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no character, staged no formal entertainments; her original show didn’t even carry her name, and the point of the half hour over which she presided was to teach, not to focus attention on herself. In fact, Julia spent her first decade on TV begging WGBH to put guest chefs on The French Chef with her because she thought people would learn much more if they could be exposed to a wide range of teachers. (The station never complied, first because the program was so experimental, and later because it was so clearly and magnificently Julia’s show.) Despite the modesty that was intrinsic to her personality, the camera adored her, perhaps because she generally forgot about it as soon as the food absorbed her attention. Often she looked straight into the camera and gave a sudden little smile, because Ruth Lockwood had been holding up an idiot card that read SMILE. In a medium stoked by artificiality and blandness almost from the beginning, Julia was herself and famous for it.

At the same time, however, she tended her public image with great care. Paul did all the still photography for The French Chef and tried to make sure that his were the only photographs of Julia that appeared in the press. She was not conventionally good-looking or particularly photogenic, and newspaper photographers weren’t going to edit their contact sheets as painstakingly as he did. As he told his brother, “The image can be spoiled by letting out half a dozen stinkers.” Over the years, similarly, she went on many diets but rarely discussed them in public until late in her career. What she preferred to tell the press, when reporters invariably asked how she controlled her weight in the face of so much tempting food, was that she and Paul simply watched their calories and tried never to have second helpings. (But, “TOO FAT!” she groaned to an old friend. “I’m just too damned fat, my waist is middle aged, my bust is bulging bubbidom, and [worst of all], I really can’t buy any clothes anymore.”) A few years after she started on television, she bought her first wig—“which will save a pile of distress in rainy weather,” Paul explained—and in the late 1960s, she had plastic surgery for the first time, an “eye job.” In the spring of 1971, she had a complete face-lift. The operation took place in Paris so that she could go straight to their house in Provence to recuperate in absolute privacy. When she learned that Simca was planning to be next door in her house at the same time—Simca would be working with an American writer who was translating her cookbook into English—Julia insisted that the translating be done elsewhere or at another time. “You forget, ma chérie, that I am, malgré tout, a public figure and it will not do to have a reporter and writer be aware in any way of my condition,” she wrote to her colleague. “I am sorry to be difficult about this, but you must understand the problem!” Nobody knew about the face-lift—“my sacquepage,” Julia called it—except Paul, Simca, and Ruth Lockwood. “People think I look just fine, and so rested,” she wrote to Simca after returning home. “Avis said your skin looks so good, and your face—I said, well, since the TV I’ve learned how to put on makeup. Actually, it is very subtle—the neck fixed, the pouches at either side of the chin, and the hollows out of the cheeks. I didn’t realize myself until suddenly I looked—no turkey neck! No dewlaps!” She had plastic surgery again in 1977 and once more in 1989.

But her image was a bigger project than simply the condition of her face and figure. Soon after The French Chef became a local sensation, Julia began to get invitations—Would she appear at a department store and demonstrate cooking? Would she appear at a charity fund-raiser? Would she endorse this product, use this equipment on air, plug this restaurant? Early on, she made it a rule to say no to everything except charitable ventures. “I just don’t want to be in any way associated with commercialism (except for selling the book in a dignified way), and don’t want to get into the realm of being a piece of property trotting