Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (50 page)

Just before flying down to film a documentary on the White House kitchens for WGBH, Julia opened her door to the French consul general, who came to pin the green ribbon and bronze star of France’s Médaille de Mérite Agricole on her dress and kiss her on both cheeks. “We don’t know whether to laugh, or be proud, at this backhanded gesture from the government for which she has done so much,” Paul wrote to Charlie. Nevertheless, half a dozen friends celebrated with champagne,
Time
magazine reported. The
Smith Alumnae Quarterly
proudly announced that the green ribbon now rested beside the
cordon bleu
. What Julia did not know was that a Smith College committee turned down an effort by several alumnae to award her an honorary degree that year.

“Dinner and Diplomacy” (the initial title) was conceived when a plan by WGBH for a documentary on the French Chef in Paris (featuring Les Halles, which were closing down) fell through due to a lack of funding. In August 1967 they proposed making a color documentary of how the White House kitchens operate, what equipment they use, the staff, marketing, even menu planning. Ruth Lockwood, with contacts through her journalist son, did all the preliminary work with Liz Carpenter and her assistant, Mrs. Poulain. There would be several trips to Washington as the arrangements were made and the date moved several times. Julia and Paul flew down in August, September, and October; first it was going to be a dinner for the King and Queen of Nepal, then one for the Japanese Prime Minister.

President and Mrs. Lyndon B. Johnson honored her with an invitation to be a part of the state dinner on November 14, 1967, for the Prime Minister of Japan. Originally, the program for educational television was to be a study of the kitchen and behind-the-scenes of a state dinner, but now Julia and Paul were honored guests and the film crew would be allowed in the dining room (with releases from everyone).

Julia thought the meal exquisite: vol-au-vent of seafood, noisettes of lamb, artichoke choron, white asparagus polonais, a garden salad, cheeses, and strawberry Yamaguchi (a tart). Three wines were poured: Wente Pinot Chardonnay, Beaulieu Cabernet Sauvignon, and Almadén Blanc de Blanc (with no vintages given on the menu, Paul noted with amazement).

Julia and Paul were sitting next to Vice President and Mrs. Hubert Humphrey, and Julia found him delightful (“I’ve always liked him, but didn’t realize how thoroughly warm and attractive he is,” she informed Avis). Paul was pleased to get reacquainted with Professor S. I. Hayakawa, whom he had met in Germany and with whom he had spent a week studying just two years before. Because the Japanese guest (His Excellency Eisaku Sato) was crazy about baseball, the commissioner of baseball was there, as were a pitcher from the St. Louis Cardinals and George Steinbrenner. Maxwell Taylor, John D. Rockefeller IV, cabinet ministers, and other dignitaries rounded out the 190-guest list.

Julia had a wonderful time meeting the President and the other distinguished guests, but she was just as excited to meet Swiss chef Haller and his pastry chef, Ferdinand Louvat, a Frenchman (“Loved the two chefs, and being able to talk shop in French with them was a great help to us,” Julia wrote Simca). And she talked at length to Mary Kaltman, the food coordinator and housekeeping director. These professionals were people she respected enormously. Originally the program was going to be called “Behind the Scenes at the White House Banquet.”

She was also excited to work with her old crew from
The French Chef
. Russ Morash was the director, Peter the Dutchman operated the one handheld camera, and Willie was the sound engineer. The script, written by a professional but lacking in dignity, they believed, was rewritten around the Child kitchen table by Ruth, Paul, and Julia. This program would not be live, but edited by a professional (with assistance from Ruth and Russ) and shown on American educational television, now called the Public Broadcasting Company, the following April (Julia would have to come back from La Pitchoune to do the voice-overs).

“The White House Red Carpet,” its final title, began with the doors of the White House opening and visitors streaming in. The camera panned down the line of guests to pick up Julia Child, the narrator, who informed the audience that 40,000 people a week enter the White House. Later, in the video’s flashbacks, the Prime Minister of Japan deplaned and Julia interviewed James Symington, the protocol officer, and chef Henri Haller in the kitchens of the White House.

Ruth Lockwood told Bill Koshland that it “was a nerve-wracking experience, but as usual Julia was relaxed and lovely.” Indeed, her only worry was what dress and shoes to wear. She was used to being on television with her sneakers on. Ruth helped her choose the shoes and dress—Paul called it rainbow-colored. She wore the wig. Lady Bird Johnson wore a gold draped chiffon gown by Adele Simpson, and Tony Bennett entertained with songs after the banquet.

This was Julia’s first White House experience (“splendid,” she said, “neither of us shall ever forget it”). During this first visit she thought briefly about what it would have been like with the Kennedys, but concluded, “The food could not have been any better.” This White House dinner would remain her most memorable, not because she was “a Roosevelt Democrat at home, an Acheson Democrat abroad” (as one journalist observed), but because of the food. She admired Henri Haller and thought that the service and organization of the evening was elegant. The servers were professional staff, black men who had worked in the White House for years and served with quiet flair, “like clockwork.” Thirty years later, after visiting during two other administrations, she would tell a Boston University audience that “the food was great” at the Johnson dinner. Otherwise the “culinary reputation [of the White House] is dreary indeed.” Gerald Ford’s people were uneasy about the pomp and show—fearful of spending the taxpayers’ money—so the state dinner Julia attended was cheap, the food undistinguished, the service sloppy. The Reagan White House served chipped beef, cream cheese, green mayonnaise, veal madeleine in dough, and a platter of purple sorbet with canned peaches.

Julia was also quick to point out that WGBH’s tribute was to the White House, not to the Johnson administration. “We were there … at the height of anti-Johnsonism and the attitudes in Cambridge Mass were quite frightening—making me realize that academics are too seldom intellectuals!” she wrote to Ellie and Basil Summers the following spring, when the video was played. She and Paul could not drive through Harvard Square without seeing the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) carrying pickets reading: “Napalm—Johnson’s Baby Powder,” for the atmosphere at the university was “chaotic” and “somber.” She and Paul were also opposed to the war in Vietnam, but she thought the protest “has really pulled the country to pieces.” She mentioned “pride in the White House” on the video, and, fortunately, the political landscape would change before the spring to make their film more acceptable.

The morning after the state dinner, they taped more interviews for their documentary before flying to New York to catch the night plane to Nice, via Paris. Soon they were lounging on the terrace beside the purple bougainvillea and smelling the jasmine. Watching Jeanne pick olives to take to the local press, they thought only of the five months in France ahead of them and the completion of the book.

Page proofs for Michael Field and M. F. K. Fisher’s Time-Life book had been delivered to the plane as they left, and proofs of her own
The French Chef Cookbook
arrived in December. She corrected “plenty” of errors in both manuscripts. “America is beginning to fade,” she wrote Avis after just a week in La Pitchoune.

Julia and Simca flew up to Paris the first week of December for a morning session with Professor Calvel, head of the Ecole Professionelle de la Boulangerie, a world expert on bread making. After talking and observing, Julia concluded their bread dough was too firm (his was soft and sticky and rose slowly to twice its size). Amid the market din and smell of Les Halles, Julia bought three fresh foie gras and truffles for the coming holiday feasts. “God, it was great! Ten thousand smells, sounds, and faces! I kept thinking what a movie we could have made if that plan of ours hadn’t fallen through,” she wrote Avis.

They were happy and clearly feeling financially well-off, for they had their trunks air-expressed to their door and bought a “miniature television machine” (to see De Gaulle’s press conference) and a large Kelvinator refrigerator with separate freezer space. They knew that in a month they would have to return briefly for Julia to read the voice-overs for the documentary, but for now they were away from all the daily business of life. For the last six months, amid the bread baking and recipes testing, the occasional interview, and preparations for the White House filming, they were overwhelmed with guests and dear friends from every part of their rich past.

“This is really the first time either of us has been able to work without interruptions in months,” Julia wrote Avis. She finished twenty-seven pages of blah-blah introducing French bread and sent copies of it to Simca, Avis, and her editor (Avis was horrified at its length and said it should not go into the book) before moving on to pork. She and Paul visited the Alvaro pig farm to watch a crew of four slaughter a 300-pound pig in a ceremony as old as the Middle Ages. She was calm, unflinching, and curious to learn everything she could about it, for Paul was going to photograph her preparation of their Christmas suckling pig.

Louisette and Henri visited one weekend, and an occasional American or English reporter would find her, including one from
Newsweek
. But most of their days were uninterrupted. Simca and Jean were in Paris. Only Sybille and Eda were invited for Paul’s birthday feast, which included a flaming mountain of ice-cream cake. It was Le Kilimanjaro, the chocolate and almond ice cream dessert, which would appear in the second volume of
Mastering
(page 420). She added a touch that is not in the book: on the top of the dessert “mountain,” she placed an empty half eggshell, filled it with liquor, and lighted it before taking the flaming volcano to the table.

Here in La Pitchoune they were at peace. Paul would listen to the banging of his “Mad Woman of La Pitchoune” in the kitchen and write to his brother: “Well—I’m … smelling all these breads, chickens, pâtés, dorades, cooking, and hearing my tender little wifelet crashing around in the kitchen, scolding the pussy for meowing, whacking something metallic with something else metallic, like a Peking street vendor. A very jolly house.” Just two weeks before, he told his brother, “How fortunate we are at this moment in our lives! Each doing what he most wants, in a marvelously adapted place, close to each other, superbly fed and housed, with excellent health, and few interruptions.”

A
PERSONAL TRAGEDY

“Left breast off” is all she wrote in her datebook for February 28, 1968. They had flown back to Boston on the first day of February to do the voice-over for the White House documentary, thinking that they would be gone no more than two weeks. Julia had scheduled an appointment to see her gynecologist during their stay, having felt a small lump several busy months ago. Dr. Arnold Segal wanted to do a biopsy but could not schedule an operating room in Beth Israel Hospital until the twenty-eighth. It would only be an overnight affair, she assured Simca in her frustration at not being able to return to La Pitchoune. “It is a very simple matter to take care of,” she added. It was routine. Two days before she entered the hospital, she wrote to Simca that she took the ten days to cut down the introduction to bread (it would be nineteen published pages), and she would be out of the hospital in two or three days and back to France.

As it turned out, it was not “a simple matter,” as it might have been twenty years later. At the time they did the biopsy, they removed her breast and the lymph nodes in her left arm as a precaution against spreading cancer, a practice typical of that time. Today the surgery would be considered too radical, for on March 4, in the middle of her ten days in the hospital, she was told the small tumor had been neatly removed. “All analysis OK & negative,” she wrote in her datebook. She would have to wear a rubber sleeve and exercise that arm for months to remove the fluid and restore its use. “After seeing a photo of a naughty woman who refused to wear her rubber sleeve and what happened to her arm, I really hardly dare take mine off!” she told Simca. When she returned to Avis’s house, where they were staying because they had rented their own house, she sat in the bathtub and privately wept.

With the same practicality she expressed when she told the doctor to perform the operation and get it over with, she told herself to get on with her work and not complain. “No radium, no chemotherapy, no caterwauling,” she said in 1996. Thank God it was my left side and not my right, she wrote to Simca in a letter full of details about their manuscript and plans to get on with the recipes for tripe, calves’ feet, and calves’ heads. Each week when she returned to the doctor she asked when she could get back to France. They spent a weekend on Martha’s Vineyard with Bob and Mary Kennedy, the weekend that LBJ said he would not run again for the presidency. World events would soon put her own pain into perspective: the next Thursday, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis.

Paul was devastated by Julia’s experience. He suffered when she merely had a bad cold. His friends say he had a terrible time, fearing he would lose her. “He was good and loving about both [the operations],” Julia wrote Simca. “I bless him and feel very fortunate.” This man who wrote nearly every day of his life apparently did not write a word for weeks. Charlie and Freddie came to visit, as did John and Jo McWilliams, then Dort and her Phila, who decided to apply to Radcliffe for her college education and to live near her Aunt Julia.

At noon on April 11, Julia and Paul attended the press preview of “The White House Red Carpet” at WGBH. She tossed her last cigarette out the car window when it made her nauseous. That afternoon she saw Dr. Segal once more, and the following evening the Childs flew out of Boston for two months of recuperation. When the documentary ran nationally on April 17, Julia and Paul were entertaining Simca and Jean at La Pitchoune.