The French Chef in America Page 6

  VI. WGBH: A WHOLE NEW APPROACH

  On Wednesday, April 21, 1965, a dozen technicians and executives huddled around a television monitor at WGBH, Boston’s public television station. On the black-and-white screen Julia Child was making a tart decorated with strawberries and cream. The camera focused on the berries, then zoomed in closer and closer, when the lumpy gray fruit suddenly exploded into bright red orbs and the dull crème pâtissière flashed a startling white.

  The group at the monitor jumped up from their seats and threw their arms in the air, laughing and cheering. “It was the first time Julia and her food had appeared in living color,” recalled Russell Morash, the director and producer of The French Chef since the show’s inception. “It was a kind of mind-blowing moment.”

  “It was absolutely beautiful,” Paul Child wrote of this Wizard of Oz–like colorization. “The Boys in the Back Room believe that within 3 to 5 years most people who own television[s] in this country will have color sets and that most emissions will be in color, must be, in fact, if the producers aren’t to be swamped by competitors.”

  While the red-and-white tart wasn’t the future, exactly, it was a glimpse of things to come, a hint of the great possibilities just around the corner. It would take another five years before WGBH had the proper equipment to broadcast Season Two of The French Chef in color. But the 1965 color test was an exciting development, one that Julia had been waiting for impatiently.

  “I’m tired of gray food,” she griped.

  To WGBH, color TV was both a threat and an opportunity. At the time news programs and documentaries were aired in black and white, a palette that connoted rigorous fact and serious journalism. Color, on the other hand, was a relatively new and expensive technology that was still gaining acceptance. The first nationwide broadcast in color was NBC’s airing of the Tournament of Roses Parade on January 1, 1954. A decade later, only 3.1 percent of households with televisions owned color sets.

  Yet color was catching on quickly. If black and white denoted serious, stodgy fare, then color TV was seen as hip, fun, modern, and youthful. NBC, ABC, and CBS embarked on a color TV arms race, and by the 1966–67 season the three major networks were airing their full prime- time schedules—including shows such as Bewitched and Star Trek—in color.

  Public television executives watched this rapid shift in technology and consumer tastes warily. In March 1967, Dave Davis, WGBH’s station manager, wrote a heartfelt memo to his staff: the old, black-and-white order was under assault from every quarter, he warned, and the station’s audience was hungry for vibrant, provocative, risky programming. If WGBH didn’t respond, it would be left behind. “The visual electronic world is providing a total assault on our senses,” Davis wrote. “The pressure is on for Public Television. It’s probably now or never—and we don’t intend to sit back and wait. With color, we will create a whole new approach to the presentation of the visual arts.”

  After reading the memo, Julia wrote to Ruth Lockwood urging WGBH to adapt to the changing times and “get out of its somewhat ladylike rut.” That was a typical Julia sentiment. She was a strong, earthy personality who embraced new technology. To her, words such as “ladylike,” “housewife,” and “home ec” were synonyms for “prim,” “amateur,” “fearful,” or “conventional”—all that she was not. “Home economics [is] a person with a white uniform and a dry look, preaching…food as medicine, not food as food, and that’s a horrid approach,” she’d say. “I talked about food as joy, comfort, and delight—food as fun.”

  —

  BY LUCK more than by design, Julia had launched her television career at one of the nation’s leading public stations at a crucial moment in the development of the medium.

  WGBH got its start in 1946, when Harvard president James Conant pushed for the spread of public education through new media. Conant and Robert Lowell, a wealthy relation of another Harvard president, helped to build a consortium to fund a new radio station. It was given the call letters WGBH (which allegedly stood for “God Bless Harvard,” but actually stood for “Great Blue Hill,” named after the land it sat on), and began to transmit in 1951. WGBH-TV followed, and first broadcast in 1955, with a children’s folk-music show. The station went on to air the Boston Symphony, science and arts programming, and college extension courses.

  In the early sixties, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) mandated that just over a tenth of the two thousand licenses granted to stations across the country be used for “noncommercial” or “educational” programming. There was no national educational TV system: instead, there was a smattering of local stations, like WGBH, that served their own communities. This proto–public TV was known for well-intentioned but uninspired programming, a televisual cod-liver oil in which talking heads droned on about Worthy Subjects.

  When The French Chef hit the Boston airwaves in 1963, WGBH shared copies of the tapes with sister stations, allowing viewers in New Hampshire, Maine, Pennsylvania, and parts of New York to watch Julia a week after she aired in Boston. The French Chef was distributed nationally in the fall of 1964, and two years later, Julia won educational TV’s first Emmy Award. Her success was a significant boon to public television stations across the country.

  In 1967, the Carnegie Commission issued a report on the feasibility of building a nationwide educational television network. The commission’s report pointed to The French Chef as a shining example of the kind of programming public television could provide its audiences. Julia had a home-field advantage: the board of the Carnegie Commission was filled with Boston Brahmins, including James Conant of Harvard, James Killian of MIT, and Ralph Lowell of the Lowell Institute. Indeed, WGBH general manager Hartford Gunn wrote the report, and Lowell delivered it to President Johnson in 1967. In 1970, Gunn founded the not-for-profit Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which remains the nation’s largest distributor of public television programming. He used The French Chef to illustrate the potential for public TV to transmit culture and education nationwide.

  Julia and Paul with her Emmy Award in 1966

  But making television is not cheap. Public TV was notoriously short of funds and unable to raise money in conventional ways, such as by running paid advertising. WGBH’s attorneys interpreted FCC rules to read that as long as specific brands were not mentioned on air, then commercial underwriting support was acceptable. The station earned its income from viewer donations and corporate largesse rather than from direct ad sales.

  As WGBH prepared to air The French Chef in 1963, S&H Green Stamps agreed to finance the first season, and Safeway stores and Hills Bros. Coffee stepped in for later episodes. The show’s audience was a desirable demographic: well-educated, middle-class families with enough income to enjoy cooking at home, eating out, and travel. As Julia’s audience increased, bigger companies took notice. In 1965, the Polaroid Corporation—a Cambridge-based success story—became The French Chef’s lead underwriter.

  Some chefs, notably James Beard, plugged products such as Borden’s milk, Omaha Steaks, Green Giant Niblets, Old Crow Bourbon, Shasta soft drinks, and DuPont chemicals somewhat shamelessly for the money. Julia refused to endorse products, restaurants, chefs, or stores. She covered the brand names of goods she used on TV—even on sugar and salt containers—with masking tape. She tried to persuade appliance makers to donate a well-made stove to the show, but was unsuccessful. Yet when Oster sent her an Osterizer blender—presumably in the hope that she’d use it on air—she politely declined. And when companies sold products with names like “Julia Chives,” or Ocean Spray used “Julia Chicken” in its advertising, Julia’s lawyer sent them a stern letter; they pulled their ads and paid restitutions that ranged from $5,000 to $40,000, which Julia donated to pubic television.

  Julia’s public TV series were hardly moneymaking ventures, as today’s extravagant cooking shows decidedly are. She earned income from book sales, magazine columns, personal performances, and from a modest family inheritance, not to mention Paul’s incom
e from the State Department and his artwork. Julia’s aversion to corporate sponsorship was an article of faith. “Just last week I was offered a million dollars if I would endorse a new product, but I said no,” she observed in 1980. “Once you start endorsing products, you’re no longer a free agent. Your value is gone.”

  VII. THE NEW WORLD OF PUBLISHING

  In 1968, as the old order was being upended around the world, Julia Child’s fortunes were soaring. She and Simca Beck were finishing Mastering, Volume II, and Julia was planning new television programs. In the meantime, Judith Jones and Robert Gottlieb, Knopf’s canny editor in chief, recognized that a tie-in book based on The French Chef had great commercial potential. “We hardly needed to discuss it,” Jones recalled, “it was so obvious.”

  Thus The French Chef Cookbook was quickly cobbled together. It was a simple, straightforward paperback made up of little more than an introduction by Julia, followed by 119 recipes taken directly from Season One of The French Chef. The recipes ranged from chicken breasts and risotto (from show number 14: the tapes of the first thirteen shows had been reused, a circumstance that delighted Julia, who did not care for her inexpert early work) to turban of sole (labeled show number 134, for some reason). Each recipe featured a brief preamble and a set of cooking instructions. Quite a few of them were slightly altered versions of dishes that had appeared in Mastering. The cover featured a photograph of a smiling Julia about to whack a turkey carcass with a mallet. Inside, the book was illustrated with Paul’s photographs of Julia smelling, tasting, and presenting her food; here and there were a few of his line drawings of jars, pots, and wineglasses. Julia was paid a handsome $25,000 advance for the book, which made a nice contrast to the $2,500 advance in total she and her two co-authors had received for Mastering. Out of a sense of fairness, Julia chose to share her latest advance with Simca, Louisette, Ruth Lockwood, and WGBH.

  As Knopf prepared to publish The French Chef Cookbook, Judith Jones and Bob Gottlieb met for lunch one day to discuss marketing. “How many copies are you planning to print?” Gottlieb asked.

  Jones steeled herself. Because of her successful run as an editor, she had been given latitude on such decisions by the house’s founder, Alfred A. Knopf. But now she worried she might have been overly optimistic about the prospects for this new book of familiar recipes.

  “Twenty-five thousand copies,” she mumbled.

  Gottlieb raised his eyebrows. “Are you crazy?!”

  “Is that too much?”

  “No! Don’t you know what you’ve got here?”

  Though the Childs had moderate ambitions for this quickly done book, Gottlieb ordered a first print run of one hundred thousand copies.

  Brooklyn-born, educated at Columbia and Cambridge, Gottlieb was bright, ambitious, and quirky (he collected vintage plastic handbags, among other things). As an editor at Simon & Schuster, he had discovered Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and was later elevated to editor in chief. Now at Knopf, his mandate was to “bring us into this new world of publishing,” Jones said. It was a heady, disorienting time, when stodgy book publishers were suddenly asked to synergize their product with television, journalism, public relations, and Hollywood. Gottlieb understood this new media ecosystem, and the role Julia could play in it.

  “Crazy!” Paul scribbled on a note after taking a phone call from Judith Jones. “Gottlieb has made a contract w/Bantam [for the paperback] for a $340,000 guarantee for the French Chef !…They’ll flood every drugstore in America!”

  By May 1971, the book had already sold more than two hundred thousand copies. Julia was pleasantly surprised by this success, though she considered The French Chef Cookbook a minor sidelight to her primary focus: Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume II.

  3

  Volume II

  I. LOUP EN CROÛTE

  One afternoon in 1969 Julia, Simca, and Paul took Patricia Simon, a writer for McCall’s magazine, to lunch at L’Oasis, a two-star restaurant in Mandelieu-la-Napoule, just south of Cannes. They wanted to try a special “wonder dish” called Loup de Mer en Croûte. Invented by Chef Paul Bocuse, the “Lion of Lyon,” it is a sea bass baked in a brioche crust and served with a sauce suprême, a white sauce of butter, flour, and cream.

  They began lunch with aperitifs under the plane trees on the restaurant’s patio, then ate a pâté of fresh duck livers and truffles, big slices of pain brioche, a timbale, tomatoes, and a salade verte. And then came the star of the meal, the loup (“lou”): the bass was baked in a brioche crust made to look like a fish—complete with pastry fins, eyes, and scales—and came out of the oven “enormous, brown, and glistening,” Julia enthused. To serve it, the headwaiter cut around the edges of the crust and carefully lifted the top off. There lay the fish, steaming and fragrant. It was, Julia wrote, “a really remarkable sight.”

  The waiter peeled the skin off the top of the fish and lifted pieces of fillet from the topside of the bone; he plucked out the skeleton and served the loup’s bottom side. With each portion, he added a piece of the golden brioche crust, a spoonful of the sauce suprême, and another of fresh tomato fondue.

  Like an investigative reporter, or a spy, Julia pleasantly quizzed him: “Is the bottom molded ahead of time? Are those shallots and herbs in the fondue? Which herbs did the chef use on the fish?”

  Paul chuckled, and explained to Patricia Simon, “No one knows us here. Julia just bats her eyes at the waiter and asks very dumb questions, ‘What kind of knife did you use?’—that sort of thing—and the waiter takes pity on her and tells her everything she wants to know.”

  Paul called this technique “la Juliafication des gens” (“the Juliafication of people”), and she had used it to great effect while working on Mastering in the fifties. It placated ornery policemen, buttered up rude waiters, and extracted valuable culinary tips from tight-lipped chefs. “She could charm a polecat,” Paul marveled. It also cast a spell on journalists.

  Seated on the restaurant’s terrace, surrounded by palm trees and geraniums beneath a leafy trellis, Patricia Simon fell into a reverie. “Much had I traveled in the realms of gold in New York restaurants, but sitting there in that lovely French restaurant, I felt that none of them could compare, and never would,” she wrote in McCall’s. “The originality, the buoyancy, the genuine delight of the waiters, the great style and presentation and service—$200 in New York could not buy it. At once quiet and irrepressibly gay, at once light and sérieux. And this spirit, I thought, spoke in every line of Julia and Simca’s magnificent book.”

  As soon as they finished lunch, Julia and Simca rushed back to La Pitchoune to reverse engineer the Loup de Mer en Croûte and adapt the recipe for Volume II. They stuffed a fresh loup with fennel, parsley, and lemon, then seasoned it with salt and pepper. When two cats from a nearby farm appeared, meowing for attention, Simca and Patricia got sidetracked. Julia guided them back to the task: “Less talking or the crust will get too soft,” she admonished.

  As Julia attempted to wrap the loup in brioche, she struggled. “Difficult, this tucking under…Ha! Ça va très bien! That’s going to be very nice!”

  Paul snapped photographs and sliced a black olive to make the fish’s eye. Simca cut brioche fins and scales. Julia wondered out loud how to glaze the crust: paint it with water or egg white? “Subject it to the operational proof, Julie!” Paul commanded. It was his way of saying: Don’t rely on guesswork or conventional wisdom; do it for yourself, and decide which way is best. Like careful scientists, the cooks painted half the crust with water, half with egg yolk, to see which worked best. (The egg glaze was the unanimous decision.) After the loup had cooked for forty-five minutes, Paul set the fish on the dining table, arranged parsley and sliced lemons around it, and snapped a photo.

  Julia and Simca Beck with their loup en croûte

  The loup, Simon reported, looked “perfectly golden and perfectly fishlike.” And it tasted, all agreed, “perfectly delicious.”

  Patricia Simon’s presence in
that kitchen at that moment was a coup for the chefs, and for Simon. McCall’s was a popular and influential monthly magazine aimed at married women. Founded by James McCall in 1873, it was one of the “Seven Sisters”—a group of magazines that included Better Homes and Gardens, Good Housekeeping, Family Circle, Ladies’ Home Journal, Redbook, and Woman’s Day. With large budgets to hire leading writers and photographers, including Eleanor Roosevelt during the fifties, McCall’s had built a circulation of 8.4 million readers by the late sixties.

  Competition for popular stories and competent writers was fierce, and securing Child’s and Beck’s cooperation was a good “get” for McCall’s. The magazine threw significant resources into the story. According to the carefully worked-out arrangement between Julia, Simca, Knopf, and the magazine, Simon’s three-part story about the making of Volume II would be published at the end of 1970, to coincide with the book’s publication. Her articles would be accompanied by recipes from the book, and illustrated with photographs taken by Paul Child. Done right, the arrangement would provide a publicity bonanza for all involved.

  In the meantime, the world of French cuisine was changing in mysterious ways. Patricia Simon had caught a whiff of this change on her way to France. Delayed at Heathrow Airport, in London, at 5:00 a.m., she met a young French couple. They had never heard of Julia Child, and weren’t interested in The French Chef, or cooking. “Oh, we couldn’t care less about food,” they said. “It’s so silly, spending a lot of time and trouble worrying about food and talking about it and eating it,” the husband added. “You see,” said his wife, “we just don’t have the time.”

  Simon was taken aback: But these people are French. They’re supposed to care about food and know all about it.