The French Chef in America

by Alex Prud'Homme

  Julia kept hoping against evidence that Paul would have a miraculous recovery and life would go on as it always had. There were weeks when every letter she wrote sounded a hopeful, upbeat theme: “Paul is a little better…,” she’d say, or “he’s regaining strength slowly…” But eventually Julia acknowledged that his recuperation was slow, “like a snail,” and that he might not recover soon, if ever.

  Paul spent more than a month in the hospital recovering from his ten-hour bypass surgery in October 1974. His voluminous correspondence stopped cold for weeks, and resumed only as short, meandering notes to immediate family members. Julia was heartbroken. “It was a very difficult time,” Judith Jones remembered. “Julia didn’t like to talk about it.”

  IV. THE TEAM

  Julia was always careful to use “we” rather than “I” in talking about her career. Paul had been her original inspiration and mentor, and was essential to her success. In The French Chef Cookbook, Julia thanked him thus: “Paul Child, the man who is always there: porter, dishwasher, official photographer, mushroom dicer and onion chopper, editor, fish illustrator, manager, taster, idea man, resident poet, and husband.”

  Later, she’d say, “Not everybody realizes that Paul and I are a team, and that we work together on developing menus and dishes.”

  When they hosted dinner parties, Paul and Julia would plan a menu and shop together; she would cook, while he chopped vegetables, set the table, made cocktails, poured wine, and helped with serving; at the end of an evening, they would share pot scrubbing, floor-mopping, and trash removal. “We always finished our individual tasks at the same time—because, I suppose, we did everything that was to be done together,” Julia said. “Two are so much faster than one.”

  He was always there for her, and she for him, but they also knew when to give each other space. “We each need long, silent times by ourselves, and it’s worked out awfully well,” Julia said. “We agree on just about everything. I think I’m more social than Paul. I enjoy big parties, he doesn’t. But we don’t fight about it. We like the same friends.”

  Julia described the institution of marriage as a “lovely intertwining of life, mind, and soul,” and asserted that she was content as a housewife: “I think the role of a woman is to be married to a nice man and enjoy her home. I can’t think of anything nicer than homemaking.” She fondly recalled that in all their years of living abroad, she and Paul were rarely apart: “We had a happy marriage because we were together all the time.”

  These are appealing sentiments, and they were genuine. But once Julia became a celebrity the day-to-day reality of the Childs’ marriage grew more complex. There was a tension inherent between her wish to be a good wife and her professional ambitions. The first required selflessness while the latter required selfishness; maintaining a balance wasn’t easy.

  Dinner at La Pitchoune, July 1967 (left to right: Ruth Lockwood, Jean Fischbacher, Arthur Lockwood, James Beard, Simca Beck)

  Judith and Evan Jones in front of the fire at La Pitchoune in the early seventies

  Beneath her modest exterior, Julia was a very determined person who loved to work hard and was energized by success. Cookery was not merely a pastime to her: it was a vocation and a nearly religious calling. She had found her raison d’être in Paris and never deviated from it, though she denied she was goal oriented. “I’m not driven. I’m enjoying what I do, and I don’t have any great ambitions,” she said. “I’m lucky to be in this profession that I just adore.”

  With all due respect, she was driven and ambitious. She had to be. One doesn’t stumble into the kind of remarkable career she had in books, television, magazines, newspapers, and live performance, or invent and reinvent oneself as often and as successfully as she did—especially as a woman of that era—unless one is focused on doing so.

  Julia’s professional obligations dictated how and where she and Paul spent their time. This could mean working twelve to sixteen hours a day at home or in the TV studio, rising before dawn to perform live cooking demonstrations in far-flung cities, or undertaking cross-country book tours, transatlantic cruises on the Queen Elizabeth, or visits to the White House. She felt guilty about ignoring Paul, and made sure to include him and take care of him as much as she could. The two of them occasionally slipped away to “recharge the batteries” in Maine or California or France. But most of their time was devoted to the care and feeding of Julia Child, Inc.

  Paul was content with this arrangement. He was proud of Julia’s success, and happy that she was the public face of the team while he remained in the background. This is one of the most remarkable aspects of the Childs’ marriage. While Julia was naturally social, Paul was a quiet observer who trained himself to be an effective public speaker, writer, and editor. “My whole life has been concerned with communication,” he explained. “Communication is the glue that holds people together…it’s the mortar of civilization’s structure.”

  While in the Foreign Service, Paul was the “senior” member of the Child team; after his retirement, he took care of the less glamorous side of things. He was a dedicated gardener and was handy with broken lamps, leaky toilets, or caulking around the furnace. He had a sophisticated eye, and helped Julia—who was not an especially visual person—style her dining tables and the sets of her TV shows. “ ‘Paul,’ was my frequent plea, ‘this platter of vegetables just doesn’t look right,’ ” Julia recalled. “And with a few deft movements he’d almost always manage to transform it.”

  At home, Julia could be found in the kitchen on the first floor, or in her office on the second floor. While she loved the “big, rambling Victorian house” on Irving Street, she did not care for vacuuming, bed making, or other non-culinary housework. She liked to have cut flowers on the table, particularly roses, but had a brown thumb in the garden. (Julia complained bitterly about Simca’s habit of buying lots of plants for Bramafam, then leaving for Paris and expecting Julia to water them. Julia couldn’t be bothered, so Paul did the job.) Julia loved animals, especially “poussiquettes”; while she kept a cat named Minette (“Pussycat” in French) in Paris in the fifties, she was too busy thereafter to keep a permanent feline in residence; she would temporarily adopt local farm cats while at La Pitchoune.

  There were times when Julia grew wistful about not having a child and grandchild, as her siblings did, and commiserated with Simca about their lack of progeny. Yet, Julia acknowledged that had she conceived she would have devoted her energy to her children and would not have had the career that she did.

  Paul was Julia’s first reader and toughest critic. He pushed her to write clearly and originally, without cliché, and to say exactly what she meant. For most of his life, he was a prolific writer of letters, journals, date books, and poetry. Paul wrote hundreds of words a day, usually in longhand, in a clear flowing script, in blue, black, or green ink. He recorded mundane details and globally significant events with equal fervor: noting the pink socks on a clothesline in Paris, the price of Champagne on a Wednesday in 1952, the internal politics of the U.S. Consulate in Marseille, the impact of the Cold War on German civilians, the subtleties of Norwegian humor, and the sounds of Julia cooking—as if to fix each moment in time. In this accretion of journalistic detail, he seemed to be writing for the ages; it was as if he hoped that one day someone might use his notes to write about his and Julia’s remarkable lives.

  Paul and Charles Child in Maine

  Julia saw his epistolary output as a way for Paul to bring order to his exciting but often chaotic existence—“a curry of a life,” he called it. His father, Charles Tripler Child, was an electrical engineer who died of typhoid fever when Paul and Charlie were six months old. Their mother, Bertha Cushing Child, was a beauty, a singer, a theosophist, a wonderful cook, and a distracted single mother. His older sister, Meeda, was an attractive and fiercely intelligent woman who grew dissolute and died young. As boys, Paul and Charlie bounced around various schools and jobs, such as carting supplies in a munitions factor
y during the First World War, mostly around Boston.

  Julia noted that much of Paul’s writing was to, or about, Charlie. Like many twins, they were mutually supportive and rivalrous. While Charlie “opted for chaos,” Paul preferred the “fortress-castle-square” of calm and control. When they were seven, Charlie accidentally blinded Paul’s left eye with a sewing needle. Paul never complained about it, and managed to earn a black belt in judo, could drive a car, and taught perspective drawing.

  Known in the family as “Cha” or “the Eagle,” Charlie was brawnier, louder, more charismatic, and less sensitive than Paul, who was called “P’ski.” Charlie was apparently the favored twin. One of Bertha’s paramours—said to be Edward Filene, the founder of Filene’s department store in Boston—paid his tuition at Harvard; Paul was given tuition for one year at Columbia. When the money ran out, he worked on ships, at odd jobs, and traveled across the country. Yet Paul was a voracious reader and autodidact, and for much of the 1920s and 1930s he worked in Italy, France, and the United States as a private tutor and teacher. As mentioned earlier, he fell in love with Edith Kennedy, and they lived together unmarried in Cambridge, until she died in 1942. Charlie was a professional painter, while Paul made art in his spare time, but was arguably more talented. In his letters, Paul went to great lengths to appraise, analyze, and critique Charlie’s artwork, and frequently suggested techniques, exhibits, or readings to his brother. Charlie was an evocative writer, but he rarely returned the favor; he ignored Paul’s questions, and preferred to write—and talk—about himself, a habit that grated on Paul and Julia.

  Though she was very fond of his wife, Freddie (Fredericka), “Charlie brings out the absolute worst in me,” Julia confided to Avis DeVoto. “He is inclined to holier-than-thou statements…I become crass, violent, materialistic, gluttonous, mean. Paul finds his ancient twindom animosities rising to the fore, though is far nicer than I. It is probably really much better not to see one’s intimate family for more than 2½ days at a time.”

  Charlie would pout, or yodel “Ohhh, Juuuullliaaa!” in exasperation, rolling his eyes, when he felt that she was being pushy or intrusive—which she could be, though some would say she was merely being enthusiastic or watching out for her husband.

  Paul needed Julia. She was strong, enthusiastic, funny, and smart. She provided the emotional love and humor that he did not have as a boy, and the intellectual and physical love that he needed as a man. He did not want children as much as she did. I suspect Paul wanted Julia all to himself, and she was happy to have him. She made sure to tell interviewers how intelligent and supportive he was, and how she admired his “EOT” (“Eye on the Target”) ability to get things done.

  “Without Paul Child,” she said, “I would not have had my career.”

  V. L’GE

  Finally released from the hospital on November 24, Paul returned to 103 Irving Street, where he worked with a speech therapist and learned to walk again. As his brain was stimulated, his physical health began to improve. “It is the fact of DOING something, I think, that is especially useful,” Julia noted. “He is still having reception trouble, but that is very gradually improving. That also annoys him because, being better, he is more aware of it.”

  We fidgety children learned to tiptoe around the grumpy old man who slumped in his chair like a smoldering volcano. Occasionally, he’d erupt in public—demanding to be seated at the head of the table in a restaurant, or pointing theatrically to his watch and shouting, “Julie! Time’s up!” while she performed onstage. My sisters and I were mortified by these awkward outbursts. But Julia handled them with great patience and empathy. “Yes, dearie, just a minute,” she’d say with a smile, before getting back to work.

  She tried to include him, and wrote to friends: “He was even on radio talk shows, and if he answered quite other things than the questions posed, it made little difference. So we shall just go on as usual, as long as he is able.”

  While the doctor said Paul was “just fine physically, the mental picture will not improve, and there is nothing to do but hope for the best,” Julia confided to Simca, whose husband Jean was also beginning to decline. “We must be thankful for each day, I have come to believe, and to remember that every day—I tend to forget my credo, but it does make each day sweeter. L’âge, ma chérie. Suddenly it is there, staring at you.”

  Julia faced a poignant quandary: while Paul was confused and needed her help, she was brimming with energy and ideas for new books and TV shows. She was constantly invited to events, but declined most of them to care for her husband.

  Characteristically, Julia poured her energy into completing the seven-hundred-page manuscript for From Julia Child’s Kitchen in a few months of highly focused industriousness. She found that working without Simca’s suggestions, or Paul’s input, for the first time gave her a new sense of freedom and purpose. She drove herself to the point of exhaustion. “And thank heavens I did!” she’d say. “Without a challenging project like a cookbook to work on, I could well have gone cuckoo in those dark months.”

  On January 19, 1975, Julia put the finishing touches on From Julia Child’s Kitchen. Then she sat back and typed a letter to Simca: “I have nothing more to say—I’m writ out…NO MORE BOOKS!”

  VI. “1,000 CACKLING WOMEN”

  From Julia Child’s Kitchen was published on October 6, 1975, and Julia departed Cambridge on a book tour. Once again she was in her element. She found cooking, signing books, talking to her admirers, and trying new foods across the country invigorating. For help at the stove, Julia hired Elizabeth Bishop—a pragmatic, tart-tongued Boston food and wine expert. At one of their first stops, on Long Island, Julia reported “1,000 cackling women” appeared to watch her every move with rapt attention. She was deeply grateful for their warm reception, and stayed for hours that afternoon, talking to nearly every person in the room, whether they bought a book or not. Most did, and From Julia Child’s Kitchen sold more than a hundred thousand copies by 1977.

  Paul accompanied her for part of the tour, but it was not a happy experience. He tired easily, and resented the large, noisy crowds she attracted. Had he been at full strength, Julia would certainly have traveled more extensively. She went on alone, and did special events, such as a televised “Noodle Jamboree” with Jim Beard and Barbara Walters. But it was neither practical nor desirable for Julia to be away from her husband for long.

  “We are going to take a ‘sabbatical’ next year,” she wrote to Simca. “We’ve been on deadline basis for some 15 years or more, and that is enough…No more trips…And this is thinking of Paul—were it only me, that would be a quite different matter.”

  —

  SO HERE WAS Julia Child in 1975, with a new persona, a new book, a large audience, plenty of energy, but with no TV show. Though she had dedicated From Julia Child’s Kitchen to her producer Ruth Lockwood, it was the first of Julia’s cookbooks not to be turned into a series by WGBH. (Mastering, Volumes I and II, inspired much of The French Chef, Seasons One and Two.) Of course, some of the blame for this can be assigned to Paul’s condition. But there might also have been a feeling in the halls of WGBH that Julia’s new book was built on recipes left over from The French Chef. To prod WGBH, and perhaps to inoculate Julia from charges of padding her book, her attorney Bob Johnson went so far as to write up an estimate that just a third of From Julia Child’s Kitchen contained material previously aired by WGBH.

  The lesson Julia took from the modest response to Mastering, Volume II, and Season Two of The French Chef, and to the strong response to From Julia Child’s Kitchen was that her audience was splintering, or distracted, or perhaps was hungry for something more distinctly American. Sensing this shift in public mood, and feeling itchy to get back on the air, Julia began to root around for a new television special.

  7

  The Spirit of ’76

  I. THE BEARDED CHILD MANIFESTO

  In advance of the American bicentennial celebration of 1976, Julia envisioned
a TV series and book about pre-Revolutionary cooking, and she wanted to collaborate on it with her good friend James Beard, whom The New York Times called “the dean of American cookery.”

  She named the project “Thirteen Feasts for Thirteen Colonies.” Its conceit, Julia wrote, was that “in the 200 years since Independence, Americans have been enjoying—without knowing it—many dishes of the Revolutionary period.” Now the two best-known cooks in the country would “acquaint Americans with their great national dishes and how to prepare them.”

  With the combined strengths of “Julia and Jim,” as the publicists called them—or “the Bearded Child” (“l’enfant barbu”), as they called themselves—it was an idea perfectly suited to its bicentennial moment.

  James Beard, a six-foot two-inch, rotund, twinkle-eyed cook, culinary historian, and author, was born in 1903, in Portland, Oregon. His father, John, worked at the Customs House, and his mother, Mary Elizabeth, was a strong-willed Englishwoman who loved to cook and ran a boardinghouse. The Beard family liked to camp and grill outside, and Jim was raised on the Pacific Northwest’s salmon, grains, and berries. He grew into a large boy who loved theater. He attended Reed College, in Portland, but was quietly expelled when he was exposed as a homosexual.