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{SPEAKER name="Rayna Green"}

Hi, I'm Rayna Green.

I'm a curator at the National Museum of American History and one of the two co-curators of Julia Child's Kitchen [[laughter]] at the Smithsonian.

[00:00:10]
Julia's kitchen has been up since 2002, when we collected it in 2001, just before Julia left her kitchen. "I downsized", as she'd like to say, instead of "retired", and went out to Santa Barbara.

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And the kitchen has been up except for the two--uh--years in which we were closed for renovations. But, I have to tell you,

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and when I see the crowd here today, I am probably not telling you anything.

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We've begun calling the kitchen the "eighth station of the cross". [[audience laughter]]

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It's extraordinary. People make the religious pilgrimage. They've been making it since 19--since 2002.

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Every day the kitchen is jammed and people always ask me the question, and I think we will sort of talk about that when we talk about this wonderful photograph of Julia.

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What is it? I mean--the--a 6 foot 2, actually she was 6 foot 3. She lied about her height most of her life. [[laughter]]

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The official figure was 6 foot 2, but she was 6 foot 3. And her sister, if you've seen the movie, Dorothy or Dort as everybody called her, was actually 6'5", not 6'4", so we got

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Actually, we got some, we got some tall -- an unlikely star. She was not a great beauty although if you see earlier pictures of her, she is really quite stunning

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and you can understand why a 5 foot 9 tall child was enchanted with her. But she is a most unlikely star in America.

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She was gawky. She was froggy voiced.

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Everybody who comes in the gallery by the way does the Julia voice, you know.

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It's become an icon of American humor and life. Everyone knows that extraordinary voice. A very unlikely star.

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Yet, the day she appeared in a dorky little talking head on one of the first education--we called it educational TV back then at WGBH in Boston.

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The producer of that show, Russ Morash, who's the current producer of This Old House, and other things that you--

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He went on to--he was the science guy at WGBH and he went on, besides producing all the series of The French Chef, went on to produce other wonderful things.

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But educational TV was, as Julia told us, just a bunch of talking heads. You know, it was book reviews.

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And she went on to do, they asked her to do, a book review of her new and very important book Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

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Which by the way right now is in its 32nd week of being on the Top Ten list in the New York Times, go figure.

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She did this little book review and she thought she'd just jazz it up, a little bit.

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So, instead of just taking the book, she took a wonderful French copper bowl, a dozen eggs, a large whisk which becomes almost an important icon in American life.

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When Julia started using the whisk on TV, by the way, Chuck Williams of Williams-Sonoma said she made him a fortune. [[laughter]]

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Because all these things he was trying to sell around America and weren't sell--they weren't selling, suddenly became a hot hit.

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She made an omelet right on WGBH and Russ Morash, the producer, told me that the phones--they had a switchboard then, the switchboard lit up and it never stopped. And thus a star was born.

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What Julia did for public television in America, which is sort of not known, really was to reform this very nerdy, dorky educational TV medium, into that wonderful combination, which every teacher knows well,

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Which is extraordinary entertainment, but with knowledge and with enormous flare.

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And she became the unlikely TV star of of early public television and went on to write book after book after book and become a real star on live--uh-- cooking demonstrations and everything.

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She was on the Today show for years, excuse me, Good Morning America, oh kill me.

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She became a public presence in America. And what you see on the TV, on the reruns, on all the videos in the hundreds and hundreds of photographs of her and you see it in this place,

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you see somebody who transformed an America that was used to these--with her great teaching skills and that's what she said she always was, by the way, not a chef, not a cook, but a teacher.

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And she transformed it with her teaching skills into what we now know is perhaps the monster [[laughter]] the Food Network.

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Most people will tell you, most of these star chefs and everybody will tell you, Julia did it. It was Julia.

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Without that presence and showing people what could be done on television and what could be done through live media. She made that come alive.

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And she came onto public television, in the public eye at a time when Americans really in the post World War II generations were not very interested in foreign influences on America.

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They were not interested in much of anything that didn't come out of a box or out of a silver tray that you defrosted and put in an oven.

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They really were very resistant to all of these things that Julia in her enormous enthusiasm for, not only for the France that she came to love, but for the food that she came to love.

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And yet she turned it around at a moment in American life right around 1961, '63.

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The World's Fair in Long Island features a gr--the French pavilion, which turned into that--the Renaissance of French restaurants in New York.

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The Kennedys are in the White House with their passion for things European. And yet she took that and turned it into the public face of what American cooking could be.

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And went on after that to really focus on, not only on American cooking, but on the great cooks in America from all kinds of communities.

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And transformed all sorts of things.

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And what we see in this portrait. And I love this-- is a classic photo by David Marlin in 1971.

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This is when she's doing the second series of the French Chef, in color, although his portrait is in black and white. He was a cameraman for NBC and he was filming a--a news story on Julia.

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Some of you may remember Hughes Rudd, the distinguished commentator. Some of you are old enough to--[[laughter]] I do.

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And he as a cameraman he often took stills of his--his uh, the people he was shooting.

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So he took this little, it's really a little candid still of Julia as everybody knows her.

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The wonderful thing about Julia as everybody knows her on TV. She is [[laughs]] tasting the vinaigrette, she's tasting the salad dressing. This was an episode on salad.

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And the mixed salad, the--that we all now know as common. By the way, the salads and--well, hmm, '71, they might have transformed,

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but it was pretty much iceberg lettuce and that ghastly orange stuff that you get out of [[laughs]] a bottle. Which I actually have a little secret love for occasionally.

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She is tasting the back of the salad--as French home home cooks do, by dipping the end of the spoon into the dressing and tasting it.

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Of course, the other thing that people loved about Julia was that she was not above just sticking her finger in, two fingers, as chefs do it actually, and tasting it.

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She was, on television and live, what she was in person. Signing your book, thousands and thousands would come to her and do that.

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But she was the same on the television screen and in--as she was in person.

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And I've really over these year now, having watched people's reactions to her and been with her with crowds, watched that--that sort of marvelous moment in which the Julia that everyone approaches with, 'oh my goodness it's Julia Child!' you know,

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and she is licking her fingers in the salad dressing, is this moment at which you see the star become a part of the world that she helped make.

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People who just loved food and loved what she was doing. And had an incredibly good time at it.

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And I think in this little picture you can see all of that. It encapsulates in many ways just exactly what interested people about Julia. Because she was able to convey that passion and that sort of goofy craziness.

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We don't have one of the other classic pictures of her, of course, of which there are hundreds. Mostly taken by her husband Paul, by the way, the lovely photographer.

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Most of the ones that I've seen on the set were taken by Paul. If you've seen the movie, it's a pretty true picture of their relationship.

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She always said that without him there would be no Julia Child.

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He would take the pictures of her, of course, in everybody's image of Julia as tipsy chef, you know. Drinking out of the wine glass.

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On the early shows by the way, it wasn't wine, it really wasn't wine on the first part of the French Chef it was gravy master, this horrible concoction of gravy master and water that looked like red wine on TV.

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They would use water for the white wine. When they went to color she went to real wine! [[laughter]]

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She was able to do that. But Julia was never tipsy on the shows. She was just full of that kind of crazy goofiness all along. Paul said that she was a real ham. And she was.

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She--everything was, not done for effect, it was because it entertained her. And that's another one of the secrets of stars that we know.

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If they're happy, you're gonna be happy. You're gonna love it. And in that moment, she can do something strange.

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She can, as the mythology says, she never dropped the chicken and picked it back up. She did drop things from time to time, and people loved that about her.

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Or she'd spill something on the stove, and she would look out at the audience to say, you know, don't worry. You're alone in the kitchen, you know [[laughter]]

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Or, 'whoops, I made a mistake', you know. I love the ones where she makes the omelet and it sort of flops over. And she just tosses it in back of her. [[laughter]]

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By the way, under the table there, what you don't see, is the staff, who, in the old cooking show, they are sitting on the floor ready to hand her something or ready to catch the flying omelet, or the batter that goes backwards.

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But she is having a great time. She is exactly where she wants to be. And the cameraman and the photographers who shot her, shot exactly those moments over and over and over again.

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And examining all those portraits really does tell us that they're true. I mean, because we don't see any variation in them. We see someone having a wonderful time and enjoying what she's doing.

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From the simplest thing, making a salad, to something much more complicated.

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By the way, were any of you doing that thing in August after the movie came out, where you--they were--people were having boeuf bourguignon parties all over the country. [[laughter]]

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People would call us and say, and email us and say we're having a having a boeuf bourguignon party. God knows in August why anybody would want to make boeuf bourguignon is beyond me.

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But nevertheless, in homage to Julia she loved that and conveyed that passion, I think. And that's what we see in these wonderful photographs. It's what we see in every video of her. It is that animation that comes from the joy of doing what she was doing.

[00:14:02]
Which was teaching. In that sense, there is no um--

Transcription Notes:
Could probably use some more timestamps