Backstage with Julia

by Nancy Verde Barr

  She peppered her instructions for proper, classic techniques with frequent, amusing soupçons of sound: blump, blump, blump as she quickly sliced through mushrooms, whomp when she smashed her knife down on a clove of garlic, and a throaty, crackling sound when she broke off the claw of a lobster. In a distinctive voice that became one of the most recognized—and most imitated—voices in the country, she told us to be prepared to "shoot the wad" on buying the best ingredients and "go whole hog" in fearlessly cooking them. The combination of her off-the-cuff, madcap quirkiness and her deeply serious commitment to things culinary made watching her addictive. She catapulted to fame. When, in 1966, Time magazine featured her as its cover story, dubbing her "Our Lady of the Ladle," they wrote that her shows "have made her a cult from coast to coast and put her on a first-name basis with her fans."

  Her name, sans the s, was unlikely to be forgotten.

  "Want something to read?" Julia asked, reaching into her carry-on and pulling out an impressive stack of current magazines.

  I held up the spy novel she had loaned me. "No, thanks. I'm just at the good part." Julia and I shared a passion for thrillers, mostly the ones that involved espionage. I could trace mine back to the Hardy Boys mysteries that I discovered when I was eight. Julia honed hers during World War II, when she worked with the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. She had just loaned me The Spy Wore Red, and although she insisted that during the war she had only typed and filed, I knew the government had cleared her for high-security work, and my overactive imagination kept plugging her into the role of undercover agent depicted by the heroine of the nonfiction book. Julia admitted that she had wanted to be a spy, but the "Oh So Secret," as she called the OSS, rejected her. "They said I was too tall," she would sigh. But of course, that's the sort of thing a spy would say.

  I felt something brush by my foot. "Here comes the deluge," I said in a singsong voice.

  "So much useless stuff," Julia said as she discarded several scented inserts, subscription forms, and coupon offers onto the floor. She didn't make neat piles; she unselfconsciously tossed the "useless stuff" around our feet. We were seated behind the bulkhead; there were no seats with pockets in front of us, so the floor was the only available receptacle for the mounting trash. I'd seen her do it often when in flight and, being infinitely more self-conscious, I always felt a compulsion to stand up and make a general announcement that we would pick them up before we left the plane. But Julia had no such compulsion. Delightfully uninhibited and completely comfortable with herself, she didn't worry about what other people might think.

  "Do you know how many people actually pay attention to all that?" she asked pointing to the pile.

  "No, I haven't a clue."

  She cited an impressive statistic. "Isn't that amazing?"

  "Amazing," I agreed, but more amazing to me was the fact that she was interested enough to find out. But then, after so many years with her, I was used to being amazed by her.

  She continued to thumb through the magazines, paused intermittently to read articles that interested her, tore out several pages to read later, and tossed the pillaged remains into a heap on the floor. The litter at our feet was growing in scary dimension.

  "Would you like me to take those?" the flight attendant asked, eyeing the mess and slipping a navy-blue apron over his head.

  "Not now," Julia replied.

  He looked at the pile at my feet and gave me a questioning look.

  "It's her mess," I said with a shrug.

  When he walked away, Julia gave me a quick, playful poke in the arm, and I responded as though she had broken it. I wasn't traveling with Julia Child the star—I was in the company of Julia McWilliams, the slightly naughty schoolgirl who took to elbowing and horsing around. Biographies, television programs, and articles about Julia often allude to the fact that in her youth she was a mischievous cut-up, a prankster, a party girl who loved to stir things up. But that fun-loving, mischief-causing character with a wicked glint in her eye was always very much there, elbowing and stirring up a little trouble whenever she felt like it.

  We began our approach to Dallas, and the flight attendant returned to our seats. "We'll be getting ready to land soon, Mrs. Childs." And then, with a hesitant look at the clutter around our feet, "Shall I take these away now?"

  "That would be very nice. Thank you."

  "Is there anything else I can do for you?"

  Julia gently patted both her knees with open palms and said, "We're supposed to have an airport cart pick us up. Where will that be?" Overall, Julia was blessed with remarkably good health, but stiffness in her knees often caused her extreme pain. "An old skiing injury and all that basketball in school," she'd say. Although bad knees are just in the cards for some people, all that jumping on her long, slender legs may well have compromised the joints. I'd realized just how long those legs were some years before, when a fan sent her an enormous box of Vidalia onions that contained the instructions "Store well ventilated in a cool place." When I asked her how she suggested we should store them, she handed me a pair of her pantyhose, saying, "These should do it. We'll hang them in the basement." The entire box of sweet Georgia onions fit into the one pair of her stockings.

  When standing and walking seriously began to tax her knees, she reminded everyone around her to heed her call to arms: "Save the knees!" The Ritz-Carlton Hotel, our lodging in Houston, had rallied to the cause and arranged for an airport cart to pick us up.

  "It will be at the gate at the end of the walkway. I'll make sure it is," the attendant informed us as he walked away with his armload of trash.

  "There it is," I said, leading Julia toward the cart where a beaming woman driver was holding a sign that read, "Julia Child." We loaded our carry-on bags, our computers, and ourselves on board. When the cart began to back up, sounding its tooter to alert travelers that we were on the move, I said, "This is great. I've always wanted to ride on one of these."

  Julia responded without missing a beat. "I've always wanted to drive one."

  Her bright blue eyes smiled at me with a look I had grown to know and love in the more than a dozen years, and thousands of miles, I had been with her. It was the twinkling, teasing, conspiratorial smile that implied a connection, an understanding, a secret; it was a smile that she often gave me across a crowded dinner table when someone said something that we both knew more about but weren't going to tell. The one she flashed with a wink of her eye to me during long demonstrations that said, Hold on, we'll be finished soon, and enjoying a cocktail and dinner. That moment in Houston, the smile was saying, Of course I drive. It's my cart.

  There never was any question that Julia drove the cart. I was just lucky to go along for the ride!

  That ride began in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1980. I was thirty-six years old and married with two toddler sons, had graduated from culinary school, and was running two cooking schools of my own. The husband and the children were intentional; teaching cooking was a delightful fluke.

  In 1969, I married Philip Barr and we moved to Washington, D.C., where he attended dental school and I found a job teaching hard-of-hearing children. I quickly became fast friends with a fellow teacher who was supporting her husband through law school.

  "We can't just sit at home nights while our husbands study," she stated emphatically while turning the pages of the latest brochure of community classes. "Here's something interesting," she said, handing me the catalogue so I could read about the cooking classes a local woman gave in her home.

  I signed up for the classes not because I had a particular interest in food but because it was something to do with a friend. But from the moment I placed a nugget of herb-infused butter on top of a boneless chicken breast, rolled it, and fried it into an elegant, stuffed Kiev, I was hooked. When I tasted the crisp explosion of unfamiliar flavor that a quick dip in hot olive oil made of a small, unimpressive bouquet of parsley, I wanted to know more about this food thing. I bought my first Julia Chil
d cookbook, The French Chef, and watched her shows with a pad and pencil. Philip began to photograph our meals. When I watched Julia make something she called "Glamour Pouding," I took copious notes, invited friends to dinner, and wowed them with the "handsome molded dessert" that Julia promised me I would have if I did what she did on TV.

  I became a community cooking class junkie, and one of my teachers suggested that I might want to assist. She put me in touch with Madame Teresa Colonna, a colorful Polish-French woman in her sixties who ran a cooking school from her home in Bethesda, Maryland. She had immigrated to the United States as a young woman with a certificate from the Cordon Bleu and training as a French milliner. When ladies' custom-designed hats became passé and cooking classes all the rage, she taught full time. For two years, I spent two nights a week at culinary boot camp—setting up the preparation for hands-on classes, fetching ingredients, adjusting students' grips on knives, and washing the dishes that remained. I couldn't have been happier. By the time Philip graduated from dental school in 1973, I knew I wanted to be Madame Colonna.

  We returned to Providence, and I immediately enrolled in Madeleine Kamman's Modern Gourmet cooking school in Newton Center, Massachusetts, where I systematically worked my way through the classic techniques of French cooking. In 1975, I passed my Modern Gourmet exams, received my diploma, and opened my own schools.

  I had been teaching classic French cuisine for five years when, in the spring of 1980, a friend, Tina Frost, telephoned me.

  "I'm calling for my husband, Fred. He's heading up the committee for Providence's Planned Parenthood fund-raiser in October, and we'd like you to help out."

  I'd done volunteer work for Planned Parenthood before. I knew there was a need. "Sure. What can I do?"

  "Julia Child has agreed to come to Providence and give two cooking demonstrations. We need help organizing them."

  Ta-da! I was not just going to meet the most important culinary figure in the country—I was going to work with her. It was akin to tossing a football around with Joe Montana or jamming on guitars with Eric Clapton. Tina was giving me dates and venues, and I was mentally kneading images of me standing next to Julia, passing her utensils and ingredients with the efficiency of an OR nurse. She would say, "Bismarck," and I would know exactly which pastry tip to pass her. "Brioche pan" and the fluted, tin mold would be in her hand.

  I was lost in truffle heaven, but Tina's next words brought me back to earth. "Julia's bringing her own assistants, but she said we needed someone local with cooking experience who could take care of the food and the set. Do you think you can do that?"

  Okay, I would be an orderly, not head nurse, but I would be there. "Absolutely! It's what I do," I said, stepping up to the plate with exaggerated confidence. True enough, it was what I did. I just didn't do it for Julia Child.

  I made myself focus on the job and not the star. We needed food shoppers, dishwashers, and prep cooks. Since the demonstration site was to be the Rhode Island School of Design's auditorium, which in no way resembled a place where one could cook, we needed a cooktop, ovens, a refrigerator, small appliances, makeshift sinks, pots, pans, whisks, spoons, measuring utensils, food.

  Julia mailed us detailed lists itemizing everything she would need, along with some specific instructions: the demonstration counter was to be thirty-nine inches high, four inches above the norm; the electric stand mixer should be a heavy-duty K5A—the "real McCoy"—and the rolling pin should be a proper ball-bearing one, at least sixteen inches long, and "not some toy." As did most Julia devotees, I'd formed my impression of her by watching her television shows. I'd seen the messes, the dropped potato pancake, the loaf of bread flung over her shoulder. She was someone who effortlessly winged it and didn't sweat the small stuff. Those lists said that there was a finely honed structure behind her madcap exterior.

  Julia even told us precisely what she would like served for lunch on the set: smoked salmon with a "nice salad" one day and a "real Rhode Island red clam chowder" on the next. A popular local caterer volunteered to do the salmon buffet, and I asked my mother to make the chowder. It wasn't nepotism; her recipe was my great-grandma Feely's, and it was the best Rhode Island red clam chowder I'd ever tasted.

  The day before the first demonstration, the Julia entourage arrived by train. The plan was for me to meet them at the auditorium, where Julia would check the set before going to the hotel. Sylvia Walker Quinn, one of my team of helpers, called me that morning.

  "I told the committee we'd pick Julia up at the train station," she said.

  "You're kidding!" I'm sure I must have thought a limousine would pick her up. At least it never occurred to me to offer to do it. Such things always occurred to Sylvia.

  "Why would I kid you? I'll pick you up first."

  The train was early, so when Sylvia and I arrived, Julia was already outside with her husband, Paul, Liz Bishop, Ruth Lockwood, and several pieces of mismatched luggage, some emblazoned with enormous, yellow masking tape X's for identification and others hand-lettered with a bold black P surrounded with the letter C. A few oversized tote bags, bloated with an assortment of aprons, food, and cooking utensils, were leaning against the suitcases. This small culinary cortege looked more like an AARP group back from a weekend tour than a television star and her roadies. At a lofty six foot two, Julia towered over the group, and I realized why the counters needed to be so high. In later years, she became somewhat stooped, but on that day, the sixty-eight-year-old undisputed queen of cooking straightened up to her full height and greeted us with enthusiastic warmth.

  "Hooray! You're here!" she warbled, taking Paul's arm with one hand and hoisting a tote bag with the other.

  I smiled, or maybe I laughed. It is impossible not to the first time you hear that unmistakable voice in person—especially when it is accentuating the word hooray.

  "We are," I said, accepting the bag she handed me. After multiple introductions, we squished ourselves into Sylvia's small blue station wagon, with Julia, Liz, Ruth, and me vying for space in the backseat.

  "Up and back, Ruthie," Julia said. Ruth, a neatly coiffed, smartly dressed, efficient-looking woman, was Julia's friend, her original television producer, and clearly someone who had been squished into many backseats, because she'd devised the up-and-back seating arrangement that gave the derriere plenty of space. The person nearest the door slides well back in the seat, the next person sits just on the edge, the next back, and so on. Julia was sitting next to but well behind me, yet her long legs stretched out as far as mine. Many people dream of rubbing elbows with celebrities. There I was rubbing knees with Julia Child, who was telling us how happy she was to be in Providence. I guess we all have different reactions to being in the company of famous people. Mine was to ask innocuous questions about the trip and mention the weather. Sylvia's was to take a hostage. "Would you like to stop at Nancy's house to freshen up? It's along the way," she lied. It was close to the auditorium, but it was a roundabout way to go.

  "Why not?" said Julia, demonstrating how delightfully ordinary my extraordinary idol was.

  While I made coffee and rooted around in the cupboards for something to serve with it, Sylvia dragged my complete collection of Julia Child cookbooks off the shelf and asked Julia to sign them for me. All the books were food-spattered and dog-eared, and I half expected bits of parsley and pieces of onion peel to trickle out. I thought ruefully of the protective Plexiglas bookstand gathering dust in the closet.

  "How nice to see that they are so used," Julia said, flipping through the smeared pages. Chalk one up for being a messy cook. Years later, after publishing my own cookbooks, I realized just how gratifying it is to see proof that someone actually cooked from them.

  As she signed each book, she passed it on to Paul, who wrote his name in a fine bold hand, with a jaunty scroll beneath it.

  "Thank you," I said, giving what I thought was a nice grateful smile and reaching for the book. He held it open in front of him and gazed reproachfully at me—f
or what, I didn't know.

  "You have to wait for the ink to dry," he said authoritatively.

  "Of course," I said, meekly sliding my hand away.

  When he determined that the ink was dry, his tone became gentler and he directed my attention to the photographs and drawings in From Julia Child's Kitchen, or "JC's Kitchen," as I learned it was always called by all those who had anything to do with it.

  "I took the photographs over her shoulder so readers would see the food from the cook's angle," he explained. It was an innovation in food photography, since most food photos aimed at tantalizing the appetite and not at teaching. Up until that moment, it had escaped my notice that the photographs and artful sketches in Julia's early books were Paul's. For all I knew about Julia's cooking, I knew little about her personal life. I'm not sure I even knew there was a Paul, so I certainly didn't know that Julia's husband, ten years her senior, had suffered a heart attack in 1974, followed by a small series of strokes from which he had never fully recovered. That day she made no apology or explanation for Paul's peculiar scolding tone.