Defending Julia
September 17, 2010
JULIA CHILD supposedly detested the word ‘housewife.’ She was a great cook, but was she a lousy wife? In this entry, a reader contends Mrs. Child emasculated her husband, Paul. Here, another reader disagrees.
MRS. P. writes:
Paul Child strikes me as a man who was his own person and not easily emasculated by anyone let alone his loving wife and closest friend Julia. The pair married in 1946. She was in her early thirties at the time. He was ten years her senior. When Paul passed away in 1994 after a long illness, the Childs had been married 48 years.
Compared to the younger Julia, Paul was sophisticated. He had traveled extensively and was a gourmet. It was Paul who introduced Julia to French cuisine which she immediately fell in love with. He was best known for being an artist. But he was also a photographer and a poet. Plus, he had been a teacher for several years prior to WWII. He held a Black Belt fourth class in Judo which was one of the subjects he taught. During WWII he worked for the OSS designing war rooms. This is when and where he met Julia as she worked for the OSS too. After the war he was assigned to the U.S. Information Agency. He retired in 1961 just in time to help Julia launch her TV career as the French Chef.
Paul took great delight in Julia’s stunning success. Not only did he support her in her career, he worked right along with her helping her manage it. Julia always thought of the two of them as a team. Paul participated in all the decisions pertaining to her career. He took photographs and created designs. He was the one who designed her famous kitchen which she later donated to the Smithsonian. Whatever there was to do, Paul was always willing to do it. So, he washed dishes and hauled equipment. He peeled and chopped food. He ran errands. He reviewed her mail and helped answer it. He went with her on publicity tours and to book signings. He was there by her side. It seemed they were always together. And when he was not needed he took time to enjoy his gardening, his painting, his poetry writing. Most of his poems were written about Julia. He was quite willing to let her be the one in the spotlight.
From Laura Shapiro’s “Just a Pinch of Prejudice.” : 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.
As to their politics, the Childs were Democrats. I guess in the eyes of some that would make both of them blatant socialists.
Yes, lovable Julia Child was “a good cook and had good tastes in food prep skills.” But she was more than that. She was an icon. She was a national treasure.
— Comments —
Hurricane Betsy writes:
Sad that so many of us have to learn how to cook from TV shows. Sadder yet that one who microwaved a living, struggling lobster to death in front of an audience is held in such esteem. And please don’t tell me it doesn’t suffer any more than a chicken executed by neck- chopping or -twisting. That is a baldfaced lie. If anybody reading this wanted to die, for whatever reason, which would you choose – microwaving or a sudden beheading?
Laura writes:
I’ve only seen snatches of Julia Child’s shows. I do like her cookbooks. By the way, I did not see the recent movie Julie and Julia for reasons I discuss here. The book on which the movie was based was repulsive.
Mrs. P. writes
I do not eat lobster. Boiling it while it is alive (or microwaving it) is offensive to me. My feelings probably are not justified.
I remember watching my paternal grandmother kill a chicken for Sunday dinner. I would have been five or six years old at the time. Usually she chopped off the chicken’s head. I remember how it would run around the yard for a few minutes afterwards in what I thought was agony. Later the delicious smell of Grandma’s fried chicken made me forget any pain the chicken might have suffered.
By the time my maternal grandmother passed away, she had turned chicken and dumplings, her signature dish, into an art form. But she did not know how to scramble eggs without making them tough. My mother did not know how to scramble eggs either. I was in my sixties before I learned how to scramble eggs properly. You use very low heat. I learned that from a cooking show on TV.
Laura writes:
There are many beings in this sad world on which I would like to expend my sympathies. Lobsters are not among them.
Randy B. writes:
As it turns out the investigation into the Child’s (Julia McWilliams) socialist activities had nothing to do with her party affiliation in the US, rather it went into her husband and his brother’s (Paul Cushing Child’s brother Charles) time and activities in France. It is also important to note that Julia Child (at that time) worked for the OSS, while Paul (in 1948) was offered a job with the U.S. Information Service in Paris. Had Paul taken the job with the USIS and been charged or even investigated for Communist activities, he would have just disappeared.
Yes, Julia and Paul were in fact staunch supporters of Kennedy and the Democrat’s, but they were not successful in covering their tracks when it came to the lunatic fringe with whom they had association throughout the Marxist progressive movement. I would have to imagine anyone that whoever idolizes Julia or the Child’s for their “falling all over themselves marital love affair,” would have to be nearly completely dismissive of the McCarthy investigations. But to ignore that every one of the people who McCarthy accused of being a Communist later came out, or were confirmed by practice and association to have proven the accusations true. I guess it’s possible that Julia and Paul were innocent of the accusations, but that defies the odds.
Back in McCarthy’s day it is estimated that over 20% of American US Senators and Congressmen were or had ties to Communism. Today it is estimated that over 55% of our US elected officials have those same ties. In the current Delaware Senate race the Democrat is an admitted Marxist, and he does not stand alone.
In a perverted attempt to be fair, any homage paid to Mrs. Child’s is restricted to her cooking. The funny thing is, it was her cooking and notoriety that saved her and her husband from being wrapped in a larger investigation.
