Prologue

"Now, dearie, I will require a hot plate for my appearance on Professor Duhamel’s program.”

Russ Morash, who had answered the telephone in a makeshift office he shared with the
volunteers at WGBH- TV, was momentarily startled, not so much by the odd request as by the
odder voice. It had a quality he’d never heard before— tortured and asthmatic, with an
undulating lyrical register that spanned two octaves. A woman’s voice? Yes, he thought, like a
cross between Tallulah Bankhead and a slide whistle.

With brusque Yankee economy, Morash tried to decode the caller’s m.o. “You want— what?”

“A hot plate, dearie, so I can make an omelet.”

Doesn’t that beat all, he thought. A hot plate! An omelet! What kind of a stunt was this gal trying
to pull? Morash had worked at the station for a little under four years, and in that time he had
heard his share of doozies, but they were workaday doozies, what you’d expect to hear at
“Boston’s Educational Television Station.” The principal clarinetist for the symphony orchestra
needed an emergency reed replacement, a beaker broke during a Science Reporter rehearsal,
those were the tribulations that befell such an operation. But— a hot plate . . . and an omelet . . .

“Well, from my experience that’s a first,” Morash told the caller, “but I’ll be happy to pass it on
to Miffy Goodhart, when she gets in.”

The twenty-seven-year- old Morash knew that commercial television was in remarkable
ascendance; since the end of World War II, it had catered to an enormous, entertainment- starved
audience that was hungry for distraction, and creative minds were struggling to feed the greedy
beast. But educational TV— and WGBH, in particular— was a different creature altogether.
Educational TV was an anomaly, a broadcasting stepchild in its infancy, still in the crawling
phase, with no real road map for meaningful development. “We were kind of making it up as we
went along,” Morash says of an experiment that was barely six years old. “There was
tremendous freedom in what we could put on the air.” Still, there was nothing exciting about the
programs on WGBH. Audiences were as scarce as scintillating programming. A scattering of
viewers tuned in to watch Eleanor Roosevelt spar with a panel of wonks; fewer tuned in Friday
evenings when a local character, jazz priest Father Norman J. O’Connor, introduced musical
figures from the Boston area. Otherwise there were no hits to speak of, nothing to attract people
to the smorgasbord of brainy fare. The station was licensed through the Lowell Institute to the
cultural institutions of Boston: the museum, the libraries, and eleven universities, including
Harvard, MIT, Tufts, Boston College, Boston University, and Brandeis. The educational
backdrop was a fantastic resource. Each member of the Institute provided support, financial and
otherwise. If one of them said, “Hey, we’ve got a great professor. Let’s broadcast his lecture,”
that was enough to launch a new show.

Such was the case with Albert Duhamel— make that P. Albert Duhamel— one of Boston
College’s most lionized teachers. Duhamel was a man who loved books and their authors. A
suave, strapping academic with a penchant for Harris tweed, he was addicted to the intellectual
interplay that came from talking to writers about their work. Al was an author himself— his
steamy Rhetoric: Principles and Usage was a campus blockbuster— and his show, People Are
Reading, was the tent pole of WGBH’s Thursday-night lineup.

People Are Reading was the forerunner to shows like Fresh Air and Charlie Rose, but in those
days, with a budget based primarily on the host’s pocket change, books on loan from his personal
library, and no such thing as an author tour sponsored by a publisher, it was television—
educational television— at the most basic level. Because the dirt- poor station shied from
appearance fees, let alone train fare, the authors who appeared came mostly from the Boston
area, and to make attracting them easier, guests were usually college colleagues— a noted
economist or quantum physicist. Thus, in the words of one WGBH crew member, “The shows
were dry as toast,” but plans were afoot to inject a little jam into the equation.

Morash, who was familiar with the show’s static format, realized that People Are Reading,
however tedious, served the greater good. For one thing, it was the only book- review show in
Boston— this was long before the days when “breakfast television” would trot out authors fi ve
mornings a week— so there were no other outlets for writers promoting their work. And his
neighbors, the university crowd, loved to read. They loved to read. They formed the show’s
small, faithful audience, creating buzz about any book that happened to catch their fancy.

The guest who had telephoned, Morash imagined, might just throw this gang a curve. Later that
day, when he caught up with Miffy Goodhart, he told her,

“Miffy, you’ve got a hot one here this week. Some dame named Julia Child called, and she wants
a hot plate, thank you very much. She says she’ll bring all the other ingredients for— get this!—
an omelet.”

Miffy wasn’t the least bit surprised by this last detail. As assistant producer of People Are
Reading, she had conspired for some time to bring about a makeover to the show. It needed
pizzazz, something to appeal to a wider spectrum of viewers, younger, more engaged viewers
who looked beyond academia for their jollies. Politics, science, and literature were fine . . . in
moderation, she thought. “But I was trying to lighten the mood and make it completely
different,” she recalls.*

Goodhart had been hearing about Julia Child and her “super new cookbook” for some time. For
several months, in fact, word had buzzed around Cambridge that this cookbook sensation,
Mastering the Art of French Cooking, offered a remarkable new take on food, and once that
crowd got it in their bonnets that something had cachet— well . . . look out! . . . there was no way
to stop the groundswell. This Cambridge set— they were called Cantabrigians, of all things—
saw themselves as an extremely enlightened circle, a clique of wellborn WASPs who were
slightly bohemian and slightly rebellious. If there was someone in their midst who could entice
their wary eye, you could be sure the Cantabrigians would take notice and respond.

That’s what Miffy Goodhart was banking on when she booked Julia Child for a segment of
People Are Reading. All that week, Miffy awaited the Thursday- night broadcast with an
eagerness that bordered on impatience. There had been something in this woman’s voice that
promised to shake up the eggheads. She’d felt it from the start, when they’d first talked on the
phone. There was an energy, a spark, that conveyed a broader characteristic. Miffy tried to put
her finger on it. Spirit? Spunk? No, more than that— a joie de vivre laced with mischief.
“Making an omelet on TV didn’t seem to confound Julia one scrap,” Miffy recalls.

“It’ll be fun, dearie!” Julia warbled. “We’ll teach the professor a thing or two. Just watch.”

LITTLE DID MIFFY Goodhart realize how much fun figured into Julia Child’s universe. It was
the axis on which Julia’s world turned, the pivotal component in a groundswell of social change
that would not only reshape the way Americans ate but the way they lived, as well. When Julia
first appeared on television, as the insatiable 1960s unfolded, the marriage of fun and food were
light-years apart. Most households remained devoted to Jell- O molds, frozen vegetables, and
tuna-noodle casseroles. Barbarous meat- and- potatoes families roamed the earth; Swanson’s TV
dinners were flying off supermarket shelves. Nothing on the menu spoke of well- made food and
fun. Understanding how these elements eventually intersected goes toward understanding why
the nation, at a crucial crossroads in its fast- moving history, anointed Julia Child its culinary
messiah and beloved cultural icon. She was every bit a sixties superstar as Jackie Onassis or
Walter Cronkite, whose personalities magnified the contributions they made. But unlike other
luminaries fixed in the public eye, Julia gamely thrust a sense of humor into the mix. Cooking
was fun for her, it was the shadow ingredient in every recipe in her repertoire, and she wanted
everyone to experience it that way, too. This spirit was striking even in her youth. “I was sort of
a comic,” Julia recalled of her storybook childhood, a natural cut- up, “just normally nutty.” As a
young coed at Smith College, a roommate reflected that Julia “was almost too much fun,” due to
a mischievous streak that competed with her studies. And in her diary, where she dished with
only sketchy regularity, Julia confessed to a weakness for “an unconscious wicked devilish
goodness.” But it took years— half a lifetime, in fact— to harness that behavior into her own
unique expression. To master the art of cooking, French or otherwise, you first had to demystify
the process, to not be intimidated by it, to be fearless, to plunge right in. Technique was essential,
of course, but you had to find the pleasure in it. Without pleasure there was no payoff. The
irrepressible reality of Julia Child was a combination of spontaneity, candor, and wit, which is
why her passion for cooking bore unparalleled results. She not only brought fun headfirst into the
modern American kitchen, a place that housewives equated with lifelong drudgery, but used it to
launch public television into the spotlight, big-time.

NO ONE, THAT day in 1962, suspected the impact that Julia Child would have on their lives,
not Russ Morash, who, with his wife, Marian, would be inextricably linked with her for the next
thirty- five years, nor the suits at WGBH, which would become, thanks to Julia, a media
colossus, one of the most influential producers of highbrow TV in the world and the platform for
Julia’s rise to prominence. That day, you could sense the droning boredom inherent to
educational television. The set was woefully spare: two leather Harvard chairs, a coffee table,
and a fake philodendron, nothing more. The crew, uninspired, went about business with
monotonous languor. It was hard to get it up for two scholars discussing a book.

There was some confusion in the studio leading up to airtime. The cameraman for People Are
Reading apparently misheard the assignment. It sounded like the director said there would be . . .
a live demonstration. Impossible! This show was a walk- through, practically a paid night off.
There was no rehearsal to speak of and, therefore, little for him to do. It was the same thing,
week in, week out: two heads talking for a scant half hour. Since no one ever moved, the
cameraman merely set up the shot and took a seat. Nothing to it.

But someone had gone and thrown a monkey wrench into the works. The guest actually was
going to do a demonstration. On a book show, of all things! No rehearsal necessary; they’d go
into it straightaway. And the camera set-up promised to be tricky. It was obvious the minute the
guest walked in the door.

Julia Child wasn’t your basic Cambridge housewife. She was huge— Bill Russell huge— the
kind of person who filled a room. And larger than life: her square footage, swimming in a loose-
fitting blouse and pleated skirt, seemed to expand as she swung herself along as if nothing in the
natural world could contain her. She was a fair, russet- haired woman, already fifty, going soft in
her waist, yet well- aligned, with fine-toned arms that suggested constant physical use. Her body
from the side provided a glimpse of the curse imposed on middle- aged women, with their
expanding torsos and athletic legs, which threw their symmetry off balance. At six foot three that
aspect verged on anarchy. Most women that size and build appeared lumbering, gently clumsy.
But there was an aristocratic self- possession in the way Julia carried herself, something solid,
yet graceful, that gave her presence an assertive, irrefutable quality. Her size seemed like a tool
she could use, like a car salesman with a grin, though she resisted turning it into an unfair
advantage.

Whatever anxieties weighed on the cameraman when he learned there would be a demonstration,
he could not have been prepared for the spectacle Julia created. He was clearly awestruck by her,
pop- eyed and openmouthed. This impression was punctuated by the paraphernalia cradled in her
arms. Framed under a bank of overhead spots, she stood in the middle of the studio clutching a
ring burner, a long- handled pan, and a distended bag of groceries: ready to roll. In the coming
years, that very image— Julia Child, poised and prepared, in a TV kitchen— became the iconic
image of cooking in America. But in 1962, this was quite an odd scene. Cooking, like sex, was
practiced privately— and, some might say, without much enthusiasm— in the home. Few gave
the process much of a second thought. Preparing a delicious meal on TV, with an elaborate array
of ingredients and specialized equipment, was unheard of, to say nothing of harebrained. The
notion of Julia lumbering about in front of the camera, juggling pots, pans, and who- knows-
what- all, flanked by a baffled host who couldn’t have cared less about cooking, much less her
book, could not have escaped the cameraman’s gaping eye. When Julia finally piped up and
those vocal flourishes, the trills and flutters, began to shoot about like fireworks, the image
turned almost comical.

Against the general tide of upheaval running through the studio, Miffy Goodhart attempted to
reassure her guest. She knew that Julia had no experience in front of a TV camera. Nothing was
more likely to flummox a novice performer than talking to a host while cooking a recipe. They
were two dissimilar acts, like patting your head and rubbing your stomach. To make matters
worse, the show was going out live, so, in effect, they were flying without a safety net. The
chances for disaster were better than good. To distract Julia, Miffy filled the downtime with an
explanation of their whereabouts, which had been cobbled together in appreciable haste. Some
months before, WGBH had occupied space in a reconverted roller- skating rink on the MIT
campus, a state- of- the- art television center with gorgeous hardwood floors. Everyone at the
station—the production staff and crew— was notorious for “smoking their brains out” on the
job, leading to a horrific fire that burned the place to the ground. Everything was lost, except for
the trusty mobile unit, an old Trailways bus with about seven million miles on it. Thanks to that,
they could broadcast from various borrowed facilities. One of them, in fact, was the studio they
were prepping at the moment, the Boston University Catholic Center, in which the Diocese of
Boston produced the morning Mass. Perfunctorily, the People Are Reading stagehands pushed
the religious objects out of the way. A hawk- eyed viewer could still make out the center’s
motto, in hoc signo vinces,* etched into an exposed beam; otherwise, with TV magic, the space
resembled a cozy book nook. Julia wondered aloud at all the clergy nosing about, but Miffy
assured her they were harmless. “Except for Cardinal Cushing,” she warned, pulling a face. “Be
careful. He likes following one upstairs, if you know what I mean.”

EVEN BEFORE HER improbable stardom, Julia could take care of herself. “She is unusually
strong physically,” her husband, Paul, had written his brother, in 1944, “ . . . and appears not to
be frightened easily and is therefore emotionally steady rather than hysterical when things get
tough.” In “nightmarish” situations, she would gather the durable threads of her character until “I
could literally feel myself knitting together,” she said, owing to the strong self- image she’d
cultivated since childhood. Jacques Pépin described her as the most generous person he’d ever
met, who “could be as tough as nails” when it came to protecting herself. “She was like a boxer,
you know, who puts up the gloves just- so, making it impossible to land a punch.”

There was never any need, however, to go to the mat. For Julia, the fight was never physical, but
a visceral necessity. Conformity offended her; it was behavior to reject, like a foul- smelling
turnip, and she fought all her life to transcend its strictures. She defied all the expectations that
had been laid out for her. Privilege intruded at the top of that list. Julia Child grew up in a haven
of Southern California, an exclusive sun- drenched paradise where privilege was a birthright, like
education or fresh air. Pasadena in the 1920s doubled as a gorgeous Hollywood back-lot, a
scenic resort of palatial mansions, lush orange groves, posh country clubs, and opportunity
galore. Wealth was the ticket into this selectively upscale enclave, and Julia’s family could
afford the extravagant price. But prosperity and entitlement were not on Julia’s agenda. The
oldest of three children in a traditional Republican family with deep Yankee roots, she scuttled
her destiny as a “dilettante” and “social butterfly,” just as later, after graduating from Smith
College, she foreswore the inevitable marriage track in search of something more meaningful.
Relying on her self- esteem and a reservoir of optimism in an attempt to fashion a career, she
succeeded beyond her— or anyone’s— wildest dreams. Imagine the gumption it took, in 1942,
for a thirty- year- old woman who’d never been farther east than New York, to go halfway
around the world to join a spy network in Southeast Asia. And, afterward, to enroll in an all-
male cooking class whose French martinets scorned a woman’s touch.

Conformity: Julia refused to conform. There wasn’t so much as a trace of it in her DNA.
Unflinchingly, she pursued an area of expertise that had not been tackled before— or, at least,
not in a way that resonated with the public. She was determined to teach French cooking to
American housewives captivated by tuna casseroles and beef Stroganoff— “taking [it] out of
cuckooland,” as she put it, and making it accessible to all. It fazed her not one bit that a large,
middle- aged, unpolished woman who lived out of the loop should take her campaign to the
masses via television, at the time a vehicle for glamourpusses like Gale Storm and Loretta
Young. To hell with conformity! Without design or forethought, she created an enormously
appealing personality that was unlike anyone else’s. Julia could seem at times gregarious,
instantly chummy, like an eccentric aunt who comes to visit. Her personality left, in the course of
a half- hour encounter, an individually personal impression, both because of its sweeping,
informal power— she was capable of being gracious, entertaining, flustered, neighborly, ham-
fisted, sly, and self- deprecating— and because the mechanism of that personality was
unburdened by ideology. The world had never encountered such an embraceable character, but
TV changed all that. “She had an animated way about her that was infectious,” says Russ
Morash. “She wasn’t performing it; she actually felt that way.” Detailed instructions, the cooking
lessons, came packaged as an intimate get- together between old friends. When she ordered a
box of pears over the telephone, she would say, “This is Julia, dearie, I need some pears, and I
bet you have some good ones.” The friendliness— that infectious quality— came bursting across
on camera. After her appearance on the scene, people began talking about food, not as
sustenance but as a staple of pleasure. She sparked an interest and understanding of food that
whet people’s appetites for a different kind of culinary experience. It takes a real nonconformist
to start a revolution, and Julia Child started a corker, one that was to affect the nation’s behavior
and change the way its people lived their daily lives.

NOTHING IN THE studio immediately augured those dramatic changes. Julia was nonchalant,
all business, as she arranged her equipment on the coffee table. The way she went about it, her
easy approach, seemed totally unrehearsed, even though there’d been plenty of practice. She’d
spent all week anguishing over the set-up and the demo: several dry runs enacted in the kitchen
of Anita Hubby, a classmate from Smith, who lived around the corner; more in her own kitchen
under Paul’s watchful eye. You had to concentrate, Julia discovered; the delivery wasn’t easy.
Ten or fifteen omelets took the guesswork out of the process, but one never knew when that
camera began to roll.

Plus there were unforeseen hitches specific to the studio. The moment the cameraman laid eyes
on Julia he cried out in exasperation, “How do you expect me to light this woman?” and he
circled her dubiously like a livestock judge at the county fair. Ideally, in a conventional room,
the camera rested at eye level. But if the person to be photographed was six foot two— or, in
Julia’s actual case, six foot three; she had a lifelong tendency for shaving inches off her height—
and the ceiling was eight feet, with lights hanging eighteen inches from the top, well then,
brother, you have to be a magician to keep the lights out of the shot. Tilt the camera up or down
and something got cut from the frame; pull back, and the scene wasn’t as interesting. For an
instant, the cameraman contemplated sitting Julia down for the segment, but that seemed to
defeat the purpose of a demo. “I take it you’ve never worked with T. Rex,” she joked. She took
the problem into her own hands, placing the burner on a stack of coffeetable books and raising
the pan a few inches so that the field of action was condensed. The cameraman peered into the
viewfinder and gave the crew the high sign.

Professor Duhamel, shunted to the side, looked lost in the process. Inviting this guest to the
studio hadn’t been his idea, that was for sure. People Are Reading was a show about big ideas;
theories and doctrines were its stock- in- trade. He wasn’t the least bit interested in cooking, but
the girls in the office had insisted. They’d insisted. It wasn’t just his show, they’d reminded him.
Cooking was a particular enthusiasm of theirs— and, by the way, while they had his attention,
there’d be something in the future on sports, as well.

Al Duhamel, as it turned out, was the perfect host. He introduced

Julia with a bouquet of adjectives befitting a movie star, held up a copy of
Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and ceded the spotlight to this amiable creature. His
cockeyed grin, however, betrayed a hint of concern: What in the world was this woman going to
do?

The same question dogged Miffy Goodhart, the young assistant producer, who stood in the wings
among a mostly female support staff, wealthy Cambridge housewives who volunteered at the
station on a regular basis. They had more of a stake in this than anyone realized. Julia’s
appearance was something of a breakthrough, a counterforce to the clubby fraternal order that
cinched the ranks of academia. Miffy could count on one hand the number of women who had
appeared on the show: finchy types with degrees in stupefying disciplines. Julia Child was going
to cook. She was going to cook! And on TV, imagine that. This promised to be one for the record
books.

There was a brief, awkward moment as Julia unwound her giant frame from the precious leather
chair. Producing a small copper bowl and a whisk, she looked directly into the camera with the
intimacy of a lover, and said, “I thought it would be nice if we made an omelet . . . ” To
Professor Duhamel and other viewers, she might have said, “I thought it would be nice to create
nuclear fission,” the process was that unfathomable to their superior brains. “They’re so
delicious and so easy to make.” She cracked two eggs into the bowl with a one- handed flourish
and began to beat them with the fury of a half- crazed thug.

Next she introduced her sturdy black- rimmed omelet pan. An omelet pan. It was unreasonable to
think you could find an omelet pan in any store in Boston, but Julia assured her audience it was
exactly what they needed. And butter, rich, silky butter— not that artificial stuff they produced in
a lab. An omelet had to be exciting in the mouth, she purred, making it sound like oral sex.

The cameraman crept forward, closing in on Julia’s paw- like hands, but had it picked up
Professor Duhamel you would have seen bewilderment crisscrossed on his face. “This is going to
work on that little burner?” he wondered aloud.

“Oh, yes! And it’s going to be delicious, just you wait.”

The butter crackled and sputtered as a chunk hit the hot pan, followed by a hush, what musicians
call decrescendo, as molten egg flowed across the bottom. “This all happens very fast,” Julia said
breathlessly, “in just thirty seconds or less.”

By this time, everyone in the studio, host and crew alike, was transfixed.

In a sudden, sweeping motion, Julia grabbed the pan’s long handle and began jerking it back and
forth, as if some unseen force was trying to wrench it from her grip. The energy behind it
convulsed her body in sharp spastic tremors. This vision of Julia Child, gyrating like a wind-up
toy, would be an enduring, endearing image to millions of viewers for the next forty years, but
that night, without warning, it set off alarms. In the wings, Miffy Goodhart held her breath,
watching the unfolding action in horror.

“[Julia’s] loose, white shirt was open at the collar,” she recalls. “And as she made the omelet, her
rather large boobs were going furiously. And going! And going! The energy with which she
made this omelet while talking about her book and . . . staring into the camera and . . . laughing
madly and . . . talking to Albert on the side and . . . whisking everything up and . . . turning it
over and . . . looking triumphant all at once—I was absolutely sure those buttons were coming
undone. And what then?”

What then, exactly. It was a function of live TV that nothing was foreordained. There were no
contingencies in place for the unscripted faux pas or sudden expletive— or the unforeseen
appearance of a locomotive breast. One did as Miffy Goodhart did: she held her breath and
prayed. For just a moment, through the blinding skein of lights, Miffy glimpsed the entire future
of WGBH resting on the breasts of Julia Child.

In the end, there was nothing to cause anyone more than a mild case of heart failure. Julia Child,
going rogue, was nothing less than a revelation. Her omelet was perfect, intense and creamy, a
masterpiece of eggdom. Despite the constraints of black- and- white TV, it was hard for those at
home to keep from drooling. You could practically smell the buttery concoction through the
cathode- ray screen. Even Al Duhamel had to admit it was exciting in the mouth. Reluctantly, at
Julia’s insistence, he’d taken a bite from her fork and had the kind of slow facial awakening akin
to a child’s tasting something chocolaty for the first time. He lit right up, mouth still full, while
Julia beamed from above. “Therrrre. You seeee,” she cooed. “Just as I said: delicious.”

THE JUNGLE DRUMS started beating the next morning. Calls came into WGBH from viewers,
wondering when that Julia Child woman would be back on the air. Not a lot of calls, but enough
to get a producer’s attention. For a TV station, it was still the Dark Ages when it came to
gauging audience reaction. There was no method in place for collecting scientific data, no=
Neilsen ratings, no overnight numbers. Response was measured strictly by what executives heard
on the golf course or from their close circle of friends. They multiplied the anecdotal information
they got by any number they wanted. So if the station received twenty calls, which would have
been a lot for People Are Reading, they would say, “We’ve had an overwhelming response.”

“We’ve had an overwhelming response,” Miffy Goodhart told Russ Morash, when he checked in
the next morning. She related in breathless detail the entire Julia Child saga. “I was just blown
over by her energy and how good she was on telly,” she says. Russ, for his part, wasn’t
immediately convinced. “I had absolutely no interest in a cooking show,” he recalls. “I was
twenty- seven years old, making $83 a week, and newly married, with a working wife whose
party piece was a franks- and- beans casserole. Cooking was as relevant to me as Norse poetry
read in the original Scandinavian tongue.” Besides, he already had a full plate directing a show
called Science Reporter, which showcased the greatest minds at MIT and required all his energy.
But Miffy Goodhart was not to be denied. “Let’s see if we can do something with her,” she
pleaded. “What do you say, Russ? What do you say?”
Before he could answer, she had Bob Larsen on the phone. Larsen, the program manager at
WGBH, had missed Julia’s performance, but he’d already heard how well it had gone. Miffy
mentioned there was a tape of the show. “Really, you’ve got to watch it,” she said. “For once
you’ve got to watch the Duhamel show.”

You had to admire Miffy’s gumption. She was a firecracker when it came to pressing her case.
Bob Larsen was only stage one in the offensive she was mounting; she also called Dave Davis,
the station manager, and laid it on thick, as well as her husband’s cousin, Henry Morgenthau III,
who ran the entire operation. In a flash, she was knocking on Julia’s front door, purportedly to
thank her for the bang-up performance over a cup of coffee. But more groundwork was being
laid. Miffy remembered Julia’s excitement after the show. Her adrenaline had been palpable.
“Julia was elated, she’d really had fun,” Miffy recalls. “I told her, ‘As far as I’m concerned,
we will be using you again.’ ”

By March, WGBH could no longer deny the inevitable— either to itself or to the whim of its
demanding viewers. There was something more than intriguing about Julia Child. This woman
bore a special quality that appealed to their audience, yet a lot of unanswered questions
remained. Could she fill a half- hour week after week? Would she have the kind of impact, the
charisma, that ignited her People Are Reading appearance? Did anyone out there give a hoot
about cooking? Would lightning strike twice? The answers to these and other relevant questions
boiled down to one salient fact: the station was desperate for a hit. Desperate! Without a must-
see show— without real growth of loyal viewership— there’d be no increase in donations at
WGBH, no money to expand. It was unlikely anyone would pony up to watch a physics
professor discuss string theory. Or an educator who led preschoolers in arts- and- crafts projects.
But . . . cooking?

COOKING: it was the axis on which Julia Child’s world turned. The ingredients, the meals, the
pursuit of pleasure and the sublime all dazzled her like nothing she had ever encountered, not as
a scion of the Pasadena social scene nor as an operative of the CIA. Cooking signified her break
from conformity. It was an expression of her freedom from a legacy of dead ends, but especially
from taking the expected path of a midcentury homemaker. Julia was determined to stand at the
center of her own world, to express herself without following timeworn rules. Being a
housewife— that is, the ideal of a housewife— wasn’t in the cards. The bounds of domesticity
couldn’t contain her. Through cooking Julia found real purpose in her life, and through that
purpose a greater meaning.

The story of her emancipation and self- realization runs parallel— and it is no coincidence— to
the struggle of the post- war modern- day American woman: the dearth of opportunity available
to her, the lack of respect for her untapped talents, the frustrations of the educated housewife
who felt bored and trapped by the traditional role that had been handed to her, by the tedium of
housework, the demands of motherhood, being the perfect cheerleader, the perfect hostess, the
perfect lover, perfect wife— responsibilities that for generations kept most women from
pursuing other dreams and desires. The domestic life of that era was fraught with dissatisfaction.
Many women wrestled with the dilemma that personal creative and intellectual challenges
weren’t being met. There was a discrepancy between what they wanted and what was expected
of them. A shakeup was long overdue. The assumptions of what a woman’s place was were
about to be altered, and Julia Child, despite looking like everybody’s Aunt Ethel, was one of the
revolutionaries leading the charge to uproot the norm. It is no accident that Betty Friedan’s game
changer, The Feminine Mystique, was published only eight days after Mastering the Art of
French Cooking. As journalist Laura Shapiro noted: “Homemakers read The Feminine Mystique
for the same reason they watched The French Chef. They had been waiting for a long time, and
they were hungry.”

Julia’s hunger was a well- known symptom. She was a woman with boundless appetites— for
food, absolutely, but also for the tides of change. Nothing sustained her like a ripe idea, a fresh
experience, a saucy challenge, the impossible. In that respect, her timing was impeccable,
because Julia came into her own during the early 1960s, when not only the role of women, but
also other cultural paradigms, were undergoing upheaval. The arts, politics, fashion, values were
all breaking out of the narrow concept of everyday life. Julia, being an iconoclast herself, was
eager to shake up the norms. She took up arms alongside the other cultural guerrillas who were
busy knocking down walls: Andy Warhol, Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, Hugh Hefner, Philip Roth,
Martin Luther King Jr., Helen Gurley Brown, Allen Ginsberg, the Beatles. The Kennedys: their
sophistication and youthful exuberance gave all of this momentum, leading Americans to look
beyond their own culture for inspiration. “With the Kennedys in the White House, people were
very interested in [French cooking],” Julia said, “so I had the field to myself, which was just
damn lucky.”

Actually, Julia Child found herself the leading advocate of cooking in America for reasons that
had nothing to do with luck. She achieved that position of prominence by the same means that
had shaped her skills from the beginning. Aside from stanching her insatiable hunger, there was
nothing in her upbringing to suggest an interest in food, even less that signaled a desire to cook.
“As a girl I had zero interest in the stove,” Julia recalled. She was “never encouraged to cook and
just didn’t see the point in it.” Her foray into the culinary arts had less to do with pure talent than
a desire to fully engage her passions. Throughout her long and distinguished career, she indulged
in pleasure after pleasure, serving them up, without any stigma, to her loyal public to be sampled
as one would a canapé or a sticky pudding. Her initial success, which mos personalities might
see as something not to tinker with, only gave her greater freedom to say and do as she pleased.
“Out came whatever was on her mind,” says Jacques Pépin, “no matter how controversial or
what the repercussions. It was a breath of fresh air, and people loved her because she said what
she felt.”

Like with most insular families, however, in which competition simmered, feuds erupted, and
jealousies raged, there were those in the food world who found Julia’s straight talk all too
threatening. Her outspokenness never failed to provoke new controversies, new challenges, often
rooted in the fragile terrain on which her reputation rested: that she was an interloper, neither
French nor a chef— at least not with the traditional provenance of a serious cook. She would
eventually convince these skeptics, just as she convinced cooking novices everywhere, to take
her seriously; to embrace her casual approach to a vital and substantive discipline; not just to
laugh at her, but to respect her, to respect her research and techniques, and ultimately her
cooking.

SOMETIME THAT SPRING, in April 1962, Russ Morash appeared on the doorstep of 103
Irving Street in Cambridge, one of the more unprepossessing houses on a street lined with
splendid residences described in realtors’ listings as estates. John Kenneth Galbraith lived a
stone’s throw down the block, as did Arthur Schlesinger, interspersed among other homes
belonging to Harvard’s leading minds. As he knocked at the half- open door, Morash must have
marveled, as other outsiders had, at the naked privilege on display in the perfectly manicured
neighborhood and the strange circumstances that brought him to this place. Clearly, he was out
of his element. Raised in “a very modest family,” Morash was blue- collar Boston— in his own
words “a plain, driven guy”— armed with a strong work ethic that lacked any false sense of
entitlement. Cambridge, to Morash, was uptown, Brahmin. One came here to see how the other
half lived.

Ostensibly, Russ was here against his better wishes. His boss, Bob Larsen, had corralled him at
the studio and mentioned that WGBH was considering doing something with Julia Child. “What
do you think, Russ?” he asked. It was a loaded question. If Larsen was involved, then Morash
knew something was already in the pipeline. There would have been others, influential friends,
who’d already weighed in with enthusiastic opinions. “What do you think, Russ?” wasn’t a
question, it was a caress that needed a hug. In other circumstances, Morash might have given it a
quick thumbs- down. A cooking show was absolutely of no interest to him. Food, as he knew it,
was a necessity, nothing more: Sunday roasts cooked beyond well- done into gray shades,
glutinous gravy, rubbery vegetables, and Italian Swiss Colony wine. And French cooking?—
ooh- la- la! One of the more “ridiculous assignments” Russ had at WGBH was directing En
Français, a program that attempted to teach French to elementary school children. Russ didn’t
have to remind Larson that “there was no student with less potential for learning classical French
than” he. Put it all together, Russ Morash was the wrong guy for this job. He could have
convinced Larsen of his inadequacy. Instead, he hemmed and hawed.

“We have no studio at the moment, so we’ll have to do it in the field somewhere,” Russ
grumbled. “Plus, I need to know what kind of support we’re going to have, what kind of
resources you’ll give me. And this person— Julia Child— I need to meet her and see what sort
of a character she is.”

Larsen arranged their introduction at 103 Irving, and over the next few months, Morash would
return there again and again, drawn to the formidable character he encountered, a fearless,
ambitious, supremely self-confident woman, a force of nature, “with this ebullient spirit, and her
voice and her manner and her enthusiasm and her wit and her charm.”

When push came to shove, her appeal was the one surefire way Julia Child could convert the
skeptics who resisted French cooking. In the warm glow of personality, she could transfer her
passion for good food to men and women everywhere, in kitchens in the loneliest corners of the
country to galley nooks in teeming metropolitan sprawls, from farmhouses and suburban
developments to Park Avenue and Beverly Hills— and everywhere in between. Ultimately,
cooking was the way to unite these extremes, to nourish their spirit, and to make them feel loved.

Communicating was Julia’s essence. Her brilliance rested in her capacity to articulate her
experiences with food and relate them to anyone, no matter how little or great their desire to
cook or eat. Less than twenty years after Russ Morash stepped into Julia Child’s kitchen, his
wife, Marian, the same woman whose franks- and- beans casseroles blighted the family menu,
gained recognition as a masterful cook in her own right, with a television series and go- to
cookbooks of her own, and a restaurant in Nantucket that showcased her innovative food. No
woman had demonstrated less talent for cooking until Julia Child swept into her life. Countless
others had a similar story— without the cookbooks, TV series, and restaurant, of course—
discovering and realizing their own talents, with Julia as their personal mentor, instructing,
cheerleading, encouraging, being blunt, genuine, and unaffected, as only she could be.

Americans were inspired and changed forever by Julia Child— even if they never saw it coming.

Excerpted from Dearie by Bob Spitz. Copyright © 2012 by Bob Spitz. Excerpted by permission
of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be
reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.