’s remarkable life. Those who agreed to be interviewed are cited in the notes. There are several, however, who deserve special mention. Russ and Marian Morash provided a fascinating behind-the-scenes tour of The French Chef set and the pioneering days of educational TV. In addition, they withstood enough queries and calls to have my number blocked by the phone company, but never failed to make themselves available. Only Russ, the Ayatollah, could stand up to Julia’s relentless drive; his stealth contributio
n to the rise of public broadcasting is incalculable. Judith Jones’s recollections of the early days at Knopf may force my publisher to take their name off the spine of this book; nevertheless, her insights and extremely frank conversations with me were instrumental in understanding Julia’s ambitions. Another individual who deserves special mention is Geof Drummond, Julia’s indefatigable producer for the latter part of her TV career, who was more than generous with his time and tidings. Geof has been criticized for “dragging an old lady across the TV screen,” yet he not only saw beyond age, he gave Julia a second act, which she deserved and loved (as did we).

  I received encouragement and assistance from several Julia Child scholars, who made my work on this biography so much easier. Laura Shapiro’s wonderful portrait of Julia for the Penguin Lives series is as incisive as it is irresistible. Her writing in general about the incestuous pas de deux between food and culture is a valuable resource to any author. Alex Prud’homme’s lovely memoir, My Life in France, written in collaboration with his aunt, was extremely helpful in capturing Julia’s entrée into the world of cuisine, and his discussions with me were equally effective.

  My deepest gratitude, as always, goes to my dear friend Sandy D’Amato, one of America’s most distinguished chefs, who answered every question I had about food and cooking with his usual perceptive wisdom. William Grimes, the former food critic for The New York Times as well as one of my editors at the paper, came to my rescue at several culinary impasses. I also tapped into the collective brilliance of Rozanne Gold and Michael Whiteman, in addition to Fuchsia Dunlop, Marion Nestle, Joan Nathan, Nancy Silverton, Anne Willan, Jane and Michael Stern, and the late Michael Batterberry, all of whom contributed their food-related expertise. I would also be remiss if I didn’t thank Henri Cointreau and Catherine Baschet for their hospitality at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. The school has come a long way since Madame Brassart’s reign of terror, and counts Julia among its emissaries in its more modern existence.