Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  Amid their preparations, Julia was suddenly called back to Pasadena (she had spent a week there in March). Her father died on May 16 at eighty-two years of age. The public funeral included his business associates and members of the California Club, as well as friends such as Andy Devine, the actor. The three children discovered after the funeral that their father had kept the urns with ashes of their mother and grandparents in his study. A chapter of Julia’s life, a chapter she walked away from years before, was finally closed. If there were any regrets, she would never acknowledge them. “Eh bien,” she wrote Dort, “it is hard to believe that old Eagle Beak is no longer around. Thank heaven his last 15 years were so happy, and that the actual death was so quick.” (Dorothy and Phila Cousins would remember in later years Julia’s eyes tearing up when they spoke of Pop.) Now she needed a new will, converting her assets to a Living Trust, and she and Dorothy turned over the monthly management of the family estate to brother John.

  It took nearly three months to find the sponsors, but by June WGBH was ready to tape the pilots with a minimum budget of only a few hundred dollars. Not enough money to pay for rehearsals, but enough to buy tape. Educational television was largely a volunteer effort, with Boston University students running the cameras. Paul’s retirement and her $15,000-a-year family estate income allowed her to do her teaching on educational television, then as always a nonprofit venture.

  “Russ, Ruthie, and I worked on the name,” Julia says of their program. They considered and rejected “The Gourmet Kitchen,” “French Cuisine at Home,” “Cuisine Magic,” “The Gourmet Arts,” “The Chef at Home,” “Cuisine Mastery,” “Kitchen à la Française,” and “Table d’Hôte.” “We called it The French Chef because it had to be brief enough to fit into the newspaper’s television guide.” Ruth Lockwood, who was working on the Eleanor Roosevelt program, remembers acting as associate producer, and planning the three programs while sitting around the Norwegian-built table with Julia and Paul. Everything was written out ahead of time. Ruth, who had both a graduate degree in communications (with a concentration in television) and experience at the Fannie Farmer Cooking School in Boston, drew the layouts.

  Because the station burned down in 1961 (the first copy of Mastering that Bibi gave to Ruth Lockwood burned with it), they filmed in the auditorium of the Boston Gas Company just off Park Square. Morash worked out of a huge Trailways bus (“with seven million miles on it”) and long cables running from the generator into the building and across the terrazzo floor. Morash remembers that someone built a simple set and borrowed the appliances from architect Ben Thompson’s firm, Design Research; Julia recalled that “Ruth dug around somewhere and came up with the anonymous but sprightly musical theme song.” Lockwood remembers taking a red-checked tablecloth from her mother and cutting it up to make the curtains for the set and helping Julia with her makeup.

  Julia and Paul arrived with all their pots and pans and eggs, piling them inside the lobby of the Boston Gas Company. While Paul parked the car, she waited for him and for a dolly to move the heavy equipment. “Hey, get that stuff out of this lobby!” said the uniformed elevator operator, as office staff and executives in business suits rushed by with disapproving looks. They finally found a janitor and got everything moved to the basement auditorium. When the crew arrived, Ruth was setting up the dining room for the final scene (she believed the “third act” should show the finished dish), Julia was arranging her detailed notes (“Simmering water in large alum. pan, upper R. burner”) and to the side Paul was arranging his notes (“When J. starts buttering, remove stack molds”). Every detail was scripted, dialogue on the right, what was to be pictured on the left. “Let’s shoot it!” called Russ.

  We used 16 or 35 millimeter black-and-white film which ran continuously during the taping [says Morash]. There was no editing, no cutting in, and the only way to edit videotape was to literally cut the tape with a razor and tape it. We used two cameras, each the size of a coffee table, four only for the Boston Symphony, and when Julia moved from the stove to the refrigerator it was a very big deal that took careful planning.

  The first pilot, “The French Omelet,” was set up and filmed on June 18, 1962. The second two, “Coq au Vin” and “Onion Soup,” were both filmed on June 25. The tapes were reused, as was the station’s practice, and ultimately disappeared from history. But on the typed script it is clearly shown that at the last minute they added the two words that would become her signature sign-off: “This is Julia Child. Thank you, bon appétit.”

  At 8:30 on July 28, after a big steak dinner, Paul pulled out the television they purchased and kept in an unused fireplace and watched the first program. Julia was shocked to see herself for the first time: “There was Mrs. C swooping about the work surface and panting heavily. I had put too much into the program. The second would be much better. Perhaps if I did twenty more,” she told James Beard, “I’d get on to the technique a bit better.” What the audience enjoyed in part was the lack of studied technique, the natural enthusiasm of Mrs. C.

  I “careened around the stove, and WGBH-TV lurched into educational television’s first cooking program,” Julia wrote six years later. At the time, Morash says, “I did not think that this was going to be momentous. This was an extremely disposable medium, and I was doing important stuff like science and language. I was on data overload in those days.” He would later produce The Victory Garden and This Old House. Yet the timing was significant, for the January before Mastering the Art of French Cooking was published, President John F. Kennedy and his Francophile wife, Jacqueline, had moved into the White House and in April hired a French chef named René Verdon. French cooking was trendy and chic but seemingly unattainable, its techniques mysterious, the words unpronounceable.

  Television was a relatively new medium, with the station signing on at four in the afternoon. Julia’s programs ran in what is now called prime time, precisely because it was educational and family-oriented. The introduction of French cooking attracted educational television’s usual audience of university and privileged people. “These pilots would not have worked in Bayonne, New Jersey,” says Morash. “It had to have happened in Boston. Julia was a child of academe, well connected to Harvard people.”

  BREAD LOAF AND

  THE CAMBRIDGE CIRCLE

  For the second year, before the Child family holiday in Maine, Julia and Paul went to Bread Loaf, this time for the full term of the writers’ conference, from August 14 through August 29 (the third in her pilot series aired while she was in Vermont). The day after her arrival they celebrated her fiftieth birthday. For the fun of being with Avis and sitting in on the lectures and readings, Julia worked as “assistant deputy typist” to Mary Moore Molony, managing editor of The American Scholar and secretary in the summers at Bread Loaf (it was she who typed the Houghton Mifflin draft of Julia and Simca’s first, rejected version of the cookbook). Paul was official photographer, “the Photographic Consort,” as assistant director Paul Cubeta called him, the man who captured Robert Frost against the clear Vermont sky. “Julia is an absolute dreamboat,” he added in a letter that year. In recompense for their work they paid no room and board. Julia loved the classes: “I learn so much from the lectures, even the poets,” she told James Beard without apparent irony.

  The Bread Loaf environment was both intellectually heady and physically relaxing. The writers’ conference, founded in 1926 and directed by John Farrar (then at Doubleday), was a summer camp for professors and writers, with the lure of drinking and fishing. Even the waiters were writers, unpublished but “highly promising.” Isolated and peaceful on acres of tranquil green grass, Bread Loaf offered only intellectual stimulation, and that was dulled nightly by alcohol. In truth, it had the reputation for alcoholic and sexual stimulation, earning the name Bed Loaf among insiders. The summer literary colony was also, at that time, “exclusively New England,” says Peter Davison. Julia and Paul became friends of poets Richard Yates, David McCord, John and Judith Ciardi, Jo
hn Nims, Robert Frost, who lived just down the road, and Carlos Baker (Hemingway’s future biographer). They all gathered in the soft evening air, laughter emanating through the bushes of Treman House, which Avis oversaw. Here was the scene of the late afternoon alcoholic socials, much like Bernard DeVoto’s Sunday evening “hours” in Cambridge. Indeed, many of the people at Bread Loaf were connected to Cambridge circles.

  Ciardi was the director, though Paul Cubeta made all the arrangements. The great poet was called “Big Daddy” behind his back, and his national reputation and hauteur kept him from being questioned about any decision. Frost, who was considered the unofficial poet laureate of the country, especially since his reading at the Kennedy inauguration the year before, was always the guiding light of the writers’ conference. Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Louis Untermeyer attended in past years, as did Wallace Stegner (Stegner and DeVoto had been boys together in Utah). Bernard DeVoto taught at Bread Loaf for decades before his death, after which Houghton Mifflin endowed a fellowship in his name. DeVoto insisted on teaching fiction, though David H. Bain, whose history of Bread Loaf is called Whose Woods These Are, claims rightly that DeVoto was a terrible novelist but a brilliant historian. Avis continued to work after her husband’s death and was paid a modest salary to put some order in the Bread Loaf house party.

  “Treman House, a cream-colored cottage at the edge of the writers’ conference area, was dedicated to the generous drinking habits (Bloody Marys before lunch, cocktails before dinner, other drinks or beer after the evening lecture or reading). Treman was open to leaders, fellows, and visitors like me,” says poet Peter Davison, but “it was off limits to ordinary students.” There was a large veranda under two of the upstairs rooms. Davison remembers that the summer before, when the sun was setting on the downhill side of the mountain at the cocktail hour, Avis introduced him to Fletcher Pratt, William Sloane, and Julia (“a tall woman, robust, genial and smiling, with a remarkable voice”). Julia reminisced:

  We went because of Avis, who was in charge of the bar. I went to a lot of the lectures and learned about writing and how vivid it should be. Our house had a lot of fun, and Treman was where everyone drank a lot, screaming and yelling. Once when I went back to our house, I could hear the screaming from there. Ran into my old friend Joe Sloane who had lived in Pasadena, and we made many longtime friends.

  Though Julia and Paul lived in Maple House this and later summers, they worked and hung out at Treman Cottage, which Avis ran “on a strict system, like a military social club where, before equality came in, they welcomed only the anointed few,” according to a later assistant director. Edward (Sandy) Martin, professor of English at Middlebury, said, “It was a social center of the colony and only the staff were welcome for drinks. They drank until just before dinner and then walked into dinner almost late and all sat at the ‘high table,’ a long table at the rear near the window where it was cooler. Since they were not paid well, Ciardi felt they should have privileges.”

  “The social tides of Cambridge washed us up on the same beaches as the Childs quite frequently,” said Peter Davison, then a thirty-one-year-old editor at the Atlantic Monthly Press. After meeting Julia and Paul the previous summer at Bread Loaf, he and his wife, Jane Truslow Davison (a distinguished writer in her own right), dined with the Childs at the home of Theodore and Kay Morrison—he taught at Harvard and was longtime director of Bread Loaf before Ciardi took over. At Avis’s book party for Julia, the Childs met two other Atlantic Monthly Press colleagues, including Wendy Morison Beck and her husband, H. Brooks Beck of Hill & Barlow, who eventually became the Childs’ first lawyer. Julia was partial to Jane Davison because she was witty and literate, a Smith sister (housemate and graduate with Sylvia Plath in 1955), and unafraid to invite the Childs for dinner. These were what Davison calls “the days of ambitious dinner parties given by underemployed literary housewives.”

  Through the late Davis Pratt, Paul’s former student and prodigy at Avon Old Farms School and a curator of photography, they met Davis’s twin brother, Herb, and his wife, Pat, lifelong residents of Cambridge. The Herb Pratts became very close to the Childs, traveling back to Europe in coming years, and Pat would become one of a host of volunteers on Julia’s television shows.

  If Boston, with all its educational institutions, was “an academic tribal reservation,” as one of its journalists claimed, “the reservation was centered in Cambridge.” In addition to their OSS colleague Cora DuBois at Harvard, Paul had a childhood friend, the distinguished composer Randall Thompson, head of the music department. Harvard was “a carbuncle of cabals and cliques,” wrote novelist Wallace Stegner in his biography of Bernard DeVoto, but the Childs’ faculty neighbors all became lifelong friends, especially those who were part of Bernard DeVoto’s The Hour (his mock-heroic hymn to alcohol published anonymously in 1951) and whom Julia and Paul met in November 1959: Marion Schlesinger, then married to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Kitty Galbraith, wife of John Kenneth. Both were off serving the Kennedy administration when Julia and Paul moved to Cambridge. Schlesinger, who like his father before him was a history professor at Harvard, was serving as special assistant to the President. Catherine (Kitty) Atwater, Julia’s Smith classmate, was then living in India, where Galbraith was serving as U.S. ambassador. The Galbraiths would return in 1963 to Harvard and Francis Street, behind the Child house. Kitty told Julia she gave Mastering the Art of French Cooking as a wedding gift in India. Galbraith admired the intelligence Julia brought to her profession and her height: “We encountered each other as people whose heads were always above the crowd.” The nearly seven-foot Galbraith believed that “if she had been a foot shorter, she would have had a much more difficult time. The only form of discrimination that is still allowed in the world is in favor of tall people and it’s a very subtle matter.” Marion Schlesinger called Galbraith and Child the “benign storks” of her neighborhood.

  Literary Boston of the late 1950s would be portrayed by Peter Davison in The Fading Smile. The center of this literary world, and the subject of Davison’s longest chapter, was Robert Lowell, whose “For the Union Dead” young Davison published in The Atlantic Monthly, where he was poetry editor. His literary memoir is a group portrait not only of Davison himself and Lowell but also of Robert Frost, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Richard Wilbur, W. S. Merwin, Donald Hall, Maxine Kumin, Adrienne Rich, and Stanley Kunitz. Julia and Paul moved to Cambridge just as Boston was beginning to lose its attraction as the central watering hole, to use Richard Eder’s image, of American poetry in this century. None in this tweedy or seersucker (depending on the season) Boston knew that the voice that would become the most famous in their city (after Kennedy) had just moved into the Josiah Royce house on Irving Street.

  These overlapping circles of WGBH, Harvard, Shady Hill, and the Atlantic Monthly Press groups washed together through the years. Many of their friends became regular habitués of Lopaus Point in Maine in the summers, where they all met Walter and Helen Lippmann over cocktails. Also on Mount Desert Island with the Charlie Childs was the summer home of the great Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison (Wendy Beck’s father).

  “We live in a lovely town because everyone is doing something,” Julia was fond of saying. That they belonged in the intellectual circles of Cambridge and Boston was clear in the minds of their friends. Paul was a learned conversationalist whose interests and knowledge ranged widely. Julia had a New England dignity everyone respected and she remained clearly noncommercial, never endorsing a product. She could become a television personality without loss of stature because she was on educational television. “Julia was a scholar,” said Morash, “because she eats and breathes her subject, researches every detail, can take a set of directions and understand what the result will be, is totally comfortable with her subject, and is a recognized authority.”

  As early as August 23, Julia informed Beard that there was a plan for a series of television cooking classes with guest chefs such a
s Stöckli of the Four Seasons and there was a good chance New York City’s Channel 13 would buy the series. She saw the television classes as an extension of her teaching, not as a career in itself. In her world, television occupied no major space, and indeed it was suspect. They did turn it on to see Richard Nixon’s farewell to the press (“I hope this is the last we shall see of him publicly,” she said, having just read Teddy White’s The Making of the President).

  She went to New York City in October and November to teach classes at James Beard’s cooking school, hoping to team up with Beard and Helen Evans Brown for joint lessons and demonstrations. Julia and James Beard were drawn to each other for many reasons. Both were Westerners (from California and Oregon), companionable, generous, and big. They loved the theater of the kitchen and hated pretension. Beard, who became her news line to the New York food world, was a jovial and natural man who folded his egg whites with his hands. They would be “brother and sister,” wrote his first biographer, Evan Jones.

  While Julia was in New York, Beard arranged for her to demonstrate the making of pâte feuilletée at the Four Seasons. (“Don’t know why they want me to do them, when all those fancy types are in NY,” she wrote to Dort.) She also took every opportunity to teach small groups in private homes in her neighborhood: