Backstage with Julia (38 page)

New Year's Eve itself presented a dilemma to Julia because there were two parties that she really wanted to attend. Russ and Marian Morash were hosting what sounded like a fabulous bash at the Santa Barbara Biltmore, a breathtaking resort in a magical setting. And our good friend from Boston, Sally Jackson, and her husband, Paul Mace, were celebrating their wedding anniversary at the Wine Cask, a fine Santa Barbara restaurant, where they had had their wedding dinner a few years earlier.

Julia decided we should join Sally and Paul along with their honor attendants, Jack and Joann Warren, also friends of Julia's, at the Wine Cask since we had missed their actual wedding. We began the evening at the Warrens', where Sally and Paul gave us anniversary gifts: silver wine coasters inscribed with Julia's favorite toast, "Here's to us. None better." Then we moved on to the Wine Cask, where Sally and Paul were obviously well remembered as the good-time couple they are. We were feted admirably, and our glasses remained full until long after midnight, when we shook the confetti from our hair, grabbed a handful of the bobbing balloons, and said goodnight.

Roy, Julia, and I climbed into our car and headed home. "That was such fun," I said, sated, tired, and a little tipsy.

"We can still make Russ and Marian's party," Julia said.

I didn't need an interpreter to translate the look on Roy's face when he turned to me: Is she serious? Most of us have had a number of evenings of party-hopping that last until the sun comes up, but will we still want to do it when we're eighty-four?

Julia's ability to rally and her energetic, determined mind-set remained a part of who she was even in her nineties, when health issues threatened to compromise them. I was planning to visit her in August 2004 for her ninety-second birthday, but Sally Jackson called me in May to say that she had just spoken to Stephanie and learned that Julia's health had failed.

"I don't want to spread gloom and doom, but I think we should go out to see her as soon as possible," she said. "Can you go next week?"

"Absolutely."

"I'll tell Stephanie and Julia that we're coming. I think we should be prepared for the worst."

I began to think of how difficult it was going to be to see Julia bedridden. I had spoken to her recently on the phone, and she told me how delighted she was with her new kitten that slept on the bed with her. She emailed me photos of the wee black-and-white kitten, or poussiquette, as she referred to all felines. Poussiquette's given name, like the Childs' cat in France, was Minou, French for "kitty cat." I tried to picture Julia in bed playing with the kitten and not simply lying supine, dozing in and out of sleep.

A few days later, I received an email from Sally giving me our flight schedule, sleeping arrangements, and a packed itinerary from Julia that filled just about every minute of the time we would be in California. None of it involved playing on the bed with a kitten. So much for keeping vigil.

The following week, Sally and I arrived at Julia's small apartment in the lovely Casa Miranda, an above-average assisted-living facility in Santa Barbara. Julia was thinner than I'd ever seen her and in a wheelchair. I think the common expression is "resigned to a wheelchair," but there was no resignation; she was rigorously undergoing physical therapy to help her walk again following hip surgery some months before. She was also eager to get going, and for the next three days Stephanie, Sally, and I wheeled her to breakfasts with her Casa buddies, into restaurants for lunches and dinners with good friends, and through the local Costco, where a girl of about twelve approached her shyly for her autograph. We gobbled down Double-Double burgers at the In-N-Out drive-through and took in a movie, The Day After Tomorrow, which Julia thought sounded like fun. In spite of catnapping through some of it, she found the action exciting.

Julia and I had good talks during that visit. Roy had passed away a year and half before, and she knew how much I missed him. She wanted to know if I was okay, really okay. I told her that I was following her example and keeping busy by working. I was writing a novel, which was loosely based on the television work we did together. She wanted to know all about it, and as I told her what was in it we began to talk about the years we had spent together and what fun we had.

On the way to the airport on the morning we left, Sally and I drove by the apartment. Julia was in the middle of her therapy, and the therapist wheeled her out to the car so we could say our goodbyes. We chatted and promised to ring each other up often, and then Julia took hold of my arm. With her other hand, she gripped the walkway railing, pulled herself up and out of the wheelchair, and walked briskly and resolutely down the path to her front door.

That was the last time I saw Julia, and my image of her on that day is the same as it always was: an exceptional woman who had the energy and determination to accomplish whatever she wanted to do, whether it was to change the way we thought about eating or get up out of that wheelchair and walk on her own two feet to her front door.

Postscript

I miss my unique friend. I miss the cooking knowledge that I trusted so completely and that she so readily shared, the wise mentoring she so generously offered. The culinary world as a whole is poorer for her loss, certainly less colorful, and I think less focused on her vision of uniting professionals and nonprofessionals in the common goal of enlightening and enriching American kitchens—sensibly, with moderation in all things. It has lost that strong, positive voice of reason that weighed in on food fads, the food police, nutty nutrition, and dangerous diets, and did so for the benefit of sound enjoyable dining, not for the sound bite.

More than that, I miss the friend who made me laugh and showed me that having a good time sometimes meant breaking the rules. I chuckle when I recall her quick witticisms, such as the time I was trying to explain jam bands and in particular Phish to her.

"Jam bands usually have large groups of fans who follow them around from concert to concert. You've heard of the Grateful Dead? Well, their fans were called Deadheads, and they went practically everywhere the band did."

"So the Phish have fish heads," she logically concluded.

I'd love to hear that warbling "woo-hoo" or "boop-boop" across a crowded room alerting me to where she was, or her typical nighttime request to "knock me up" in the morning. I'd love to answer the phone and hear, "It's Ju-u-lia," as though it could be anyone else, or hear her characteristically welcoming response to my calls to her: "Is that Nancy?" I want to see that index finger raised in indignation or feel it poking me in jest. I think of walking into her office and seeing her sitting at her huge plain oak desk with a teakettle on a nearby hot plate and books everywhere. I'd love to cook with her once more in her kitchen alone and then with a group, because "cooking together is such fun."

I miss the familiar, comfortable things: the Post-it notes, the kitchen table clothed in a padded vinyl tablecloth. I miss setting that table with her colorful round raffia placemats, the slightly chipped Provençal dishes, the blue-and-white breakfast bowls. I miss the cow.

Foolish things, I suppose, and like the lyrics from her favorite song say, they remind me of Julia. When they pop into my mind, in spite of how much I miss her, they compel me once again to say "souf-flé" and smile.

Resources

BOOKS

Child, Julia.
Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
New York: Knopf, 1961.

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Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume II.
New York: Knopf, 1970.

———.
The French Chef Cookbook.
New York: Knopf, 1968.

———.
From Julia's Kitchen.
New York: Knopf, 1975.

———.
The Way to Cook
. New York: Knopf, 1989.

———.
Cooking with Master Chefs.
New York: Knopf, 1993.

Child, Julia, and Nancy Barr.
In Julia's Kitchen with Master Chefs
.
New York: Knopf, 1995.

Child, Julia and Jacques Pepin.
Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home
. New York: Knopf, 1999

Fitch, Noël Riley.
Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child.
New York: Doubleday, 1997.

PERIODICALS

Apple, R. J. "Oyster-Loving Idealist."
New York Times,
August 18, 2004.

Hersh, Stephanie. "A Full Measure of Humor."
Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture,
summer 2006.

Hudgins, Sharon. "A Conversation with Julia Child, Spring 1984."
Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture,
summer 2006.

Julier, Alice. "Julia at Smith."
Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture,
summer 2006.

Lawson, Carol. "Julia Child, Boiling, Answers Her Critics."
New York Times
, June 20, 1990.

Pépin, Jacques. "My Friend Julia Child."
Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture,
summer 2006.

Schrambling, Regina. "Julia Child, the French Chef for a Jell-O Nation, Dies at 91."
New York Times,
August 13, 2004.

Whittemore, Hank. "Julia and Paul," interview with Julia and Paul Child.
Parade
, February 28, 1982.

INTERNET RESOURCES

Kummer, Corby, and Marilyn Mellowes. "PBS: 'Julia! America's Favorite Chef,' American Masters Series."
Washington Post
, June 16, 2005.

COLLECTIONS

Julia Child Papers. Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Harvard University.