The French Chef in America Read online

  ALSO BY ALEX PRUD’HOMME

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  (with Michael Cherkasky)

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2016 by Alex Prud’homme

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.​aaknopf.​com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Prud’homme, Alex, author.

  Title: The French chef in America : Julia Child’s second act / Alex Prud’homme.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015043441 (print) | LCCN 2015051459 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385351751 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780385351768 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Child, Julia. | Cooks—United States—Biography.

  Classification: LCC TX649.C47 P78 2016 (print) | LCC TX649.C47 (ebook) | DDC 641.5092—dc23

  LC record available at http://​lccn.​loc.​gov/​2015043441

  Ebook ISBN 9780385351768

  Cover photograph of Julia Child by Arnold Newman/Getty Images

  Colorization by Dana Keller

  Cover design by Carol Devine Carson

  v4.1

  a

  To Judith B. Jones

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by Alex Prud’Homme

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction: Julia’s Second Act

  Part I THE FRENCH CHEF FACES LIFE

  1 Dinner and Diplomacy

  2 The French Chef

  3 Volume II

  4 The French Chef in France

  5 That’s It

  Part II THE FRENCH CHEF IN AMERICA

  6 From Julia Child’s Kitchen

  7 The Spirit of ’76

  8 The President, the Queen, and the Captain

  9 The New French Revolution

  10 A Go-To Cultural Figure

  11 Bursting Out of the Straitjacket

  Part III FOLLOWING THE GLEAM

  12 Prime Time

  13 The Celebrity Chef

  14 “Bon Appétit, America!”

  Epilogue: A Civilized Art

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  A Note About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  Julia’s Second Act

  In mid-July 1976, Julia Child attended President Gerald R. Ford’s bicentennial celebration in Washington, D.C., where she provided commentary for public television, interviewed the White House chef, and met Queen Elizabeth II. Then, as the somewhat raucous party was still winding down, Julia slipped away to rejoin her husband, Paul, in the quiet anonymity of rural France.

  Julia was near the height of her celebrity at the time. Performing as “The French Chef,” she had won an Emmy, a Peabody Award, and the French Ordre du Mérite Agricole; appeared on the cover of Time magazine; made documentary films; and co-authored two volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which had helped launch a food revolution in America. Flinging baguettes, slapping eggplants, flapping chicken wings, she had proven to be a natural on TV: a knowledgeable, unaffected culinary guide whose comic timing and idiosyncratic vocalizations were lauded and satirized across the country. In France, however, the French Chef was virtually unknown, which was just how the Childs liked it.

  Every year, Paul and Julia would retreat to their small, simple house outside of Cannes for a few weeks at a time. They had named the house La Pitchoune—La Peetch, for short—which means “the little thing” in the Provençal dialect. It was the place they went to exhale and rejuvenate. Paul would write, paint, photograph, and tend the garden. Julia would sleep, visit restaurants, and cook with her “French sister,” Simone “Simca” Beck. It was a familiar pattern, only this time the Childs invited my family to join them.

  Julia and Paul on the terrace at La Pitchoune

  We flew from New York to Nice, rented a small olive-green car, and drove along winding roads to the Childs’ house overlooking the hill town of Plascassier. That evening the Childs welcomed us with a succulent dinner of roasted lamb and ratatouille. Julia was ebullient. In the coming days, she toured us around the outdoor market in Cannes, where she spoke to nearly every vendor and bought heaps of fish for what she would deem “a great bouillabaisse.” Then she was off—visiting with M. F. K. Fisher, negotiating with the plumber, having her hair done, attending to desk work, and always tinkering with something delicious in her compact cuisine.

  At La Peetch—as in their much larger home kitchen in Cambridge, Massachusetts—Paul had erected Peg-Board on the wall, from which he hung Julia’s batterie de cuisine. He outlined her copper pots and steel pans with black Magic Marker, so one would know exactly where each should be hung. Julia worked at a small gas stove vented by a window, a tall worktable, and with a row of knives arranged by size on a magnetic strip. It was an efficient space not much bigger than a ship’s galley, and it seemed to emit mouthwatering smells at all hours.

  Though Julia and Paul never had children (they had tried but it “didn’t take,” Julia said), they welcomed my sisters and me as surrogate grandchildren. Paul was the twin brother of my maternal grandfather, Charles Child. We had been lucky to spend time with Julia and Paul in Cambridge, New York, and Maine, but this was our first visit to La Pitchoune. I was almost fifteen years old in the summer of 1976, with bushy blond hair down to my shoulders; my sisters were thirteen and nine. While my parents were lodged in a guest room, my sisters slept in an outbuilding, and I was relegated to a couch in the open living-dining room. We children had been warned to be on our best behavior, and made sure to walk slowly and keep our voices down around Paul, who was seventy-four and still recovering from a heart-bypass operation two years earlier.

  Paul was an erudite man who was a decade older, and several inches shorter, than Julia. He was pleasant, if reserved, that July. He would appear at meals, but spent much of his time sequestered in the little cabanon (cabin) across the driveway, painting, writing, and organizing the bottles in his wine cave. He had grown thin, his face was often slack, and he seemed mentally present one minute but distant the next. He could be stern and liked to talk about Serious Things, like Politics, Economics, and Culture, which made him an intimidating presence. I would later learn that he was suffering from nightmares and insomnia at the time. Because Julia was a snorer and a thrasher, they slept apart; but when Paul awoke at 4 o’clock one morning, he slipped into her bed for comfort, and, he noted in his date book, they “ ‘sleep’ late.”

  Lunch at La Colombe d’Or in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, July 1976

  Our two weeks at La Pitchoune were an idyll. We bought flowers in Grasse, shopped for handblown glass in Biot, picnicked in sunny fields, wandered through Old Nice, lunched at the house of the expat American chef Richard Olney, and swam in the azure Mediterranean. Inspired by the Formula 1 cars that race in nearby Monaco, I ground the gears and spun the tires of our rental car
in the bumpy field below La Peetch, teaching myself how to drive a stick shift. After terrorizing a herd of goats, putting a dent in the fender (stone wall), and feeling the adrenaline surge as I bounced through mud patches at warp speed, I declared myself fit for a driver’s license, not to mention hot laps around Monte Carlo.

  As always, talk at the Childs’ house centered on the gastronomic and painterly arts, and these subjects came together for me in a new way on the afternoon that we drove up to Saint-Paul-de-Vence for lunch. It is a secluded medieval town nestled in the steep hills between Nice and the Alpes-Maritimes mountains. There, we ate at La Colombe d’Or, a seemingly modest auberge where a sign reads: “Ici on loge à cheval, à pied ou en peinture” (“Here we lodge those on horseback, on foot, or with paintings”). The inn was established in 1920 by Paul Roux, a local farmer, and is decorated with a remarkable collection of artwork by the once-struggling painters and sculptors who traded their work for lodging: Picasso, Braque, Léger, Chagall, Calder, and others.

  Perhaps it was the familial warmth, the food and wine, the proximity to such a collection of masterworks, or some other mysterious trigger, but Paul suddenly grew animated. His one good eye came into focus (the other had been blinded in childhood), he smiled for the first time in days, he regaled us with stories about the local villages-perchés—the fortified hill towns built to defend against raiding Saracen pirates—and encouraged me to try a glass of rosé. My grumpy granduncle was sud denly entertaining and interesting; it was as if Paul had reverted to his charming, pre-bypass self.

  A couple of evenings later we gathered on the terrace at La Pitchoune for dinner. It was hot, the air was still, and we were tired. The sun faded behind the hills, and Julia hummed to herself as she cut up a whole chicken and steeped it in a fantastic marinade, then grilled it one sizzling piece at a time on a tiny hibachi in the corner. Paul ran a long extension cord from the house to a small black-and-white TV placed on a wobbly chair. He turned the TV on to the Summer Olympics, then under way in Montreal. As the graceful Cuban heavyweight boxer Teófilo Stevenson battled Romania’s Mircea Şimon, Paul jabbed the air with his fist and translated the French announcer’s play-by-play into English with growing excitement. When Stevenson knocked out Şimon to win the gold, we stood to hoot and holler at the little screen. (It was Stevenson’s second gold medal, after triumphing in Munich. Winning again in 1980, he was the first boxer to win three Olympic gold medals in one weight class.) Paul was so animated, and Julia’s chicken was so delicious, that the evening lingers as memorable.

  In ensuing years, Paul would fade into a state he ruefully called “the mental scrambles.” Never fully recovering from his operation, he suffered a series of strokes and other ailments that left him weary, confused, and irascible. In retrospect, those days at La Pitchoune in 1976 were the last glimpse I had of the intelligent, warm, and enthusiastic man he had been: the genuine Paul Child.

  Julia, on the other hand, was in the midst of a dynamic new phase of her career, when she left behind classical French cuisine and the French Chef, to reinvent—and re-Americanize—herself as “Julia Child.”

  —

  PAUL AND JULIA HAD MET in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) during the Second World War, married in the United States in 1946, and were posted to Paris by the U.S. Information Service in 1948. In the early fifties, Paul mounted cultural exhibitions for the U.S. Embassy, while Julia graduated from the Cordon Bleu and discovered her raison d’être in cooking la cuisine bourgeoise—excellent, middle-class food prepared according to a well-established set of rules. She and her French friends Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle opened their own cooking school, L’École des Trois Gourmandes (which Julia translated as “the School of the Three Hearty Eaters”), and toiled for years on the cookbook that would be published in 1961 as Mastering the Art of French Cooking. During this time Julia experienced a “flowering of the soul,” when she morphed from a too-tall, too-loud, rather unsophisticated social butterfly, as she described herself, into a worldly diplomatic wife and expert on what she liked to call “cookery.” This was her gestational period, when she was in her thirties, forties, and early fifties. I think of it as Act One of Julia’s adult life, and I helped her write about it in her memoir, My Life in France.

  The book in your hands is a different kind of project. While Julia’s memoir was written in the first person, in her voice, The French Chef in America is mostly written in the third person, in my voice, and strives for a more journalistic survey of Julia in the 1970s. It was a period of global upheaval, when she was in her sixties and transformed herself a second time.

  The Childs retired from the diplomatic service in 1961, and settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, outside of Boston. Their large clapboard house stood just behind Harvard Yard, where they were surrounded by “eggheads,” the professors, artists, and European refugees who formed Paul and Julia’s social circle. In those revolutionary days, protests erupted nearby on a regular basis, sometimes violently, while young restaurateurs, chefs, and farmers helped create a new American cooking.

  In the early seventies, Julia began to experiment with recipes from around the world, wrote in the first person, and began to tell personal stories. These tentative steps in a new direction led to a remarkably productive decade, when she produced a stream of books and TV shows, wrote for a slew of newspapers and magazines, was satirized by Saturday Night Live, grew more outspoken than ever—she clashed with promoters of health food and nouvelle cuisine, extoled the virtues of butter and cream, championed Planned Parenthood, questioned feminism, left public television for Good Morning America—and had other adventures that brought her to the apex of her celebrity. Yet even as Julia achieved wide renown in public, she and Paul suffered some of their darkest moments in private.

  I have come to regard this period—roughly the late sixties through the early eighties—as Julia’s Second Act: when she retooled her career, embraced her American roots, and finally discovered her true voice.

  Part I

  The French Chef Faces Life

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  1

  Dinner and Diplomacy

  I never forget that I live in a house owned by all the American people.

  —FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT

  I. WHITE HOUSE RED CARPET

  The sun shone brightly as three flags—the American, Japanese, and District of Columbia—riffled in a breeze. As the camera panned across the Washington, D.C., cityscape, four howitzers boomed a nineteen-gun salute on the South Lawn. It was Tuesday, November 14, 1967, and Julia Child was taking her audience somewhere they had never been before.

  “Welcome to Washington. I’m Julia Child, out here in front of the East Gate of the White House, where every day thousands of visitors go through this historic mansion. And today, something very special is going on,” she said in her distinctly breathy, high-low warble. Hundreds of tourists streamed through the White House, also known as the People’s House, clogging the halls and gawking at the formal dining rooms just hours before an important state dinner.

  “These visits are terribly important. And also terribly complicated to handle. It’s really fascinating to see how the White House manages one of them,” Julia narrated. “And that’s exactly what we’re going to see. Not only what goes on in front, but what goes on backstage, and backstairs. We’re going to see everything, inside and out, from the start—the official greeting right on through to the White House dinner.”

  Thus began a public television special called White House Red Carpet. Produced by WGBH, Julia’s home public television station in Boston, it was the first time that a TV crew had been allowed to document a state dinner. It also marked the first time in more than two years that Julia had appeared on the tube with fresh material. Season One of her cooking show, The French Chef, aired from February 1963 through July 1966, when Julia took a break and the show went into reruns. By then she had firmly established herself as “the kitchen magician,” as The Boston Globe called her. With more
than a million viewers a week, Julia encouraged her audience to cook boldly and take risks without fear of failure. “Eat heartily!” she declared, and, “Never apologize!” Her fans referred to her simply as “Julia,” as if they knew her personally.

  Julia had taken a sabbatical for two reasons: she had been hard at work with her French colleague Simone “Simca” Beck, on a follow-up to their cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking; and she was waiting for color television to become a reality. By November 1967, the book was coming together and WGBH had received its first color cameras. With White House Red Carpet, Julia was making a dramatic return to the national spotlight.

  A robust fifty-five years old, Julia stood more than six feet two inches tall, had a long face with a rounded jaw, frizzy brown hair, lively blue eyes, strong hands, and usually dressed in pearls, a blue apron, and size-twelve sneakers. At the White House she wore a stylish black-and-white checked coat, a shoulder-length brown wig with a flip curl (for convenience: constant hairdos during a multiday TV shoot were a burden), and an impish grin.

  The idea for a White House TV special was sparked in 1966—“the year that everyone seems to be cooking in the kitchen with Julia,” noted Time magazine—when the Public Broadcasting Laboratory (PBL) asked if she would like to do a thirty-minute special about “What’s Happening Now.” Avid news watchers, Julia and Paul drew up a list of potential ideas.

  Paul’s voice was important. He was an equal partner in their joint venture: Julia’s mentor, editor, manager, confidant, bodyguard, staff photographer, sommelier, and culinary “guinea pig.” He avoided the limelight and described himself as “a part of the iceberg that doesn’t show.” While she was a blast of sound and a ray of sunlight, he was more internalized, with a quieter, moodier demeanor and a sometimes prickly intellect. Julia and Paul were “a team,” they said, “two sides of a coin,” and they often signed their joint letters “JP” or “Pulia.”