The French Chef in America

by Alex Prud'Homme

  “It’s become a totally different world” for chefs like them, said Greenspan. In 1985, Vongerichten and Boulud “couldn’t have conceived of where they’d be today. Paul Bocuse was probably the first ‘flying chef,’ but he didn’t have an empire. No one did. It would have been impossible for Jean-Georges and Daniel to even dream of an empire.”

  —

  JULIA CHILD WAS NOT solely responsible for the extraordinary growth of the American food business, of course. But by single-mindedly following the gleam in her eye, she played a significant role in establishing the right conditions for it. Julia created a new model for what cooks and food could be, and thus changed public perceptions. She encouraged people to have large appetites, both literally and figuratively.

  “If you don’t eat with gusto, the gastric juices are not going to work properly,” she advised. “You just won’t digest your food properly. So don’t eat meekly!” This was vintage Julia, both in its humor and its underlying seriousness. She loved food, and she wanted others to love it as much as she did. Yet, I suspect Julia would have reservations about some of what has been wrought in her name—the glitz, the melodrama, the nonsensical competitions that make up much of today’s 24/7/365 televised culinary circus. Julia loved cooking for the camaraderie and creative satisfaction, not for cutthroat competition and soap opera storylines.

  She could sense the coming change, even as early as 1979, when she wrote to Simca: “I’m really getting tired of all the cuisine brouhaha, jockeying for place and prestige. I think we were lucky, you and I, to be in at the beginning. OUF.”

  14

  “Bon Appétit, America!”

  I. HOLY FIRE

  I’ll never, never, never retire,” Julia said. “I’ll go on cooking and writing and experimenting…That’s the best part about having your own thing: you can keep right at it ’til you drop.”

  She regarded the techniques and attitudes that she learned in France, and the knowledge she had honed at the stove and typewriter and in front of a camera, as “a sacred trust” to be “handed down” from generation to generation. “You have to show people that learning about food is a continuing thing, that as you progress through the years, you find different ways of doing things,” she told Boston magazine. “An old chef wrote…‘I’ve been cooking more than fifty years, and almost every day I find something new.’ I never talk to one of the great chefs who doesn’t say that. It’s just a continuously creative process.”

  Julia would continue to create through the eighties, the nineties, and into the aughts, almost until the day she died. Through it all she maintained her “passion for the métier,” and “the holy fire” she believed is required for fine cooking.

  “If you want to be a chef, you have to like work,” she said. “Oh, my God, how you have to work.”

  In the eighties, Julia continued to branch out in new directions. Concerned that the public was ill-informed about wine and food, Julia and the California winemakers Robert Mondavi and Richard Graff established the American Institute of Wine & Food (AIWF): a nonprofit whose mission is “to advance the understanding, appreciation and quality of wine and food through fun educational experiences.”

  In 1982, Julia dropped her McCall’s column to become the first food editor at Parade, a magazine supplement to Sunday newspapers. Calling itself the world’s largest-circulation magazine, Parade had a circulation of 21.5 million, and a readership of 43.5 million. Parade was “a perfect fit for Julia because it wasn’t elitist,” said Judith Jones. “She was able to reach all kinds of people all over the country.” (Julia wrote for Parade through 1986.) For her inaugural column, a smiling Julia appeared on the cover under a headline that neatly summed up her ethos: “Bon Appétit, America!”

  And there was always television. In 1983, Julia returned to PBS—while continuing to appear on Good Morning America—with a new series, Dinner at Julia’s. A thirteen-episode program underwritten by Polaroid and taped in Santa Barbara, California, the show synthesized many of her previous ideas but presented them with a new look and tone. Each program followed Julia as she roamed fields, forests, and vineyards in search of ingredients; Julia appeared in short stints behind the stove, but much of the cooking was done by a rotating cast of celebrity chefs, including James Beard, the former Kennedy White House chef René Verdon, and a young Wolfgang Puck. The episodes concluded with Julia hosting an elegant dinner party at the Hope Ranch, attended by well-dressed guests who arrived in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce.

  “It was meant to be upscale, high-level entertainment,” explained executive producer Russ Morash. Determined not to be tripped up by the scheduling gaffes that hobbled Julia Child & Company, Morash inserted the word “dinner” into the title to not so subtly nudge PBS programmers to air the show in the evening.

  Morash had been doing pioneering single-camera work on Victory Garden and This Old House, and applied the same techniques to Dinner at Julia’s. A video magazine that looked at food production broadly, and ingredients from the American West in particular, Dinner showed Julia foraging for wild mushrooms, learning how goat cheese is made, fishing for salmon in Puget Sound, gathering fresh artichokes or peaches, and interviewing California winemakers. Now seventy-one years old, she gamely dressed in a pith helmet and slogged through mud to hunt for chanterelles, donned sparkling earrings and a high-necked blouse for swanky dinner parties, and smiled broadly. In private, however, Julia’s knees had grown stiff and painful, and required anti-inflammatory drugs.

  While it was all glamorous fun on camera, behind the scenes tensions were boiling. Bob Johnson, Julia’s lawyer, had inserted himself into the production—claiming final say on Julia’s hair and makeup, and casting himself as the head butler on the show. Julia liked Johnson’s gruff, “macho” manner, considered him an effective negotiator of her contracts, and loyally stood by him. Others—friends, family members, colleagues—had a less benign view of Johnson. “He was an odious character,” said Morash. “The result was that her hair [a short, dark, frizzy ’do] and makeup [heavily applied] looked ridiculous and cost a fortune.” When Johnson and a friend demanded to be lodged in the same house as Morash and his wife, it was nearly the last straw. Julia refused to take sides, and Morash threatened to walk off the production. “It’s amazing we got through it,” he said. “But once we started shooting we had a wonderful time.”

  Dinner at Julia’s debuted in the fall of 1983 and ran into 1984. The show featured a few vintage moments—Julia spilling flour on the counter, dancing and shouting, “Yippeee!” and being lassoed by a cowboy at a barbecue. But it was panned as unfocused and overproduced. The New York Times complained that Dinner’s elegant mise-en-scène was “silly and distracting,” that the recipes were “not-uncomplicated,” and that Julia took a “cavalier” approach to expense. The first episode demonstrated a beef tenderloin and salmon dinner for ten people. Food, transportation, and paper towels for each episode cost a thousand dollars a week, The Washington Post reported, which was seen as excessive; and “the cost would be higher but the lamb, shrimp, wines, and such are donated by the producers.” Used to seeing her in casual dress and unpretentious surroundings, some of Julia’s confidants felt uneasy about this luxe vision, grumbling that had Paul been well enough he would have intervened.

  “To gather a sufficient audience, we had no choice,” Morash explained. “We couldn’t continue doing the same show over and over—another ‘Julia in the kitchen’ series.” Mindful of the tepid response to Season Two of The French Chef, Julia had pushed for something new and different. “A handful of people didn’t like [Dinner] because it wasn’t the way they were used to seeing Julia. It made them uneasy,” said Morash. The new approach “was the only way we were going to get the show done,” and was worth the risk. Besides, “Julia had a ball.”

  She brushed off the criticism and moved on.

  II. LA DÉGRINGOLADE DU CORPS

  In January 1983, Paul and Charlie Child turned eighty-one. In quiet moments Paul was
lucid and thoughtful, and he was able to write or paint. But he tired easily, and in large crowds he grew confused and would sometimes growl intemperately. “What a bore, la dégringolade du corps!” (the tumbling down of the body), Julia confided to Simca.

  His twin was in better health. After the death of his wife, Freddie, in 1977, and trouble with high blood pressure, Charlie sank into a dark despond. He sold their large stone house in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and moved to a nearby retirement community. There, he began to socialize, paint, write, and travel again; his mood slowly improved. He visited Paul and Julia in California, realized a long-held dream by traveling to China, and was planning a trip to England. On February 8, 1983, Paul was on the Dinner set with Julia when the news arrived: Charlie—known as Cha—had suffered a heart attack while writing letters, and died.

  Paul was devastated. He crossed out all of the appointments in his date book that day, and scribbled, “I suffer because of Cha’s death.” A few days later, a letter from Charlie arrived in the mail, full of news and good cheer.

  The “twinnies,” as they called each other, had shared a complex, loving, competitive, mutually dependent relationship that was never fully resolved. Paul had recovered enough to start painting again, but Charlie’s death stopped him cold. In ensuing years, Paul had a series of small strokes, and suffered prostate, dental, eye, and other health problems. To ease the strain, the Childs stayed at an apartment in Santa Barbara during the icy months. Julia wrote to Simca: “Mon pauvre Paul is in a bad state…He has deteriorated a great deal…and is suddenly now un vieillard [an old man]. He is very unsteady on his feet and the other day…he lurched forward and plunged down a flight of wooden steps onto the cement below. Fortunately a neighbor’s little dog…alerted his master, who rushed to help us. Result, a cracked rib, cracked bone in one wrist, and broken tooth. He’s in a lot of pain.”

  Julia and Paul, 1989

  Julia kept herself busy. In 1985, Good Morning America dispatched her for a five-part series called “Julia Child in Italy,” which proved wildly popular. ABC received letters from more than a hundred thousand fans, and re-aired the series.

  In 1988, while “plunging around” her office in Santa Barbara, she tripped and broke her hip. She was hobbled and frustrated, but managed to finish writing her latest book, The Way to Cook, which was published the following year. This gorgeously produced tome took its title from six one-hour videocassettes Julia had made, though it incorporated recipes she had developed over forty years for Dinner at Julia’s, Parade, and Good Morning America. The Way to Cook took her five years to complete, and was dedicated to her attorney Bob Johnson (who had succumbed to AIDS in 1986).

  Published in a large, colorful format, it was a calorie-conscious primer for cooks of all skill levels that emphasized Julia’s tried-and-true formula of theme and variation. The Way to Cook sold three hundred thousand copies in its first year, though the videocassettes fared poorly and a TV series never materialized.

  Nevertheless, Julia kept up a full schedule of appearances on both Good Morning America and public TV, columns for Parade, and emceeing fund-raisers for the AIWF, IACP, Planned Parenthood, Smith College, and other organizations she was willing to lend her name to.

  —

  BY 1989, leaving the house had become impossible for Paul, the man who had once roamed the world. One afternoon, he wandered out of 103 Irving Street and got lost in the streets of Boston. He was rescued and returned safely home, but Julia was horrified by the incident. Paul had two prostate operations, suffered a series of strokes, and began to drift in and out of reality. He could no longer be left alone.

  “It was extremely painful for Julia,” recalled Judith Jones.

  But Julia was pragmatic: “Let the living live!” she said.

  That September, she moved Paul into an assisted-living facility outside of Boston. She visited him daily or, when traveling, set an alarm so that she could call him at the same time every day. In France (where local time is six hours ahead of Boston) she would wake at 2:00 a.m. to call Paul in Massachusetts.

  Julia kept her spirits up in the way she always had: she appeared on David Letterman’s show, encouraged Peter Kump to establish the James Beard Foundation, and teamed with Jacques Pépin and Rebecca Alssid to create the nation’s first master of liberal arts degree in gastronomy at Boston University.

  Julia and Simca continued to write back and forth, and La Super Française teamed with Suzy Patterson, an Associated Press reporter based in Paris, to write a new book called Food & Friends: Recipes and Memories from Simca’s Cuisine. Impatient as ever, Simca badgered Patterson to work more quickly, and sent photocopies of half-completed chapters to friends and family for feedback. Patterson complained to Julia, who admonished Simca by mail: “You must be patient…Writing is not something you grind out like hamburger. It takes time, thought, calm, inspiration…CALM DOWN! RELAX! Let Suzy be at peace with her work. She’ll do a good job,” Julia wrote. “And don’t keep sending sample chapters around on dirty Xerox paper. It gives a bad impression…People shouldn’t see unfinished unedited bits anyway.”

  In July 1991, Simca turned eighty-seven years old and published Food & Friends. It would be her last book, and she dedicated it to her husband, Jean, who had died in 1986, leaving Simca inconsolable. In her introduction to Food & Friends, Julia wrote: “Both Simca and Louisette…took their craft with utter seriousness, as a beautiful, marvelous, and creative art form—but an art form with rules. It was that attitude, really, that drew me irresistibly to the profession.”

  Simca’s health was failing. Her heart was wearing out, her eyesight and hearing were spotty, and she frequently stumbled. One day she fell and lay on her bedroom floor for two hours before a relative found her; she had gotten a chill in the meantime and contracted double pneumonia. Julia worried about her, and suggested she sign up for an assisted-living community. Predictably, La Super Française would have none of it, and insisted on finishing out her days at Bramafam, virtually alone. In December, Simca stopped eating, and expired.

  “We were like sisters,” Julia lamented. “We were a pair of cooking nuts. She was a wonderful and generous friend.”

  On May 12, 1994, Paul Child died at age ninety-two.

  —

  JULIA WAS a people person, and unsentimental about possessions. Without Paul, Simca, or Jean for company, or friends like Jim Beard or M. F. K. Fisher to visit, La Pitchoune had lost its allure. Moreover, she noted, Provence was becoming “hideously expensive” and “flooded with people, new little houses, streams of cars, great trucks plowing down winding country roads.” By June 1992, Julia had decided it was time to turn the beloved house built on friendship over to its owners. She cooked a final boeuf en daube à la Provençale while a small group of family and friends toasted the house with Champagne. Then, as she had promised, Julia handed the house keys to France Thibault, Simca’s sister-in-law, and bumped down the driveway for the last time.

  “I must admit that I left France this time with no regrets whatsoever,” she wrote to a friend.

  Not one to mope, Julia returned to the States and proceeded to celebrate her eightieth birthday with a string of parties in Boston, Los Angeles, New York, and Cambridge. “It’s such fun!” she declared after each one. “Bon appétit!” Some of these fêtes raised money for the AIWF, and others were used to promote the glories of la cuisine française at a time when French cooking was losing popularity in the States. The “Merci, Julia” party—the thirtieth celebration of her eightieth birthday—was “an intimate dinner for 500” people in Los Angeles. Julia was toasted by leading French chefs, including Paul Bocuse, Roger Vergé, Daniel Boulud, Michel Richard, and Jean-Louis Palladin. As they wrung their hands over declining revenues and Americans’ fear of “rich, stuffy” French food, Julia stood firm. Railing against trendy, half-raw and half-burned “kiddie food,” she declared, “If we ate the way nutritionists want us to eat, our hair would be falling out, our teeth would be falling out, and o
ur skin would be drying up!” French food, Julia reminded the world, “can be rich, but it can be simple too.”

  The crowd ate it up.

  III. IN JULIA’S KITCHEN

  Back in 1972, Julia had pitched an idea for a show that would follow her as she cooked regional specialties with master chefs across the country. David Ives, the president of WGBH, had turned the idea down, telling Julia that he didn’t believe other cooks “could come up to your standards” on television. Stubbornly, Julia held on to the idea for twenty years.

  In 1993, she starred in the PBS series Cooking with Master Chefs. Just as she had originally imagined, the show followed Julia as she cooked with Emeril Lagasse in New Orleans, Robert Del Grande in Houston, Alice Waters in Berkeley, and Amy Ferguson-Ota on Mauna Lani, Hawaii, among others. The episode featuring Lidia Bastianich cooking orecchiette pasta and mushroom risotto in Manhattan was nominated for an Emmy and helped to launch Lidia’s TV career five years later.

  Master Chefs proved so popular that the following summer Julia taped In Julia’s Kitchen with Master Chefs. In this iteration, Julia flipped the conceit by inviting twenty-six multicultural chefs with diverse specialties—from Madhur Jaffrey’s Roasted Curry Powder to Jacques Torres’s Chocolate Soup, Dean Fearing’s Pico de Gallo, and Mark Militello’s Pork with Jamaican Spices—to cook in her Irving Street kitchen. The show aired in 1995, and led to Julia’s second Emmy. (Knopf published companion books to both Master Chef series.)