New doc shows Julia Child as a cultural trailblazer beyond food
Long before Martha Stewart and Sohla El-Waylly, there was Julia Child.
Child, who found her calling at age 50 as “The French Chef” (though she was neither), blazed a path not only for women as chefs but for the notion of cooking as a visual medium.
Directors Julie Cohen and Betsy West, the team behind the Ruth Bader Ginsburg film “RBG,” tell the story of the cookbook author and television personality in their new docubio, “Julia,” now playing in theaters.
The filmmakers started at the beginning and went to the source. Russ Morash, now 85, was a 27-year-old producer at Boston public-television WGBH when the phone rang one day in 1963. On the line was a woman, with a “gasping, strange, very distinctive voice,” who had written a cookbook titled “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” She requested to use a hot plate for her appearance on Professor P. Albert Duhamel’s book-review show. Child cooked an omelet and the phones lit up, a public broadcaster’s dream.
Cohen and West suggest that things did not come easy to the statuesque Julia McWilliams, who left a comfortable life in California to attend Smith College in Massachusetts and, during World War II, hopscotched through Asia as an OSS officer smitten with Paul Child, a diplomat 10 years her senior. Posted in France with her now-husband after the war — you’ll know this from the very first accordion notes — she became enthralled with French cooking and enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu.
With friends Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, she set about laboring over “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” sharing edits by mail. Alfred A. Knopf published “Mastering” in 1961, two years after Houghton Mifflin rejected the manuscript, claiming that it would “prove formidable to the American housewife.”
“The American housewife,” in those days, was being pushed to convenience through TV dinners and Jell-O molds. Child brought a whiff of flair and endearingly awkward theatrics while demystifying continental cooking, first on PBS, then on ABC, and back to PBS. All the while, she was a regular on the talk-show circuit.
Child achieved the pinnacle of 1970s pop culture on the night of Dec. 9, 1978, when Dan Aykroyd, in character wearing a brown wig and pink blouse on “Saturday Night Live,” demonstrated how to debone a chicken, slipped with the knife, and bled to death — remaining upbeat all the while.
The Childs were watching “SNL” that night, unaware of the skit, says her great-nephew Alex Prud’homme, who says in “Julia” that she was flattered at the parody. Besides Prud’homme, whose books inspired the movie, the directors interviewed such food figures as Ruth Reichl, Sara Moulton, Jacques Pepin, Jose Andres, Marcus Samuelsson and Ina Garten.