Julia Child_ A Life - Laura Shapiro [52]
Back in 1942, when Julia belonged to a team of volunteers who watched the skies over Southern California for enemy aircraft, a story in the local paper noted that members of the group habitually called each other “Mr.” or “Mrs.,” with one exception—“Julia McWilliams, whom everybody addresses as Julia.” Decades later, people were still addressing her as Julia. In person or on-screen, her whole countenance invited familiarity; barriers dropped away as if she had been a friend forever. Paul used to marvel at a phenomenon he witnessed again and again while they were living in Paris: he called it “la Julification des gens”—“the Julia-fication of everybody.” She had a way of hypnotizing people, he once said, “so they open up like flowers in the sun.” Nobody was insensible to her effect: one of the themes that ran through the piles and piles of mail was pure gratitude. “Thank you for being such a pleasure.” “Many thanks for bringing so much pleasure.” Or, as a thirteen-year-old put it, “I don’t know why, but whenever I see you it makes me feel good.” Hard as she worked on her image, in the end it was irrelevant. “You are so utterly real, I feel as if I know you,” a fan wrote. They did know her, perfectly.
Chapter 5
Real Male Men
JULIA LOVED PAUL, and she also loved their marriage, which seemed to her the highest form of life. “We are a team,” she often said. “We do everything together.” To be part of a team was her favorite way to work—she always referred fondly to the “team” of cooks and technicians involved in her television series, or the “team” of editors and artists producing a cookbook—and the team at the heart of it all was Julia and Paul. Whenever she talked about her career, she said “we,” not “I,” and she meant it literally. Paul attended all business meetings and participated in all decisions, helped rework the recipes for television, hauled equipment, washed dishes, took photographs, created designs and graphics, peeled and chopped and stirred, ran errands, read the mail and helped answer it, wrote the dedications in all her books, accompanied her on publicity tours and speaking engagements, sat with her at book signings, took part in most of her press interviews, provided the wine expertise, baked baguette after baguette during the French bread experiments, and in general made a point of being at her side on all occasions, professional or social. Yet he was self-sufficient. When he wasn’t needed—because Julia was at work in the kitchen with Simca, for instance, or rehearsing with Ruth Lockwood—he disappeared happily into his own world, painting and photographing and gardening. In the firmament of useful, devoted spouses who serve celebrity without a trace of malevolence, he was one of the few husbands.
Paul had no qualms about living with powerful, independent women. His mother had been a singer and soloist who worked for a living; and the first love of his life, Edith Kennedy, was a single mother some twenty years older than he who regularly attracted acolytes to her Cambridge salon. Julia had no such distinctions when he met her, but she was certainly bigger, and far more skilled at relating to people. Being married to a woman who outranked him physically and personally never bothered Paul, and he was deeply grateful for what Julia gave him. He knew he had a streak of grouchiness, that he tended to be solitary, and that Julia had warmed and gentled him. “I am continuously conscious of my good fortune in living with her,” he wrote to his brother from Paris in 1953. “I hate to think what a sour old reprobate I might have been without that face to look at.” Occasionally, after a taping of The French Chef, while Paul was collecting dirty