The French Chef in America Page 27

  There was no single explanation for the lackluster performance of Company and More Company, but the quirks of public television likely contributed. First, PBS is a “network” in name only. Unlike at a commercial TV network—which dictates that its affiliates broadcast certain programs at certain times across the country, in order to assure continuity for viewers and advertisers—local public TV stations are run as independent fiefdoms. Their programmers air whichever shows they like at whatever time they like. Lacking the ability to promote a single airtime for a national audience, it is an arrangement that practically guarantees internecine rivalry and a certain amount of public confusion.

  “It’s the Balkanization of the system, like a bunch of independent countries fighting with one another,” explained Russ Morash. “There’s no discipline. This guy in San Francisco decides to run Nova at four a.m. on a Wednesday, and that guy in Philadelphia runs the same program at six p.m. on a Friday. It makes it very difficult to know what you’re going to get when you turn on the TV. That lack of universal coverage is the weakness that almost killed PBS. It wasn’t a secret. We deplored it. But there wasn’t anything we could do about it.”

  Second, local programmers would sometimes promote their own, in-house shows over those produced by rival stations. “They would do their mischief,” said Morash. “There was bad blood—I don’t think there was any question about it.” He pointed to WNET, the New York station behind Nature, among other shows, as an example: “New York was a bunch of arrogant bastards. It seemed they would deliberately not run our [WGBH] programs in prime time. I don’t think they were particularly impressed with Julia, or any of our offerings, despite their good ratings in other markets.” As petty as it sounds, he said, “it goes back to the Yankees versus the Red Sox. Large or small, that old rivalry had a role.”

  Third, while WGBH was producing some of the nation’s best educational programs—including performances by the Boston Pops, documentaries about the Vietnam War, Nova, and Morash’s hit shows Victory Garden and This Old House—there were only so many hours of “prime time,” between 8:00 and 11:00 p.m., when the audience was largest. The competition for those precious hours was fierce, and the station was rife with internal politics. In the meantime, public tastes were shifting.

  “After a while, the whole how-to genre wasn’t a top priority,” recalled Henry Becton, who ran WGBH’s cultural programming in the late seventies. “Julia may have been feeling she wasn’t getting as much audience reaction as she had hoped for, compared to some of the other shows.”

  Lastly, the Company series—and Julia herself—may have been taken for granted by WGBH. Despite the fact that she was the station’s first breakout star, her programs were considered “quirky,” a mere afterthought, “some little cooking show” next to the “truly” Important Programming the station was known for, Morash said. “You have to remember the context of the time. No matter what the revisionists would have you believe, Julia’s shows were never, ever that important to GBH. Ever.”

  By 1980 Julia had confronted these realities and made a previously unthinkable decision: she would quit public television and take her talents elsewhere.

  “It’s a twelve-hour day and seven-day week, and I’m not going to go into that kind of thing and have it just lay an egg,” she told Dial. “That’s a damn good book, and there were damn good shows and very original recipes. A lot of places didn’t get [More Company] because [PBS] never announced that it was going out there and they made their fall schedules without it. So I’m through, frankly. It was so good, that’s what annoys me.”

  In the seventeen years she had been at WGBH, Julia had produced 250 television shows that were broadcast on 104 PBS stations, had written or co-written five books, and was a major fund-raiser for public TV. But after the bungling of the Company series she was disenchanted.

  “As soon as you’re off the television for a year nobody will know who you are, which is fine,” Julia said philosophically. “That makes fame quite bearable.”

  She had enjoyed an enviable career and could have slipped into a quiet retirement with Paul, perhaps at La Pitchoune. But that prospect did not interest Julia Child. “I love working,” she would tell the Los Angeles Times when she was ninety years old. “You don’t have to retire nowadays, do you? I don’t even know what it would mean.”

  Part III

  Following the Gleam

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  12

  Prime Time

  I. GMA

  In 1980, Julia was approached by producers from ABC-TV, who wondered if she might be interested in a regular cooking segment on Good Morning America (GMA), the network’s popular variety show. By then, the American food revolution was well under way, and they were searching for a marquee cook to add to their talent roster. They may have caught wind that Julia was available.

  Julia had appeared on network shows with Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett, Tom Snyder, and the like, and was keenly aware of the reach and power of commercial television. But she had concerns. Paul was ailing in Cambridge, and she did not want to commit to a heavy TV schedule in New York. Anticipating this, the ABC executives offered an elegant solution: Julia could fly to New York once a month, perform one live show and tape several others, which would be shown in ensuing weeks. To entice her, GMA offered to pay her $605 per appearance, fly her to and from Boston, put her up in a top hotel, and hire a team of trusted cooks to help prep the food she would use on air. It was a generous and well-timed offer, and Julia gladly accepted it.

  Her segments on GMA ran for about two and a half minutes each, which seemed like hardly any time at all for someone accustomed to doing half-hour shows, each of which took a week to prepare for. In typical fashion, Julia carefully researched and rehearsed each show, but struggled to adapt to the velocity of commercial production. “I feel things are still a bit rough, but are improving,” she confided to Simca. Each short GMA segment “must be made to appear like plenty of time” to demonstrate a recipe, she wrote. But with practice she got into the rhythm of performatory cooking and found her stride. “Actually, now we are into it, one can do a surprisingly rather large amount in that time,” she noted.

  In a typical week in October 1980, Julia and Paul rose early Monday morning in Boston, caught an 8:00 a.m. flight to New York, and checked into a midtown hotel. That afternoon, they wandered through SoHo, poking their noses into food emporia like Dean & DeLuca, Raffetto’s, SoHo Charcuterie, and the venerable Vesuvio Bakery. That evening, they had an early dinner at The River Café, on a barge under the Brooklyn Bridge with sweeping views of the East River and lower Manhattan.

  At 5:15 Tuesday morning, the Childs were picked up by a limousine and whisked to ABC’s studio, where Julia taped six cooking segments—one aired live and five were broadcast later. That afternoon, the Childs ate lunch with Judith Jones and took a walk before an early dinner. On Wednesday, Julia and Paul flew to Providence, Rhode Island, where she patiently submitted to a string of radio and TV interviews, and appeared at a benefit for Planned Parenthood.

  Returning to Cambridge, the Childs socialized with friends, or at the private St. Botolph Club, visited a bird sanctuary, and had a bit of fun—judging a pie contest and going to a hair salon. Then it was back to the daily routine of researching recipes and writing articles. “Julia cleans her closet!” she wrote in her date book.

  Under the watchful eye of the English producer Sonya Selby-Wright, Julia’s cooking spots appeared at 8:40 every Tuesday morning, and she soon became a popular fixture at GMA. The key to making her segments work in the allotted 150 seconds was a reliable crew of behind-the-scenes cooks, such as Nancy Verde Barr—a cooking teacher in Providence, Rhode Island, whom Julia had met at a Planned Parenthood fund-raiser—and some TV sleight of hand. In a show about rice pilaf, Barr recalled in a memoir, Julia would briefly demonstrate chopping and sautéing vegetables, and would then employ a carefully choreographed “swap”—in which the camera switched to a second, identical pan fi
lled with already-cooked vegetables. Julia would add rice, stock, and seasoning to the second pan, and the camera would switch again. Julia would uncover a third pan to show the audience a fully cooked pilaf. As the seconds counted down, she’d ladle the finished pilaf into a serving dish, proudly display it, and sign off with a hearty “Bon appétit!”

  To help prep her early GMA cooking segments, Julia hired a trusted protégée from Boston: Sara Moulton, who had been part of the Julia Child & More Company crew. Though Moulton was pulled away by other commitments, she returned to GMA in 1987 as food editor, and eventually had a stellar career in New York as a cookbook author, chef of Gourmet’s executive dining room, and the host of popular cooking shows. But first she had to get past Chef Cazalis.

  II. GETTING OVER IT

  Sara Moulton was destined to become a cook on the day in 1952 when her mother, Elizabeth, an editor at Mademoiselle who was nine months pregnant, interviewed Henri Soulé at Le Pavillon. Soulé, the restaurant’s charming and autocratic patron, made sure she ate every delicious morsel to benefit the baby.

  “Years later, my mother decided that that lunch was the reason I became a chef.” Moulton laughed.

  A diminutive blonde, Moulton had a passion for chopping carrots and baking brownies in the modest kitchen of her parents’ Manhattan apartment. Unlike most French chefs, who come from blue-collar backgrounds without much education, she attended a private all-girls school on New York’s Upper East Side, and graduated in 1974 from the University of Michigan with a major in the history of ideas. Feeling aimless after college, Moulton slung hash at an Ann Arbor bar. Concerned, her mother wrote to Julia Child and Craig Claiborne, asking, “If my daughter wants to become a chef, what should she do?” Julia did not respond, but Claiborne did: “She should go to cooking school,” he wrote.

  It didn’t occur to Moulton that she could make a career out of her love of food until her mother urged her to apply to the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in Hyde Park, New York. Sara was accepted. After some trepidation about leaving her boyfriend, Bill, in Michigan, she packed for cooking school. There, she learned many valuable lessons, and not only about the art and science of cooking food.

  “Housed in an old monastery and run like a military academy,” Moulton recalls, the CIA would deduct points from your grade if you were not dressed in clean whites, with your hair completely tucked under a hat, all jewelry removed, and nails trimmed. If you missed a class because you were running a fever of 102 degrees, too bad: more points off. Most of the faculty and students were men, and they did not welcome women. More than one chef told her point-blank: “Women do not belong in the kitchen!” This remark was breathtakingly offensive, but Moulton did her best to ignore it and eventually thrived at the school.

  Like most aspiring chefs in the 1970s, Moulton watched Julia Child on television and stayed up late reading her cookbooks. In 1976, Moulton took an externship to cook at Harvest, in Cambridge. She got to know the restaurant’s owners, Jane and Ben Thompson, and kept tabs on their interesting customers, including Paul and Julia Child, through the window of the kitchen door.

  Upon graduating from the CIA the following year, Moulton worked as the chef-manager of a catering operation in Cambridge. One of her co-workers was Berit Pratt, a daughter of the Childs’ good friends Pat and Herbert Pratt. Sara and Berit made thousands of hard-boiled eggs together, and discussed Julia’s famous “no boil” method (start the eggs in cold water, bring them almost to the boil, pull them off the stove and let them sit, then plunge them into ice water). Berit mentioned that she volunteered on Julia Child & Company, and Sara asked if she could join the fun. The next day, Berit said to her, “I told Julia all about you. She wants to hire you.”

  Moulton was stunned. The next thing she knew, she—who is short, slim, with a blond pageboy, a wide smile, and the face of a youthful teenager—was staring up at her hero and shaking her large hand. “Julia was like Big Bird. She couldn’t go anywhere without people recognizing her. She was endlessly curious, and just so lovely to so many people, including me.”

  It was 1979, and Julia was about to start taping Julia Child & More Company. But her trusty assistant cook, Rosie Manell, was delayed in California. “Do you style food, dearie?” Julia asked casually, not betraying her predicament.

  “Oh yes, I’m very good at it,” Moulton lied.

  She was hired on the spot.

  “I think anyone else would have lied,” Moulton said unapologetically. “Why be honest when you have an opportunity like that?”

  There were only two problems: Moulton had no experience as a food stylist (one who prepares and arranges food to look attractive for photos and television); and she had just started a job as the chef at Cybele’s, a French restaurant in Faneuil Hall. She solved the first problem by learning on the job, and the second by rearranging her schedule so that she cooked five days a week at the restaurant and two days a week with Julia at More Company.

  Julia noticed that Moulton was a hard worker and accomplished cook with a sunny personality, and took a special interest in her development. Once More Company wrapped, Julia arranged a three-month summer “stage,” an apprenticeship, at a respected restaurant in France. It was a tremendous honor for the grateful, if slightly terrified Moulton. “Oh, I worried so much about everything!” she recalled. “Will I be able to cook well? Will I be able to speak good enough French? Will I get everything done? I was so nervous.”

  Julia had recommended Moulton to the Henri IV, a one-star establishment in Chartres, a small city southwest of Paris and home to the famed Gothic cathedral. The restaurant’s chef-proprietor, Maurice Cazalis, was a restaurateur of some note.

  In person, Cazalis was short, plump, and egocentric. He welcomed Moulton to Chartres warmly, explained that he would cover her room and board but would not pay her for her restaurant work (this is standard). His son had died in an accident, he explained, so he, his wife, and their daughter had devoted themselves to the Henri IV. Moulton couldn’t wait to get behind the stove.

  Every day, she would walk through Chartres Cathedral and pause to listen to the voices of the choir drift high up to the arched stone ceiling and slip into the ether. This became her ritual, a moment of subdued privacy in the shadowy church before diving into the hot, bright cacophony of the restaurant kitchen.

  Moulton was twenty-seven, well trained and experienced, if slightly too American and female for the chef’s taste. She was not allowed to work “the line” as a cook behind the main stove, but the honor and experience of working at such an establishment would suffice. Or so everyone told her. “It was, uhm, rigorous,” Moulton recalled. “I was stressed all the time.” Her duties were to make salads, pizzas, lunch for the crew, chicken stock from scratch, and anything else the chef wanted. “There was a lot of scrambling,” she said. “It made me crazy to not be cooking on the line.” She felt isolated, and missed Bill.

  During her stage at the Henri IV, Moulton befriended two affable fifteen-year-old apprentices, was dogged by a mean-spirited Japanese sous-chef, and was hazed by a gang of hyperaggressive French line cooks. Worst of all, Chef Cazalis revealed himself as a screaming bully who used humiliation and the occasional slap or punch to keep his crew in line. One day, a cook placed a bubbling-hot cassoulet in a beautiful copper casserole in the dumbwaiter to send it from the first-floor kitchen up to the second-floor dining room. But the pan’s handle stuck out, and as the dumbwaiter’s door slammed shut, the cassoulet exploded and seeped onto the kitchen floor.

  “Who did that?” shouted a red-faced Cazalis. “Who did it?”

  “She did!” the Japanese cuisinier said, pointing an accusing finger at Moulton. (It was clear that the mistake had been his, but “he knew Chef wouldn’t hit a woman,” said Moulton.) Enraged, she stormed out of the kitchen without a word. Jean, the friendly chef de cuisine, comforted her, and then she began to cry. “I just uncorked,” she said, grimly. “Then Jean began to cry. He said, ‘I’m so, so sorry.’ It was a m
ess.”

  Moulton was the only woman in the kitchen, and she resented the staff’s casual chauvinism. Cazalis was no help, and tried to woo Moulton, telling her that “This is how it’s done in France.” The seventy-two-year-old chef once cornered her in the wine cellar, and another time in the walk-in refrigerator. She managed to fend him off, but did not enjoy his overtures.

  When Cazalis invited Moulton to visit the Élysée Palace, where a former apprentice was the sous-chef for President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, she happily agreed. He booked them into the same room at a hotel near the Champs-Élysées. That evening, Cazalis took Moulton to dinner at the Folies Bergère, a topless burlesque in Montmartre, where he attempted to ply her with drinks. Back at the hotel the chef announced he usually slept très nu (very naked), but out of chivalrous deference to her tender sensibilities he would wear pajamas. Moulton retreated to the bathroom, slipped on her pajamas and raincoat “with the belt tied tight,” and slept on top of the covers at the far edge of her bed. “I was no more to this old goat than a tender young lamb,” she said. “I vowed to never go anywhere alone with him again.”

  Back at the Henri IV, Moulton was tempted to quit. She and Bill debated the question on long, expensive transatlantic calls. “In the end, I decided to grit my teeth and stick it out,” she said. “I mean, [Chef Cazalis] was a dear friend of my old mentor. Julia had sent me there, and I couldn’t just leave. What would I tell her?”

  In fact, she never called or wrote to Julia to complain about her treatment. Besides, life in Chartres wasn’t all bad. The cathedral was her solace, and the cooking was phenomenal. She learned wonderful sauces and to cook specialties like a dreamy prune soufflé. She also learned practical lessons, such as how to limit food costs. Cazalis insisted his crew use every last scrap in the kitchen. “We’d collect leftovers, sweetbreads, whatever, combine them and put them on pizza for amuses,” Moulton recalls. “I still do that to this day.”