Sara B. Franklin Transcript
Kerry Diamond:
Hi, everyone. You are listening to Radio Cherry Bombe, and I'm your host, Kerry Diamond, coming to you from Newsstand Studios at Rockefeller Center in the heart of New York City. I'm the founder and editor of Cherry Bombe Magazine.
My guest today is Sara B. Franklin, author of the new book, “The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America.” Judith is best known in the food world for her work with Julia Child, Edna Lewis, Madhur Jaffrey, Claudia Roden, and many others. She helped usher in the modern cookbook era and changed the culinary world in the process. Her influence was not limited to cookbooks. She saved Anne Frank's diary from the slush pile. Can you believe that? And worked with the likes of John Updike and Anne Tyler. Sara B. Franklin is a teacher at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, and she is also the author of “Edna Lewis: At the Table with an American Original.” Sara joins me in just a minute to talk about Judith and the email that led to their friendship and in turn, this book. Stay tuned for Sara.
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Some housekeeping, Cherry Bombe is on the road. We're hosting eight events this summer and traveling from Portland Maine to Portland Oregon with lots of stops in between. Head to cherrybombe.com to check out our events calendar and see if we're coming to a town near you, or maybe our travel schedules will overlap. That would be fun. This Thursday, June 6th team Cherry Bombe will be at Alma Cafe in New Orleans as part of our Sit With Us dinner series with OpenTable. Head to Alma Cafe, that's A-L-M-A on the OpenTable app or website, click on the experiences tab, and get a ticket. Come solo and sit with us or come with some friends and we'll seat you together. It's going to be a fun night with beautiful food and all of you beautiful people.
Now, let's hear from today's guest. Sara B. Franklin, welcome back to Radio Cherry Bombe.
Sara B. Franklin:
I'm so glad to be here, Kerry.
Kerry Diamond:
You have been working on this book, “The Editor,” for a long time.
Sara B. Franklin:
Very long time.
Kerry Diamond:
As I said in the intro, the book is all about Judith Jones, someone you have known and admired for a very long time. So I thought we would start with how Judith even came to be someone that you knew about.
Sara B. Franklin:
Judith Jones is someone I met in January of 2013, and it's a bit of a story about serendipity, right place, right time, but also following your nose. So I was a beginning graduate student, a reluctant academic, trying to figure out what to do with my life, and I had gotten into a PhD program in Food Studies at New York University, and I was really unsure if I wanted to keep going. I hate academia. I now say as a person with a PhD who's been teaching for 11 years, but-
Kerry Diamond:
I was just going to say you're a teacher, a professor.
Sara B. Franklin:
Yes. I do love the teaching part, but the dry writing, not so much for me, then or now. I was taking a class in oral history up at Columbia, which is the clearinghouse for training for oral history in the country. And as you may be, I'm always the food person in a non-food space. People always think of me as a bit of a curiosity, and in academia, food is still looked down upon. It's as not serious stuff.
Kerry Diamond:
Really?
Sara B. Franklin:
Oh, absolutely. It's women's stuff, it's literature light. It's to every day. It's not philosophical enough. It's not abstract enough. You think about any kind of snootiness you could project onto the learned world and the ivory tower and food receives that kind of skepticism.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, I thought that would've changed by now.
Sara B. Franklin:
It is changing, but it has not changed. One day during break, my teacher who ran the center at the time was looking through her emails and that center received voluminous requests asking them how various people could do oral histories of particular individuals or potentially of whole staffs or institutions. They wanted to archive the history. I was peering over her shoulder. She wasn't listening to me while I spoke. She was checking her email and I was trying to get her attention, and so I just started looking at her emails while I kept trying to get her attention. I saw in the subject line, Judith Jones oral history, and admitting something I should never have done, but I'm so glad that I did and I read the first few lines of the body of the email which was the Julia Child Foundation recognizing that Judith Jones had recently retired from Knopf about a year and a half before. That time was of the essence.
She was in her late 80s, and they understood that she was really an American treasure who had not been spoken to about the breadth and depth of her career, certainly for their interests, particularly in the realm of food and her impact on discovering Julia Child. So I'm reading this email over my professor's shoulders and trying to commit the email address to memory because Judith at this point was something of a hero to me already. I had found her memoir, “The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food,” which was published in 2007 on a random bookstore table in Cambridge Massachusetts. I was someone who was interested in food. I picked it up, I bought it on a whim. I devoured it in two days, and Judith had really been someone that I wanted to model my life though that was a secret to me. After that, someone who was involved in both books and food and carved a life out of those twinned passions.
Kerry Diamond:
And that was the first time you learned about her when you picked up that book?
Sara B. Franklin:
I had never heard her name before, but I quickly found that she had edited all the cookbooks that I was obsessed with, that I had learned to cook from, which I think is true for many of us that we know the cookbook authors and the books themselves, but not necessarily about Judith Jones.
Kerry Diamond:
So the book that you picked up was “The Tenth Muse.” Did you pick it up because you had an interest in food?
Sara B. Franklin:
Yes.
Kerry Diamond:
Or was it just a bookstore situation you thought it looked interesting?
Sara B. Franklin:
I was deeply interested in food. I had grown up with a second wave feminist mother who worked and really resented having to cook, spent as little time as she could on preparing dinner. My dad worked here in the city, got home late, so she had to do all that work. My whole family liked to eat, but no one enjoyed the act of cooking, and so I taught myself by watching the Food Network. This was the heyday of the Food Network in the '90s, but also by picking up the few cookbooks we had in the house, which were things like the “Moosewood” cookbook, the “Fannie Farmer” cookbook, “The Joy of Cooking,” real classics. That's how I taught myself through experimentation, food television and these couple of cookbooks.
Kerry Diamond:
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You are looking over your professor's shoulder doing something you maybe shouldn't have been doing.
Sara B. Franklin:
And I see this query from the Julia Child Foundation asking for help with finding a way to craft an oral history or approach Judith Jones about an oral history of her life. And so my professor finally looks up at me and she says, "Oh, you're a food person. Maybe you'd be interested in this," and by now I'd already been eavesdropping or whatever the visual equivalent of eavesdropping is. I had committed the sender's email address to memory, and as soon as class was over, I sent him an email and I said, "Look, I have no chops, but if I can do anything, be a research assistant, I just want to be part of this project. You're talking about my hero here."
Kerry Diamond:
Wait, we have to stop for one second because this is so funny that that's how-
Sara B. Franklin:
That's how it happened.
Kerry Diamond:
All of this came to be.
Sara B. Franklin:
Yeah, that was fall of 2012. I had no business knowing it, but I knew that I would regret it if I didn't. I just knew in my core that if I didn't do something and someone else got this gig, I was going to be upset. Three months later, I had had several interviews and I had been green lit to run the project on the one condition that Judith liked me, and so I was given her phone number. There was no intermediary her, I was given her phone number and told to call her. And anyone who's ever spoken to Judith Jones, she was this tiny woman, five feet tall, very slender, but she had a very throaty deep, very sexy voice, even in her late 80s. So she picks up her phone with this low voice. I was completely shocked that this was what she sounded like. She said, "Oh, I've been expecting your call," and I'm of course, shaking on the other end of the line.
And she invited me to her apartment for tea in about a week's time, and we had a first date, a professional first date. She fed me tea and cookies. I mean, it felt grandmotherly, but Judith was no grandmother figure. I mean, she was this brilliant, totally disarming, mischievous worldly figure even in her late 80s. And at the end of about an hour of talking about leftovers and food and travel, she said, "I'll work with you." And two months later, in the spring of 2013, we started recording oral histories together, and that took about six months.
Kerry Diamond:
Go back to not grandmotherly, was she not warm?
Sara B. Franklin:
She was very warm, but I think she was reserved. She kept her guard up, and I think that was after decades of working in publishing, which when she began was very much a man's world and she was a very private person. She could also be a very intimate and connected person, but she first wanted to know she could trust you and she needed for her own trust to be earned, and so I think she was on her guard a little bit. This young woman has been sent by a foundation that she didn't have a strong relationship with. She was very, very skeptical of the food scene as a whole. She distrusted people that ran with any kind of a pack and weren't individuals and sort of dipping in and out of different things that they were interested in. I think she worried about people lumping themselves in with a group identity rather than asserting themselves for who they were and how they wanted to be.
You're right, it's a very loaded term. I think when I think of grandmotherly, I think of soft, threatening, maybe even a bit of a shrinking violent, not going to assert their big presence towards you. Those are the kind of grandmothers I grew up with, certainly not everyone did. Judith was in your face with her curiosity, with her laughter, with her sensuality, and to see someone that vivacious and that embodied in their late 80s, a woman in particular, was not something I had experienced in my life to date, and so I quickly developed something of a crush on her. I mean, I really say I fell in love with her in quick succession and I felt very fortunate that we got to spend this time together.
Kerry Diamond:
So she'd give you tea and cookies, but maybe not a hug?
Sara B. Franklin:
It took a long time to get a hug. That took months, Kerry. It was a long time before there was hugging.
Kerry Diamond:
We have so much to talk about. So maybe let's start at the beginning of her professional career, like you just said, and you say this in the book as well, publishing was a man's world.
Sara B. Franklin:
Publishing was absolutely a man's world, and it's so interesting. So in 1942, she was a freshman at Bennington College, World War II was raging overseas. The whole of the publishing world, the whole of all American industries had really been gutted by men shipping off overseas, and so publishing like other industries had asked women to step in. And so Judith was from a fairly well-connected New York family, and she knew that she was interested in books and literature, and through a number of family connections, she was offered a winter position at Doubleday here in New York. And there were no women editors on staff at the time. There were lots of secretaries, but there were not women on staff doing the editorial work.
And one thing that was really interesting up at Bennington College, they had this winter recess that was prolonged during the war because it was very expensive to heat the students, and so as part of the war effort, they give a longer dismissal. So Judith had this period of months from January to March of 1942 in which she worked in this building, and there was such desperation in the publishing house. Doubleday was a force in publishing at the time, it was the largest publisher in English language, and it very quickly became the largest publisher in the world by the time the war was over. And she was handed manuscripts with no experience or expertise, and told to basically figure it out. And so she learned to edit completely based on intuition and guts. She learned to edit completely based on intuition and guts. Marking up manuscripts, sending them back to her boss who barely glanced over them, and then sent them back to the author to make revisions. As Judith told me, she quickly realized she was good at this and she loved it. She had a period of work like that. Throughout her college years, she tried at one point working with newspapers and she hated it, in part, she said, because they called all the girls boys, and she really did not like that there was this sort of stereotype of helpers in the newsroom being young boys scurrying about, and she really strongly identified as a woman. She was quite feminine, very elegant. She was very, very beautiful.
Kerry Diamond:
I was curious why she didn't gravitate toward newspapers or magazines. I mean, later in life she wrote for magazines like the original Saveur and Vogue, even.
Sara B. Franklin:
Yes. I think the speed of newspapers and magazines was uninteresting to her. She wanted to go deep. She was someone who really wanted to go deep with working with authors, with cultivating voice, with sort of getting all she could out of a story, and the speed of news magazines a little bit inhabit a middle ground there, but newspapers in particular, especially a daily, that is a different kind of transmitting information, and it didn't give her the kind of depth and richness that I think she always wanted in terms of being someone who facilitated storytelling.
Kerry Diamond:
Let's jump to the Paris years.
Sara B. Franklin:
Yes.
Kerry Diamond:
How did she wind up in Paris?
Sara B. Franklin:
So 1948, she's involved in a very complicated love affair with a poet who had been her professor at Bennington and then came to Doubleday. He had first been published at Knopf, where Judith would later spend almost her entire career. He came to Doubleday in large part because she was there and she became his handler, but he was really manipulating her and she was well aware of it. And she found publishing really dull. She found the culture around publishing dull, she knew she was not being listened to, that regardless of how good she may have been at her job, the only people that authors were listening to were male editors. She wanted to have more sway over her own life. There was a lot of pressure on her from her family to get married. Her sister had gotten married. She wanted to get out.
So her cousin was actually going on honeymoon steaming across the Atlantic and Judith decided to request an unpaid leave of absence from Doubleday and use her cousin as a sort of chaperone. She knew her parents would be more supportive of the trip and also give her a little loan so she could afford to go if she had quote unquote "adult supervision." That's how she ended up in Paris in the summer of 1948. It was meant to be a three-week vacation. She ended up staying for nearly three years.
Kerry Diamond:
Tell us about her career while she was over there.
Sara B. Franklin:
So most of her time in Paris was not spent in a career. It was spent sort of apprenticing herself to life and culture, the sort of flowering of post-war music, literature, and food, really importantly.
Kerry Diamond:
I think you gave some of our younger listeners a great way to explain things to their parents. "I'm apprenticing myself to life, mom and dad."
Sara B. Franklin:
I mean, I think it was so wise, right? You have to remember, this is before the rise of things like MFA programs, so if you had an interest in arts and culture, you had to find a way to put yourself in the center of it. And Paris at the time was the center of it. It was very cheap to be there in the post-war years. Things, food, heat, apartments were not cheap, but it was cheap to get there and it was cheap to simply sort of be there. Coffee, wine, you could sit at the cafes. Also, being an attractive woman, she was having truly most of her meals and drinks bought for her. She was a tremendous flirt. Everyone who knew her in her youth talks about it. She really knew how to work her sexuality. It was sort of part of her playing the system.
And so her very first boyfriend there, who was a member of the French Resistance, Pierre Sierra was his name, taught her how to cook in his tiny, tiny, tiny Parisian kitchen. And she talked about falling in love with him and falling in love with cooking at once. That the sensuality of that experience, the intimacy of the smells, the taste, the heat, the closeness of the kitchen, was just completely transfixed her. Woke her up from this kind of post-war malaise that was sweeping across affluent New York, which was really her milieu that she grew up in. That romance eventually ended. He was sleeping around and she got fed up. She was really looking for someone to build a life with there, and she was very cognizant of that.
She ended up losing her passport. She was sitting on a park bench in the garden one day, and she left her purse with her ticket home and her passport on the back of a bench. She sort of dozed off. She had had a lot of wine with lunch. It was sunny, it was a beautiful day. She knew she didn't want to go home. She was having a wonderful time in Paris. And by the time she came to, she started to walk away and realized she had left her purse and she went back and the purse was gone.
And so there were a period of a couple of weeks where she was scrambling to try to get a new passport and writing home sort of frantically to her parents saying, "Really what I want to do is stay," and they were saying, "You must come home." It was totally improper to be staying in Paris. She had no job, she had no chaperone. What are you doing over there? And she used it, to her credit, she really figured out how to use it to get permission to stay. Her parents wired her a little more money in the interim, and by the time she had sort of put her foot down and said, "I'm staying," and a new passport had come in, she had quickly moved on to looking for new jobs.
And one of them was with Weekend Magazine, which was a publication of Stars and Stripes, that was a U.S. military newspaper, and she cold called them sort of out of desperation. She had been given a list of people in media. They sort of said, "Well, we're busy." They had just moved from Germany to Paris, a bunch of guys working in a newsroom. They were pretty overwhelmed with a glossy weekly. "We could use a little help, so why don't you come in and interview?" And that very first day, she met the man who would become her husband, and that became the reason that she ended up staying in Paris for almost three years. She was deeply, deeply in love.
Kerry Diamond:
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Do you think she lost her passport on purpose?
Sara B. Franklin:
Good question. Knowing Judith, there's a pretty good chance that there was a subconscious intention behind that. So Weekend Magazine also folded pretty quickly. They couldn't keep up with the production costs, they weren't great business people. Good journalists, but not particularly good business people. So both she and the man who would later become her husband were out of a job. Again, sort of serendipitously, her former boss at Doubleday, Ken McCormick, wrote a letter. He knew she was in Paris. He had passed through in the summer of '48. They had had a lunch together.
Doubleday was opening a Parisian outpost for the first time. They wanted to scout European talent and they also wanted to be able to facilitate travel for their American authors overseas. He knew that Judith was good, but he also knew he couldn't put her in charge. She was a woman and she wasn't experienced enough. And so he appointed a male editor and he asked that editor to take Judith out to eat for them to meet because he thought Judith would make a terrific secretary for him, but he didn't really give him an option, and Judith got a job at Doubleday in Paris.
Kerry Diamond:
And that leads us, of course, to Anne Frank. Tell us the Anne Frank story.
Sara B. Franklin:
So one very cold winter afternoon in 1950, Judith was left alone in the Parisian office. Her boss went out to lunch and he left her with a stack of manuscripts he had already decided Doubleday should pass on. One of them was the galley of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” which was already being published in French and German, but had been rejected by a number of English-language publishers. And Judith was really taken by the photograph, that iconic image that we all know of Anne Frank's face on the cover. Her boss was nowhere to be found. He often went out for long, booze-fueled lunches. She knew she had time. She took it over by the fire and sat down and proceeded to read the whole thing.
In her telling, she was moved to tears and when he came back, she stood up and said, "You have got to publish this book." And he was sort of incredulous and he said, "What? That book by that kid?" And she said, "You need to send it to New York. Doubleday should publish this book." And it was really an affront to his authority, and she knew that, but to his credit, he did give it a second look, and he did decide to send it on to New York. Two years later, Doubleday published The Diary of Anne Frank in English, and it remains a publishing phenomenon all over the world. It is one of the most read pieces of published literature, certainly of memoir, in terms of Holocaust history, Jewish history, but also as a woman's voice, as a girl's voice that was given credit in public life. It was a really early example of that.
So it tells you a lot about Judith. That as a young woman herself who was displeased with the constraints of her life, with what femininity and womanhood in the post-war years had to offer her with a quite privileged upbringing, she knew what was expected, which was a society life to become a wife and a mother and to really hang up her smarts and not show them. That she saw something in Anne Frank's voice and in her story which demonstrated a kind of moxie and guts and a desire to be seen and heard that I think connected the two of them right off the bat. Judith was not given credit for her role in that book until much, much later. And in fact, when she came back to New York a couple of years later, they refused to give her a job even though they recognized that she had been responsible for sending the manuscript back to New York for that second look.
Kerry Diamond:
You wrote something interesting, I think it was maybe in your intro, that ultimately with The Tenth Muse, you were left somewhat unsatisfied because you felt that she didn't explore much of her interior life. Now that you've had the opportunity to go through all of her personal papers... And we should actually talk about that, because people might be wondering how you know all these things about Judith. You had her own writings, three books that she had done herself, articles that she had published, but that's not enough to write...
Sara B. Franklin:
Not even remotely close. Not even close.
Kerry Diamond:
... an autobiography on. Tell us how you know so much about Judith.
Sara B. Franklin:
So there were the six months of our formal work together, which always began by cooking lunch together. She insisted. I later learned it was something she did with a lot of her authors, as well. I think it was a kind of foreplay, honestly. She understood that people loosened up. We always cook together. She did not cook for me and then serve me lunch. I think about how brilliant that was as an editor, learning to sort of put someone at ease. She would ask me a lot of questions about my life, so sort of drawing me out so she understood who she was conversing with, what I was interested in. So we kind of co-created those conversations in terms of both of our interests.
But then we remained friends. So our work together ended in 2013. It took place both here in Manhattan, but also at her second home up in the northeast kingdom of Vermont. She invited me to come finish our project there, and then we remained very good friends until her death in the summer of 2017. So a lot of our conversations, a lot of the kind of clues I had that there might be more or about some of the more disappointing or painful elements of her personal life were from little sort of breadcrumbs that she dropped in conversation with me in knowing her in those more informal walks, meals, experience and time together. Then there is an enormous archive at the University of Texas, that's where the formal Knopf papers live, more than any one person really could ever get through. I mean, it is the volume... If you think about publishing done entirely on paper before fax and email, it is just overwhelming. Everything is in triplicate. It's just...
Kerry Diamond:
I think you wrote the Knopfs, they were meticulous.
Sara B. Franklin:
Meticulous. Notoriously so to the point that they drove their staff crazy. The systems were sort of overwhelming even to the people who knew them and believed in the Knopf superiority even within the world. But it was sort of insane that they would have to go through these repetitive processes.
Kerry Diamond:
And then the faxing and the emailing era seems to have broken your heart, Sara.
Sara B. Franklin:
You know, she did print out a lot of her emails, to her credit. I mean, bless her, honestly. I really was so pleased to find that. But the real gift was that at her family and friends' memorial service, which I had been invited to by her stepdaughter, at the end of that service, Bronwen Dunn, Judith's stepdaughter, pulled me aside and said, "I've begun to look around in the apartment in New York and there's an awful lot of stuff, and I know you've written a little bit about Judith and I know that you were very dear friends. Do you think you might want to come down and just take a look and maybe help me figure out what to do with it?" I had 10-month-old twins at the time, I was completely overwhelmed, I was married to a full-time working chef. I had no business taking on a project, but I also knew that I would be completely nuts to say no to this request.
Kerry Diamond:
Sometimes you just can't say no.
Sara B. Franklin:
Sometimes you just have to say yes. And so it took a couple of months. In November of 2017, I went down and there were literally two rooms full, full of marked-up manuscripts, of letters, of magazines, newspaper clippings. She and her husband, too, were meticulous in their filing. There were physical letters dating back to the 1930s that Judith had written home when she spent a year living with her grandmother in Vermont. Her parents had kept all of them, all her airmail letters when she was living in Paris. They had kept things that I really had... I mean, they should be very carefully protected, but much to her credit, Bronwen allowed me to use them and trusted me with them and allowed me to start working my way through them. It took me a year just to even see what I had.
Kerry Diamond:
When you walked in and saw all of this, what was your reaction? Or were you just like, "Oh my God. How do I start going through this?"
Sara B. Franklin:
Part of me wanted to flee for the hills, I have to say. It was so overwhelming. And also there was. The hills, I have to say. It was so overwhelming. And, also, there was a sense of intrusion. As well as I knew Judith at that point and as friendly as we were, and as true as our relationship was, there was a question in my mind about whether she would want me to look at these things. And as I began to look through, that question plagued me and it continued to plague me as I worked on the biography. There is plenty I left out.
Kerry Diamond:
Does it plague you to this day?
Sara B. Franklin:
No, because I think that a biographer's responsibility always is to play editor in a way, right? You're filtering a story. You're not just creating an index of facts. That's not storytelling, that's not writing. That is archiving, and that is not what I set out to do. And I also felt like I wanted to write the story in a way that I thought she would respect, even if it wasn't the way that she would have done it. If anything got into a space of feeling like it was reflecting a moment where she was really entrusting, say a dear friend, to work out something that was deeply, deeply private, I waited until I had something that she had said to me to go on, to sort of decipher, map out the path of this book.
Kerry Diamond:
When you say you left things out, were these professional things, personal things, all?
Sara B. Franklin:
Mostly personal things. Yeah. There was very little about her professional life that I left out. And in fact, I think some people will probably think I went too far in painting certain characters in the publishing industry, colleagues of hers, because their treatment of Judith, of course, was not necessarily how they treated everybody, right? It's reflecting one individual relationship through her own lens and through the people that were in her intimate sphere.
So for example, Bob Gottlieb, a giant in Publishing was not particularly kind to her, and her friends and family members were very clear in reflecting that to me in a number of interviews that I did. And so I felt like I had enough to go on to safely say that Judith felt like she had been deeply mistreated when he was the editor in chief of Knopf, which was for a 20-year period, really during the heyday of her career.
There are other moments of doubt or insecurity. There are a couple of letters with the man who became her husband that felt really intimate away that it didn't really feel appropriate to be publishing those letters. Again, Judith didn't give me permission to look at those papers, her stepdaughter did. And so I think having a little bit of respect, even in this age of share all, for a sense of decency and only using what I needed to paint the picture that I was trying to paint.
Kerry Diamond:
Did she keep a diary?
Sara B. Franklin:
She kept notebooks and they were a mix of journals, recipes, menu plans. She traveled a lot with her husband. He was a travel and food writer, and so she'd often go on the road with him. They really worked together in very formative generative ways. They shared ideas. They really built one another's careers. So she often took notes very quietly while he did the interviewing. He was a true loquacious journalist, and she was not. She preferred to be in the background, scribbling down notes. And so her notebooks, and there are boxes and boxes and boxes of them, were a real mishmash just of her thinking, her observations across the board, but not the kind of intimate diary of her day-to-day.
Kerry Diamond:
You mentioned her intimates. Did she have people with whom she dropped her guard?
Sara B. Franklin:
Yes. She is someone who developed friendships early in life, and those are the friendships she kept throughout her life. Her dearest friend, Betina, who she met during her Parisian years, remained her closest friend until her death. She had a friend that she went to high school with who she then also went to Bennington with, and who steamed across the Atlantic with her that she was also dear friends with until she died. She was very, very loyal. And it's so interesting because one of the things her stepdaughter and her adopted son said to me is, if you looked at her social circle, it didn't necessarily reflect the kind of upper echelons of New York cultural life that one might assume an esteemed editor would have. She was close with the people who were loyal to her and who nurtured a space of trust for her outside of publishing. She did not have a lot of close friends in publishing.
Kerry Diamond:
What was her relationship like with her cookbook authors? It seemed like they were all very reverential toward her.
Sara B. Franklin:
I think they were reverential towards her skill as an editor, and some of them certainly became very, very close friends of hers. So examples of that would be Edna Lewis, Lidia Bastianich. Julia Child and Judith Jones worked together for decades. They also had really difficult moments, as you would expect from any long creative partnership. There were others, James Beard. She was very, very, very close with James Beard. There were others, most famously Marcella Hazan, who she did not get on with, and they did not continue to work together. They had a difference of opinion of what a cookbook should do, how a cookbook author might position themselves, how to translate a cuisine from outside the US to a US audience.
So she was not for everyone. She was a complete perfectionist. She was extraordinarily demanding of her authors. And you had to be a certain kind of a writer to flourish under that kind of pressure. You were not going to turn in a manuscript and she'd make a few corrections and it would go off to press. She demanded revision after revision, after revision, after revision. She often cooked with her cookbook authors, watch them, but also it meant she would intercept. If they left something out of their recipe, she would catch it and insist that they go back and work on the recipe again.
So if you think about work ethic, that's certainly not going to be everybody's cup of tea, and it's certainly not the way all home cooks cook with that kind of attention to detail. Some people are much more fly by the seat of their pants. They might not want to cook that way. But for the people that she nurtured who took to her style, this is the who's who of the cookbook canon in the English language. So clearly, her support and nurturance and intimate way as an editor for certain people was this gift that lifted up their talents. Whatever their particular voice and talents were, she was able to amplify them with her style.
Kerry Diamond:
Knopf was not a cookbook publisher. She really had to talk them into this, but then she went on to publish so many seminal cookbooks. Did she set out to change the cookbook world?
Sara B. Franklin:
Absolutely not. It's so interesting. When I was interviewing her for the, quote unquote, "Official record," I had the same question. And I really believed that by the time she got around to Madhur Jaffrey and to Claudia Roden and to James Beard, that she did have a mission and she insisted I was absolutely wrong. She said, "I waited for the right person and the right story to come along, and then I would see if they had a book in them." She did not have an idea of mapping the world of cuisines through Knopf cookbooks. She did not have some sense of equal distribution across geography. And if you look at the cookbooks that she published, they are not representative of the entire world of cuisines. They're representative of the time that she lived in, which was that certain waves of immigrants, certain individuals were sort of coming into the American public sphere or making their way into restaurant culture here in New York, or that she met a particularly charismatic, talented individual, and that was enough to make her want to do a book with them.
So there was not a sense of, I'm going to check off this long list of cuisines and do a book one by one on each. I will say there's an exception to that, which is her ‘Knopf Cooks American” series, which is one that is very little known that she began to publish in the 1990s. That was a series of almost 20 books that she did set out to do as a collection. She was trying to talk about vernacular American regional cuisines in a way that, at the time, there was very little appetite for commercially.
Now, we see it throughout cookbook culture and food media, right? The Anthony Bourdains even of the world. The “Travelogue” cooking show is very much in that vein, which is, let's get specific. But there were not a lot of cookbooks doing that at the time. And so when Judith was writing to, say, a regional food editor of a Tampa Bay newspaper and saying, "You seem to really have a handle on what's going on in Floridian cuisine. Might you want to do a cookbook with me?" She was truly ahead of her time. Also, there just wasn't all that much interest in American regional cooking at the time.
So the series as a whole was flop. Certain of those books did quite well. Joan Nathan's first book for Judith Jones was part of that series on Jewish cooking in America, but most of the authors in that series would not be names familiar to listeners.
Kerry Diamond:
That makes Edna Lewis's book all the more remarkable.
Sara B. Franklin:
Yes.
Kerry Diamond:
Did that come after that series or before?
Sara B. Franklin:
No. Edna Lewis's “The Taste of Country Cooking” came out in 1976, the bicentennial year, very deliberately.
Kerry Diamond:
Tell us more about that.
Sara B. Franklin:
Well, I have a real soft spot for Edna Lewis. My first book was a collection of essays written by chefs, scholars, thinkers about Edna Lewis and her importance, which until very recently had been really swept under the rug of American culture, of Black history, of the way we talked about southern food. Thankfully, that has begun to change, and she is becoming really recognized for the remarkable figure that she was in helping us understand that southern food is not a monolith, that Black cooking is very distinct in different parts of the U.S., and that she was from a very particular part of Virginia. The cooking that she grew up doing, which was on a wood stove in a community that had been founded by formerly enslaved people, among them her grandparents, was a real mashup of indigenous ingredients, ingredients that had come across the Atlantic Ocean as part of the transatlantic slave trade, but also the Jeffersonian ideals and traditions of working with the Piedmont Virginia products with French technique.
And so she had a highly specific vernacular cuisine to her part of Virginia. Her place, Edna Lewis was born in 1916, made her way North after both of her parents died, and she needed to find work. Tried her hand at being a launder. She was apparently absolutely terrible. Wonderful cook, terrible at washing clothes, but remarkable at sewing and designing them. Fell in with the sort of Bohemian crowd of the World War II years here in New York City. Fell in with communist organizers, one of whom she married, and ended up becoming a chef and partner in an Eastside restaurant, Cafe Nicholson in 1949. So interesting that the two men that founded that restaurant were actually in Paris the same time Judith was, and they actually had lunch together, but it wasn't until many, many years later that the connection was remade. Judith Jones and Edna Lewis did not meet one another in person until the early 1970s.
Kerry Diamond:
What made her want to publish Edna?
Sara B. Franklin:
Edna Lewis, I never had the good fortune of meeting her, but people who speak about her presence, it was sort of impossible not to pay attention to her. She demanded your attention in her grace, in her stature. She was very tall. She was extraordinarily elegant In her presentation. She sewed all of her own clothing by that point, much of it out of African Batik. She wore long dangly earrings. She twisted her beautiful gray hair up on top of her head. She had this very low, I've watched a lot of video and listened to audio of her speaking, very low, slow way of speaking. Extraordinarily deliberate. And Judith was captivated by her immediately as a person, as a presence.
But what made Judith think that perhaps there was a book there was when Edna Lewis began to talk about her childhood and Freetown, the way she had grown up cooking and eating, but also the way the community functioned, which was around communal living, tending of the fields, foraging for wild things in the woods. Socioeconomically, the community was very, very poor, but culturally, they were extraordinarily rich, and they were really interested in amplifying their own culture. Formal education was really important in that community, but also informal education of the sort. Learning to cook by an older woman's elbow, walking behind the plow in the fields, going out and learning plant identification in the woods. This is the way Edna Lewis grew up.
And so she had this worldliness that Judith was completely enamored of and understood that it would translate beautifully to the page. That connection between place, the natural world, and what one prepares in the kitchen and then puts on the table. Now, we think of it as farm to table cooking, it's almost become a cliche. But at the time, there was very, very, very little of it going on in American cooking, certainly in restaurants.
Kerry Diamond:
I want to talk about Madhur Jaffrey, another one of her authors. I didn't realize until I interviewed Madhur for the cover story of Cherry Bombe, that Judith wasn't her original editor-
Sara B. Franklin:
That's right.
Kerry Diamond:
... for the book. Did you know this?
Sara B. Franklin:
I sure did.
Kerry Diamond:
You did know?
Sara B. Franklin:
I have the letters.
Kerry Diamond:
I was amazed that Madhur wrote this cookbook, and then her publisher essentially dropped her. They kind of ghosted her.
Sara B. Franklin:
The book was abandoned, and this happened a lot in the early days of cookbooks making their way into mainstream publishing. Did she tell you what the working title was? “Curry: Myths and Realities.” The editors left, and Elaine Markson, who is Madhur's agent at the time, sent it on to Judith. Judith was a big enough name at that point, that people understood that she was making waves in the world of cookbooks, and that if you wanted to do a cookbook in the English language in the U.S., really you wanted to do it with Knopf. At this point, this is 10 years after “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” has come out, it is clear that she is the queenmaker as far as cookbooks go. And Judith took a look at what was nearly a finished manuscript and said, "Well, I have an awful lot of revisions that I would like to make. So check in and see if your client is interested in that."
And Elaine Markson quickly did, and Madhur had said yes, and they were off to the races. The manuscript did get almost entirely rewritten into what became An Invitation to Indian Cooking.
Kerry Diamond:
I was really interested in whether Judith had some kind of mission statement or not, because she could have just kept publishing French food cookbooks.
Sara B. Franklin:
She could have. It probably wouldn't have been a very successful career in the world of food because I think she would've gotten quite quickly to a point where there was not a lot left to say that felt fresh and novel. She also didn't want to publish any cookbooks that she couldn't learn something new from herself. She had no interest in repeating a cuisine, to many potential authors' frustration, by the way, who felt like she was tokenizing or flattening particular identity groups, sort of saying, "What do you mean you've done an Italian.” In particular identity groups sort of saying, "What do you mean you've done an Italian cookbook? Do a different part of Italy. What do you mean you've done an Indian cookbook? Do a different part of India." Right? So she had her blind spots and she was very much a product of her time, but really important for people to understand. Judith Jones is best known for her work in food in some circles. She was an absolutely tremendous figure in the world of literature, in terms of fiction, John Updike and Tyler, she worked with both of those novelists for their entire careers.
Kerry Diamond:
Sylvia Plath.
Sara B. Franklin:
Sylvia Plath, she was Sylvia Plath only American editor before her death. She edited her first collection of poetry. She passed on the bell jar.
Kerry Diamond:
Surprised to read that.
Sara B. Franklin:
Regretted it after Sylvia Plath died, but not because she liked the book so much because she understood that Sylvia Plath's legacy was about to explode in the culture and that from a position of someone in publishing, she had made a real error of judgment, but she could not convince her bosses to go back and give it a second look. Blanche could not said no a second time.
Kerry Diamond:
In the process of writing this book, what was the biggest surprise for you about Judith?
Sara B. Franklin:
More than surprised, it was a sense of awe that someone could have a career for nearly 60 years in which her curiosity never dulled at all. That when I met her, which was after her retirement, she was every bit as curious, as engaged, as open as game, and as capable of getting herself out into the world to have an experience she hadn't had before, and as receptive to newness. I think there are very few of us, even in our younger decades who can claim the same. We tend to kind of find our people, we find the things we like to do, the things we like to eat, the places we like to be and we get comfortable. She had an element of that, but I think part of what kept her lively for so long was that openness to new experience that she did not give up really until Alzheimer's took her mind in the very years of her life.
Kerry Diamond:
Then let's talk about “Julia and Julia.” That's a good segue. She is not open to that. Not a fan of Julie Powell's blog.
Sara B. Franklin:
Not a fan of Julie Powell's blog, and also very upset with the way that Julie Powell portrayed her in the book and then that Nora Ephron adapted into a movie. Anyone who's seen or read the book, there's this terrible rainstorm and Julie Powell has invited Judith Jones to dinner at her apartment in Queens and that the rain is what deters Judith from coming. And Tyler, who is one of Judith's longtime authors, they were very, very, very intimate with one another, mostly by letter, gives very few public interviews, but she did go on record after that came out and said basically, "You've got to be kidding me. You think a rainstorm would keep Judith Jones away? Like this is not the portrayal of this remarkable woman that we need."
Judith wasn't interested in the project, and so she had declined the invitation because she didn't feel like it was worth her time to go. She thought the project was sort of amateurish. She thought she was really taking advantage of Julia Child's memory and capitalizing on it in a way that I think Judith was very reverential and protective towards authors and she felt like this person was being commercialized and used for someone else's gain in a way that was not reflective of Julia and she didn't want to be a part of it.
Kerry Diamond:
So you think Julie Powell made up that story?
Sara B. Franklin:
Oh, she did. If we are to believe Judith, and also if we look at the rest of the book, which is heavily fictionalized, the Julia Child portrayal in that book is fictionalized and there's lots of proof to the contrary. Yes, I would say that is made up. I am speculating here. My guess is Julie Powell was disappointed and that this was a convenient way to narrate that disappointment. Perhaps there was a great rainstorm, perhaps to the last minute she held out hope that Judith Jones would change her mind. Who knows. Maybe she spoke to a secretary who says, "I'll pass on the message," but Judith was never going to dinner and Judith spoke about it on tour for her first book. I mean she herself went on record and said that never happened.
Kerry Diamond:
She was very unhappy with the film.
Sara B. Franklin:
Very.
Kerry Diamond:
So she didn't like the blog, she didn't like the film either. She did... I got the sense respected Nora Ephron or maybe, Sarah's making a face, maybe not.
Sara B. Franklin:
No, I think she did respect Nora Ephron. She didn't like what she did with that particular story. When you're talking about Julia Child and Judith Jones, and this is a real criticism I have of the HBO Max series “Julia” as well. The truth is better than the fiction, so why change the story, right? These are important, important cultural figures who people should know about. Granted, I'm trained as a historian, I do know some of the truth here, but when you have stories this good, why change them? People begin to believe that they are truth and they're being sold as truth. So I think we need to be careful. I think we would all do well to turn on our critical eye a little more, but also as storytellers, I think we have a real responsibility to talk about when we are talking about fact to the extent that we know it and when we are fictionalizing and I think it's really important.
Kerry Diamond:
Totally hear what you're saying on that front about fact, fiction, history, but at the same time, would we even be talking about Judith Jones if it hadn't been for “Julia and Julia?”
Sara B. Franklin:
That's a great question. I don't know that I know the answer. I know that when she died, the turnout for her funeral here in New York City, who were people who actually knew her, knew her in publishing, knew her personally, was tremendous, was standing room only, which suggests to me that even only in the world of publishing, there was an understanding that this woman was a giant, and this is, again, this is my own perception. I felt that perhaps there was a bit of guilt in the room about not having celebrated her more when we had the chance. The food world did at the end of her life.
The James Beard Foundation really upheld her legacy towards the end of her life. They showered her with awards. They were really keen to make clear that she really carved out a space for cookbooks and American publishing and helped bring food to the center of American culture in the way that we enjoy and experience it now. Certainly not perfectly, but was really influential in that space, but that her nimbleness across genres, the way that she being influenced by poetry as much as she was by cookbooks, by fiction, as much as historical and cultural reporting. I think very few people know that, and certainly Julia and Julia does not do that story any service at all.
Kerry Diamond:
Isn't it fair to say though, most editors labor and obscurity.
Sara B. Franklin:
Yes, absolutely.
Kerry Diamond:
In publishing houses.
Sara B. Franklin:
Absolutely. Yeah, that's absolutely right. Interestingly, in this calendar year, this 12 month year that we're looking ahead to that is beginning to change, this is the first biography of Judith Jones. There is a biography of Katharine Angell White who helped make the New Yorker and really published a lot of their first women writers. The second, but the first commercial coming out about her. And there is the first thank goodness biography of Toni Morrison as an editor of Random House coming out next year. Not only are these three literary editors, but they are three women literary editors whose influence has been swept under the rug when we talk about how stories have been made in American literature. To the extent that we do understand what editing, what it looks like and who does it, we have heard from men in books written by men.
Kerry Diamond:
Let's talk about “Julia” on HBO Max. I know you are not a fan.
Sara B. Franklin:
Not a fan.
Kerry Diamond:
Tell me why.
Sara B. Franklin:
Again, we have these tremendous figures of history that are being portrayed in the spotlight. Julia Child is not invisible to many, but certainly the show is exposing her to a new and younger audience, re-familiarizing her to the audience that learned to cook from her. And it's so interesting. So many of the emails I have gotten about this show are asking, "Is this true?" That's what people want to know. And my answer to most details is I can't tell you for sure in some cases, so I'm not going to pretend, but where I have seen the show diverge from truth, it has been in ways that I think are pretty unforgivable. For example, the idea that Julia Child introduced Judith Jones to James Beard is completely incorrect. Judith cold called James Beard to introduce him to Julia Child hoping that he would celebrate mastering the art of French cooking and help sort of fet it when it came out in 1961.
So that story is backwards and decentralizes Judith, I will say the opening scene of that series is when I sort of had a hard time coming back from it where Julia Child is in a doctor's office and what is completely glossed from that story is that she had a hysterectomy right before mastering the Art of French cooking right before she went on tour. So in between the publication in the fall of '61 and January of '62 when she went out on tour with Simone Beck, she had a hysterectomy. She had not been able to have children.
She desperately wanted children, and when she and her husband moved back from Paris, it had been recommended that she have a radical hysterectomy, which was often the, quote, unquote, treatment for infertile women at the time take out all the equipment and she was devastated. So this idea that we begin that moment with a, quote, unquote, diagnosis of menopause which completely glosses the disappointment of having had an idea about how she wanted her life to go and that in fact her seriousness around learning to cook was in large part a coping mechanism with trying to fill her time and find new purpose in the void of being able to have children.
This is not me making an argument for women having children as their soul or primary purpose, but to suggest that she sort of spontaneously burst onto the scene or that she had this sense that she was just going to wait until the right time and then she was going to go to WGBH and pitch a television show is completely false. It was a winding path as most people's lives are. She had two years in between the book coming out and when she went on television and those years mattered, she began to transform and redirect her life in part because of a large disappointment and a new opportunity that she had been given both to publish the book with Knopf and then to go on TV two years later. So I think especially when we're talking about women's history, which has been so sort of tidally summed up, so misrepresented when women's private lives, especially the histories of their bodies has been really denied from a public space to perpetuate that in the 21st century feels to me like an egregious misstep.
Kerry Diamond:
I don't remember reading about Julia's hysterectomy. Did she write about that?
Sara B. Franklin:
It had not been anywhere until I put it into this book. It was in the letters.
Kerry Diamond:
People always ask why Julia never had children, and she never really answered.
Sara B. Franklin:
She wasn't able to conceive. I don't have medical records as to why, and I'm certainly not going to speculate, but she did have a hysterectomy and it's part of the reason that she didn't go out on tour until a couple of months after. I say go out on tour as that was a normal thing to do it the time, it was not. It was something that she sort of pioneered along with the folks at Knopf and her co-authors and later she had breast cancer as well, and she was very, very public about that, but she was very quiet about the hysterectomy because women were not given license to talk about their bodies.
Judith had the same history 10 years later. She had a hysterectomy. She wasn't able to have children. She had desperately wanted them and then she also got breast cancer. Judith talked a lot about this parallel experience that she and Julia Child had of sharing this experience of having their body changed, their disappointments about what they thought their life could be, which might have included work and family, and how it had to be reconfigured in light of not being able to have biological children.
Kerry Diamond:
Well, the nice thing is that so many people care about these women. They care about Judith, Julia, Madhur, Edna, and I think reading your book will help them take that interest even further.
Sara B. Franklin:
I hope so.
Kerry Diamond:
And answer a lot of questions.
Sara B. Franklin:
I hope so.
Kerry Diamond:
Thank you for all the work you put into this book and just in making sure we know the real Judith Jones. Sarah, you are the Bombe. Thank you so much.
Sara B. Franklin:
Thank you for having me, Kerry.
Kerry Diamond:
That's it for today's show. I would love for you to subscribe to Radio Cherry Bombe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and leave a rating and a review. Our theme song is by the band Tralala. Joseph Hazan is the studio engineer for Newsstand Studios. Our producers are Catherine Baker and Elizabeth Vogt. Our associate producer is Jenna Sadhu and our content operations manager is Londyn Crenshaw. Thanks for listening, everybody. You are the Bombe.