JULIA LOVED PAUL, and she also loved their marriage, which seemed to her the highest form of life. “We are a team,” she often said. “We do everything together.” To be part of a team was her favorite way to work—she always referred fondly to the “team” of cooks and technicians involved in her television series, or the “team” of editors and artists producing a cookbook—and the team at the heart of it all was Julia and Paul. Whenever she talked about her career, she said “we,” not “I,” and she meant it literally. Paul attended all business meetings and participated in all decisions, helped rework the recipes for television, hauled equipment, washed dishes, took photographs, created designs and graphics, peeled and chopped and stirred, ran errands, read the mail and helped answer it, wrote the dedications in all her books, accompanied her on publicity tours and speaking engagements, sat with her at book signings, took part in most of her press interviews, provided the wine expertise, baked baguette after baguette during the French bread experiments, and in general made a point of being at her side on all occasions, professional or social. Yet he was self-sufficient. When he wasn’t needed—because Julia was at work in the kitchen with Simca, for instance, or rehearsing with Ruth Lockwood—he disappeared happily into his own world, painting and photographing and gardening. In the firmament of useful, devoted spouses who serve celebrity without a trace of malevolence, he was one of the few husbands.
Paul had no qualms about living with powerful, independent women. His mother had been a singer and soloist who worked for a living; and the first love of his life, Edith Kennedy, was a single mother some twenty years older than he who regularly attracted acolytes to her Cambridge salon. Julia had no such distinctions when he met her, but she was certainly bigger, and far more skilled at relating to people. Being married to a woman who outranked him physically and personally never bothered Paul, and he was deeply grateful for what Julia gave him. He knew he had a streak of grouchiness, that he tended to be solitary, and that Julia had warmed and gentled him. “I am continuously conscious of my good fortune in living with her,” he wrote to his brother from Paris in 1953. “I hate to think what a sour old reprobate I might have been without that face to look at.” Occasionally, after a taping of The French Chef, while Paul was collecting dirty dishes and the audience was crowding worshipfully around Julia, he thought back to their foreign service days. “It was, ‘Monsieur Child, l’Attaché Culturel des Etats Unis!’—and some minutes later: ‘ah oui, et voilà aussi Mme. Child.’” (“Mr. Child, the U.S. Cultural Attaché! Oh yes, and here’s Mrs. Child, too.”) He enjoyed the reversal, he told his brother: “I feel Nature is restoring an upset balance.”
The fact that the world paid little attention to his art, his poems were consistently rejected by magazines, and most of his published photographs were of Julia didn’t appear to trouble him. Standing by at a book signing with nothing to do while “Julia’s adoring public” swarmed over her, he felt he was providing a service just by being there. “It demonstrated that Julia is part of a combination rather than a lone operator,” he explained. “I remember how horrid it was for Edith. Financially & sexually rapacious men were constantly trying to take advantage of her. My plan is never to have Julia appear anywhere in public without the very evident husband.” For Paul to experience such a rush of masculine satisfaction in this role—self-appointed protector of a giant—says much about the confidence he brought to his marriage. He called her “Joooolie” or sometimes “my little wifelet,” created the witty, loving Valentines they sent out every year instead of Christmas cards (“Wish you were here,” read one of them, showing Paul and Julia in a bubble bath), and considered her the most remarkable and delightful creature on earth. Every morning they liked to snuggle in bed together for a half hour after the alarm went off, and at the end of the day, Paul would read aloud from The New Yorker while Julia made dinner. “We are never not together,” Paul said once, contentedly. One evening after the dishes were washed, Julia stayed in the kitchen and made an impromptu batch of blueberry muffins. When they came out of the oven, Paul opened a bottle of vintage Veuve Clicquot for a late-night celebration. What was the occasion? Just life. Or as Paul explained it, “Iced champagne and hot blueberry muffins!”
Paul was one of the few men of his generation who found it natural, even admirable, for women to have careers. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to object to his wife’s passion for work, even as it swept her from cooking school to teaching to writing to national television. But during their years in Europe, both of them took it for granted that Paul’s job came first. As a foreign service couple, they were expected to socialize and entertain a great deal, and Julia’s participation counted heavily. More important, at least from Julia’s point of view, was the fact that Paul worked extremely hard and needed all the moral and logistical support she could give him. This posed no problems for her during the first years of their marriage, when her only obligation was to be Mrs. Paul Child—a job she treasured, especially in the entrancing new surroundings of their life in Paris. “The husband comes home for lunch,” she told Avis. “I love that!” But the more deeply involved she became in the cookbook project, the more she resented being pulled away for consular events, tea with the embassy wives, and Paul’s occasional trips. He hated to travel without her, and she hated to make him unhappy, so she often went along despite a kitchen full of eggs or mushrooms pleading for her attention. “My first job is wifedom,” she said resignedly, in the midst of an unwanted burst of official travel right after they moved to Marseille. When she couldn’t bear to leave the book, she sent him off alone and felt horribly guilty about it. “If I was able to put in as much work as I would like to, we would soon be having a divorce, I fear,” she told Simca, exaggerating the potential for divorce, but not the painful sense of conflict. Though she was sorry to leave France for their posting in Germany, she welcomed at least one aspect of the new assignment. “Paul doesn’t come home for lunch, and I shall have almost the whole day to work in,” she reported to Avis. “Thank heaven!”
Much as she cherished wifedom, it was impossible for Julia to be Paul’s helpmate and nothing else. And much as Paul believed in her career, what he really wanted was to have Julia with him at all times. To be pulled in such implacably opposite directions was a source of constant distress for her. Again and again she vowed to be a more dedicated diplomatic wife, only to find herself back in the depths of the manuscript, reflecting mournfully, “I am a cook book.” So when Paul began planning his retirement from the foreign service, they decided what would suit them both best would be a quiet, companionable future in Cambridge. Paul would paint, Julia would give cooking lessons—perhaps two a week. If the book became a success, maybe she could break into magazine food writing. Paul could take the photographs for her stories. Life would be simple and harmonious. Then came The French Chef, and any dreams of domestic balance shattered as Julia’s new career crashed like a meteor into the center of their marriage. New roles sprang up and grabbed them—she the star and he the support staff—but they were determined to maintain what Julia called “that lovely intertwining of life, mind, and soul that a good marriage is.” She knew the TV schedule was hard on Paul, who missed concerts and art galleries and dinners with friends, as well as time for his own pursuits. In 1965, her royalties from the book enabled them to build La Pitchoune, the little Provençal house on Simca’s property near Grasse; and they retreated there often for a cozier, less pressured daily life. But the real reason their marriage flourished despite the frantic demands they placed on it was that they came up with a very traditional arrangement, albeit with a twist of their own. Paul and Julia agreed to live one life, and that life would be Julia’s.
Despite, or perhaps because of, this arrangement, Julia sometimes professed loyalty to old-fashioned gender assignments. “I think the role of a woman is to be married to a nice man and enjoy her home,” Julia told the New York Times in 1966. “She must have something outside to keep conversation going and herself alert, but I can’t think of anything nicer than homemaking.” Even the reporter was unconvinced—she called it a “simplistic” viewpoint—and it certainly lacked any roots in Julia’s desires, beliefs, or experiences. Apart from cooking, housework bored her, and she was appalled by the Pasadena wives who lounged on their patios and played bridge all day. But she identified so strongly as a wife, she barely noticed that it was Paul who played that part in their marriage. At the time of this interview, moreover, the women’s movement was gathering steam; and Julia worried that cooking might be jettisoned, especially her kind of labor-intensive cooking. Betty Friedan had made it clear in The Feminine Mystique that women had responsibilities in the world, not just in the kitchen. Julia didn’t disagree, but she wanted to make sure the kitchen received the time and respect it was due. She was also aware that she still had something of a housewife problem. Her recipes could seem very intimidating, especially in print, and she relied on book sales for most of her earned income, not the nominal fees of public television. Associating herself with ordinary domestic life was an important aspect of her image. In later interviews over the years, she gave firm support to women with careers and spoke out vigorously in favor of abortion rights; nonetheless she always insisted she wasn’t a feminist. “I just think that women should be treated as people,” she said. So do feminists, but Julia was constitutionally unable to be a camp follower, no matter what the camp was.
If her proclamation of faith in homemaking rang a bit false, her faith in marriage did not: this was a belief at the core of her being. Julia changed much more than her name when she married: she changed her very identity, from an individual to half of a couple. She was Julia of Paul and Julia, fundamentally incomplete on her own, one piece of a two-part jigsaw puzzle. And once she became a wife, it was from that perspective that she viewed the world. People belonged in pairs, she felt—male and female together, marching through life as if they were streaming aboard the ark.
For this reason, she found homosexuality outlandish—not immoral, and certainly not to be criminalized, but a rude disruption in the natural order of things. Homophobia was a socially acceptable form of bigotry in mid-century America, and Julia and Paul participated without shame for many years. She often used the term pedal or pedalo—French slang for homosexual—draping it with condescension, pity, and disapproval. “I had my hair permanented at E. Arden’s, using the same pedalo I had before (I wish all the men in OUR profession in the USA were not pedals!),” she wrote to Simca. Fashion designers were “that little bunch of Pansies,” a cooking school was “a nest of homo-vipers,” a Boston dinner party was “peopled by 3 fags in an expensive house…. We felt hopelessly square and left when decently possible,” and San Francisco was beautiful but full of pedals—“It appears that SF is their favorite city! I’m tired of them, talented though they are.” The opposite of homosexual, in her terminology, was “normal” or “well muscled” or “very masculine!” Or, as she often put it, “real male men.” Lesbianism was less of an affront to her, though she felt sorry for women so sexually benumbed that they were not attracted to men. (“Can’t be much fun.”)
It appears never to have struck Julia that she was talking about homosexuals the way her father talked about Jews, blacks, foreigners, intellectuals, and artists. All her adult life, his prejudices had sickened her, especially because he was so contemptuous of Paul, who represented several categories of humanity that John McWilliams despised. Her father’s ugly convictions threw Paul into such a rage that he finally stopped visiting Pasadena with her. Yet she was able to detest her father’s bigotry while her own remained a blind spot. During the McCarthy era—the period when her liberalism was forged, mostly out of sheer outrage—Paul himself was summoned to Washington from Germany, on suspicion of being a Communist and a homosexual. He was interrogated for a day, then cleared. (The only evidence for the first charge was his acquaintance with a couple of other people whose politics were under investigation. As for his supposed homosexuality, the most damaging evidence seemed to be the fact that he was married. As his interrogators pointed out, many homosexuals were married and had children.) Paul laughed outright at the accusation, and Julia did the same when she reported the incident to Avis. “Homosexuality. Haw Haw. Why don’t they ask the wife about that one?” Even the knowledge that McCarthy, whom Julia regarded as evil personified, was using the specter of homosexuality as a deadly weapon, didn’t raise any alarms in her own conscience.
For all her prejudice, however, when she met homosexuals whose appearance and body language were what she called “normal,” or straight, much of her disapproval evaporated. What she really disliked was effeminacy in men—a caricature that made it clear how they spurned the male-female differences and rituals she so relished. “My, I hate being a widow!” she exclaimed to Avis when Paul was summoned away from Germany for the investigation. “And I have finally had to admit to myself that if I were a real widow, I’d probably have to take to the streets. It’s just no fun; it is not only the physical male, but the mental male. Thank god there are two sexes, is all I can say.” Julia’s whole being was ignited by proximity to men: they were at the center of her world view, and their presence lent energy, authority, and dignity to all undertakings. The very idea of a social or professional event designed around women was offensive to her. “I hate groups of women,” she said many times, flatly and without apology. No matter the occasion, if it was only for women, she was convinced it would resemble a Helen Hokinson cartoon in The New Yorker: silly clubwomen dithering over their agendas. As a foreign service wife, of course, she was invited to countless ladies’ luncheons and tea parties; they drove her wild with boredom, especially when the cookbook manuscript was waiting back home. “I just cannot stand to waste a day like that anymore,” she told Simca after an endless afternoon of female socializing. “And if there is anything I HATE, it is a ladies tea parlor.” The only women’s events she approved of were meetings of Les Gourmettes, because everyone was busy with the important work of cooking and eating. Otherwise, “Cackle-cackle…sounds like a hen house” was her invariable reaction to being in a room full of females. In 1973, she was one of a dozen Women of the Century honored at a lavish dinner and spent the evening talking with Lillian Hellman, Marya Mannes, Louise Nevelson, and Pauline Trigère, among others. It was very nice, she remarked later, but they should have invited some men. She said the spark was missing.
Not surprisingly, when clubs and restaurants that excluded women came under pressure from feminists to change their policies, Julia sided with the men. “I am very much against the new policy at the Ritz of allowing unaccompanied women into the Grill,” she told an audience at the all-male St. Botolph Club in Boston, where she had been invited to give a talk. “They’ll turn it into a clacking hen house sure enough, and then no one will want to go there. So, stick to your guns, gentlemen.”
One of her longtime ambitions was to attract more men to the food world. In France, where cooking had the status of a high art, men were the chief players whether or not they actually cooked: it was their talking, writing, and gourmandizing that put cuisine at the center of domestic and national life. In America, by contrast, cooking was traditionally defined as a female preoccupation, hence unworthy of serious attention. Julia had spent years in France trying to win the respect of male culinary authorities, self-appointed and otherwise, and had met with little success on account of her two handicaps: she was American and she was female. Yet the experience didn’t turn her into a culinary feminist—quite the opposite. She was inclined to see men the way the French did: natural masters in the kitchen, born with an easy confidence at the stove, graced with an understanding of science and logic that guided them smoothly through the preparation of a meal. No matter that most American men couldn’t cook. An aura of maleness in the world of American cookery would be enough to ennoble the whole enterprise, or so she hoped. When William Rice was appointed food editor of the Washington Post in 1972, she cheered. “I’m all for having MEN in these positions; it immediately lifts it out of the housewifery Dullsville category and into the important things of life!” Receiving fan letters from men gave her tremendous satisfaction, and she regularly assured her male correspondents that men made the best cooks.
Julia was adamant that her programs be aired in prime time, not only for the prestige but because having men in the audience made her work legitimate in her own eyes. Daytime television attracted only housewives—“And that’s not our audience,” she often said. Her audience, of course, was overwhelmingly female and packed with housewives, but when Julia said “housewife,” she meant someone who didn’t take food and cooking seriously. She knew very well there were countless women who weren’t “housewives” in this sense; nonetheless, all “housewives” were women. If improvements were under way in American cooking and eating habits, it had to be men who deserved the credit. “Thank heaven for the men in our TV audience,” she remarked in 1966. “They are responsible for stimulating interest in cooking. The women would just pass it over.” When an interviewer asked her what she would say to young brides starting to cook, Julia’s advice was to think about what men like to eat. “It will keep you away from those horrible gooky casseroles covered with canned mushroom soup and cornflakes,” she went on. “Men don’t like that stuff, and men are the people you want to feed.” And, she added, be sure to buy solid, high-quality knives. “Just because the housewife doesn’t know a great deal about equipment, she is often, unfortunately, taken in by glitter. If she went with her husband, he would not allow her to get a lot of this sort of flimsy junk, knives that are pretty.” Women were too easily intimidated in the kitchen, Julia believed; they panicked if the recipe called for three tablespoons of lemon juice and they had only two. Men were fearless—in fact, men were accustomed to bullying, she once noted, which could be a very useful trait when faced with a recipe.
But while she was confident that men would have a good influence on the American home kitchen, their growing visibility in the culinary profession was a touchier subject. Yes, an infusion of talented male chefs was exactly what the profession needed in order to gain stature and respectability. But the ambitious young men taking up cooking included a number of homosexuals, and Julia feared they would soon define the profession, keeping straight men away. “It is like the ballet filled with homosexuals, so no one else wants to go into it.” She urged a few close friends in the food world to encourage the “de-fagification” of cooking, but admitted that she had no idea how to go about it—and besides, “fags” bought plenty of cookbooks, including hers. “What to do!”
What she did, in the end, was generously support the career aspirations of every gifted cook who came her way—male or female, “normal” or not. Her devotion to “real male men” ran deep, but her appreciation for good cooking ran deeper still, and at this level she was entirely free of prejudice. Richard Olney, the moody American living on a Provençal hillside whose brilliant cooking impressed even the French, was a homosexual and not particularly friendly to Julia or most other people; she, in turn, never took to him personally. Yet she gave a press party when he published Simple French Food and used all her contacts to help him promote it, simply because his work was so outstanding. Another very skilled male cook of her acquaintance was “on the soft and wandlike side, feminine, but nicely so”: this was a rare instance when she praised such traits in a man. And though she distanced herself from the women’s movement in general, she spoke out readily against sex discrimination in the culinary profession. “You know, it wasn’t until I began thinking about it that I realized my field is closed to women,” she told a reporter in 1970. “It’s very unfair. It’s absolutely restricted. You can’t get into the Culinary Institute of America in New Haven! The big hotels, the fancy New York restaurants, don’t want women chefs.” Her remark drew indignant letters from the director and the dean of women at the institute, pointing out that there were fully a dozen women among some 650 students. (“Julia and her sister Women’s Lib advocates might also be pleased to hear that, if they don’t get married first, each female has at least five good job offers by graduation.”) By 1976, the institute had moved to Hyde Park, New York, and was doing so much better in regard to women that Julia agreed to speak at graduation. “Finally we have found out that women are people,” she told the crowd. “It’s a useful thing to know.” In her own profession, she was a feminist in spite of herself: she simply would not put up with any injustice that threatened to deprive the world of a good chef. Julia funded scholarships for female culinary students, encouraged them to write to her about their progress, did a great deal of networking on behalf of young women chefs, and dispensed quantities of advice and encouragement. For her Master Chefs programs, she made a point of inviting male and female chefs in equal numbers; and she worked her media connections tirelessly to help cookbook writers she admired.
Julia’s tangled sensibility about sex, gender, and food relaxed a good deal in the warmth of her friendship with James Beard, whom she loved and admired above anyone else in the American culinary world. Beard, a homosexual who neither hid nor flaunted his orientation, was widely recognized as the nation’s leading authority on good cooking when Julia set out on her career. When she, Paul, and Simca went to New York for the launch of Mastering, Beard invited them to his house in Greenwich Village; and Julia very quickly recognized a soul mate. It was not an obvious match: Beard was self-taught, not professionally trained; his expertise was in American cookery, not French; and besides being homosexual, he was so extremely fat that he had none of the physical charms Julia normally liked in a man. But the two of them forged a bond that lasted until his death in 1985. They were both magnetic people, and when they turned that magnetism upon each other, they were captured simultaneously. Both were sharp, funny, and unpretentious; and both of them felt the same way about cooking—that it was endlessly and profoundly fascinating, that it deserved all the time and intelligence they could command, and that it was the greatest fun imaginable. A few months after they met, he was urging her to consider teaching at his school and touring with him so they could give joint lecture-demonstrations; she in turn wanted him to come to Boston and meet the people at WGBH—perhaps he could become involved in her new television series. “I would very much welcome the idea of doing something together,” she told him. “I sense une grande sympathie spirituelle!” Beard was Julia’s model for how to be a professional and how to be famous. She never forgot how generous he was when she arrived on the scene in 1961, a potential rival whom he greeted enthusiastically and introduced to everybody. “I think he has done much to set the tone of friendliness among cooking types, which is so different from that sniping and back-biting that goes on in France,” Julia told M. F. K. Fisher. “Jim is such a hard worker, has such a vast store of knowlege in that enormous frame. There is outwardly some bluff in him, but I think that is because he is very tender inside.” She used to say he was “cozy”—one of her favorite qualities in a man.
Julia rarely commented on Beard’s homosexuality; she was far more concerned about the various health problems associated with his weight. Yet her homophobia came and went during their long friendship, apparently at random. “Good that people are out of the closet at last!” she noted in her journal in 1974, upon learning that an acquaintance was openly gay. “Makes things easier all around.” A year later, she was agitating to keep “them” out of the culinary business. But by the 1980s, when the AIDS crisis began to unfold, the horror of what was happening to people she knew, and people she loved, dealt a significant blow to her longtime prejudice. “Last year my husband and I stood by helplessly while a dear and beloved friend went through months of slow and frightening agony,” she told a crowd at Boston Garden in 1988 during an AIDS benefit sponsored by the American Institute of Wine and Food. “But what of those lonely ones? Those impoverished ones with no friends or family to ease the slow pain of dying? Those are the people we’re concerned about this evening. And food is of very special importance here. Good food is also love.” Her politics, her passions, and her fundamental decency were coming together at last. Some time after that, when a woman friend told her she was in love and about to marry another woman, Julia blanched for a second and then congratulated her warmly. What was important was the team.