Backstage with Julia

by Nancy Verde Barr

  Julia was extremely generous and thoughtful to include us in all that her culinary status afforded her, and when James Beard invited her to a tasting of champagne and chocolate ice cream that he was hosting, Susy and I saw just how far her thoughtfulness extended. We were working at the studio and had not quite finished all the prep we needed for the next day. But Julia had to leave, since she was expected to say a few words with Beard at a given time and then had to go on to another event. Her afternoon schedule was crowded, and a limousine was already waiting outside to take her to the Beard party and then on to the next and the next. "I hope you can finish in time to make Jim's party," she said. "Leave as soon as you finish all this."

  Almost an hour later, Susy and I finished. Looking at the time, we realized that unless we found a taxi immediately we would probably miss the party. As soon as we opened the door to leave the studio, we saw the downpour and we knew that finding a taxi at all would be nearly impossible. We had no raincoats, no umbrellas, and several blocks to go. As we descended the stairs, a driver stepped out of the limousine parked at the curb and asked, "Are you Susy and Nancy?"

  "Yes," we answered.

  "Mrs. Child sent me here to wait for you and said I should bring you to the party."

  It was a thoughtful, generous thing to do, but when I look at the larger picture of who Julia was, I know that her efforts to include us in her many outings were not solely out of her generosity. She wanted to introduce us to the entirety of the culinary world—a world she had the foresight to know was undergoing important and exciting changes.

  Chapter 4

  My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate—that's my philosophy.

  —Thornton Wilder, The Skin of Our Teeth

  Wysiwyg. That's what Russ Morash said when members of the press and fans asked him to reveal exactly what the real Julia Child was like in person. Those in search of a juicy story most likely hoped to unearth tales of a misanthropic madwoman who hurled pots and pans at kitchen assistants, or hear stories of a prima donna who lazed about conceitedly watching reruns of her own programs while kitchen slaves served her coq au vin and croquembouche on a tray emblazoned with her image. Russ, who was not only her director but also her good friend, was in a better position than most to know, and he gave the true and definitive, succinct and explicit answer—"wysiwyg." It may sound like a word from Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky," but don't reach for the dictionary. Wysiwyg is not a word. The letters stand for "what you see is what you get." And that's the truth of it. Julia was just as down-to-earth, unpretentious, and unselfconsciously outspoken in the company of friends as she was with the cameras rolling. She was just as humorous and deliciously quirky. The real Julia Child was right there to see, whether you watched her on a TV screen or sat next to her at the dinner table. She was always Julia.

  To say that Julia was always the same person does not mean that she was without depth or breadth. There were many prismatic dimensions to her personality, many layers. Discovering those layers did not require a special guidebook or road map. You only had to spend time with her. And I was getting to do just that.

  If I had to describe my working association with Julia, I would say that at first it was gradual, and then it was simply all of a sudden. When she made me executive chef at GMA, she also asked me to assist her at a few of the many demonstrations that she gave on a regular basis to promote her own work and to raise funds for charitable organizations. That meant traveling with her and seeing her out of the public light. Then Julia offered me another job. In 1981, she gave up her McCall's column and accepted an offer to be the food editor for Parade, the popular Sunday newspaper insert. Her monthly features were much more elaborate than her column had been and they would reach a much wider audience, a fact that greatly appealed to her. Parade shot the photos for the first series of "From Julia Child's Kitchen" in Santa Barbara, California, where Julia and Paul had just purchased a condominium. Julia worked it out with Parade to have the shoots take place on whichever coast she and Paul were living at the scheduled time, and she asked me to serve as her executive chef for the East Coast team when she shot the next series in Cambridge in the spring of 1982.

  Up until Parade, Julia and I had communicated primarily by phone or mail, but when our work became more involved, she suggested I come up to Cambridge to go over things with her. There I observed my first at-home, in-person Julia-isms.

  Actually, the first was before I even got there. We were on the phone working out the time I should be there, and she asked me how long it took me to drive from Providence to Cambridge. I told her that the drive should take a little over an hour, depending on traffic.

  "Well, how do you go?" she asked.

  I described my route. "That's all wrong," she said. "You have to take the little eekie off Memorial before the garden center and then the eekie off Kirkland before the fire station."

  "Uh, is Eekie the name of a street?" I asked, thoroughly confused.

  No, it was the term Paul and Julia gave to the shortcuts they used that resulted in the quickest drive to their 103 Irving Street home. On my one previous trip to her house, with a reliable map as my guide, I made turns onto clearly marked streets. Julia's route called for zigzags onto barely noticeable, seldom labeled, and often poorly paved streets. To this day, I can find my way to 103 Irving Street with those eekies, but I couldn't tell you the name of the streets I took, because Paul and Julia simply called them "eekies." What's more, if they did mention street names, they used their own appellations: the street with the tilting chimney was "Slanted Chimney Way," and the one with the white fence was "White Picket Street" regardless of what the street signs said.

  So I followed the eekies and pulled into her driveway having cut a good eight minutes off my trip.

  Julia let me in the back door—she never used the front—and I followed her up a short flight of stairs, through the high-ceilinged hallway, and into her kitchen. It was not glamorous. In fact, it was downright funky. Pegboards, painted the shade of fading grass, hung floor to ceiling on nearly every bit of wall space. Attached to them was a batterie de cuisine that would tax the capacity of a Williams-Sonoma warehouse. Knives, carbon- and stainless-steel-bladed, stood at the ready in descending order of size from large chef's knives to small paring ones along two magnetic strips attached to either side of the kitchen window, where a person who was more interested in decoration than function might have hung café curtains. There were more knives, including a very large Chinese cleaver, nestled in a hollowed-out groove next to a wooden cutting block abutting the counter. "I'm a knife freak," Julia confessed.

  Julia in her Cambridge kitchen.

  A professional six-burner Garland range that Paul and Julia had purchased used in 1956 for $429 dominated one wall, and above it hung a handsome set of long-handled, flat copper lids designed to cover any size pot or pan. Linoleum, in a spattered pattern common in the 1950s, covered the floor. Yellow Post-it notes inscribed in Julia's hand clung to numerous surfaces and instructed how things worked. The one on the dishwasher told exactly how much soap to add and which buttons to press; on the electric coffeepot were detailed calculations on how to measure the coffee (both per pot and per cup); the note stuck to the door of the small under-counter freezer used for baking ingredients listed what was stored inside. A Post-it on the bathroom door asked departing occupants to leave the door ajar, "to air the joint out." And, because at one time someone had inadvertently left a scoop in the icemaker, causing it to break down with a scrunching noise that Julia imaginatively imitated for me, that note said, "DO NOT leave scoop in ice machine."

  The kitchen was the epitome of Julia's no-nonsense approach to cooking and to life—a visual expression of her practical personality. The pegboard organization, a system Paul and Julia first devised for their small French kitchen in Provence, was a sensible solution to storage constraints. Paul cut and painted the boards, and then, after each pot, pan, and
tool was in place, he outlined it with a thick tracing of black marker, so when an item was lifted off the peg, the remaining ink shape told exactly where that tool and only that tool fit. The boards not only provided ample space for equipment but prevented the problems that can arise from having revolving teams of workers in the kitchen. It annoyed Julia to no end if someone used a piece of equipment and then put it where it didn't belong, thereby forcing her to hunt all over for it when she needed it. The pegboards and the knife strips showed exactly where those tools belonged, and there was no excuse for not putting them there. The Post-its prevented newcomers from clogging the dishwasher with an excess of soap or putting odor-exuding ingredients into the freezer with odor-absorbing bits of pastry and sticks of butter.

  Julia Child's culinary sanctum may not have been worthy of a center spread in House Beautiful, but it was one of the most functional kitchens I ever worked in—except for the counters. Just as she always requested that her demonstration counters be higher than the norm, she'd had her home counters designed and built to accommodate her height. It was practical for her but a bear for me. I could manage most things at the awkward height, but I simply could not roll pastry on them. I was too short to get the leverage I needed, so Julia provided me with a child's stool to stand on. It was effective, but standing on the stool made me feel like a kid, and I couldn't help but laugh at myself as I pushed her massive rolling pin over sheets of pastry dough. Liz loved to emphasize my little-girl-in-Mama's-kitchen feeling by dragging into my vision a small sign that Julia kept in the counter corner. It read, "I wasn't there. I didn't do it. It was the little people."

  My sons, Brad and Andrew, at Julia's house in France with poussiquette Minou.

  The "little people" sign did not charm me nearly as much as the paintings and photos of cats that decorated the few smidgens of free wall space. When I asked Julia about them, she told me she loved poussiquettes. She didn't have one in Cambridge, just the wall images, but she had Minou in France, and she reached into her daybook and pulled out the cat's photo that she always carried with her. Some years later, I discovered why Julia was so fond of Minou. She was a lively ham of a cat. My sons and I stayed in Julia's house in France when she was not there, and poussiquette introduced herself to me in the middle of a pitch black night while I was sound asleep in Julia's bed. She entered the room from outside by leaping up to pull down the handle of the bedroom's French door and then pounced on me, frightening me nearly to death. I called Julia from France to tell her that her cat was diabolical; she told me to give her some fresh hamburger and she would stop assaulting me.

  Each trip to Julia's Cambridge house was like opening a surprise package that held another dimension of her personality. On one visit, when I walked into the hallway I immediately saw a very elderly, stooped woman walking up the stairs to the second floor. She had a firm hold on the banister and was obviously struggling with each step.

  "Should I help her?" I whispered to Julia, assuming she was an elderly relative.

  "No. That's my housekeeper. She's used to it." The woman had to be ninety! And she did the laundry, ironed, and dusted that enormous, three-story house with a small dust rag that she kept clutched in her arthritic hand. Julia had employed her for years and wouldn't for a minute let that loyal woman feel that she had outgrown her usefulness. Julia was much too kind to let her go because of details as insignificant as poor posture and a halting gait. She did hire a professional cleaning company, however, to come in on a regular basis to wipe up what that dear old woman missed.

  The two questions I am asked most frequently about Julia are "Did she ever see the Dan Aykroyd spoof of her on Saturday Night Live?" and "What did she think about it?" An early visit to Julia's answered both: yes, she saw it and she loved it. She kept a videotape copy of Aykroyd's 1979 performance under the television in her kitchen so she could show it to anyone who had missed it. Usually when people ask me about the tape, they wonder if Aykroyd's stumbling about while taking swigs from a bottle of booze offended Julia. Not at all. She had a marvelous sense of humor that was expansive enough to include all well-done parodies about her. What never did amuse her were the countless attempts to imitate her voice, as impossible as it was to resist doing. Those she dismissed with a curt "I don't sound like that." In fact, most people's imitations sound more like Aykroyd than Child.

  When I admitted that I had never seen the tape, she immediately popped it into the VCR, and she and Paul laughed with me as though they were seeing it for the first time. When Stephanie Hersh began to work for her years later, Julia didn't show her the tape but acted it out, giving her impersonation of Dan Aykroyd's impersonation of her staggering around a kitchen trying to stop the profuse, fatal bleeding from a thumb gash while shrieking "save the liver" from the chicken she was cutting. Stephanie said Julia did her own staggering around her office and ended her skit "by sprawling herself across her desk and exclaiming, 'And then I died!'"

  Since Julia was, by her own admission, a born ham, my guess is that she enjoyed acting out the skit as much as she liked watching Aykroyd's performance. Sometimes she planned her spoofs into her performances; often they were spontaneous.

  Julia the ham took me by surprise for the first time in New Haven in the fall of 1981 when we did a benefit demonstration for the Long Wharf Theatre. Named for the wharf that ran beside New Haven Harbor, the theater occupies a previously vacant warehouse that sits in the middle of what was once a busy terminal. Two Yale alumni created the theater as a home for a resident acting company in 1965, and like all such theaters across the country, it relied on benefactors' support. Betty Kubler, one of the theater's benefactors, had been a classmate of Julia's at Smith, and her husband, George, and Paul Child shared a longtime friendship, so when Betty called Julia and asked her to help raise money with a demonstration, Julia said yes without hesitation.

  The night of the show, Julia walked out on the stage, smiled, and bowed to the cheering audience. I stood behind her knowing that as soon as the cheering part of the program ended, she would walk around behind the counter and I would move forward to stand by her side. But when the applause died down, Julia didn't walk anywhere. She turned around, picked up a breadbasket from the set, and with the exuberance of a relief pitcher warming up in the bullpen began tossing the dinner rolls into the audience. There was mayhem as hands stretched up and out to snag one of the starchy missiles. Cheering and applause broke out again with renewed vigor. You could just see what a kick Julia got from doing it.

  Tossing things was nothing new to Julia. It was obviously something she loved to do. She did it often on her TV shows. In fact, long before she developed a reputation as a food maven, she had one as a food tosser. As a kid in Pasadena, she hurled mud pies at passing motorists and then had to scale a fence in order to escape their wrath. And it didn't end there. When she was a student at Smith College, she and her roommate would get into such "giggle fests" that they couldn't concentrate on their studies, so they stretched a rope across the center of the room and draped a green rug over it. That way they could no longer see and disturb each other. It should have done the trick—but it didn't, because Julia couldn't resist repeatedly tossing jelly doughnuts over it.

  Her slapstick performances, like the layout of her Post-it-annotated kitchen, were not convoluted attempts at eccentricity. They were, as Russ noted, wysiwyg—just who she was. Spending more time with her, I was seeing the varied ways that her public persona played out in her private life. Those ways were not always necessarily loveable.

  Most viewers would agree that she came across publicly as an outspoken, opinionated woman, and she was. We loved it when she gave the "food police" hell for trashing cream and butter. During a pre-Thanksgiving radio interview with a vegan host, he repeatedly expressed his distain for the "dead meat" Julia planned to eat on the holiday. She asked him what he would cook. "I fashion a bird out of whole grains," he said, and Julia gave him a raspberry—loud and clear over the air. Her immediate, unguarde
d response was hilarious, but that same bluntness could be insensitive. She was often curtly dismissive of old people who acted old, "fluffies" who referred to every dining experience as "gourmet," and "housewifey types" who were not "serious" about cooking.

  She had an appealing openness about her own personal life and an insatiable curiosity about the lives of others. But she loved to gossip, and unless you made her swear on her life not to tell, she'd throw your personal issues into the storytelling mix without thinking that you might be more sensitive about revealing your private matters than she was about sharing hers.

  Professional organizations sought her involvement because she was a strong, effective leader who had no problem writing scathing letters to anyone who stood in the way of her causes. In her personal life, her strength often translated to stubbornness, and when she dug in her heels, there was simply no talking to her. At times it was terribly frustrating; usually it was just plain funny. Ironically, for all her strength and directness in her public affairs, in her personal life she hated to deal directly with conflict, and usually refused to do so even when she was the one who had caused it in the first place.

  Strong, admirable people are still, of course, only human and not without their share of shortcomings. Yet people such as Julia are venerable because their shortcomings never override their qualities. Certainly, Julia's faults never diminished my admiration for her or dissuaded me from wanting to be like her in many ways. Of course, I never could be exactly like her, but my years in her company clearly rubbed off on me, as my sons, who were raised with Julia in my life, often remind me. Recently I was embroiled in a conflict that was driving me to distraction. My son Brad listened to my blithering complaints for a length of time that would try anyone's patience. When I paused in the midst of my tirade, he calmly said, "Mom, think for a minute. What would Julia do?" It was all I needed to hear.