Julia Child_ A Life - Laura Shapiro [45]
The schedule was relentless, and despite the hours of rehearsal, those twenty-eight minutes were harrowing. One day the studio was so hot that after they completed the run-through, the butter was put into the refrigerator instead of being placed in the drawer where Julia was supposed to find it at the proper time. When the time came, she told Simca, “All I found was a little bowl with a paper in it saying ‘butter.’ So I had to say, ‘Merde alors, forgot the butter, always forget something,’ and go practically off camera to the frig. And I pull out the butter carton and find to my horror it has only about 30 grams of butter in it. Luckily I was able to spot when one camera was off me and focusing on the chicken, and was able to mouth an anguished ‘BUTTER’ to the floor manager, who snuck into the frig, with trembling fingers peeled paper off a piece of butter, and snuck it on the work table, with no camera spotting him.” The production team used to say they aged ten years with each show. But over the years, only a handful of shows had to be redone because of accidents or mistakes Julia couldn’t fix on the spot. The second show, on onion soup, was one she couldn’t save: she swept through the recipe so quickly that she arrived at the dining table with seven minutes to fill with chat instead of two. After that experience, they worked out a system of what they called “idiot cards”—nearly one a minute, tracking the time and reminding Julia what she was supposed to say and do. ASPARAGUS. SET TIMER. HOW BUY, STORE. FRONT BURNER HOT. (The camera she was supposed to be looking into some-times wore a small hat and a sign: ME FRIEND.) Later a second set of cards, orange instead of white, was introduced for emergencies. If Julia forgot an ingredient, or described a pot as “aluminum-covered steel” instead of “enamel-covered steel,” Ruth Lockwood would flash a special orange card alerting her to the error, and Julia would make the correction.
Six months into it, Julia was getting quite good, Paul reported to his brother. “Now she wipes the sweat off her face only when the close-up camera is concentrating briefly on the subsiding foam in the sauté-pan, for example. Her pacing is steady rather than rush-here and hold-there. She knows how to signal the Director that she’s going to make a move out of range of the cameras, so they can follow, by saying, ‘Now I’m going to go to the oven to check-up on the soufflé’—instead of suddenly darting out of the picture toward the oven.” WGBH continued to be overrun with letters from enchanted viewers. The Boston Globe published an editorial calling the show “the talk of New England” and signed up Julia as a regular columnist in the food pages. Kitchenware stores found they were running out of items Julia used on the show—flan rings one week, oval casseroles the next. “I can hardly go out of the house now without being accosted in the street,” Julia told Koshland in some amazement. New York, San Francisco, Sacramento, Philadelphia, Washington, and Pittsburgh all picked up the show, and floods of mail poured into every new station as soon as Julia appeared on-screen. Stories ran in Time, Newsweek, the Saturday Evening Post, and TV Guide. By January 1965, all ninety stations on the public television network were carrying The French Chef, and WGBH found it could raise money for the station every week by selling tickets to the taping sessions at $5 apiece. Paul greeted the audience before each session and asked them please not to laugh aloud during the show.
Julia spent most of the next forty years on television—new programs and repeats, public television and commercial TV, season-long series and one-time specials. She was a star, a host, a guest, a commentator, and a voice-over; once, to the delight of millions including herself, she was evoked by Dan Ackroyd on Saturday Night Live in a skit that became a classic. (Hacking away at a chicken, he fatally cut himself and collapsed, shrieking,