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time being.” She was still vigorous, but the experience with Company persuaded her that if she wanted to keep going, she had to take her television career in a different direction. Like any artist, she was far more interested in the future than in settling back to read her old reviews. In 1980, she withdrew from the shelter of WGBH and began a long association with Good Morning America, her first regular commitment to commercial television. The two-and-a-half-minute cooking segments were enormously popular, and she relished the format for its efficiency, as well as for the huge new audience it delivered. By 1983, when shooting began on her next public television series, she had established her own production company, which meant she could exert much greater control over her own programs than she ever had before. She still thought of herself primarily as a teacher, but she was convinced that she had to package herself with far more glitz if her message was going to get out.

The idea for the new series, which she developed with director Russ Morash, was to offer not a cooking school show but a television magazine, glossy and expensive. Julia would do a bit of cooking, but she would also visit fisheries, farms, cheese makers, and vineyards, chat with guest chefs, and welcome guests to a luxurious party that would conclude each program. Home base for the show would be a twenty-five-acre ranch near Santa Barbara, and Julia would have hair, makeup, and wardrobe professionals outfitting her for each program. As a coproduction of WGBH and Julia’s own company, the new series would be, as her business manager put it, “quintessentially Julia’s own show.”

Dinner at Julia’s was a disaster, the only real embarrassment in her long career. Julia looked grotesque, her hair frizzed and her makeup garish, dressed up in caftans and evening pajamas, or rigged out for a barbecue in jeans, a vest, and a purple ten-gallon hat. Though she was never ill at ease, she had little of substance to do in her long stretches of time on camera. As she stood there listening to a winemaker or chocolatier describe how various products were made, she looked as if she were a cardboard replica of herself, deployed to lend the symbolic presence of Julia Child to an alien landscape. With the food, as always, she was restored to life, but the cooking sequences were designed to show only quick highlights from the preparation of a dish, not an entire recipe. Nothing that happened on-screen was alive or spontaneous; nature itself had been banished. Even the chanterelles in the mushroom-gathering sequence had been carefully tucked into the ground by hand, before the cameras arrived. The sumptuous mansion, the Rolls-Royce pulling up to the door, the staged parties with their make-believe guests pretending to have fun—it was a painful spectacle, and Julia’s fans were appalled. The reviews were lacerating, and the letters were worse. “To see this darling, feisty, gifted lady dressed up in cowboy clothes, tottering around in boots, swishing among rather wooden-looking ‘guests,’ and above all to see her modest, perfect little show given the Beverly Hills treatment, the ostentation, the waiters, the gratuitous free plugs for restaurants and grape-growers, cheese factories, and what not, well, it’s awful!” “I miss my old friend Julia.” “We want you to be human.” “How could you?”

Julia never apologized, any more than she did when she had to serve a soufflé fallen flat. “We had such a good time making those shows” was all she would say when a reporter asked her how she felt about the debacle. But it was another ten years before she returned to television with a new series, and this time she stayed on the sidelines. Cooking with Master Chefs featured sixteen chefs preparing meals in their home kitchens, and Julia—who called herself Alistaire Cookie and wished the series could be named Masterpiece Cooking—introduced each show. The only complaints about the program were that people wanted to see more of Julia. After that, she made sure to share the screen with her guests, acting