American culinary world. Beard, a homosexual who neither hid nor flaunted his orientation, was widely recognized as the nation’s leading authority on good cooking when Julia set out on her career. When she, Paul, and Simca went to New York for the launch of Mastering, Beard invited them to his house in Greenwich Village; and Julia very quickly recognized a soul mate. It was not an obvious match: Beard was self-taught, not professionally trained; his expertise was in American cookery, not French; and besides being homosexual, he was so extremely fat that he had none of the physical charms Julia normally liked in a man. But the two of them forged a bond that lasted until his death in 1985. They were both magnetic people, and when they turned that magnetism upon each other, they were captured simultaneously. Both were sharp, funny, and unpretentious; and both of them felt the same way about cooking—that it was endlessly and profoundly fascinating, that it deserved all the time and intelligence they could command, and that it was the greatest fun imaginable. A few months after they met, he was urging her to consider teaching at his school and touring with him so they could give joint lecture-demonstrations; she in turn wanted him to come to Boston and meet the people at WGBH—perhaps he could become involved in her new television series. “I would very much welcome the idea of doing something together,” she told him. “I sense une grande sympathie spirituelle!” Beard was Julia’s model for how to be a professional and how to be famous. She never forgot how generous he was when she arrived on the scene in 1961, a potential rival whom he greeted enthusiastically and introduced to everybody. “I think he has done much to set the tone of friendliness among cooking types, which is so different from that sniping and back-biting that goes on in France,” Julia told M. F. K. Fisher. “Jim is such a hard worker, has such a vast store of knowlege in that enormous frame. There is outwardly some bluff in him, but I think that is because he is very tender inside.” She used to say he was “cozy”—one of her favorite qualities in a man.
Julia rarely commented on Beard’s homosexuality; she was far more concerned about the various health problems associated with his weight. Yet her homophobia came and went during their long friendship, apparently at random. “Good that people are out of the closet at last!” she noted in her journal in 1974, upon learning that an acquaintance was openly gay. “Makes things easier all around.” A year later, she was agitating to keep “them” out of the culinary business. But by the 1980s, when the AIDS crisis began to unfold, the horror of what was happening to people she knew, and people she loved, dealt a significant blow to her longtime prejudice. “Last year my husband and I stood by helplessly while a dear and beloved friend went through months of slow and frightening agony,” she told a crowd at Boston Garden in 1988 during an AIDS benefit sponsored by the American Institute of Wine and Food. “But what of those lonely ones? Those impoverished ones with no friends or family to ease the slow pain of dying? Those are the people we’re concerned about this evening. And food is of very special importance here. Good food is also love.” Her politics, her passions, and her fundamental decency were coming together at last. Some time after that, when a woman friend told her she was in love and about to marry another woman, Julia blanched for a second and then congratulated her warmly. What was important was the team.
Chapter 6
I Am Getting Very Tired of Kiwi Fruit
JULIA WAS SO enthusiastic about the idea of the National Beef Cook-Off, an annual cooking contest sponsored by the beef industry, that, in 1979, she agreed to be a judge and flew to Omaha. There were forty-nine beef dishes in competition, each a prizewinner at the state level, and the judges sat in a closed-off dining room tasting and discussing two dishes every half hour for two days. At 10:45 a.m. the first day, Julia finally tasted something she liked (Greek