Three Thumbs Up for Julia!….Raspberries for Julie & Nora
Anyone wanting a good movie for the weekend could do a lot worse than get a copy of Nora Ephron’s latest directorial offering “Julia & Julie”, based in part on Julia Child’s biographical “My Life In France”.
The movie is great viewing so long as it stays with the love story and career of Julia and husband, Paul Child, superbly portrayed by Meryl Streep, in one of her best-ever voice & character roles yet, paired once again with Stanley Tucci. Together they run away with the movie, way surpassing their last outing as Ice Queen and Creature in “Devil Wears Prada” (who remembers Anne Hathaway in that? As for Amy Grant… who she?). Don’t miss either, the brilliant cameo role of comedian Jane Lynch as Julia’s sister Dorothy. I’ve never seen her before but in my book she deserves an Academy Award for best supporting actor.
Unhappily Ephron has attempted to reprise her soggy romantic comedy successes “Sleepless in Seattle” and “You Got Mail” scripting in the parallel story of Julie Powell, who blogs her way daily for a year through Child’s recipes. The blog caught on and a book ensued. The twinning of Julia and Julie however, does not work. Viewer attention sags and the heart sinks the moment Julie and husband Eric come on screen. The conceit is contrived and comes across as politically correct Noo Yawkish mawkish, with trite feisty garnish à la NY Cité. “If I was a Republican I’d have fired you”, says Julie’s boss at the government office overlooking the ruin of the WTC, where Julie works counseling the bereaved of 9/11 having rang in sick to blog away to her fans. No wonder Julia, a class act, was not impressed and declined the suggested publicity involvement.
America’s Culinary Granny
For those of you who don’t know, Julia Child was America’s Elizabeth David, who turned the culinary desert that was the US in the 1950s on to French cuisine in the early 60s with her monumental 2-volume work ”Mastering the Art of French Cooking”. David to Child in food, is a bit like Robert Graves to Joseph Campbell in mythology. Your familiarity depends upon which side of the Atlantic you were brung up. Unlike David with her literary approach, bringing Mediterranean sunshine back into the life of austerity Britain in the 1950’s, and much of the English-speaking world, Julia Child took a more updated Beatonesque style, demystifying and introducing the ABCs of French cooking to servantless American housewives, just at the time Jackie Kennedy was bringing European chic to Washington. With her warbling fluting soprano, informal approach and signature “Bon Appétit!” she went on to a stellar TV career as America’s favourite culinary Granny.
À la Belle Vie, Julia….!
Both David (1913-92) and Child (1913-2004) had interesting provenance. Both came from privileged backgrounds and both in their particular ways exhibited considerable lust for life, though Child’s personal life was much less complex and a lot happier. Their influence is still felt to this day and it is interesting to speculate which of the two had the most profound effect. In terms of sheer numbers perhaps Julia’s influence was the greater. At American cuisine’s darkest hour, the Eisenhower years of canned vegetables, Jell-O, cake mixes, cotton wool bread and pre-packed TV dinners, her first book “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” changed Amderica forever, leading to more bestsellers and launching a series of syndicated TV cooking programs via Public Broadcasting. She became a national treasure and the world’s first celebrity chef.
Genial and klutzy she breezed through all complexities, for viewers and readers alike. In the TV interview launching her book the producer recalls wondering, “who is this madwoman cooking an omelet on a books-review program?”. She quickly became the darling of comedians and in the 1980s I remember watching Barry Humphries on TV doing his Dame Edna bit with American friends and one of them leaping to his feet, clapping hand to forehead exclaiming, “My God! Of course, Julia Child is a man!”.
Her father was a wealthy paleo-Republican businessman in Pasadena, Julia McWilliams was one of 3 very tall siblings. Asked about her achievements in life her mother said, “I gave birth to 18 feet of children”. At 6.2 ft Julia was the shortest of them. She had a classic private East Coast education. Showing no particular aptitude for a career until war came when, turned down by the WACs as too tall, she was introduced in Washington to Bill Donovan, who was setting up the Office for Strategic Services and employed as a cyphers clerk. Posted to OSS in Kandy, Ceylon in 1944 she met Paul Child, whose speciality was designing war rooms and chartmaking. Ten years older, a worldly-wise bon-vivant, artist and poet, several inches shorter than she, he was to be Julia’s friend, mentor, opening her eyes to food and other pleasures of life. In 1945 they were posted to Chungking, China’s wartime capital where they married. Paul Child was a witty, creative and literate man, loving, supportive and shrewd. Their marriage was a long and happy one. He died in 1994.
Epiphany in Rouen
Following a short post-war stint with the US Information Services (USIS) in Washington, Paul was posted to the US embassy in Paris in 1948. Julia’s first lunch in Rouen at La Couronne was a sublime revelation. She decided to master the art of French cooking, studying at the Cordon Bleu School and with a number of master chefs. In collaboration with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle she set up Les Trois Gourmettes, a school teaching French cooking to Americans and collaborated on a book intended to introduce French cuisine to American readers and which became “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”. Paul and Julia Child returned to the US in 1956 after several European USIS postings in Marseille, Bonn and Oslo, setting up house in Cambridge, MA. Her book was published in 1960 and her culinary star was set.
Of her, an unnamed colleague said, “here she is, in the cattiest back-bitingest industry there is and she’s risen above it. Nobody is mad at her. Her personal generosity is second only to the Pope’s, yet she is a guarded complex woman under the guise of a simple one. She has all this warmth, yet I do not know her years after working with her”.
Some mystery does stick to her OSS days. Was she a spy or just a simple office clerk? Intelligent and socially acceptable women occupied many important jobs with the highest level security clearance and misleadingly modest titles in Allied intelligence services during the war, so the answer is probably a bit of both.
What makes a “Classy Dame”?
And that voice…. what was that? Many Americans thought she was English, but no Brit ever would. Julia Child was among the last of that particular American phenomenon, the ‘Classy Dame’ spanning the era 1925-65. They all talked a bit funny, but were strong-minded independent women who appeared born to privilege and well-educated, even if they weren’t, and exhibited both a well-developed lust for life as well as a common touch, if not the Runyonesque. They didn’t have to be good, particularly if they were beautiful, but they were gallant. They were invariably Democrats. Perhaps because the writers and filmakers who extolled them were all Democrats. Call me prejudiced if you like, but I agree. The words ‘class’ and ‘humanity’ when combined and applied to Republicans seems to me a contradiction. It is possible for a Republican woman to be one or the other, but not both. The ‘Voice’ though, probably acquired on the East Coast, was not geographical, as in Bawston, or mid-Atlantic as some suppose. It probably came through the educational institutions wealthy Americans sent their children to in the first half of the 20th century. Classy Dames include Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Dunant of Marx Brothers fame; Mary Astor, Katherine Hepburn and Bette Davis are, Vassar’s Miss Jane of Beverly Hillbillies as portrayed by Nancy Kulp is; powerful women like Katharine Graham and heiresses like Doris Duke can be Classy Dames, but power mavens like Pamela Harriman cannot.
Julie Child, a class act, stuck with PBS, refused to endorse products and passed on Julie Powell. It’s a pity Nora Ephron didn’t do that last bit as well.
