Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  This second show, “More Cooking in Concert,” aired in August and December 1996. Their two “In Concert” shows are the most popular tapes played for PBS fund-raisers around the country.

  They also packed the venue for every public appearance together, whether at the Smithsonian “Gala Celebration” in June 1995 or Sotheby’s “Conversation” the next December. At the Smithsonian, which holds sixteen lectures a month, they drew the largest audience on record. At Sotheby’s, two hundred applicants were turned away for a conversation that included Jacques’s Connecticut neighbor Morley Safer of 60 Minutes. Julia and Jacques were comfortably linked because they both represented education, not commerce, a respect for French culinary techniques, and a distrust of faddishness in cooking. Jacques, with his graduate studies in French literature from Columbia University, was a dean at the French Culinary Institute in New York and the major luminary in the master’s degree program at Boston University. Because teaching was their talent and French cuisine their passion, they teamed up for education and for demonstrations. They were also both professionals in front of an audience and had a familiar repartee and rapport. When a member of one audience asked Julia what her cholesterol level was, she replied, “Medium.” Jacques, after a moment’s pause, added, “Medium rare.”

  Julia appeared to some of her associates to have an ambivalent relationship with Jacques, flirting one moment and on another offended by a seeming male condescending remark. One assistant says, “Julia likes to be the event. Neither one likes to share the spotlight. They bicker sometimes before a concert, though they admire each other. But he is a Frenchman and grew up in a French kitchen. Men bang the knife three times on the table to get the noise going before they cut. Women don’t do that. Hut one! Chop, chop, chop.” To a viewer it is clear that when they work together, he takes charge of the preparation, in part because she is not as fast and accurate as she once was. During the taping of “More Cooking in Concert,” she seemed to lean on the demonstration table during the entire performance (she had been on her feet for hours during the preparations). But if he carried the physical labor, she carried the spirit and humor of the evening.

  Julia also began appearing with Graham Kerr in 1994, because they played leading roles in the IACP and always announced the winners of the cookbook awards each year. He had never before cooked onstage with anyone. They were a pair of Scots: Graham Kerr in his green plaid kilts and Julia “McWilliams” in her bright jewel-colored dresses. At the 1995 IACP convention in San Antonio, their first filmed “Master Class” was an unfortunate disaster because it was interminable. After six hours, a staff member was reduced to tears, and after all that work Geoffrey was not able to sell the tape to CBS. The second Child-Kerr public cooking took place at a December 1995 PBS fund-raiser in Seattle, where Kerr is based. Sue Huffman of TVFN believes that only Kerr comes close to Julia in connecting directly with a television audience.

  For their third teaching appearance (“Birds of a Feather”) at the 1996 IACP national convention in Philadelphia, Julia cooked pheasant en croûte, and he roast ostrich tenderloin. She slathered on the butter while he sprayed olive oil and boiled up his aromatic fruits and herbs for sauces. During the banter about butter and the Dr. Dean Ornish no-fat diet, it was Kerr who came across as the tolerant and open-minded cook. When he tasted her heavy sauce at one of their demonstrations, he swallowed hard and said, “I think that as an Englishman I have just been violated.” She turned around immediately and answered, “Really, darling, I did not think it would be that easy!”

  When Julia first saw “The Galloping Gourmet” on television early in 1969, she told Simca he was “cute and funny,” but he would be better without a live audience and if he took his cooking more seriously. She and Simca tried one of his suggestions (to add a teaspoon of water to egg white before beating them) and discovered the height of their whipped egg whites was improved. After a serious accident and a religious conversion, Kerr had transformed himself into a sort of dietary disciplinarian in the 1970s. When his wife, Treena, suffered a stroke and then a heart attack in the mid-1980s, he stopped evangelizing and began cooking for her, making his low-fat, low-salt recipes as flavorful and pleasurable as he could. He was editor-at-large for Cooking Light, with a 5.7 million circulation, and his books sold 14 million. The “gallop” and alcohol were gone, but Julia found his gray-bearded charm irresistible.

  The contrast between Pépin and Kerr is dramatic and may in part explain why the first taping with Kerr was unsuccessful. Whereas Pépin takes charge and pushes the program along, Kerr defers to Julia. Kerr, once the boisterous Englishman (via Australia), is deferential and empathic. One can almost see in his concentration on her that he mouths the words she speaks. “Graham is nonalcoholic and ten percent or less fat, which is absolutely what I am NOT,” says Julia, “so we are each going to do our separate things. He is just charming.” But there does not seem to be an edge to their contrasting philosophies, though the contrast allows some dramatic tension when they cook.

  Pépin, Kerr, and the master chefs were happily cooking with Julia, but some questioned whether the country was cooking with her. Despite a plethora of cooking books and cuisines, the ascendancy of pasta and risotto, Julia insisted on the primacy of French cooking techniques. At the Aspen Food and Wine Classic and on the pages of Food & Wine, she exclaimed, “Bring Back the Quiche!” The influence of French cooking, according to both Julia and Jacques, was as strong as ever. At the French Culinary Institute, on a recent panel entitled “French Cooking Is Dead, Long Live French Cooking,” they agreed that what was dead was the idea of French cooking, the image of its being heavy cream, which had been dead even longer in France than it had been in the United States. “Classic cuisine died in 1950 with Escoffier,” says Pépin. “We have had the thesis (Escoffier), the antithesis (nouvelle cuisine), and now the synthesis,” he adds.

  Perhaps more important is the question whether the American people at the end of the century were eating better than they did in 1961, when Mastering the Art of French Cooking was first published. Certainly those who wanted to eat well had far greater access to the best variety of fresh produce; indeed many were eating better than they did in their parents’ home. In 1960 most shops carried only iceberg lettuce and button mushrooms. “It used to be Rice-A-Roni and noodles,” says Zanne Stewart of Gourmet, “now there is risotto, couscous, and dozens of other products.” Pépin insists, “The rate at which we have moved forward in produce and cooking in the last decades is faster than in the last hundred years in Europe … and if we keep it up we will have the best in the world.”

  But the eating habits of far too many are worse than they have ever been, in part because of the proliferation of fast food (McDonald’s spends nearly $800 million a year on advertising). Julia often pointed out during her appearances that there are more and more books on cooking and a greater variety of produce, but kids are fed at school by pizza franchises. On September 4, 1996, Jane E. Brody reported in the New York Times that the American diet improved over the last three decades, but that only 25 percent of the people were eating healthy diets. The diets of wealthy whites were improved, the diets of poor blacks deteriorated, “a discrepancy the researchers attributed to the difference in ability to afford substantial amounts of meat and other foods high in saturated fat.” The study measured “improvement” on the basis of saturated fat and consumption of grains, fruits, and vegetables (not on taste or artistry).

  The junk food versus good cooking battle will always be fought, and people on both extremes will choose their statistics to argue which side is “winning.” There are paradoxes aplenty. Brody points out that more skim milk is now consumed, but more burgers and fries as well. Four and a half million Americans watch The French Chef on TVFN, but in 1996 the Pillsbury Bake-Off winner (the first man in its forty-seven-year history) won a million dollars for inventing a recipe made of packaged devil’s food cake mix, canned sliced pears, sweetened condensed milk, eggs, chocolate chips, ma
cadamia nuts, and butterscotch-caramel fudge topping (for a whopping 460 calories a serving). Only the eggs were fresh (one hopes).

  When news of what is called the French paradox reached the growing army of American food writers via CBS’s 60 Minutes, Julia Child and the French chefs in America seemed at least momentarily vindicated. “Why aren’t the French dropping like flies?” asked Jeffrey Steingarten, Vogue’s food editor (and one of the many men at Harvard Law School who used to regularly watch The French Chef). The paradox is that the French, who eat fat goose liver (foie gras) and drink red wine, have lower cholesterol, lower obesity, and fewer heart attacks and other cardiovascular diseases. At this news, Americans nearly emptied the shelves of the cholesterol-lowering red wine—but for the usual puritan reasons (self-improvement).

  The paradoxes are evident in restaurants as well as in homes. Restaurant diners are experimenting with all kinds of ethnic cuisines, displaying a more sophisticated American palate. But the “fusion” of these cuisines (Thai barbecue pizza) threatens to blur the native cuisines. On the other hand, one of the most popular books of 1996 was Rozanne Gold’s Recipes 1-2-3, using recipes with no more than three ingredients. Doomsayers point to the number of major French restaurant closings, citing Ma Maison, La Toque, L’Escoffier, and L’Ermitage—yet Le Cirque remains. France was suffering even more, it seemed: Alexandre Lazareff told a conference at the French Culinary Institute in 1996 that twenty years ago in France one could count from fifty to a hundred great restaurants that were prospering; now, after years of recession, he can name only twelve.

  Competition in both television and publishing grew with the interest in food during the last decade of the century. Approximately 700 cookbooks were published in 1995 alone, racking up more than $50 million in sales. Stand Facing the Stove, a dual biography of Irma Rombauer and her daughter Marion Becker, who had edited The Joy of Cooking until 1975, was published late in 1996. A “reissue” of Joy, Julia’s first cookbook when she became Mrs. Child, was being rewritten by committee, “a parade of superstars,” Laura Shapiro called them. When Shapiro asked the woman hiring and firing this “Keystone Kops in the Kitchen” why so many writers were needed for a book once written by Mrs. Rombauer, the editor declared that cooking had grown so complex no one cook could know both cakes and meats.

  BAKING WITH JULIA

  In her eighty-fourth year, Julia played her final “Alistair Cookie” role in Baking with Julia, a television series with master bakers (“Baking is anything that has flour in it,” she explained); no one had yet done a baking series for television. Moreover, the most popular segment of their Cooking with Master Chefs was with Nancy Silverton baking her La Brea bread, and two of the most successful programs on In Julia’s Kitchen with Master Chefs were with Carol Field of San Francisco baking Italian bread and Jim Dodge of Montpelier, Vermont, making chocolate fudge cake and apple pie. For this series, Julia agreed to write the introduction to a book based on the series, but this time she refused to write the book.

  The controversy over the accompanying book began in 1995 when, after Julia insisted she would not write another book and Geoffrey hired Dorie Greenspan to author the book itself, he mailed multiple submissions of his (A La Carte Communications’) proposal to several publishers for bidding because he needed a large advance to finance the filming. Judith Jones was surprised and angered by the multiple submissions, and Knopf did not make a bid, knowing that a bidding war would drive up the price of the book. Ink spilled in Publishers Weekly and the New York Times, leaving the impression first that Knopf was dropping its longtime author and second that Knopf refused to relinquish electronic rights (though it had relinquished them for the first two books of the series). Misleadingly, the issue looked like it was part of the larger battle of the 1990s for writers to control their own electronic rights. A La Carte’s lawyer, Carl DeSantis, told Publishers Weekly it was over “control of electronic rights.” Yet both Judith Jones and Jane Friedman at Knopf/Random House insist that “it had nothing to do with electronic rights.”

  Morrow made the winning bid with A La Carte Communications to publish the book, including payment for all photographs. Whether Knopf would have matched the bid no one will know, but it is doubtful. A La Carte received far more money than expected, and misleading reports that Julia always kept her electronic rights became big news. Writers from around the country called her for advice on retaining their electronic rights, just as they did when the New York Times decided to claim copyright on all articles written for the paper (Pépin announced he would no longer write for the Times). These two issues would define writers’ battles for claims to their work during this decade, and many turned to one of the oldest members of their profession for advice and leadership.

  Drummond’s budget for his master chefs and bakers series (about $35,000 per episode) compares with the cost of a half hour of Martha Stewart ($90,000), but contrasts dramatically with the millions spent for each episode of a weekly drama like E.R. or Law & Order. These relative costs explain the growth of (inexpensive) cooking shows on television. Yet the search for sponsors was never easy because PBS policy limits all advertising to a preliminary half minute. Part of Julia’s contractual agreements on the last few series involved help and support (though not endorsement) for their major sponsors, including Land O Lakes (they used 753 pounds of butter for the baking series) and Farberware. PBS contributed part of the funding and benefited most from the programs. A La Carte Communications and Julia, partners, benefited from book sales, which is why Julia was the chief promoter of what she honestly called “Dorie’s book.” This gracious honesty on celebrity-drive QVC “killed the book,” said one publicist, and they sold one fifth the books she had on her previous appearance.

  Drummond used three cameras for the baking series and made thirty-nine shows with twenty-six bakers, thus ensuring a regular slot in the season repertoire of local PBS stations. According to several of the crew, the major problem in making the series was in team morale when the ever-loyal Julia insisted Nancy Verde Barr be appointed associate producer. Baking was more complicated to dramatize in the filming, according to Drummond, because the magic occurs inside the oven. Thus, at one point they had seventeen bread machines working: “If we lost a bread in the middle of a second rise, we would need a second bread and a third bread.” When Julia watched Mary Bergin caramelize the sugar on the crème brûléed chocolate bundt cake with a blowtorch, Julia remarked, “I think every woman should have a blowtorch.”

  Baking with Julia was shown thirteen shows per season in 1996 and 1997, featuring bakers like Michel Richard, who began his career with the famous French pastry chef Gaston Lenôtre; Lora Brody, who founded the Women’s Culinary Guild and made the bread machine a common household appliance; Martha Stewart, who made “One Glorious Wedding Cake;” and Craig Kominiak, the tall and handsome baker of the Ecce Panis Bakery in New York City. “A real man,” Julia purred upon seeing the tall, burly baker.

  Fame came to Julia when she was mature, and she handled it with what Fred Ferretti in Gourmet called “an innate ease” and grace, occasionally even being surprised by it. She had lived now so long that she was famous for being well known (no doubt the definition of an American celebrity). She became what one writer called “a familiar object next to which people might pose for photographs.” But unlike Woody Allen, Charlie Chaplin, and Martha Stewart, the public has never turned on her. She never suffered the “perils of persona.”

  “Fame is a fickle food upon a shifting plate,” the poet Emily Dickinson wrote in the nineteenth century. Julia seemed aware of this New England wisdom, and with the help of Bill Truslow’s eye on “quality control” she kept her integrity, nurturing the national hunger for the famous, so that she could keep doing what she loved to do and avoid loneliness and boredom. She was observed by a local journalist greeting guests at a garden party in Woodstock, Vermont, in the summer of 1996. She appeared to be like the queen mother, the observer thought: “If her public demeanor i
s one of bemused acceptance of the attention showered on her, her private aspect is of an elderly and omniscient bird who keeps her own counsel and is rather less reverential than the treatment accorded her.” Both R. W. Apple, Jr., and Dun Gifford, on separate occasions, compared her to Michael Jordan: at the pinnacle of her career, she remains an American icon who transcends a single task or definition.

  The changes in her private life came as a result of her aging. After her friend John McJennett’s health began to fade, he was put into a nursing home, where he died of bone cancer in February 1996. “All my California friends are dropping like flies,” she reported just after the deaths of Robert Hastings and Jack Wright. Then George Kubler and Mary Ripley died. “Woe,” she often said. When his health weakened, her brother John and his wife moved into a retirement home. She wanted her family close to her, and she talked to Dorothy regularly. She found her renewal in other people (“My greatest happiness is a good meal with friends”) and in short catnaps. She never joked about her age and denied ever having jet lag or fatigue. She possessed what Margaret Mead had said were the prerequisites for any American woman to succeed: superhuman energy and an ability to outwit the culture’s plans for her.

  She always kept her private life private, even from her closest professional friends. In 1995 Jacques Pépin thought that she had children, and Dorothy Cann Hamilton said she did not think she really knew Julia. Her personal assistant Stephanie Hersh was never an intimate. A friend with whom she traveled for years said, “I do not really know Julia.” She was a social and physical animal, not a philosophical one. She remained, in her eighties, the girl who adored peanut butter and raw dough, who cried at movies and loved cats. She had a huge collection of rubber stamps, many of them images of cats, which she would imprint on the bottom of notes. She laughed at dirty jokes and planned parties, did not take herself seriously in private, but steeled herself publicly. She was generous, tough, and stubborn.