Laura Shapiro (13 page)

Cooking shows had been a staple of early television, but none of them bore any resemblance to
The French Chef.
Most were plain-spun, local broadcasts featuring a home economist or food editor. James Beard and Dione Lucas, two of the best-known culinary authorities before Julia's arrival on the scene, had starred in their own cooking programs, but neither of these experts was able to develop the skill or personality demanded by the screen. Their shows left no mark on the medium. By the 1960s, cooking had been relegated to the dim wastes of daytime TV, where it reveled in the simpleminded sentiments considered appropriate for housewives. Julia's real peers were those beloved figures who made instant, indelible impressions in the first decades of television—Lucille Ball, Steve Allen, Milton Berle. Yet she stood out here, too, because what she was doing on-screen didn't fit any existing categories. She invented no character, staged no formal entertainments; her original show didn't even carry her name, and the point of the half hour over which she presided was to teach, not to focus attention on herself. In fact, Julia spent her first decade on TV begging WGBH to put guest chefs on
The French Chef
with her because she thought people would learn much more if they could be exposed to a wide range of teachers. (The station never complied, first because the program was so experimental, and later because it was so clearly and magnificently Julia's show.) Despite the modesty that was intrinsic to her personality, the camera adored her, perhaps because she generally forgot about it as soon as the food absorbed her attention. Often she looked straight into the camera and gave a sudden little smile, because Ruth Lockwood had been holding up an idiot card that read
SMILE
. In a medium stoked by artificiality and blandness almost from the beginning, Julia was herself and famous for it.

At the same time, however, she tended her public image with great care. Paul did all the still photography for
The French Chef
and tried to make sure that his were the only photographs of Julia that appeared in the press. She was not conventionally good-looking or particularly photogenic, and newspaper photographers weren't going to edit their contact sheets as painstakingly as he did. As he told his brother, “The image can be spoiled by letting out half a dozen stinkers.” Over the years, similarly, she went on many diets but rarely discussed them in public until late in her career. What she preferred to tell the press, when reporters invariably asked how she controlled her weight in the face of so much tempting food, was that she and Paul simply watched their calories and tried never to have second helpings. (But, “TOO FAT!” she groaned to an old friend. “I'm just too damned fat, my waist is middle aged, my bust is bulging bubbidom, and [worst of all], I really can't buy any clothes anymore.”) A few years after she started on television, she bought her first wig—“which will save a pile of distress in rainy weather,” Paul explained—and in the late 1960s, she had plastic surgery for the first time, an “eye job.” In the spring of 1971, she had a complete face-lift. The operation took place in Paris so that she could go straight to their house in Provence to recuperate in absolute privacy. When she learned that Simca was planning to be next door in her house at the same time—Simca would be working with an American writer who was translating her cookbook into English—Julia insisted that the translating be done elsewhere or at another time. “You forget, ma chérie, that I am, malgré tout, a public figure and it will not do to have a reporter and writer be aware in any way of my condition,” she wrote to her colleague. “I am sorry to be difficult about this, but you must understand the problem!” Nobody knew about the face-lift—“my sacquepage,” Julia called it—except Paul, Simca, and Ruth Lockwood. “People think I look just fine, and so rested,” she wrote to Simca after returning home. “Avis said your skin looks so good, and your face—I said, well, since the TV I've learned how to put on makeup. Actually, it is very subtle—the neck fixed, the pouches at either side of the chin, and the hollows out of the cheeks. I didn't realize myself until suddenly I looked—no turkey neck! No dewlaps!” She had plastic surgery again in 1977 and once more in 1989.

But her image was a bigger project than simply the condition of her face and figure. Soon after
The French Chef
became a local sensation, Julia began to get invitations—Would she appear at a department store and demonstrate cooking? Would she appear at a charity fund-raiser? Would she endorse this product, use this equipment on air, plug this restaurant? Early on, she made it a rule to say no to everything except charitable ventures. “I just don't want to be in any way associated with commercialism (except for selling the book in a dignified way), and don't want to get into the realm of being a piece of property trotting about hither and yon,” she told Koshland. “The line is sometimes difficult to see, but I know where I mean it to be.” Anytime she accepted a fee for a cooking demonstration or a special appearance, she donated the money to WGBH. If viewers wrote to ask where she bought her mixer, or what brand of rum she was using, she wrote back with the information, but she never mentioned a brand name in public. Thanks to the success of her books, as well as an inheritance, she and Paul didn't need the money; and she often said how grateful she was to be able to turn down such offers. But she made her stance for another reason as well. Commercial endorsements were demeaning: they tarnished the reputation of the cook. James Beard lent his name to many food companies, always justifying it by saying he needed the money, and Julia felt that his standing in the profession was suffering as a result. Audiences understood the difference between paid-for and unfettered speech; they loved her for staying on the right side of the line, and she had no intention of letting them down by muddying what she called “the purest of noncommercial images.”

With the help of her lawyer when necessary, Julia kept her name free of commercial taint throughout her career. But other aspects of her public image had a way of tripping her up, often right on air. Scrupulous though she was about how she looked and how she taught, Julia was so comfortably at home whenever she was handling food that she moved around the TV kitchen as if she were in her own house. She stashed away the colander and then forgot where it was, hunted about for the mixing fork, lost track of a casserole; once she snatched up a huge handful of paper towels and swabbed her face, explaining, “I've got so many burners on here, I'm hot.” No matter how well she planned a program, moreover, reality had a way of breaking over the proceedings like a raw egg. Julia's equanimity in the face of a crisis was dazzling—repairing the molded potatoes that stuck to the bottom of the pan, withstanding a series of electrical shocks from the microphone tucked in her blouse (she did keep fiddling anxiously with the mic, but she never stopped teaching), shoving aside a spoon holder that had fallen over with a crash, ignoring a scraper that flew from her grasp, and dismissing the collapse of a frosting-laden “twig” in the Yule log by remarking, “Well, I guess that would happen in a forest, anyway. Things sitting there a long time, and they begin losing their strength.” When she unmolded a
tarte tatin,
only to see it collapse into a messy heap of apples with the crust slipping off to the side, she simply said, “That was a little loose. But I'll just have to show you that it's not going to make too much of a difference, because it's all going to fix up.” Rapidly she tucked the apples together on top of the crust, then carried the disheveled tart into the dining room along with another “ready” tart that had been unmolded perfectly earlier in the day. “Now everybody can get one of each tart,” she said as she cut slices, managing despite everything to sound like a chemistry teacher showing the results of an experiment that went off just as it was supposed to. “There. I think that actually makes a more interesting dessert.”

One day Julia taped a program with four different potato recipes, trying to move through them at a good pace. Standing at the stove over a large mashed potato cake in a skillet, she waited a little impatiently for the cake to brown on the bottom. She eyed the pan and shook it dubiously, then decided to try to flip the cake over anyway. Clearly she knew she was taking a chance. “When you flip anything, you just have to have the courage of your convictions, particularly if it's sort of a loose mass, like this.” She gave the pan a swift, practiced jerk. The potato cake rose heavily into the air and disintegrated, half of it spilling in shreds onto the stove. “Well, that didn't go very well,” she observed steadily. “You see, when I flipped it, I didn't have the courage to do it the way I should have.” Quickly she gathered up the pieces and reassembled them in the pan. “You can always pick it up,” she remarked as she worked. “You're alone in the kitchen—who is going to see? But the only way you learn how to flip things is just to flip them.”

“You're alone in the kitchen—who is going to see?” This incident became legendary and then apocryphal, revised so many times in the telling that the original event disappeared. Julia dropped a chicken, Julia dropped two chickens, she dropped a turkey, a twenty-five-pound turkey, a pig, a duck, and in each case blithely returned them to their platters—all fantasies, but people recalled them joyfully. They also remembered seeing Julia pour wine into a dish, then finish off the bottle herself, saying, “One of the rewards of being a cook.” Actually, she had been showing how to juice tomatoes and finished the lesson by drinking up the last bit of juice; but memory preferred wine. “Sometimes she forgets to put the seasoning in the ragout; sometimes she drops a turkey in the sink,” wrote Lewis Lapham in the
Saturday Evening Post.
“In New York's Greenwich Village…a coterie of avant-garde painters and musicians gathers each week in a loft to watch
The French Chef,
convinced that Mrs. Child is far more diverting than any professional comedian.” A story in
Time
played up her “muddleheaded nonchalance”; a piece in
TV Guide
reported “blunders,” “grunts,” and “mutters.” “Practically every article on Julie so far has concentrated on the clown instead of the woman, the cook, the expert or the revolutionary,” Paul complained to his brother. Julia hadn't intended to do kitchen vaudeville, but that was the image taking shape—despite the fact that efficiency and competence characterized her television cooking far more accurately than pratfalls did.

Reading the fan mail as well as the press, Julia could see that the informality and humor that came so naturally were doing just what she wanted the show to do: dispel the fog of intimidation around French cooking. Hence she was willing to play up the entertainment aspect of the program, especially in the opening moments—sorting through mounds of tangled seaweed to reveal a twenty-pound lobster, for instance, or standing over a chorus line of six raw chickens exclaiming, “Julia Child presents the chicken sisters! Miss Broiler! Miss Fryer! Miss Roaster! Miss Caponette! Miss Stewer! And old Madame Hen!” But she was of two minds about the bloopers. They were peerless teaching tools: every cook ran into mishaps, and Julia knew that to see the
pommes Anna
stuck helplessly to the bottom of the pan, then rescued and restored, constituted a more memorable lesson than the original would have been. “It may well happen to you,” she always told viewers as she patched and revised. But she hated making mistakes in public. Informality was one thing; ruining the food was definitely another. And she didn't want to be known as a bumbling clown; she wanted to be known as a good, professional cook. When hapless beginners wrote to her begging for advice—which they did in such numbers that she composed a form letter to send in response—she was full of sympathy and encouragement, but never admitted having been in the same position herself. “The story of the beginner cook is often a real tale of woe, and I feel for her,” she told them. “Whenever
I
sew or knit it turns out a disaster. I really think the best thing is to take some cooking lessons…. Cooks are made, geniuses are born, and you can learn to cook with the right instruction—especially if you are lucky enough to be married to someone who loves good food, as that will always inspire you.” It was, of course, her own story, minus the early agony.

“Bon courage!”
she bid the audience at the end of the flopped-potato-cake show. Be of good courage!
“Courage!”
she said again, after a visibly exhausting bout with French bread. When she demonstrated the nerve-racking process of creating a lacy caramel “cage” to go over a cake, she didn't try to disguise the challenge: she told viewers to fail if they must, and try again. “Cooking is one failure after another, and that's how you finally learn,” she told the audience while she stirred the caramel. “You've got to have what the French call ‘
je m'enfoutisme,
' or ‘I don't care what happens—the sky can fall and omelets can go all over the stove, I'm going to learn.'” It was the chief lesson she had gleaned from her own cooking failures, which dogged her long after she had learned to cook. “I must say I find myself often in the embarrassing position of being the much publicized visiting supreme authority on culinary matters, and then laying an egg on top of it,” she wrote to Avis in 1953, after a Christmas visit to friends during which she botched the timing of a turkey. The next year she truffled and stuffed a turkey, then overcooked it, burned the broiled endive, nearly forgot the salad dressing, and was late with the coffee. “How miserable, depressing, and slapping-down such a fiasco is, is it not?” Nearly a decade later, living in Cambridge as the lionized author of
Mastering the Art of French Cooking,
she entertained her new friend James Beard and, she told Simca, “cooked the worst dinner of my life.” An elaborate preparation of veal scallops—cognac, Madeira, truffles—lacked flavor, and she didn't know why; the broccoli was underdone, and so were the sautéed potatoes; and the chocolate cake tasted terrible. (“Don't ever use Baker's unsweetened chocolate for anything!”) Beard didn't seem to mind the meal: he promptly invited her to teach at his school in New York.