They returned from Europe after each visit with written programs ready for the intense filming schedule of more French Chef programs in color. For a few months it appeared they would not be able to continue the series when Polaroid, assuming another company would pick up The French Chef moved on to support another program. They had been underwriting her program since 1965. No company stepped in to assume sponsorship, undoubtedly because PBS did not allow commercials. When news got out, the public response inundated Polaroid, who quickly resumed their $80,000 grants.
Julia was both happy to be renewed and reluctant to continue the demanding work of filming. When she received a letter from Madeleine Kamman about rumors of her retirement, she hastened to inform her she intended never to retire. The French Chef which now featured themes such as “Open House” and “Sudden Company,” moved to 9 P.M. on Sundays, with a rebroadcast at 5 P.M. the following Saturday. Because the letters and press inquiries never let up, Avis DeVoto was hired to write Julia-replies to letters that came into WGBH.
The tapings continued despite various anniversaries, including their silver wedding anniversary on September 1, 1971, and Paul’s seventieth birthday the following January. They had to wait to celebrate the birthday of Paul and Charlie until August 1972, when the Child family also celebrated Julia’s sixtieth birthday in Maine. She would later tell The New Yorker, “One of the good things about getting to be sixty is that you make up your mind not to drink any more rotgut wine.” For her birthday, Paul penned another poem to his “birthday queen” and to the “Recognition that the years don’t count” because her “leaves are ever green.”
Salute, O Queen! We never thought to eat
So well before your reign. “Bone appetite!”
By December of that year, they taped the final program of The French Chef and headed back to Provence. Julia believed she had presented all the important recipes she wanted to teach.
THE PRESS AND THE BBC
Again the press invaded the Childs’ privacy at La Pitchoune. Reporters from Vogue, McCall’s, the New York Times, and others came for interviews, photographs, and tapings. Suzanne Patterson, an American in Paris writing articles for Réalités, came down to interview Julia and met Simca, with whom she would later cooperate on a memoir. But none betrayed Julia’s precise location in print until a former Paris colleague of Paul’s gave step-by-step, turn-by-turn, directions to La Pitchoune in an article entitled “On the Trail of Julia Child.” On their next visit, a camper filled with Americans drove in to see The French Chef’s house. Julia and Paul were gracious, but Paul reprimanded his former colleague.
There was hardly a newspaper or magazine in the country that did not cover Julia. Terrence O’Flaherty of the San Francisco Chronicle proclaimed: “A Big Child Shall Lead Us.” He found her “more convincing than Walter Cronkite.” “Even the lowliest thaw-and-serve sloth has felt the vibrations of Julia’s cult,” declared Gael Greene in Life, “the lady unleashed our gastronomic repressions.” That year Newsweek called her the “Queen of Chefs”—though she never called herself a chef, and Craig Claiborne, in an essay entitled “Changes in the Sixties,” called her a major phenomenon of that decade.
Reviewers continued to mention her awkwardness, but always with a loving tone: “Julia breathes hard and loves food. She is human. She is plump. She can be messy, a bit clumsy … she can drop a duck on her foot without coming apart at the seams.” One newspaper columnist described her “glid[ing] around her oversized studio kitchen like a herniated ostrich, tossing off one-liners.” Another reviewer perceptively noted the dramatic action and violence of her manner, saying he hated to miss her program as much as he did Monday night football: “Perhaps for the same reason—all that programmed and controlled violence is a vicarious purging of the juices.”
Money magazine picked up on a little-mentioned aspect of Julia’s professional success: Paul was her full partner. Money featured her inclusion of Paul in her career (“our books” and “our show”) in an article about successful women and their business careers. She and Helen Gurley Brown were “extreme exceptions” in their financial success and partnership with their husbands. Indeed, Paul at seventy was keeping up an occasionally grueling pace of television and press. Julia still did the taxes and handled the finances (as did Freddie Child for Charlie), but Paul was her business partner in planning the career and working alongside her. His refrain in letters to his brother—“to keep Julie before the public as a vivid and viable personality”—explains the new series and books as well as the public appearances and press interviews. Though she was pulled into his diplomatic current during the first decade of their marriage, he told his brother in a September 19, 1973, letter, “I am still, in a sense, an accessory-after-the-fact of Julie’s rhythms,” part of that unseen iceberg.
Julia Child was a household name, as exhibited in the avenues of popular culture. The cartoon strip “Beetle Bailey,” distributed in seventy-three countries through the International Herald Tribune, carried a strip showing Beetle’s General, sitting under a picture of George Washington, explaining that he was inspired by the portrait of George Washington over his military desk: “I try to live as he did.” In the final scene, Beetle is shown sitting under the photograph of a woman in a chef’s toque, and to a private’s question about who it is, responding with a satisfied “Julia Child.” In 1970 her name appeared in the New York Times crossword puzzle under “noted cook, 34 across” in April and again as “Chef for the French [sic], 10 across” in August.
Time magazine planned a cover story on McDonald’s (the nation’s largest dispenser of meals) and wanted a quote from Julia. She insisted she had never been to the golden arches and was not interested. They persisted (Paul described it as begging on bended knees), and Julia’s curiosity worked in their favor. After they promised that her opinion would not constitute an endorsement (and informed her that other food critics such as Beard and Claiborne gave their judgment), she and Paul went to Davis Square in Somerville and ordered one of everything. She delivered her opinion: “nothing but calories,” not a balanced meal, bread soft and too much of it, cheap—“But the French fries are surprisingly good.” Seven years later, John and Karen Hess in their Taste of America would claim she tried very hard “to find something positive to say without losing the gourmet franchise.” In truth, she did like the fries. They had taste because they were fried in lard, she later learned when they switched to vegetable oil. Julia was judging taste alone; a nutritionist at Harvard, however, documented that “McDonald’s is good fare nutritionally, but could be improved by tossing in some coleslaw and the fruit of the season.”
Scores of newspaper features on Julia during the first half of the 1970s appeared in papers around the country, repeating the outlines of her life in repetitive detail. Many quoted her themes during this period: her insistence that anyone can eat well if they are willing to learn to cook, that American meats are better than the meats in France, and that fast food and airline food are terrible (she and Paul carried their own food on their flights).
Coverage during the early 1970s emphasized her media role (CBS did a half hour on the making of The French Chef, and the Christian Science Monitor covered the film tour of France), her private life (Barbara Walters interviewed her on Not For Women Only), and her artistic contribution (in August 1973 she was guest of honor at a party on Long Island that included Max Lerner, Jerome Robbins, Willem de Kooning, and many other artists). Her honors included a press award (the only one given to PBS) by TV Guide.
Julia and Paul went to London from Provence in February 1973 to tape promotions for the trial run of five of her programs for the British Broadcasting Corporation and to see the first show broadcast. Watching with Elizabeth David, England’s favorite cookery writer, Julia was appalled when she realized they had cut off her introduction (in which she said she was a home cook and not a chef, an American and not French) and began with her laughingly brushing her blouse in a disoriented way after having lifted
the two lids of the chicken pans, not realizing there was steam on the lids as she touched the lids together like cymbals. She was demonstrating two chicken dishes (“Coq au Vin vs. Chicken Fricassée, Sisters Under the Sauce”). Because she was cooking with wine, the British press suggested that she was drinking—or that she was slapdash, untidy, and unprofessional—and the show fizzled. It also suffered from the time slot at 3:40 in the afternoon and was twice preempted. Julia privately complained that the programs were “ill-used, if not demeaned,” but publicly she said, “Too bad it laid an egg” and “The English are used to stiff aprons.” Her British supporters, notably Sally Miall and Anne Willan, blamed in part an anti-American attitude and a sense of British superiority.
American-born “British” food writer Paul Levy declared twelve years later, “Deprived by this rejection of the best television cookery series ever made, the British now have an appallingly low standard—our television ‘cooks’ would not be tolerated by the more sophisticated American audience.”
IN PERSON: TOURING AND DEMONSTRATING
Because “teaching is a very good way to learn,” as she phrased it, and because she wanted to sell books and raise money for public television, Julia offered public demonstrations. She received hundreds of requests through the years, turned every commercial one down, but usually responded to work for a charity. “I like public service,” John McWilliams’s daughter often said. They paid her expenses, paid a fee to WGBH, and she profited only by the sale of her books.
She embarked on her first whirlwind tour to meet her fans in 1971 to promote her Bantam paperback boxed edition of the two volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Knopf sold the paperback rights to Bantam, with Julia’s one-third share ($115,000) paid to her over several years—a smart tax decision on the part of her lawyer. She called it “a really hard sell, at last!” campaign, beginning in a suite of the Dorset Hotel in New York City by fielding serial interviews with the press. Then she went on the road to sign books and hold clusters of demonstrations at leading department stores such as Bloomingdale’s.
From Hackensack to Houston, from Stanford to Seattle, she made fast omelets on talk shows around the country and responded to the same old questions as if she were hearing them for the first time. The formal demonstrations for large audiences were planned and diagrammed in minute detail. They were warmly welcomed in San Francisco, where Dorothy lived, and nearby at M. F. K. Fisher’s house at Bouverie Ranch in Glen Ellen. When Dinah Shore interviewed Julia on her television program, Paul remarked that they had an “immediate rapport” because Dinah was “as warm and as charming, as sensuous and as beautiful as Julia.”
With the assistance of Rosemary Manell, who flew in from San Francisco, and Elizabeth Bishop, an “associate cook” from the TV series, helping her on all of her demonstration trips, Julia’s routine was more professional and her teaching more advanced. Julia learned, she said, that “I need my own persons—Rosie Manell and Elizabeth Bishop—to travel around with me; you need somebody who knows your style.” According to Paul: “The team of Rosie, Liz, Julia and Paul works marvelously well together.” Yet with her performance skills, familiar assistants, and Paul’s talents (he was no longer washing dishes in rest-room sinks), her planning and schedules were still grueling experiences, as his detailed letters to his brother reveal, even with limousines and good hotels.
Now that she was broadcast in color, she seemed closer to her audience, who crowded her every appearance to touch her and have her autograph her book. Paul described the hourlong lines as “waves of love.” Frequently he was included in local television interviews. “She always had him sit beside her,” says Jane Friedman. “Paulski, as she called him, was always most important for her. It was charming to see them hold hands and kiss, to talk playfully of food and sex.”
Paul called fans “JW’s” or “Julie-watchers with cameras” when they traveled and were approached by American tourists in Oslo, Provence, or Paris. The Dehillerin brothers found that when they hung her picture on the wall of their French kitchen equipment store, the customers would exclaim, “Oh, Joooooolia!” The Boston JW’s spotted her at the market or movies, the symphony or a Red Sox game (Julia loved sports, but Paul thought the game “more interesting anthropologically than sportively”). Her neighbors often noticed her car: a large tin spoon was attached to the antenna.
To raise money for public television and keep her image before the public, Julia undertook another demonstration tour of the country in March and April 1973, just after her BBC failure. This time she also took along Ruth Lockwood. For these appearances, they sent ahead a detailed list of the equipment illustrated in Mastering II. Nevertheless, Julia transported eight pieces of luggage, including a two-burner stove. At each stop she would, as in Boston, write and record local pitches for public stations. Some stops were for book signings and media appearances only. Demonstration stops were for a particular charity (Chicago was for Smith College alumnae) and a fee was paid to WGBH. She was emotionally, intellectually, and financially tied to public television.
Paul believed that one was “a kind of Public Property in this epoch’s culture, if one’s name and face are well known.” In Brooklyn the police helped keep the book-hugging mob in a neat line, but in Chicago there was nearly a riot. Paul felt Julia had “created a speaking style and method that is first class.” (When she gave a lecture at the Harvard Law School, they had “the biggest audience [they] had ever had!” Even when the fuses blew, she kept on talking.) Her audiences responded immediately to her relaxed manner and spontaneous humor. She often began by reading some of the letters of complaint, and the audience roared. Her demonstration skills transferred from her television appearances and vice versa. She always wanted as many people as possible to see the demos, yet talked as if no one could see: “cut it on the shoulder, where the upper arm joins,” she said instead of “cut it here.” She pretended a blind person was in the audience.
Julia and Paul chose to keep up their heavy schedule. We “love it,” Paul told Charlie, it keeps “our juices flowing,” and “we are not wondering what to do in our retirement.” Michael Field died in May 1971 because he drove himself to overwork, Julia believed, but she did not feel she was overworking. She chose her focus—a book or a television series—and then gave it her total commitment. She told Elizabeth David about her television work: “We’ve brought this rush on ourselves, since we’d rather get it all done in a series of 2 lumps than let it drag all year.” Though Paul suffered from occasional serious insomnia and was beginning to be aged by the schedule, Julia seemed to thrive on activity and the contact with people.
Phila Cousins, then completing her education at Radcliffe and graduating magna cum laude in social psychology, was an important ingredient in Julia’s life during this time. Paul initially acted as a father-mentor figure, correcting and educating her (“first class mind but sloppy thinker,” he pronounced). “We McWilliams women had to be molded Pygmalion style,” Phila said. When she met and set up housekeeping with Bart Alexander, Paul believed she was in good hands and relaxed and enjoyed her growth and beauty. The two young people were frequently at the Childs’ or entertaining them at their apartment. When they married on July 14, 1974, in Sausalito, Julia and Paul were tied up completing a book in Provence; but they planned to celebrate Christmas at La Pitchoune while the young people spent a year of study in London.
Both Julia and Paul deliberately cultivated youth, both to keep themselves young and to avoid becoming fixed in their views and habits. Living near Harvard helped, for they had Phila and the numerous children of their friends and acquaintances, among them the children of David Brinkley and of Wendy Beck, whom they invited to a large party for young people in December 1973. “It was quite charming for me as a young person,” said Jane Friedman, “watching these older people who really liked each other. They liked my youth.” Julia also went to Pittsburgh to fulfill a promise to Mister Rogers, who had a long-running children’s program on telev
ision. For his vast audience of three- to six-year-olds, she demonstrated the making of spaghetti to be eaten with chopsticks. Unknown to the television world, children were avid watchers of “Julia.”
But Julia was most at home with her WGBH staff and her neighbors. In 1973, she was thrilled to be free of “our television maelstrom,” as she put it (Paul said, “Julie is going crazy from her new freedom, combined with a sudden release of her long-backed-up desire for social life”). They joined in the neighborhood traditions, according to Jean deSola Pool, their next-door neighbor, which were Christmas caroling in the neighborhood (“We were Jews and Moynihans are Catholic, and Julia and Paul were anti-religious, as were the people whose home we went to after the caroling,” Mrs. Pool says) and the John Kenneth Galbraiths’ June commencement party (“Oh, everyone went. They are still doing it”). Paul always called him “moose-tall” Galbraith and liked to talk economics and the oil crisis with him.
SOLIDARITY FOR THE FOOD WORLD
Julia’s career and personal life were inexorably connected to the food world of chefs, cookbook writers, and cooking teachers. She believed in showing what she called “solidarity for our friends in the food world.” She attended their book signings and lectures (Paul thought that Claiborne’s lecture at Boston University was formless and embarrassing), wrote letters of support (to White House chef Henri Haller, whom Claiborne publicly criticized), bought equipment from Elizabeth David’s cookware store in London, and visited new restaurants. For their twenty-seventh wedding anniversary, after going to see the French film comedy Le Sex Shop, Julia and Paul dined at Maison Robert, an excellent new restaurant in the old Boston city hall building. She took an interest in the young chef Lydia Shire, transferring her loyalty to The Harvest and then to Shire’s own Biba, overlooking Boston Common.
Appetite for Life Page 49
