Julia Child Rules (3 page)

Make the most of the makeshift.

Today, Le Cordon Bleu is an international institute of “gastronomy, hospitality, and management,” with branches all over the world. The name itself attracts such words as “elegance,” “prestige,” “distinction,” and every fancy-pants modifier that comes to mind. But in 1949, the year Julia enrolled, it had fallen on hard times. Like everything else in Paris, the war had done a number on the venerable institution.

The place was dirty. There was no one around to wash the mountains of dishes dirtied by the students. They were often short of necessary ingredients, including salt. After some haggling with the management, Julia was placed in a class with eleven ex-GIs, most of whom were there in order to learn enough to enable them to cook on the line at a diner back home.

It was as lame and poorly run as it could be, yet it was here that Julia met her mentor, Chef Max Bugnard, here where she discovered her great passion for cooking.

The degree to which Julia learned to cook in makeshift conditions cannot be overstated. There’s a famous black-and-white picture of Julia standing in front of her stove in the kitchen at rue de l’Université, stirring something in a saucepan. The stove top hits her at midthigh. So low is the burner, her arm is practically straight. The counters were for “pygmies,” as she good-naturedly complained in a letter to Avis DeVoto. Still, here is where she learned to cook.

These days, we’ve gotten incredibly fussy. With our personal playlists, our complicated made-to-order half-caf, half-decaf lattes, our special mattresses that can adjust for each sleeper, our individually designed college curriculums, we’ve gotten out of the habit of making do with what’s at hand. Part of living with abandon is giving oneself over to one’s circumstances without any expectation that things are going to be to our liking anytime soon. We can hope that things will improve, but it shouldn’t prevent us from doing what we’ve set out to do. Julia had an astonishing capacity to be content with what was in front of her, whether it be a cooking school run on spit and a string or a less than perfect hunk of meat. She made do and moved on and rarely regretted it.

Make it up as you go along.

Do you have a file containing a list of lifetime goals for education, career, and family broken into ten-year plans, complete with large-scale goals to achieve within that time frame, and further divided into smaller goals you must reach to contribute to attainment of the larger ones?

If so, you should seriously consider either moving the file into the tiny trash can on your desktop or folding it into an origami flapping bird before recycling it.

Julia, for most of her life, never knew what the hell she was doing. The moment that best exemplifies her inborn laissez-faire attitude occurred at Smith College, where she professed to
anyone who was interested (her academic counselor) that her life’s goal was to be a “lady novelist” but then neglected to take the only creative writing class offered at Smith.

This isn’t to say Julia wasn’t highly organized and meticulous with her cooking—perhaps she loved cooking in part because by its very nature it required her immediate attention and focus—but she was always ready to walk through whatever door opened next.

Who could have planned for, or anticipated,
The French Chef
? Even the “bon appétit” was ad-libbed.

Once, during the late 1980s, Julia guest-starred on
Late Night with David Letterman
. Her task was to cook a hamburger. Letterman asked whether she’d ever cooked anything inedible.

“Of course, many times,” she replied.

“What do you do then?” he asked. “What happens?”

“I give it to my husband,” she said.

Meanwhile, the portable demonstration stove was on the fritz, and the big, bulging patty of ground beef sat cold in the pan. With less than a minute left in the segment, Julia decided to serve it as is, smothered with grated cheese she melted with the aid of a blowtorch she produced from behind the counter. To Julia’s delight, Letterman managed to choke down a mouthful of the “beef tartare.”

Bon appétit!

Make this your mantra: I’m never too anything for anything.

Maybe it was because Julia’s mother, Caro, thought her daughter could do no wrong. Maybe it was because Julia was always the tallest person in the room (beginning with her Montessori preschool class), or because she was old (thirty-seven) when she discovered her passion for cooking, or because she was very old (fifty-one) and very tall and had that cartoon voice when she hit it big as The French Chef. But if she wanted to do something, she did it.

When she landed on the shores of France in 1946, she spoke only high school French, and bad high school French at that. Her teacher had pronounced her accent “insurmountable.”

Still, she plowed ahead.

Julia was so at home in her own skin, it never occurred to her that whatever was going on with her or whatever people thought of her would be a reason to refrain. If she had the energy and the interest—and when did she not?—she was up for it. ATV riding at seventy-two. Impromptu trips abroad at eighty. She was an early adopter of technology, especially the laptop, which allowed her to work while on airplanes as she was rounding the bend to ninety. In 2000, four years before she died, she was trading wisecracks with her friend, chef and cookbook author Jacques Pépin on their cooking show,
Julia & Jacques Cooking at Home.
“Are you going to toast our buns, Jacques?” she famously wondered on the hamburger episode.

Julia arrived at “just do it” as a personal credo long before Nike snapped it up. Nothing anyone thought about her could
stop her. Imagine a life in which you’re never too anything for anything. Never too old to go back and get that degree. Never too uncoordinated to cut loose on the dance floor. Never too wrong-of-body to wear that swimsuit and throw yourself into the waves.

I
N 1992
J
ULIA WENT TO
L
ONDON TO ATTEND THE
O
XFORD
Symposium on Food. She traveled with Nancy Verde Barr, who served as the executive chef for Julia’s
Good Morning America
segments and helped her produce her feature articles for
Parade
magazine. Anyone who worked with Julia for any length of time inevitably became a good friend, and Barr had been with her for a dozen years by then.

Julia almost never said no to an invitation. Even in her dotage, the only thing that prevented her from saying yes to every invitation that came down the pike was the scant twenty-four hours in every day. Just as the two friends were preparing to leave for England, the London branch of Cordon Bleu invited them to another event, and Julia, a traveling pro with everything she
needed packed into a small black suitcase, insisted they add it to their itinerary. But where would they stay? As luck would have it, Julia’s friends—the Sullivans—were traveling in the States at the time, and their very nice flat remained empty.

What could be more perfect? Especially since this would allow Julia and Nancy to throw a cocktail party for their London friends in the cooking world, of which Julia had many.
*
One night, at the end of their stay, Julia thought it would be nice to thank their generous hosts by photographing themselves enjoying the flat, and enclose the pictures in the thank-you note. Then she spied a rare porcelain vase sitting on the mantel—but one of the Sullivans’ large, priceless collection—and hatched a better, much more entertaining plan.

Inside their proper thank-you note the Sullivans also received a handful of photos of Julia and Nancy … in their bathrobes pretending to hurl their museum-quality porcelain to the floor. Ha!

Julia was eighty when she carried out this caper, and it was far from her last.

There are many stories like this about Julia, by those who knew her well and those who knew her in passing. What they all attest to is one of the great mysteries surrounding the person
of Julia Child: She grew up without losing those tremendous kid-type qualities that make everyday life fun.

Until the day she died, Julia was never out of touch with what my friend Gabby calls her “girl spirit.” For most women that curious, rambunctious, prank-playing, singing-at-the-top-of-our-lungs-while-riding-our-bikes-down-the-middle-of-the-street
joie de vivre
begins to dwindle around the time we start reading
Seventeen
, and is usually extinct by the time we’re in the throes of calorie-counting, expensive eye cream–wearing, eligible man–pursuing adulthood. We can hardly be blamed. I can’t think of an era in which Julia’s exuberant tomboy style of behavior was ever in vogue for grown women. Being yourself in the way Julia was herself has been frowned upon as being unladylike, un-Joni Mitchell-like, or un-smokin’ hot babe-like, depending upon the era. This wouldn’t matter in and of itself, except the implication of being a woman who inhabits and expresses the full range of her personality, as inevitably put forth by the pundits-du-jour, is that refusing to get in line with accepted notions of femininity means you’re bound to wind up unloved and alone.

Once, when I was in my mid-twenties, the age at which it becomes clear that you really
are
an adult, and not the faux-adult to which people give lip service the day you turn eighteen, I had a rare, candid conversation with my dad.

The operative word here is
candid.
My dad and I talked quite a bit for a father and daughter of that time. In many ways, we were comrades-in-arms, united in our mystification at my mother’s compulsion to make complicated French food and her kooky extroversion.
*
He taught me how to drive a nail, win at checkers, draw a correctly proportioned human head, ride a horse up and down a steep hill, and shift gears in my Volkswagen without engaging the transmission. Our many conversations were topical: the Civil War, rattlesnakes, gold mines, football vs. basketball, movies, the origin of words, and the nature of infinity. My point is he wasn’t one of those coldhearted, disinterested dads (like Julia’s, as it turned out) who had no relationship with his child. We talked a lot, just not about anything personal.

But one night while I was sitting with him, “enjoying” an after-dinner drink—he was fond of the horrid licorice-flavored, urine sample–colored Galliano—I felt compelled to unburden myself of a complaint I had vis-à-vis the way he and my mother had parented me. Since we were both adults now, I figured it was time he was enlightened.

I said that my mother, now conveniently dead and not there to defend herself, had ruined my confidence by telling me, around age twelve, that I could no longer do all the stuff I really liked to do, like, for example, laugh so hard I was forced to throw myself on the floor, rolling around holding my belly;
or do headstands in the living room while we had guests; or get into fistfights with the boys with whom I disagreed; or beat everyone in the entire school at tetherball. Her fear was that if I didn’t rein it all in a bit I would deprive myself of a successful and happy teenhood, which translated to never having a boyfriend, which further meant I’d be scarred for life.
*
I told my dad that there was nothing worse than allowing me complete freedom to express my personality and then once I hit eighth grade suddenly insisting that everything everyone thought was so cool about me—my impersonation of a goat, for example
^†
—was inappropriate behavior for a young lady. I confessed that I had been tortured by this for years. I said it was an inner conflict so pernicious it was threatening to send me to a psychiatrist.

“At twelve, suddenly, I was supposed to become someone else!” I’d raised my voice. I’d sounded strident. Another big no-no.

“You’re right,” said my dad. “We should have sat on you much earlier.”

Sat
on me?

Only many years later, after I had become the parent of a child who took umbrage with some of my own parenting, did it occur to me that my dad was probably joking.

But regardless, Julia never had to deal with anything remotely like this. No one ever tried to sit on her, even in jest.
She marched straight into womanhood with the best parts of her character intact. There was no Reviving Ophelia phase, where her self-regard plunged as she reached adolescence, no transition from high school to college, then from college out into the real world, that was rocky enough to transform her from the brightest, brattiest, most ebullient girl in town, into a shy woodland creature who worried that everything she felt, thought, and did was somehow not right.

The result: She was a woman never divided against herself.

I’m sure there are men who feel divided. But I’d wager it’s usually because of choices they’ve made, not because up until puberty they were perfectly acceptable human beings, at which point they had to completely rewire themselves to become attractive to the opposite sex. Do you know one forty-year-old guy who, deep in his heart, feels he’s too old for
Star Wars
? And does a love of
Star Wars
prevent him from getting laid (maybe, but not if he’s discreet) or walking down the aisle? On the other hand, a woman of the same age who holds the same attachment for the things of her childhood might just have a mental disorder.

Look at pictures of Julia. Never will you see on her face an expression that conveys anything approaching self-doubt. Never in her eyes will you catch that vague look of self-consciousness so many of us possess, even beneath our extra-whitened HD smiles, that telegraphs our basic discomfort with the person we’re projecting. By all reports, the feeling expressed on Julia’s face at any given moment mirrored the feeling in her heart.

Pretty much everyone who knew Julia said the same thing: that what you saw was what you got. She had no buried girl self on which her proper woman self had been constructed, and, perhaps not incidentally, she had no regrets, except one: When she was a nonagenarian, long after Paul had died, and her health was forcing her to slow down to three times the speed of a normal healthy fifty-year-old, she did remark to her old colleague and cowriter Simone Beck that at this stage of her life it would have been nice to have a grandchild or two around. Otherwise, until the end of her life, she was as gregarious, energetic, pragmatic, curious, and adventuresome as she’d been as a child.

How did she turn out this way? And more important, is there any way we can reverse engineer our own lives in order to see whether we might extract any Juliaesque essence that will help us live as fully and gaily as she did?

Be rich.

My inclination is to lay Julia’s stupendous self-acceptance and
joie de vivre
at the feet of her equally stupendous privilege. Julia always maintained that her family was of the Buick not the Cadillac class, but she grew up with an upstairs maid, a gardener, and a cook. They also had a tennis court, which suggests the McWilliamses were neither of the Buick class nor the Cadillac class, but the class of people who are so well off they don’t know that having a private tennis court means you’re really well off.

Julia’s dazzling mother, Julia Carolyn “Caro” Weston, was from Massachusetts and an heiress to the Weston Paper Company. Her father, John “Big John” McWilliams Jr., was a Princeton man who moved to Pasadena from Illinois, to take over his father’s land management business. Managing land in Southern California in the early part of the twentieth century could apparently make one quite wealthy.
*
Pasadena was a small town in 1912, the year Julia was born. By Southern California standards, it’s loaded with history. The first football game that became the Rose Bowl matchup was played in 1902. Around the same time, enormous resort hotels sprang up along the board boulevards—the Raymond, the Hunting-ton, and Hotel Green—and a raft of gargantuan churches of all denominations sat on their corners, surrounded by queen palms.

John and Caro, with their three children, Julia, John III, and Dorothy (known as Dort), lived in several grand houses, including a huge five-bedroom, five-bath colonial, designed by architect Reginald Johnson, famous locally for also designing the Los Angeles Opera House, Santa Barbara’s Biltmore hotel, and several Episcopal churches. When the McWilliamses weren’t relaxing at home, you could find them at one of three country clubs they belonged to: one for swimming and riding (Valley Hunt Club), one for golf (Annandale Country Club), and one for polo (Midwick Country Club).

Pop, as Julia called her dad, was a brusque Presbyterian Republican. He was civic-minded, believed in public service, and did many good things like run the Pasadena branch of the Red Cross and sit on the chamber of commerce, but he was so conservative that anyone who didn’t grow up the way he did, think the same way he did, and hold all of the same values he did was a traitor to the nation.

Julia adored Pop in the standard manner of worshipful daughters everywhere, but lucky for her she was temperamentally like her mother, having inherited “the Weston twinkle” from Caro, whose disposition was as sunny as her husband’s was stern. A sassy redhead, at Smith College (class of 1901) Caro was the captain of the basketball team and had a reputation as an independent thinker. She didn’t marry until the advanced age of thirty-three, believing it was important to see the world before settling down. Even after she became the mother of three, she spent a good part of every day playing tennis. Endorphins weren’t discovered until 1974, but clearly Caro McWilliams enjoyed the benefits.

Caro loved to cook in the manner of people who aren’t required to do it every day. Dinner generally consisted of some kind of overcooked meat and boiled potatoes. Because Caro always instructed Cook to include a vegetable grown in their garden, and perhaps some sliced avocado from one of their trees, her reputation among Julia’s friends was as a health food nut. By the time Julia was in her teens, Cook would also have been able to purchase Heinz Ketchup, Van Camp’s Pork and Beans, Del Monte canned fruits and vegetables, Grape-Nuts,
Wheaties, Welch’s Grape Jelly, and Wonder Bread. Because Julia never went into the kitchen if she could help it, and as an adult had almost no memory of the food she ate as a child, we don’t know whether she ever tore off the crusts of a slice of Wonder Bread and rolled the white part into a ball.

Caro had a few noteworthy recipes: baking powder biscuits, Welsh rarebit, and a Yankee specialty, codfish balls, made from poached dried cod whipped with egg and mashed potatoes. She would cook these at least once a month, usually on Thursday, Cook’s night off. When Caro was too tired from her daily tennis, or simply not in the mood, the McWilliamses would repair to one of their “dining clubs.” But Caro’s “love” of cooking notwithstanding, she never pressured her daughters to learn to cook, unlike my own mother who, a week before any school vacation, would promise she was going to teach me to cook a few things when I was on break. Nothing sounded more punishing. Do you know who cooked? Boring mothers, that’s who. The first day of vacation I would leap on my bike right after breakfast and disappear until it started getting dark, and I knew she would start calling around to my friends’ houses to tell their mothers to send me home for dinner. Once she worried that no one would want to marry me if I didn’t know how to cook, to which I sneered, “
Good.”