Julia Child: Just a Pinch of Prejudice

When Julia Child’s husband, Paul, began planning his retirement from the Foreign Service, they decided what would suit them best would be a quiet, companionable future in Cambridge. Since 1948 they had been moving from post to post in Europe, and Julia was feeling the stress of being pulled in opposite directions. Paul’s job required out-of-town trips and a constant round of consular events, and he hated to go places without her; Julia hated to make him unhappy, so she often went along. But sometimes she just couldn’t bear to leave her work—the painstaking research, writing, and recipe testing she was putting into the sprawling manuscript that would become Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She would send him off alone, feeling horribly guilty about it. “If I was able to put in as much work as I would like to, we would soon be having a divorce, I fear,” she told one of her French coauthors, Simone Beck, who was universally known as Simca. Julia was exaggerating the potential for divorce, but not the painful sense of conflict.

Once they were settled in Cambridge, where the casual, intellectual atmosphere appealed to them, things would be different. Paul would paint, Julia would give cooking lessons—perhaps two a week. If the book became a success, maybe she could break into magazine food writing. Paul could take the photographs for her stories. Life would be simple and harmonious.

Then came The French Chef, shattering any dreams of domestic balance. In 1963, just two years after they arrived, Julia’s television series debuted, and she became a sensation. Her new career crashed like a meteor into the center of their marriage. New roles sprang up and grabbed them—she the star and he the support staff—but they were determined to maintain what Julia called “that lovely intertwining of life, mind, and soul that a good marriage is.” “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, and in general made a point of being at her side on all occasions, professional or social. When he wasn’t needed, 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. Every morning they liked to snuggle in bed together for a half hour after the alarm went off, and at the end of the day, Paul would read aloud from the New Yorker while Julia made dinner. “We are never not together,” Paul said once, contentedly.

But the real reason their marriage continued to flourish despite the frantic demands they placed on it was that they came up with a very traditional arrangement, albeit with a twist of their own. Paul and Julia agreed to live one life, and that life would be hers.