Backstage with Julia

by Nancy Verde Barr

  The Marquis de Pins directed his very regal visage at him and replied, "As it should be."

  Julia loved the story, and at every opportunity she saw for the phrase, she pounded the table lightly with her fist and said, "As it should be," and immediately made that expression a common phrase in the trip's vernacular. At one of Venice's better restaurants, the waiter kept our bottle of white wine off to the side of the dining room and was supposedly keeping an eye on our glasses so he could refill them when necessary. But we were consuming the wine faster than he was keeping watch, and finally Julia said to Walter, "Walter, the wine is pouring like glue." Walter broke into his charming, infectious grin and left the table. Within minutes, waiters placed two bottles of wine in ice-filled buckets by our table, and Julia planted her fist on the table, grinned at Walter, and said, "As it should be!"

  At every turn of that trip, Walter was our hero. He was just one of those fun-loving men who delighted in surprising those around him. One night we ate dinner at a small but popular trattoria, Da Ivo. The food was traditional Tuscan, not Venetian, but we were all ready for a change of menu. It was situated directly on the canal, and we sat by a window where we could watch the occasional gondola glide by.

  Paul and Julia, me, Ron Schwartz, Dagmar and Walter Sullivan, and Philip Barr in Venice. Nan McEvoy took the photo.

  "You know," Julia said, gesturing toward the boat, "that's something we haven't done. We should, though." We all agreed and went back to our meal. With the check paid, we rose and headed to exit at the front of the restaurant. But Walter stopped us.

  "This way," he said, leading us instead toward the back. At that point in our trip, we were all ready to follow him anywhere. "Anywhere" in that case was into the kitchen, and one by one—firmly supported by a chef or dishwasher on each side—we stepped out the floor-length window next to the sink, down a few narrow stone steps, and into two waiting gondolas that glided us back to the hotel. It was probably one of the only times Julia was able to walk through a restaurant kitchen without having to stop and sign autographs. No one knew who she was. They may well have thought that Walter was the star, and for us he was.

  Julia and Paul's note to Brad and Andrew on our postcard from Venice.

  Julia and Paul's note to Brad and Andrew on our postcard from Venice.

  Our Venice trip was such a good time that the following year Julia suggested we join her, Paul, and the Pratts for another Venetian holiday. This time, Philip, the Sullivans, and I said, "Why not?" and that trip, as the one before, was magical. Shortly after we returned home, Julia visited the Sullivans in Napa Valley, and Julia and Walter decided on our next trip—to China. That trip never did happen, but they had a good time planning it.

  No question, Julia had a sense of wanderlust. But more than that, she liked traveling abroad because it allowed her to move around out of the celebrity spotlight and just be the wife, friend, and tourist she could never be at home. I can't imagine what a weird feeling it must be to walk around knowing that practically everyone recognizes you. It gives a decidedly literal meaning to Shakespeare's "all the world's a stage." In a play that lasted almost four decades, Julia was always onstage, and she played her part with the understanding that fame is a two-way street. "I fell in love with the public, the public fell in love with me, and I tried to keep it that way," she said in an interview for the New York Times. Keeping it that way meant never eating an uninterrupted meal in a restaurant, never shopping for food or bathroom towels or underwear without being asked for her autograph, never having a private moment in a public place.

  Second trip to Venice with Paul and Julia Child, the Sullivans, and Pat and Herb Pratt.

  But in Europe she could be anonymous. Of course, occasionally American tourists recognized her, but so infrequently that it often came as a surprise. On our first trip to Venice, we were sitting at a table upstairs at Harry's Bar, looking over our menus.

  Julia's postcard from California after visiting the Sullivans and planning a trip to China.

  "I wonder how the risotto is here," Julia asked.

  Before any of us could comment, a voice from the next table said, "It's delicious. Do you want to try it, Julia?" Julia actually looked startled to hear her name come from somewhere other than our table. She turned around to see a young man holding out his own plate of risotto for her to try. She hesitated for a moment, and then she chose to be the Julia that audiences loved. She picked up her fork and dug right in.

  Occasionally Julia disregarded her vow to love and be loved. When an American tourist followed her around in a Venice museum, trailed her out of the museum, then finally yelled at her back, "Is that you, Julia?" Julia flatly responded, "No," without stopping or turning. She ignored a fan at London's Heathrow Airport early in the morning after we flew in overnight from Boston and were standing at the end of a very long customs line. A most unattractive, large man was standing at the beginning of the line, and when he looked beyond the many curves in the queue and spotted Julia, he began to shout in an irritating voice, "Julia! Julia! Over here."

  Julia looked at her feet and pretended not to hear, but he was relentless and continued to call her name. All up and down the line, heads were turning in our direction. I was used to strangers approaching her, but I realized that morning how absolutely grating it is to have someone call your name repeatedly across a crowded room. It was like being the object of a hazing.

  "Stand in front of me so he can't see me," she said.

  Was she kidding? Given the difference in our heights, it was impossible to block her, but I hoisted my carry-on onto my shoulder and did my best. It accomplished her goal: the man got the message and stopped yelling her name. If he ceased being a fan, I'm sure Julia couldn't have cared less. There are limits, and shouting across a crowded hall is one of them.

  Those trips to Venice and the times we shared with family and friends, out of the spotlight, made me realize how very much Julia enjoyed being just one of the gang. That's not to say that she craved anonymity. She enjoyed her fame. Far from being one of those celebrities who only dare to appear on the streets concealed by wigs, strange hats, and oversized sunglasses, she strode about her world undisguised. Somehow, she maintained a balance in her life. No matter how many people recognized her, how many awards she received, or how many books she sold, she remained centered on her true self, not her celebrity persona. At culinary conferences, she always insisted on wearing a name tag, although the people at the registration desks told her she wouldn't need one. "I want one, just like everyone else," she'd say. In reality, of course, she was not like everyone else; she was famous. But she chose not to allow her fame to define who she was—one of the reasons that Julia herself was more special than her fame ever was.

  Susy, Jasper, Julia, Andrew, and Fern after enjoying a hot dog at Jasper's.

  Recently, I was talking to my son Andrew about Julia and told him that I couldn't remember when he last saw her.

  "It was at the Summer Shack in Cambridge," he said, being young enough for instant recall. Jasper White, the popular Boston chef, cookbook author, and good friend of Julia's, had recently opened that branch of his seafood restaurant, so we were there sometime around 2000.

  "We were with Susy Davidson and another friend of yours," Andrew added. He had known Susy since he was four years old, so he had no problem remembering her name. It sparked my memory of the day. Our other friend was Fern Berman, who runs her own Manhattan-based culinary public relations firm. Fern and Susy had come to Cambridge the day before, and the three of us cooked dinner with Julia and then had a regular old-fashioned girls' overnight.

  "Oh, yes. That lunch was fun. Do you remember what we ate?" I asked him.

  "Well, I remember we had clam chowder and sweet corn. And we shared a large bowl of steamers. And Julia ordered a hot dog." Of course she did.

  Chapter 7

  I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.

  —Willa Cather, novelist

  At t
he age of seventy-two, when so many of her contemporaries were exchanging work schedules for cruise itineraries and office spaces for lake houses, Julia embraced no such wishes. In many ways, she was just hitting her stride. She had a new PBS series on the air (Dinner at Julia's), a set of instructional videotapes on the market (The Way to Cook), and a book of the same name in the works. She was writing a monthly feature for Parade, appearing regularly on Good Morning America, and traveling around the country in her crusade to build state chapters of the burgeoning American Institute of Wine and Food. Those are just the high points. The fact is that after nearly a quarter of a century in the public eye, she was as active and productive as ever.

  "When you rest, you rust," she said, and "When you stop, you drop." I don't know if she would have felt the same had she been in another field of work. "It would be a shame to be caught up in something that doesn't make you tremble with joy," she often mused. For Julia, there was no waning culinary passion, no disillusionment, and definitely no retiring.

  Some of what kept her going was her abhorrence of being bored or, worse, being boring. "Retired people are boring," she once remarked to a reporter. Hyperbole, perhaps, but it was her typical pithy response to retirement questions, which irritated her like lumps in cake batter. Interviewers who asked such questions overlooked a fundamental facet of Julia's personality: she had an extraordinary inner drive to accomplish things. It's hard to say what created that drive, but my money's on a gene from that pioneering grandfather who pushed west for the California gold. The culinary frontier of the early 1980s was expanding, and Julia intended to participate in that expansion. In 1983, she updated Mastering the Art of French Cooking to include the use of equipment that was unavailable when she first wrote the book—food processors, handheld electric whisks, electric mixer attachments. She ventured into the world of media technology with videos and DVDs. I have no doubt that were she alive today, she would have her own interactive Web site with animated recipe demonstrations.

  Fortunately, Julia sustained the energy she needed to support her unflagging passion and drive. In her seventies, she began to bolster her stamina with catnaps. Once or twice a day, for eight minutes—not seven, not nine, but eight—she'd put her head down and fall soundly asleep. If possible, she'd find a spot where she could stretch out unobserved. "Wake me in eight minutes," she'd say, but it was hardly ever necessary because she had an internal alarm clock that woke her. She'd reappear fully awake and ready to resume whatever activity required her attention. When there was not an available place to which she could steal away, she napped wherever she was—in her seat at the movies, in lectures, on airplanes. That's nothing unusual or noteworthy, but Julia snored. It was a gentle snore, but audible within a considerable radius. I knew she was sensitive about it, because I snore too—although not so gently, according to my family—and she and I chided ourselves ashamedly for being victims of such an unfeminine trait. She wanted me to wake her if she was snoring, so whenever I noticed heads turning in her direction, I would nudge her gently, and she'd wake and raise her eyebrows questioningly at me. I'd nod, she'd mouth, "Thank you," and then she'd doze off again and snore. I hated disturbing her, so I began to just let her sleep and snore her gentle snore. After eight minutes, she'd wake up secure in the belief that she had snuck in her eight minutes without a sound because I hadn't jostled her awake.

  I let her sleep and snore one time on an airplane but missed that she had nodded off with her finger pressing the D key on her laptop. When she woke up, there were pages and pages of D's.

  "Why, that's amazing," Julia said, and started to count them.

  "Please, Julia! Go to the top and copy the material we wrote and paste it into a new document."

  "You're right," she said. I'm kind of sorry now that we didn't count them and I keep meaning to sit down one day, rest my finger on the D key, and leave it there for eight minutes.

  In 1985, the seventy-three-year-old French Chef set out to conquer Italy, or at least lend her spin on Italian food. "Julia Child in Italy" was a weeklong sequence of episodes that Good Morning America taped in five Italian cities. When the trip first came up, I didn't expect to be included, since ABC usually hired production assistants even the film crew on location for such projects.

  One morning at the studio, Julia was upstairs in makeup and I was doing my thing with masking tape and cafeteria trays in the prep kitchen. Sonya walked in looking quite pleased with herself. Producing live television is a demanding—most would say stressful—job, and Sonya usually did not smile like that until the show was off the air.

  "How's your Italian coming along?" she asked me. She knew that I'd signed up for language classes after my last trip to Italy, when I'd concluded that in order to travel easily in any foreign country, it is obligatory to know exactly how to use the telephones, where to find a bathroom, and, above all, precisely what is said after the train station loudspeaker demands that we pay immediate attenzione.

  "My kitchen Italian's pretty good and the classes are helping with the basics. I think I can move around without getting lost, anyway."

  "Good, because you're coming with us."

  Sonya was never much of a hugger, but I had her in a big one when Julia walked in. "I guess you've told her," she said.

  Our Italian itinerary included shoots in Parma, Bologna, Florence, Siena, the wine region of Chianti, and the Adriatic city of Ravenna—in other words, delicate pink Parma prosciutto, nutty Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, plump tortelli, rich panforte, bistecca alla fiorentina, ragù alla bolognese, brodetto, biscotti di Prato, and Vin Santo. What made the trip especially appealing was the fact that we were not just going to tour Italy, we were going to "work" Italy, going behind the scenes into the kitchens to "see how it's really done," as Julia put it.

  Sonya had more than food in her production plan. She wanted to portray the history and traditions of Italy as well as the cuisine, and ABC's staff of researchers pored over facts about la bella Italia, leaving no morsel of food or cultural tidbit unturned. They provided us with reams of information that included tales of Verdi in Parma, education and medical firsts in Bologna, horse races in Siena, Dante, and eels in Ravenna.

  Leaving the cultural investigations in the hands of the researchers, Sonya arranged for the culinary talent who would appear on camera with Julia. She chose two already familiar to American audiences—Marcella Hazan, whom Julia called "my mentor in all things Italian," and cookbook author and teacher Giuliano Bugialli. The others were known in Italy for their expertise in preparing dishes typical of their regions. Food itself was the primary talent, and Sonya "booked" a seafood brodetto in a tiny restaurant by the Adriatic Sea; a classic meat sauce, ragù alla bolognese, in Bologna, its birthplace; and bistecca alla fiorentina in a Florentine restaurant. Julia, who boasted at every opportunity that she was "a card-carrying carnivore," was most excited about the bistecca, a plate-sized porterhouse steak that can weigh as much as two pounds and is the product of the rare, porcelain-white Tuscan Chianina cattle. The itinerary was shaping up into a gastronomic dream. Then Sonya ran into a snag.

  Postcard from Julia saying we would have fun with GMA in Italy—and we did!

  The trip was to include a cooking segment in the Chianti region of Tuscany at what was purported to be the oldest winery in existence, the tenth-century renovated fortress of Baron Ricasoli. About a month before our departure, Sonya discovered that Seagram's of Canada owned the winery and she wanted every place we visited to be truly Italian. We had to regroup. (Since then, the Ricasoli family has bought back the winery and it is once again as it should be, Italian.)

  As serendipity would have it, less than a week after this disheartening discovery, I was at Julia's when the phone rang and the call was for me. A soft-spoken woman with a heavy Italian accent introduced herself as Lorenza de' Medici of the Badia a Coltibuono winery. She explained that she was in Rhode Island promoting her wines at a local banquet room and wished to meet with me about a cooking school
she was planning to start the following year at her vineyard.

  "How long will you be in Rhode Island?" I asked.

  "I leave in the morning." There was something about her graciousness and her earnest but unassuming tone that made me want to meet her. I looked at my watch. "I can be back in Rhode Island by six. How long will you be where you are?"

  "I'll stay until you get here," she said.

  With the exception of a few waiters clearing used glasses and removing tablecloths, Lorenza was alone in the banquet room. She was sitting at a table with two clean glasses and a bottle of her Badia a Coltibuono wine. She poured me a glass and then told me about her home near Gaiole in Chianti. "Home" was a converted ninth-century Benedictine abbey with vineyards that yielded the elegant Chianti we were drinking and olive groves that kept her kitchen well stocked with peppery Tuscan extra-virgin olive oil. The extensive gardens on the property provided vegetables and fruit for the classes she wanted to teach in her kitchen. It sounded incredible, but I knew about monks' lives and wondered if she could entice American students to endure a cell-like existence in order to learn to cook. Then she showed me a brochure of her Abbey of the Good Harvest, which she called a "farmhouse villa." The warmly decorated bedrooms, spacious and efficient kitchen with workspace sufficient to accommodate at least twelve students, gracious dining room that could seat five times as many, and reception room with a fireplace that appeared larger than the room we were occupying at the moment were hardly monastic.