Paula Deen

by Paula Deen

  “Shoot,” I said. “No.”

  “Well, I think you should call ’em,” said my new husband, who had the number in his wallet. I called and asked to speak to Gail Levin, who I later discovered was the head of casting for Paramount Studios.

  Gail proceeded to thank me for returning her call and then she said, “I was home recently, recovering from a minor illness and channel surfing, when I caught your cooking show. Well,” she continued, “I’m working with Cameron Crowe and Tom Cruise on a movie about a Southern family. I’ve really had a problem finding the perfect woman to portray the character of Aunt Dora. She’s the glue that holds the family together, she’s always in her kitchen, and she loves to feed people. You look like Aunt Dora to me.”

  “Gail, do you know I’m not an actress?” I slowly asked over the phone.

  She just laughed and said, “Well, you’re further along than you think, Paula.”

  I was flattered, but I knew she could hear the hesitation in my voice when she said, “Tell you what, let me have Cameron call you. He’s the writer, director, and one of the producers, and I want you to hear what a fine man he is.”

  The next day, Cameron Crowe called me. Within three minutes, I was in love with this man on the phone. You could hear the kindness, compassion, and thoughtfulness in his voice. He was a mixed breed—half Southern, half West Coast—so he got me. Well, every good thing you thought you could not say about a Hollywood director applied to Cameron Crowe. He turned out to be one of the most special people I’ve ever met. He told me about the character of Aunt Dora.

  I gulped hard and told him, “Well, Cameron, I’m not an actress, but I will come out there and do the very best I can not to embarrass you. But if you see when I get there that I’m no good, you gotta promise you’ll put my butt on the bus and I’ll go home and fry chicken.”

  So I went to Hollywood and walked into this big old warehouse on a set on the Paramount properties, ready for a first rehearsal. When I first arrived, I saw this beautiful young man who turned out to be Orlando Bloom, who was the star. There was a script I needed to follow for the most part, but Cameron allowed me to say my part in words that felt good to my tongue. He would feed me little lines, but I could ad-lib a lot and be myself.

  We practiced and rehearsed all day. At the end of the day, the shuttle bus took us back to the hotel. The next day, I think I’m going back to rehearse some more but the bus takes us to another part of Paramount Studios and we walk into an office building.

  I learn that the whole script is fixing to be read by the entire cast. I walk into this room, and on the right-hand side are all kinds of yummy breakfast foods set out. To the left is a huge conference table that seats probably twenty-four people in very comfortable chairs. You better believe that I’m feeling a little out of place at this point, a little unsure, and a lot out of my league. I’m seeing all these faces that I have stood in line and bought movie tickets to see in the movie theater. I look over there at the big table, and there’s a thick script at every seat. On the top piece of paper it says Elizabethtown, and in huge bold black letters, on each script, is written names—Susan Sarandon, Orlando Bloom, Judy Greer, Kirsten Dunst, Cameron Crowe, Tom Cruise, Paula Deen.

  Paula Deen? On a movie script? It was a staggering sensation. So we sit down, and I’m introduced to Tom Cruise, and he takes me in his arms and hugs and welcomes me—that wonderful smile; those bright, shiny eyes.

  I muttered something dumb. I was sitting at this table next to Kirsten Dunst, like country come to town. I’m in shock. These famous people start reading the script, and they’re fabulous. The script is coming alive, and I’m in a trance. My part, I knew, was about two little lines. I’m listening to this story unfold as these people are acting out their parts, and I was so enthralled with the company and the whole scene and the story that when it got to Aunt Dora’s two tiny lines, I just sat there. The casting director, Gail Levin, reached over and shook me, saying, “Paula, that’s your line.”

  Well, shit! The whole reading had gone on without a miss, and I got these two little stinking lines and I messed them up. Eventually, I got into the swing of things and Cameron even added some more lines for me. Must have been my Greta Garbo presence.

  The movie, Elizabethtown, was such a sweet movie, actually based on an event from Cameron’s life. Cameron Crowe’s mother was from California, and his father was from the rolling hills of Kentucky. The daddy fell in love with this California woman who wanted no part of the South, but Cameron’s daddy would come back to Kentucky once a year and visit his big colorful family. Orlando Bloom played the part of Cameron Crowe, and I was Cameron’s Aunt Dora.

  It was kind of like my real-life role. In the end, I had no problems with the whole thing, I wasn’t acting, I was bein’ Paula, keepin’ everyone in line.

  And then came the movie premieres. I hadn’t been to a whole lot of those, let me tell you.

  Had to buy a dress, first. Girls, you ain’t lived until you’ve gone shopping in New York City with two handsome, hip gay men who know their stuff. My assistant, Brandon Branch, and the famous stylist David Evangelista had me inside these boutiques, and they was snatchin’ and grabbin’ clothes off all the racks, shoving me in the dressing room, saying, “Put this on, Paula, no, wrong, honey, put that on.” The dress that David and Brandon finally chose for me was in a black accordion-pleated style; it had a fancy, soft matching top with a stand-up collar and it was drop-dead gorgeous.

  Before I knew it, they’d got me all decked out and I had these fancy duds and the three of us were walking down Fifth Avenue with a million packages, just as happy as clams. To make matters even more glamorous, Food Network had decided to do a one-hour special called Paula Goes to Hollywood, so I had a camera following us everywhere.

  The film was going to have two premieres, one at the Toronto Film Festival and one in New York. So first we go to Toronto. I’m wearing my new black tuxedo suit. I pull up in the limo, look outside at the throngs lined up, and say to my sons, who were along for the ride, “These folks have no more idea of who I am than as if I was a monkey’s uncle.”

  At the New York premiere, I wore my new gown. I took most of my family up to New York for the big opening. Michael was there, and Aunt Peggy, Bobby, Jamie and his new wife, the gorgeous Brooke, my niece, Corrie, Bubba and his girlfriend, Dawn Woodside. It was beyond exciting. We were all tarted up in our fancy duds and no one dreamed our roots were plain.

  I get out of the limo and I actually get to walk the red carpet. Would you believe that? Little Paula Hiers was the cat’s meow, walking the red carpet. It’s really red, but shorter than what you’d think, probably not more than twenty-five feet long. So many people are crammed under this tentlike thing with this red carpet and photographers just stacked on top of one another. People shoved handheld microphones at me with every step I took.

  Unlike in Toronto, when I got out of that limo in New York, many people actually knew me! They were clapping and hollering, callin’ my name, and I said, “Oh, my goodness! I have died and gone to heaven. This is too exciting!” The photographers were just fighting to get their shots. My publicist at the time walked the red carpet near me, and I remembered seeing him on television on another red carpet walking with Leonardo DiCaprio who starred in Titanic. Now it was my turn, and it was just as Titanic.

  As I was walking down the red carpet, I had forgotten something that my publicist had warned me about. “Now, Paula,” he’d said, “as you walk the red carpet, photographers will say things that sound very abrasive and may shock you, but that’s how they get your attention so that you will look at their camera and they’ll get the shot that they want. Pay no attention, look straight ahead.”

  But I forgot. This fifty-nine-year-old woman from Albany, Georgia, who had as little exposure to life as you could think of, is floating down the red carpet with people clapping and lights flashing, and I’m just so happy, I’m grinning, and all of a sudden this voice yells out, “Paula, shith
ead! Paula, shithead!”

  I turned, stunned. I see the photographer it’s coming from.

  I said, “You called me a shithead. You’ve called me a shithead.” I was mortally hurt.

  I looked back at this man, and when he saw that I had taken it personally, he took the time to lower his camera and miss his opportunity for other pictures to tell me, with the biggest smile on his face, that he didn’t mean it like that. But I hated that moment. And the result? The pictures that they got of me were with my eyes and mouth wide open, looking shocked. Anyone who sees those pictures knows I was upset. Now, that’s an example of mean cursing.

  The person following me down this red carpet was my favorite, favorite person—that precious Cameron Crowe. He called my name, I turned around, and he does like this: “Come here.”

  So, I go back to the start of the red carpet, and, of course, lightbulbs really go double crazy because now I am with Cameron Crowe. He gives me a hug. This talented, generous man—well, I don’t know if he saw the whole thing, but I think he did. Now he’s just giving me a loving hug, like that. I got to back up and start again. There were better pictures for my scrapbook from that redo.

  By the time I got to the end of that red carpet, I thought, That carpet was not long enough. I’m an older girl who’s never done any of this. I would like to kick those young girls off, say “Get out of my way, it’s my turn again, I started late!” and have me walk it again, by myself. That didn’t happen.

  When I came back from doing the shoot, the tour, and the red carpet, I knew my life had been so enriched from the experience and I had people saying, “Paula, you were a natural. Are you gonna do it again?”

  My answer to that is, “I don’t know.” Since that time when I took responsibility for myself and started The Bag Lady, so we could eat, it seems like God has always had a hand in seeing that I was in the right place at the right time. It’s not something I’ll seek out, but if it finds me, I would love to give it another try. If Cameron Crowe called me today and wanted little Paula in another movie, I would be there tomorrow with a platter of the best fried chicken he ever et.

  There was plenty of excitement on my own Food Network show. In the first year, I rode motorcycles and a Vespa scooter and flew in a hot-air balloon. The balloon part really tested me. Picture the chunky, white-haired old girl trying to crawl gracefully into the balloon basket as she desperately attempted to keep her catfishwhite belly from peeking out under her shirt and onto the television screens of thousands of Americans. I won’t bore you with the sordid details except one: the line on the hot-air balloon, which was tethered to the earth, snapped, and you could hear me screaming my lungs out in Timbuktu as Gordon raced across the field trying to catch the line and pull me back to safety. Thank God that man is six feet seven; otherwise, I was going to be a star in the heavens, all right. After he finally caught that rope and pulled me down, I hyperventilated off-camera for an hour—that part my television audience didn’t see.

  One show in particular ranks high in the most memorable scenes of my life. My guest was President Jimmy Carter, who came from Plains, Georgia, about thirty-five miles away from my hometown of Albany.

  We met when I was told by my producer that I needed to find a peanut farmer, because we had to go visit a peanut field. Michael told him, “Well, we’ve got the most famous peanut farmer in the world right here in the state of Georgia.” So we start making phone calls, and it was agreed that I could go to Plains and interview Mr. Jimmy. I took my children and I said, “You’ve got to be there with me, because this is like history—yo’ momma walkin’ arm in arm with a president.” So, we go to Plains, and I’m like a little girl who’s standing back of her daddy again, in awe of who I’m lookin’ at. When I first laid eyes on him I fell in love with him; he smiled and you saw all these teeth and those twinkling blue eyes.

  Mr. Jimmy was gonna take me on a tour of the stores on Plains’s Main Street, which is only about two blocks long. Plains has gone through very little change other than the big railroad sign saying HOME OF JIMMY CARTER. Brother Billy’s service station still stands across the street. It’s in disrepair, but it’s still there. They did restore one of these buildings on Main Street and turned it into a B&B. We stayed there, and I understand that Mr. Jimmy even built one of the beds himself.

  When he walked into the Carter home and we were introduced, I asked him, “Do you mind if I touch you?” He said, “No, I don’t,” so I hooked my arm through his and asked, “What may I call you?”

  He said, “Call me Jimmy.” Now, in the South, you always teach your children to put a Mr. or a Miss in front of a person’s name when you’re too close in age to call them by their surname, but not close enough in age to call them by their first name. So President Jimmy Carter is always Mr. Jimmy to me. Now, I consider Mr. Jimmy and me new friends, but we have not once, to this day, ever spoken of politics. Our relationship has to do with family and roots, and this great glorious state of Georgia—his and mine.

  The whole town came out for the show. All of us gathered in the back of Bobby’s Peanut Shop with Mr. Jimmy and Miss Rosalynn, and we had lunch. I had something in common with the man with the blue eyes. Mr. Jimmy is, to me, the epitome of a Southern gentleman farmer. He’s down-home folks, my kind of people. There was a woman there in town who Mr. Jimmy just loves, who has the little restaurant there across the street from the downtown area, and he calls her Mom. She runs a buffet just like I do, and she was to bring us all lunch. When this elderly little black lady walked in, you saw Mr. Jimmy’s face literally light up—that’s how big a part of his life she is. We dug into the food she brought, but there wasn’t quite enough chicken for all of us.

  Only Mr. Jimmy realized I wasn’t eating. He took his chicken wing, and he ripped that wing in two and gave me the piece that he had not eaten off of.

  I was overcome with gratitude to be able to talk with him and find out about his childhood and the foods he ate. Ever the hometown booster, Mr. Jimmy told me with his famous grin, “I feel the Paula Deen show’s gonna put me on the map. A has-been politician all of a sudden, back in the limelight.”

  The show was a huge success: I got a thank-you note from Miss Rosalynn saying that it had done more for Plains than anything since Mr. Jimmy won the White House. And I got an invitation to come back.

  Sometime later, Gordon Elliott’s company, Follow Productions, made arrangements for us to revisit Plains. Well, scheduling got complicated, and even after all the steppin’ and fetchin’ and maneuverin’ to get us a time when the staff and I and the Carters could be together, we had to cancel the arrangements. Everyone was disappointed because Mr. Jimmy and the town of Plains were looking very forward to us coming back.

  So, a few months later, I was in the kitchen right in the middle of filming a cooking show and Brandon comes flying through the front door with his phone in the air saying to the director, “Paula must take this phone call.” Brandon would never in a trillion years interrupt in the middle of the show while the red light’s flashing.

  I started to panic a little as I tried to think what it could possibly be that would induce him to interrupt a show, but they kept the cameras rolling, and I took the phone.

  “Hello,” I said.

  And this familiar voice, with those buttery vowels, and that Southern accent even stronger than mine, answered, “Hey, Paula, honey, this is Jimmy Carter.”

  Holy camoley, I thought. Mr. Jimmy is calling me on my phone on my show.

  “We sure were disappointed that the show was canceled out. Plains is so looking forward to y’all comin’ back because it means so much to the town here.”

  “Well, Mr. Jimmy,” I stuttered, “I don’t know exactly what happened, and I’ll tell you what: I’m standing up here looking at the producer of this show, Gordon Elliott, and I’m going to pass the phone to him.”

  Well, those cameras never stopped rolling. Gordon Elliott could have swallowed his tongue. He wished the floor could have eaten
him alive because, he said later, he felt that I threw him under a bus. Here was a president of the United States on the phone and Gordon had to tell him we didn’t have time for him. That big old silver-tongued devil Gordon Elliott got to spittin’ and a-sputterin’. When he got off the telephone, I could almost see little beads of sweat on him. So, he rescheduled it again.

  Lo and behold, but Follow Productions called me soon after, and said we couldn’t do it on the new date. This time, it was kind of Mr. Jimmy’s doin’.

  He’d called me to say that he had to go and meet with some world leaders but asked, “Paula, how late could you film Tuesday night?” I said, “Well, Mr. Jimmy, I am there until the show is complete. I can work as long as I have to.”

  He said, “Good, because there’s a world crisis going on but I am so looking forward to your coming to Plains again, and since I’m going to be flying back on Tuesday around four-thirty, I wanted to know if y’all could stay later.”

  I told him I would work as late as it took, as long as he and Miss Rosalynn were not too tired. Then I called the production company. Gordon had a hissy fit. He was so upset because he’d allotted a certain time for filming this show, and there was so much to consider in putting it together. Mother Nature can be your biggest enemy. We can use fake light, but without the right natural daylight, lighting can be a very tricky, tedious process to get it all perfect. And, filming after four-thirty in the afternoon and into the night? Gordon said, “Paula, we are going to have to just reschedule.”