Some of my Irish friends have started asking me about Julia Child. Have I seen the recent television show about her? I haven’t and I feel no desire to. It was my great blessing to have called her my friend.
If you ever needed another example of how Ireland and the United States are two countries separated by a shared language, Julia would be a good one. Even today, 18 years after her death and more than 60 years after the publication of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the book that rocketed her to fame, she is probably still the most famous cook in the US.
In Ireland, except for the best-informed foodies, Julia seems to be known mostly through the fun-house mirror of popular culture – movies and television.
A little background: Julia came to fame in the early 1960s with her first cookbook. It hit a sweet spot in American culture, coming at the conjunction of the Kennedy administration’s love affair with France, a healthy American economy, and increasingly affordable foreign travel. That book has been constantly in print ever since, selling nearly two million copies, which makes it one of the bestselling cookbooks of all time (and it wasn’t published until she was nearly 50 years old).
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A public television appearance to promote that book led to her first TV cooking series, which was so overwhelmingly popular it ran for 10 seasons on American public television, at one point earning her the cover of Time magazine. It was followed by four more series that lasted into the late 1990s.
In the United States she is one of those first-name celebrities, like Elvis. Mention “Julia” and almost everyone knows who you’re talking about. Her home kitchen is replicated in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. Dan Ackroyd parodied her in an early episode of Saturday Night Live, and Meryl Streep played her in a movie.
But for me she was something more than a cooking hero. She was a role model. Julia is who I want to be when I grow up. Not because of her fortune, and certainly not because of her fame, but because of the way she lived her life.
I’ll never forget one of the first times we met. I had been writing about food for a few years and was invited to speak about it on a panel at a conference of chefs and cookbook writers. I sauntered up to the stage, my head swelled even more than usual. Here I was, on my way to dispense my pearls of wisdom. I took my seat on the dais and looked down at the audience.
And there in the first row was Julia, her notebook open, looking up at me expectantly. I felt like the biggest imposter in the world. What could I possibly say about food or writing that would mean anything to her? But not only did she take the occasional note while I was talking, she came up to me afterward with a couple of well-considered questions. That was Julia – always the most important person in the room, and always the most curious and eager to learn.
She was truly indefatigable. I remember having breakfast with her several years later near the end of another long food conference. After several hectic days of touring and interviews, I was exhausted and whined that I was looking forward to a day doing nothing more than a walk and a nap.
What did Julia have in mind? Her long-suffering assistant rolled her eyes. “Well”, Julia started, “first we’re going to go see this goat cheese maker I’ve heard so much about. Then there’s a farmer who’s growing all of these different herbs. And there’s a winemaker I haven’t talked to in ages. I’ll stop by there. I’m still not sure what I’ll do after lunch, though.”
Our friendship deepened when she moved from the east coast of the US to a retirement home just north of Los Angeles. I would stop by and visit whenever I travelled in that direction (and somehow I found an excuse to do that fairly often).
She was the kind of person who began every conversation wanting to know what you had been up to and what you thought. She was matter-of-fact about her own life and had a deadpan sense of humour.
The first time my wife and I went up to take her out to dinner, Kathy commented that she liked her new apartment. “Oh yes”, Julia replied, “it’s quite comfortable, my little pad. But you know, it’s the kind of place they take you out feet first.” That was Julia – no room for sentimentality. And certainly not self-pity. When I was mired deep in the final edits on my first book, we were talking on the phone and I mentioned how frustrating it was, sweating over the computer screen cutting-and-pasting material that I’d been working on for more than two years.
“Oh yes, it’s horrible”, she said, “I remember how hard it was when I was editing ‘Mastering’. We had to do it in triplicate on carbon paper on a manual typewriter. And any mistake, even a misspelling, you’d have to start typing the whole page over again.”
Right, Russ, that’s you told.
Some people, when they’ve been very famous for very long, become almost blasé about it. Not Julia. She was always fiercely proud of her work, appreciative of her status, and careful about guarding it. Unlike most celebrities – and certainly most food stars – she never allowed her name to be used in any type of commercial promotion.
I took her to dim sum one afternoon. (Chinese was her second-favourite cuisine, after working in China during the second World War.) It had taken some arranging, because the restaurant usually closed just after lunch and she had an appointment at that time. But when I explained to the owner who I was booking for he kept the kitchen staff on overtime. (It turns out he, a first-generation Chinese immigrant, had hurried home from elementary school every day to watch Julia cook on television.)
When we had finished, he brought all the cooks out to meet her and she patiently stood leaning on her walker for half an hour and took individual photos with every one of them, but first specifying “these are not to be used for any kind of publicity”.
Lest you get the impression that she was in some way humourless, one of my favourite memories of Julia was when, still recovering from surgery on her back, Kathy and I took her a picnic brunch: oven-steamed salmon with herbed mayonnaise and a big bottle of Veuve Cliquot’s La Grande Dame champagne. Julia insisted on touring the retirement centre, me pushing her in her wheelchair while she giddily waved her half-filled flute over her head.
This year’s television series, in which the British actor Sarah Lancashire plays her, is not the first rebirth of interest in Child. In 2009, the wonderful Nora Ephron wrote and directed Julie & Julia, starring Meryl Streep. It was based in part on the blog by Julie Powell, who chronicled her wayward efforts to cook her way through the more than 500 recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
The fact that Powell was not a good cook, combined with her adventures trying to find some of the more arcane ingredients, and the salty language those inspired, provided much of the humour in the blog. It’s a sweet, funny story, but in the movie, there’s a crucial plot point where Powell learns from a reporter that Julia does not approve of the blog. She collapses in tears, moaning “Julia hates me.”
I can’t say for certain whether that actually happened in just that way, but in real life I was pretty much knee-deep in that episode. I was the first reporter to write about Powell’s blog, and I naturally wanted to hear what Julia had to say about it, so I printed out a few months’ worth of posts and took it to her.
When I didn’t hear back, I called to see whether she’d read it. She had, but she wasn’t impressed. The reason was pure Julia: “Well”, she said, “she just doesn’t seem very serious, does she? I worked very hard on that book. I tested and retested those recipes for eight years so that everybody could cook them. And many, many people have. I don’t understand how she could have problems with them. She just must not be much of a cook.”
She asked me not to quote her, and after thinking it over, I didn’t, choosing a valued friendship over a couple of juicy paragraphs in a story.
Whether that scene in the movie was Ephron’s dramatic invention or another reporter had made a different decision, I can’t say for certain. Years later I’m still happy with the choice I made. And I think Julia would have approved.
Indeed, when faced with tough questions, one of my litmus tests is WWJD? What Would Julia Do? That was the kind of person she was.
I have been extremely lucky in my career to have won way more than my fair share of honours, but one of the ones I treasure most is that Julia’s family chose my memoriam of her in the Los Angeles Times to be read aloud at her funeral.
Quoting in part: “Since her death, everyone has been talking about how Julia Child taught America to cook. But that was not the greatest of her gifts. For those who had the privilege of knowing Julia, her life was a grand lesson in how to live.
“In the end, the pleasures of soufflés, omelettes and even boeuf bourguignon are fleeting. But character is eternal, and it’s those lessons that keep coming back to me, the ones she taught without ever trying to...
“Though at [the age of] 91 death is never really a shock, I had kind of convinced myself that Julia would be around forever. She had had rough patches before and had bounced back from the brink so many times.
“But this time it was final: She’s really gone and we’re still here, still with so much left to learn and no one to take her place. They just don’t make them like that anymore.”
