THE ALL-AMERICAN CHEF

A BIOGRAPHY OF JULIA CHILD MAKES IT CLEAR WHY SHE WAS, AND STILL IS, THE LIFE OF THE PARTY

Author: By Sheryl Julian, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, October 19, 1997

Page: P1

Section: Books

As for work, she wanted to be a writer but The New Yorker didn't seem to want her; she'd been let go from the W. & J. Sloane furniture company (``fired, and I don't wonder,'' she wrote later) and disqualified by the WAVES (``I was too long'').

So the 6-foot-2 Southern California girl joined the elite Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, manned with Ivy League graduates. She volunteered for India. China followed, then marriage to fellow OSS officer Paul Child, with whom she lived in Paris, Marseilles, Bonn, Washington, D.C., and Oslo.

By the time the American public fell in love with Julia Child, in the mid-1960s, she was about to turn 50 and traveled with an artsy, intellectual set. As Noel Riley Fitch writes in her honest, engaging biography, Child is witty, charming, a natural ham, and a good sport. Dogged determination went into ``Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I.'' Her success on TV was a matter of genius, of drawing on a lifetime of merriment and adventures. Fitch, author of ``Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties'' and ``Anais: The Erotic Life of Anais Nin,'' tells this story admirably.

From a young age, Julia Child was the life of the party. ``I thought they must be exaggerating because no one can be this interesting, this funny,'' said Rosemary Manell, who met Child in France in 1949 and became fast friends, ``and I couldn't believe it -- she was better even than I thought.''

Manell joined an illustrious group of friends and admirers headed by Paul Child, who was devoted to Julia for their entire married life. Ten years her senior, Paul Child was a worldly, artistic, largely self-educated man with a bleak childhood and the ``precise, almost effete, speech of an aesthete,'' writes Fitch. When he met Julia in India, she wasn't terribly sophisticated, he wrote to his twin, Charlie -- with whom he corresponded almost daily.

Paul knew a great deal about wine and food and Julia knew only how to satisfy her appetite. En route to their first post as husband and wife, they stopped in Rouen for sole meuniere, fish browned in Normandy butter, and ``I was hooked, and for life, as it turned out,'' said Julia.

Paul Child encouraged her interest in food, her classes at the Cordon Bleu (with 11 GIs), and the 10-year collaboration with Simone ``Simca'' Beck and Louisette Bertholle that became ``Mastering'' and changed the way Americans thought about food.

Paul Child's devotion, as Fitch describes it, is almost palpable. He once told a reporter that ``without Julia, I think I'd be a sour old bastard living off in a cave.'' He didn't like big parties the way she did, and struggled with melancholy. They never had children, which she regretted; there is some sense that Paul didn't want any because of his own traumatic childhood with no father and a struggling mother.

Julia McWilliams was born in Pasadena, Calif., into a patrician family. Her mother, ``Caro'' Weston McWilliams, came from old Massachusetts money; a Smith graduate, she enrolled her eldest daughter at birth. John McWilliams (Princeton '01) was a Republican businessman, a ``second generation pioneer,'' writes Fitch. Julia's parents were athletic and she was a tomboy always on the lookout for outrageous fun. She did mediocre academic work at Smith and didn't consider herself particularly intellectual -- at least not compared with Paul.

Yet this is what she brought to the study of French cookery. And to TV, she contributed what one critic called a Gracie Allen quality -- a brilliant sense of timing and charming malapropisms. Fitch has read every clip and every piece of correspondence. She had access to friends from Smith, the OSS, Paris days, and the State Department.

This makes Julia's evolution from high-security clerk to cook to writer to star an incredible adventure. But then every manuscript revision, television show, food organization, and professional relationship are also included, and that becomes arduous at moments. Yet it's all here, and Fitch is the ideal candidate to sort it out.

Fitch's research is based in part on Paul's correspondence with his brother and with Charlie's wife, Fredericka. When the Childs lived in Paris, Julia wrote to the late Avis DeVoto, a Cambridge resident who took the ``Mastering'' manuscript to Knopf after Houghton Mifflin paid $200 and then rejected it (ouch). When Julia moved to Cambridge, she wrote to Simca Beck, and though Paul never liked Beck, he didn't interfere with the famous collaboration (Bertholle was bought out by the others).

Fitch tackles many touchy things: the bitchy food world Julia Child entered; mistakes and plagiarism by her colleagues; the animosity toward Julia from French cooking teacher Madeleine Kamman; her mastectomy (``left breast off'' is what she wrote in her date book, and she didn't talk about it until years later, when Happy Rockefeller, Nelson's wife, did); and two facelifts -- or ``a little facial `touch-up,' '' in Paul's words.

Then there is Paul's moodiness and ``occasional disagreeable nature.'' Near the end of his life (he died in May 1994), he had become very grumpy and distant. After several strokes, the linguist lost his ability to recall a word.

Paul's complexity is here, but there is an emotional side to Julia that Fitch doesn't get close to. Near the end of the book, she allows someone else to say it. A friend who had traveled for many years with Julia told Fitch, ``I do not really know Julia.'' Another friend, a New Englander, explains that Julia has a Yankee spirit -- that whatever happens, you weep and carry on.

And carry on she has. Now 85, Julia is still holding court in her big house in Cambridge, which she has willed to Smith. ``May we go out like rockets, rather than delayed fuses,'' she once wrote to Beck. It seems that will be so.