Backstage with Julia

by Nancy Verde Barr

  "Perfect," agreed Rosie, who asked me to retrieve them from Julia's office upstairs. Although Julia always appreciated the many gifts that fans and industry personnel sent to her, she seldom kept them because there simply was not enough room in her house—despite its ample size—to accommodate the nonstop deliveries that arrived at her door. But she wanted to keep those particular champagne glasses, not only because she appreciated their beauty and value but also because they were a gift from a French official who was dear to her. So when the glasses arrived, Julia put them upstairs in her office, out of harm's way.

  Julia with Ira Yoffe, creative director and now vice president of Parade Magazine, who cleans up the set around the meat before having the how-to photo taken.

  I ran upstairs and then tiptoed carefully back downstairs with one costly glass in each hand, as if I were afraid to wake them. Rosie cleared a spot for them and, keeping my eyes on the empty space, I moved toward it. I should have kept one eye on my feet because I didn't see the upturned edge of the cloth on the floor. It caught my toe and sent me headlong on top of the artful arrangement of petit fours and tea sandwiches. The once beautiful setting of pink lace and dainty delicacies was smashed to smithereens and, worse, so were the glasses. Shards of what had been once finely cut crystal were everywhere. I was horrified. With a good bit of effort, I knew, we could replace the food, but Julia's precious Baccarat was history. Rosie let out the most excruciating wail, and I could tell by the look on her face that she was getting ready to hang me upside down from an upstairs window and leave me dangling there by my felonious foot.

  "I'm so sorry about the crystal, Julia," I nearly wept as I wiped bits of pink icing and homemade mayonnaise off my clothes.

  "What would I have done with just two anyway?" she said without the tiniest hint of remorse for her loss or blame for my blunder. "We'll use my old champagne glasses." And then, winking at me, she added, "I have plenty of them."

  Over the days, weeks, and eventually years I spent with Julia, the many layers of her personality constantly unfolded, and I can express no more simply what I felt about her than to say I adored her. Moreover, so many of her attributes amazed me. Right up there at the top of my list was her energy. Anyone who worked or played with Julia couldn't help but be awed by how energetic she was. As Russ Morash observed, "energy was her secret weapon."

  I was aware of her incredible energy from the first day I worked for her, but I eventually learned that it was more than a genetic inheritance; it was a mind-set. She simply did not allow herself or others around to consider the T-word. It visibly annoyed her if they did.

  One late night, after a hideously long day at a conference where Julia participated on a panel, gave a demonstration, and hosted a reception, a woman, brow furrowed and head shaking, approached Julia to express her concern. "Oh, Mrs. Child. You did so much today. You must be exhausted." The pathetic whine in her voice emphasized the level of distress she felt for the septuagenarian and sent Julia into a stern, defensive stance.

  "I don't exhaust," she brusquely snapped back before abruptly turning away from the startled woman and leading our small entourage into the hotel bar for a nightcap. Julia didn't just not exhaust; she steadfastly did not want to exhaust.

  Also noted in my mental inventory of what fascinated me about Julia was her total lack of pretension and nonchalance about her fame—how unaware she was of her own celebrity. She certainly never acted like one. She lived her life in a most ordinary fashion, taking daily walks to the local variety store for her newspaper, pushing her own cart through the supermarket, scooting around town in a very recognizable red car with a wooden spoon taped to the radio antenna—ordinary daily activities (except perhaps for the antenna spoon) that made her seem just like the neighbor down the street. She liked it that way because that was how she thought of herself.

  Her lack of affectation surprised many a journalist whom she invited to interview her over lunch at her house. I have seen many of the resulting articles and can't help but smile when I read the writers' account of how they arrived with great, hungry expectations of a gourmet lunch and instead got a tuna fish sandwich—albeit a very, very good tuna fish sandwich. My own brother, Tom, who is a writer and radio journalist, was assigned to interview Julia. She invited him to lunch, and he skipped breakfast in preparation for his meal. When he arrived, Julia opened a can of hash and together they fixed one of her favorite meals. He said she made it better by adding a bit of good beef stock to it as it sautéed—but it was still canned hash.

  Before her assistant Stephanie Hersh came on board and fixed things up, Julia traveled coach class and stayed in simple hotel rooms even though she was often donating her time to organizations that easily could have arranged for upgrades. Julia never asked. At hotels, she would wash her lingerie in the sink and hang it on the shower rod, and set up an ironing board in her room so she could do her own ironing. She even offered to iron my clothes. I borrowed the iron and the board instead. Maybe that was shortsighted of me; who knows what a skirt ironed by Julia Child would be worth today on eBay.

  On one occassion I thought she took housekeeping too far. We were in Memphis, Tennessee, to do a demonstration for Planned Parenthood and it was minutes away from show time, but there was no Julia. She had been there a few minutes before, and I hadn't seen her leave the stage area.

  "Where's Julia?" I asked Liz, who was coolly organizing herself on a stool.

  "She went to the loo. Better tell her we're ready to begin."

  When I entered the ladies' room, I saw two women standing by the sinks, gazing toward the stalls, looking confused and uttering some vague words of agreement to a voice that was coming from one of the stalls. It was Julia's voice.

  "Women can be such slobs," she protested from an open-doored stall. I looked in. She was wiping down the toilet seat.

  "Julia? What the heck are you doing?"

  "I'm wiping the seats. I don't know why women have to go all over them. It's revolting," she said, going into the next stall and grabbing more toilet paper to wipe that seat.

  I honestly didn't know if I should wipe seats with her, wash out sinks, or do what I was sent to do. "Um . . . we're ready to begin."

  "It's all right. I've finished. I'm coming." As she washed her hands, she told the two women that they should tell the auditorium to put up a sign: "No Peeing on the Seats!"

  No. Julia did not behave like a star or demand to be treated like one. In fact, she was usually surprised when she was. On a trip to Dallas, our hotel checked us into its grandest accommodation, even though Julia had reserved "two nice, roomy singles." When we entered the suite, I gluttonously digested the enormous living room with its glorious view of the city from a wall of full-length windows. There was even a meticulously polished grand piano. A long wallpapered dining room was elegantly set with two places, and the galley kitchen was generously stocked with food and beverages. No question about it—it was the presidential suite, reserved for our leader and those deserving the same grandiosity.

  "Gosh, Julia," I said when I could close my mouth enough to get the words out. "I had no idea you were such a big deal."

  "Neither did I," she responded, looking even more awed than as I was.

  Not even at restaurants did she expect special treatment, in spite of the fact that having her as a patron was money in the bank. One morning during our prepping at Good Morning America, she decided it would be good fun to call Betty and George Kubler and see if they would like to come into the city and meet us for lunch.

  "Great idea!" I said.

  "I'd like some serious French food," she said. "Have you ever eaten at La Grenouille?"

  "No, but I'd love to," I responded with genuine enthusiasm, envisioning the elegant dining room with grand floral displays, which I had seen only in photographs. Those photos always showed a dining room filled to capacity with, as they say, "those who lunch." "But how will we ever get in at this late hour?" I needled her as she left the room to call the
Kublers and the restaurant.

  "We're all set," she said when she returned. "They were fully booked, but we managed to get a table."

  "How ever did you manage that?" I teased.

  "I called my hairdresser at Elizabeth Arden's. Her brother is the dishwasher there, and he got us in."

  I stopped cooking long enough to see if she was serious. "Did it ever occur to you to just tell them who you were?"

  "Oh, they wouldn't care. They get big celebrity types all the time." There was absolutely no sense in trying to convince her that when it came to restaurants she was in a celebrity class all by herself. She wouldn't buy it.

  Without a doubt, I saw the most unpretentious side of Julia during one of our outings from work at GMA.

  In 1984, there was much chatter about an excellent cooking school opening on Broadway in New York's Soho area. The school's mission was to combine classic French techniques with American ingenuity, and Julia was fascinated. "We have to go," she announced after Sara Moulton told her about it. At that time Sara had left La Tulipe for Gourmet and had an in, so even though the school was not quite ready for business, she wangled an invitation to lunch. Our GMA producer, Sonya, called for a car to drive Sara, Julia, Paul, Susy, and me some sixty blocks south to the school, where the owner, Dorothy Cann Hamilton, welcomed us with open arms and much appreciated kir imperials, those timeless Parisian aperitifs made with champagne and eau de framboise.

  Julia with chefs and students at the French Culinary Institute.

  When we left the school, sated with allumettes au Gruyère, sole bonne femme, and fresh fruit with sabayon, it was dusk. Sonya had dismissed the car and driver earlier when we arrived, and there were no taxis in sight. Seasoned New Yorker that she was, Sara valiantly dashed from corner to corner in a vain attempt to spot one. Meanwhile, Sonya, visibly nervous about having her star entertainer stranded anywhere in New York, let alone the not-quite-yet-gentrified area we were in, tried unsuccessfully to contact the car company and see if they would come to our rescue immediately. Julia spotted the nearby subway entrance.

  "Why, we can take the subway. I used to do it all the time when I worked here for Sloane's." That was in the forties, when subways were not gathering grounds for what Sonya believed were villainous, psychotic weirdos who'd as soon push you onto the tracks as look at you. She was adamantly opposed to the idea, but Julia was already heading for the stairs.

  The last car of the train was practically empty, and we paraded in, and plopped down together toward the back. Julia and Paul sat opposite us, with Julia a few spaces away from a woman who can be described kindly as having seen better days but more accurately as a very down-and-out bag lady. She had the requisite grimy shopping bags, and we could smell her across the aisle. I suspected the odor was why the car was empty. She looked at Julia and then moved down the seats to be closer to her.

  "Hello," she said, revealing a few discolored teeth. "I know you." Obviously, her better days had included a television set.

  Sonya immediately went into retreat mode, tapped my knee, stood up, and said, "Come on. We're moving."

  I started to stand, but Julia wasn't budging from her seat, wasn't sliding away from the woman or paying any attention to Sonya's impending flight. She was talking to the woman—about where she was going, about how this had happened to her, about cooking. Their conversation lasted all the way uptown, and all that way I watched and thought, How kind, how gracious. But it was more than that. Julia didn't think of it as being a star showing kindness to a poor nobody. They were both just people who'd wound up in different places.

  Julia honestly wanted to know that woman's story, just as she wanted to know those of the many people she met. Her genuine interest in other people was one of her most outstanding qualities and right up there at the top of my list of attributes fondly remembered. Moreover, it was one I knew was worth instilling in my boys. If I could not inspire in my children the actual quality of interest in others, then at least I could teach them the graciousness and value of the characteristic. My son Brad was always shy when he was very young. (Hard to believe today when I see him onstage playing guitar and singing with his band to a thousand or more people.) So when he was no more than four or five, I told him that when he found it hard to say much, he should ask other people about themselves and take the pressure of having to talk off himself. Not long after, we were in the market and I saw an elderly woman, perhaps in her early eighties, who was a friend of my mother's. I greeted her and introduced her to Brad. Dottie had been an art teacher, and she immediately asked Brad where he went to school. "Gordon School," he replied, and then I could see him grappling a bit before he came up with, "Where do you go to school?"

  Chapter 5

  Do or do not. There is no try.

  —Yoda, Star Wars

  On my first week at Good Morning America, Julia asked me, "How much do you charge? What is your fee?"

  Fee? I'd never thought about charging her a fee. ABC reimbursed me for all my travel expenses, paid for the hotel, and even gave me a daily food allowance. It didn't cost me a penny to work for her, and I considered it a plum of an opportunity to apprentice in television production with the best in the business. If she had asked me to pay her, I would have thought it a fair price for the education.

  "You don't have to pay me, Julia. I'm just thrilled to have the opportunity to work with you," I said, and honestly meant it. I suppose I expected her to accept my zero-an-hour offer. I couldn't have been more wrong.

  Immediately her index finger jutted out and she spoke sternly. "Don't ever say that! You are a professional and should charge accordingly. I pay $12.50 an hour. Will that be okay?"

  Until the moment she decreed me a professional, I'm not sure I ever thought about what I did as an actual, honest-to-God career or really even as a job. I was serious about my teaching, but it was more a passionate hobby turned paying hobby than an occupation. Working with Julia was just icing on the cake.

  Julia saw what we did quite differently. It was a business, and we had to think of it as such. I didn't know it at the time, but her quick reproach of my offer to work for nothing was sparked by her years of determination to see that a career in the culinary arts received the recognition and respect she felt it warranted. Next to actually cooking and teaching, her ultimate passion was the development of the "profession of gastronomy," and few in the field devoted the time and effort to making that happen. Yet I doubt that even Julia could have predicted the extent to which it would grow.

  The directory of the International Association of Culinary Professionals (the food professional's equivalent of the American Bar Association or the medical or dental associations) lists over seventy networking categories for those who earn their living in food-related careers. There are the groups you would expect to see in such a directory: chefs and restaurateurs, culinary educators, nutritionists and dieticians, vintners, food writers and cookbook authors. But there are other members not commonly thought of as food professionals, and their diversity attests to the enormous breadth to which the food industry has grown. Food photographers, culinary historians, radio and television producers, and program hosts fill the lists of a constantly expanding membership roster, as do editors and indexers who specialize in cookbooks, literary agents who concentrate on selling them, and publicists dedicated to promoting them. There are professions that did not exist in pre-Julia years: freelance food stylists, recipe testers, and culinary media escorts, who greet cookbook authors at airports around the country and prep the recipes required for television appearances.

  Of course, Julia did not personally create all those categories. What she did do was change the image of the profession so that it became a desirable one. Before Julia, outside of the commercial food industry that fed America, a culinary career usually meant cooking in a restaurant or teaching those who did. Neither was considered glamorous. Julia used to say, and rightly so, that "the cooking end of gastronomy was strictly a blue-collar job." The celebr
ity chef was nowhere in sight. And although Americans could list their favorite restaurants, they could rarely name the person in the kitchen who was turning out the meals that made them swoon. They fondly named Delmonico's, the 21 Club, and the Palm as places not to be missed, but the man—and it almost always was a man—behind the stove remained nameless. There were but a few professional culinary schools in the country, and they were not well known. Today's prestigious Culinary Institute of America with impressive campuses on two coasts was in the 1960s located in a nondescript building on a New Haven, Connecticut, street that I walked along every day when I was in college in the same city. We all thought the CIA on the building meant it was a Secret Service outpost. Johnson and Wales University, now one of the world's largest cooking schools, with campuses in six states, did not exist until 1973.

  Back then, the prevailing benchmark for a great meal was lots of food at a reasonable price, so few Americans noticed the lack of culinary erudition. Moreover, the food industry as a whole was dedicated more to getting the housewife out of the kitchen than to putting her in front of the stove. Television commercials spoke of ovens that turned themselves on and off and efficient electrical appliances that "got you out of the kitchen in a jiffy." Those too busy to cook at all were encouraged to reach not into the prepared-food section of a gourmet specialty store—of which there were few to none—but into the freezer for TV dinners.

  The culinary scene that Julia discovered in France when she fell in love with gastronomy was entirely different. Eating well was a national pastime for the French and Julia thought that was exactly as it should be. The yardstick for fine dining was the careful selection of excellent ingredients cooked with care—at home and in restaurants. Although a chef's position was artisanal as opposed to professional, it was more respected in France than in America. Boys of twelve, thirteen, and fourteen—they were always boys—considered it a great coup to gain an apprenticeship under a known chef.