Julia Child_ A Life - Laura Shapiro [41]
Her first appearance on television came about shortly after the publication of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She and Paul had decided some years earlier to live in Cambridge after his retirement, and they were still settling into their big clapboard house when Claiborne’s rave review appeared. “Presumably, with this puff, we are made!” she wrote jubilantly to Simca. “HOORAY.” Later that October, Simca arrived in the United States for the book tour, and the two women—suddenly newsworthy—were invited to be on the Today show. Julia wasn’t particularly nervous, maybe because she had never heard of it. She and Paul didn’t own a television set. But when she learned that four million people would be watching, she knew she needed a plan. “The quickest and most dramatic thing to do in the 5 or 6 minutes allotted to us was to make omelettes,” she reported to her sister afterward. “They said they would provide a stove.” What they actually provided was a reluctant hot plate, too feeble to heat up properly. But she and Simca brought three dozen eggs to the studio and spent the hour before their time slot practicing. Five minutes before airtime, they started heating up the omelet pan, and by a miracle it was red-hot by the time they needed it. Julia went away very much impressed with the show—everyone was friendly and informal, but the mechanics of the operation were absolutely professional and perfectly timed. It was exactly what she would aim for in her own television shows.
The next TV invitation came along several months later, and this was the one that changed her life. A penciled note is the only thing that remains:
Beatrice Braude UN4-6400
WGBH-Chan. 2 CO2-0428
84 Mass Ave
opp MIT
home = 354 Marlborough St.
TV
Beatrice Braude was an old friend of the Childs’ who had been fired from the USIS in Paris during a McCarthy purge. Now she was working in Boston at WGBH-TV, the fledgling public television station, where she arranged for Julia to be a guest on I’ve Been Reading, a book review program. “They wanted something demonstrated and had a hot plate!” Julia reported to Simca afterward. This time she had a full half hour, so she not only made an omelet, but gave a short lesson in beating egg whites and showed how to cut up vegetables and flute mushrooms. As far as she knew, the only people who saw the program were five of her friends and Jack Savenor, her Cambridge butcher. But twenty-seven ecstatic strangers wrote in to say they loved that woman who did the cooking, and begged the station to bring her back. At WGBH, twenty-seven letters was an avalanche. Startled and impressed, station executives asked Julia to work up a proposal for an entire series on French cooking.
It’s possible that Mastering, and with it Julia, would have drifted into relative obscurity if she hadn’t been discovered by WGBH. She certainly wasn’t about to be discovered by anyone else. Even the other stations in what was called educational TV would have been unlikely to take a chance on a plain-faced, middle-aged woman who did difficult cooking with a lot of foreign words in it. But WGBH was in Boston, and that made all the difference. Dozens of colleges and universities, long-standing Brahmin institutions such as the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Museum of Fine Arts, and an unusually well-educated, well-traveled population made the area unique in the nation. The founders of WGBH intended the new station to be yet another jewel in the city’s cultural crown. French cooking fit right in; and, as viewers quickly made clear, so did Julia.
During the summer of 1962, she taped three pilot programs—omelets, coq au vin, and soufflés—and watched them at home on their new TV. She was horrified to see herself on-screen for the first time, swooping and gasping—“Mrs. Steam Engine,” she called herself—but she was determined to master the medium. “The cooking part went OK, but it was the performance of me, as talker and mover, that was not professional,” she told Simca. Everything had to be done more