Backstage with Julia

by Nancy Verde Barr

  By spring 1990, the chaos in my personal life had dissipated, my manuscript was at the printer, and I was back in action—Julia action, which meant we were off on new adventures, not ever getting T, and having fun again. Occasionally we were also getting lost.

  In addition to the phrase "immer etwas" and the potato ricer, Julia had acquired a proficiency for reading maps when she and Paul explored Germany by taking long road trips.

  "Paul would drive and I was the navigator," she told me during a road trip we were taking from southern Massachusetts to Cambridge. We were in her car, I was driving, and she decided to give me a demonstration of her skill. "Let's pull off the highway at the next exit and find our way on the back roads. I have a good map."

  So I left the sure route and, following Julia's commands, jigged and jagged along deserted country roads. We seemed to be moving in the right direction, but then a sprawling, fenced-in facility of some sort blocked our way.

  "Well, that's not supposed to be there at all," Julia said, looking back at the map. "This road should go straight through."

  "How old is that map?" I asked.

  "We bought it when we moved to Cambridge." That was some thirty years before! I suggested we turn around and try to find our way back to the highway, but Julia said we had to "stay the course." She scrutinized her map, directed me to turn this way and that, and we maneuvered our way around the facility. It was getting dark, and there were no streetlights and no major roads in sight. I checked the gas tank. I wondered if we had any food in the car. I thought about the newspaper headlines: "Culinary Giant Found Starved to Death with Clueless Driver." Julia's frequent comments that "this seems right" gave me no comfort, especially when what "seemed right" brought us to a halt in front of a mountain of a rock. "Must have been a meteor," Julia said. "It's not on the map either." Somehow she navigated us out of the wilderness, onto a street with lights, and, to my great relief, onto Memorial Drive in Cambridge. I have no idea how she did it, and I suspect she didn't either. I just know she loved every minute of the off-road adventure.

  In 1990, we took on Colorado. The Food & Wine Classic is a four-day-long foodie lollapalooza that Food & Wine magazine sponsors each June in Aspen. Julia wanted to go not just for the event itself but because it was an opportunity to spend time with a favorite niece, Phila, who lives in nearby Golden, Colorado. As soon as we arrived in Aspen, Julia experienced the unpleasant, sapping effects of the high altitude. She walked more slowly and had to stop and rest often. At times she seemed to struggle for air. I was concerned, but she assured me she was fine.

  Less fine were the preparations for her demonstrations. She planned to make the quick puff pastry recipe that she had done hundreds of times, and we needed several batches of the dough ready to use. But her recipe didn't work in the high altitude. The very low humidity and low air pressure had disastrous results for the dough, robbing the water we kept adding well beyond the amount the recipe called for. We were having a desperate time getting the proportions right, and several times I tried to get Julia to go to her room, assuring her that I would let her know as soon as we were close to working it out. "I'd rather stay," she said emphatically. Friends around the kitchen left their own prep stations to offer advice, and it was the elfin dynamo Barbara Tropp who saved the day. Barbara was a lovely lady who until her unfair and untimely death was the chef-owner of the truly outstanding China Moon restaurant in San Francisco. In Aspen, she introduced us to the secrets of pastry making in the mountains. We needed to add more of the high-protein all-purpose flour and less of the softer cake flour and increase the water by so many tablespoons per thousand feet of altitude in order to offset the high rate of evaporation.

  We got it right, but the multiple testings and then making all the dough we needed for the demonstration took a long time, and the altitude took its toll on Julia. With several neatly wrapped packages of perfect puff pastry tucked into the refrigerator and clearly marked with Julia's name, we returned to the hotel. I thought it was enough of a day for her and suggested that perhaps she should rest that evening instead of attending any of the planned events. I should have known better; I did but I forgot. Julia refused to stay put, and after a quick change of clothes we headed out for a dinner that lasted well past midnight.

  Me, Paula Lambert, Julia, Nancy Harris, and Barbara Pool Fenzl each losing ten pounds by doing "the stance."

  The next day she was ready to play with her friends. Cookbook author Pat Wells arrived in Aspen with a new trick: "the stance." In France she'd learned from some model types that if you stand with one shoulder to the camera, extend your arms slightly forward, and turn only your head toward the camera, you miraculously look pounds thinner. We thought this was the best thing since American foie gras, and like silly schoolgirls we would chant "the stance, the stance" whenever someone asked to take a picture. It may not have made us look any thinner, but it sure did make us smile broadly.

  That summer we also found ourselves playing outside the food world. The Boston Pops invited Julia to conduct a musical piece during its annual concert at its Cape Cod esplanade. It was not Julia's first concert performance—in the 1960s she'd done an incomparable reading of Tubby the Tuba at Boston Symphony Hall with Arthur Fiedler. Julia invited Susy Davidson and me to go along with her for the Pops weekend, and we arrived in Hyannis the night before the concert, dined out with Charlie Gibson and his wife, who have a summer home on the Cape, and said goodnight with promises to resume eating at breakfast.

  "Knock me up at eight," Julia said, using her favorite expression for a wake-up call. She knew it was slang for getting pregnant and thought it was a hoot to use it as she did.

  As promised, Susy and I stood knocking on her door at eight the next morning. There was no answer.

  "Maybe she's still sleeping," Susy offered, but I raised my eyebrows at her and we dismissed it as an improbable explanation.

  "Although she could be in the shower," I suggested. "There are phones in the rooms' bathrooms. Let's call her from the lobby."

  The phone rang and rang, and after checking the dining room to see if she was already breakfasting, we began to worry.

  "Wait!" I said, remembering. "I have a key to her room." We let ourselves in, quietly announcing our arrival lest hell had frozen over and she was still sleeping. She was sitting at her desk with a set of headphones securely on her head and the cord attached to a Sony Walkman. She was waving a pencil in the air with a great deal of liveliness.

  "Good morning," she said when we moved into her line of vision. She slid the headphones from her ears to her neck. "I'm practicing. It's a demanding piece." During the performance, John Williams was to call her up onstage, where he would pass her his baton and she would conduct the orchestra in "The Stars and Stripes Forever." "Lots of booming," she said. "I want to make sure I'm ready for them."

  "How are you doing with it?" we asked.

  "I think I need a lot more practice," she said. "I'm going to stay here for the morning." She returned to the Sony and her pencil and spent hours practicing her upbeats, downbeats, and flourishes.

  Susy, me, and Julia singing and keeping time.

  On a beautiful, clear summer evening, Susy, Julia, and I sat in the audience singing along with the music when asked to. Just as planned, partway through the show, John Williams called her to the stage and passed her his baton—or tried to. When he held it out to her, she waved her hand and shook her head. Before I could even think that she was chickening out, she walked over to the horn section, where an obvious conspirator reached down and pulled something from under a coat on the stage floor. It was a four-foot-long wooden spoon, and Julia accepted it with exaggerated conductor's pomp before returning to a delighted John Williams. With every note perfectly beat by the spoon's vigorous waving, she conducted "The Stars and Stripes Forever," accented by her piece of orchestrated hamming.

  Julia conducting with her wooden spoon.

  It's lovely never to lose the delight of surprising peopl
e, and Julia didn't. She got me, yet again, during a demonstration at which she made a cake that called for six beaten egg whites. When we were setting up for the show, she asked for both a K5A stand mixer and a copper bowl for the whites.

  "Which one are you going to use?" I asked.

  "I haven't decided," she said, so I had both ready.

  When it came time to beat the whites, she explained to the audience the difference between beating egg whites in the copper bowl and doing it in the mixer.

  "Let's see which is faster, shall we?" she said to the audience. For a moment I thought she would start the K5A and then begin whisking by hand, but she turned to me. "Nancy, you use the bowl, and I'll use the machine."

  Notice where my waist is compared to Julia's as we stand side by side at a counter constructed to accommodate her six feet plus.

  As was the case in Providence when I met Julia, the demonstration counter was at least four inches higher than normal height, and I immediately thought of how fatiguing it is to whisk with one's arms raised, so I cradled the bowl low against my stomach.

  "I think you'd better put it on the counter so everyone can see," Julia said. I could tell by the devilish look in her eyes that she was creating a skit and I was the straight man, so I went with it and made an exaggerated gesture of lifting the bowl onto the counter. The audience snickered.

  "Want a box to stand on?" she said, and the audience roared.

  I declined and readied myself for the workout.

  "On three," she said, taking hold of the machine's on-off handle. We began, and I whisked with all my might. Julia made a show of casually looking in her bowl and then over into mine. I was far behind. She leaned her arm on her machine, rested her chin in her palm, and pretended to be daydreaming. I sweated. "I think mine are ready," she said, turning off the machine and holding up the beaters to show the peaked egg whites. "How are you doing?"

  "Not quite there," I said, changing arms.

  "Maybe you should have taken the box."

  Demonstrations, signings, concerts—they were all Julia as usual, but with an added twist. "I am under attack" is how Julia described the not so usual. "I suddenly have to defend myself, and everything I have done and worked for." She was referring to the frequent assaults on her use of butter and cream—or, as she defined it, "nutrition rearing its ugly head." Julia aggressively defended her way of cooking because she believed adamantly that a fear of food would be the death of gastronomy. Moderation, she insisted, was the key, and looking back now, from a time when food scientists tell us "the other spread" is more harmful than butter and invalidate so many erstwhile culinary taboos, Julia's approach makes more sense than ever.

  If having to defend herself was new to Julia, then the incident in the elevator was revolutionary. In November, the publishing company Alfred A. Knopf threw a party for its authors. It was a grand affair held, appropriately, at the New York Public Library. My Knopf book, We Called It Macaroni, was about to be released, and that qualified me for an invitation, but with a guest list that included the likes of John Updike and Toni Morrison, not to mention Julia with her multiple Knopf publications, I admit that I felt like a poser. That feeling was accentuated by the realization that Julia and I were going to share a car to the event with Anne Rice, whose vampire books were swarming bookstore windows all over the city.

  "I'll no doubt be the least recognized person at the party," I told Julia.

  "Doesn't matter. Just go up to people and tell them who you are."

  Sound advice, and typical Julia, but not part of my DNA. I clutched my invitation, mustered a feeble sense of entitlement to it, and stepped into the ornately mirrored elevator of the posh Park Avenue hotel where we were staying. Two floors down, the doors opened and an elegantly dressed woman got in. She took one look at Julia, pointed an impressively bejeweled finger at her, and asked in a somewhat imperious tone, "Are you who I think you are?" People often asked that when taken aback by an unexpected Julia sighting, and she responded with one of her typical, self-effacing retorts.

  "Just that old cook."

  The woman looked disappointed—or maybe it was annoyed, because she quickly turned her back on us with a clipped explanation. "I'm sorry. You're not who I thought you were at all."

  Julia actually looked startled. With the exception of her sister, Dorothy, no one looked or sounded like Julia. No one. We stared at each other wide-eyed but remained speechless until we were in the lobby and all we saw of the woman was the back of her sable coat slipping into the revolving door.

  "I don't feel quite so inadequate anymore," I said, causing Julia to smile and poke me in the arm. For years afterward, I could make her smile by pointing to her and asking, "Are you who I think you are?" I've always regretted that Julia and I were too surprised to ask the woman who she thought Julia was.

  Nineteen ninety was a good year, a year without "something," until December. That's when Sonya died. She made it through surgery for cancer, and the doctors expected her to make a full recovery. Our joy at that news was shattered when, after returning home, she died in the night of a pulmonary embolism. She was fifty-four years old. When the New York Times asked Julia for a statement, she said, "Her talents for creating a kitchen drama in two and a half minutes were awesome. I am indeed indebted to her." Sonya was more than Julia's producer and my boss; she was our friend, and her death hurt. The pain was even sharper when our new producer, Jane Bollinger, told me that Sonya had planned a surprise for me but never had a chance to tell me. "She planned to schedule you for an appearance on the show with your book. I intend to honor her wishes." It was a bittersweet moment. Sonya had taught me so much about what made a good television food spot, and I wished that she could be there to see if I got it right. But Sonya had taught Jane as well, and she produced a good segment for me. So good, in fact, that ABC affiliates around the country asked me to appear on their shows. My own busy book tour put a temporary end to my frolicking days with Julia.

  That May, Julia and I did our first book signing together, and I was excited at the prospect of sharing that time with the person who was so responsible for my writing the book in the first place. It was in Vancouver at the annual conference of the International Association of Culinary Professionals. Each year, the organization holds an afternoon-long book fair at which a throng of hopeful authors sit at tables that wind around and through a large meeting room and attempt to sell and then sign their books. IACP headquarters seats the authors around the tables alphabetically by their last names. When Julia and I located our places, we saw that they were far apart. Julia poked me in the arm and, with a voice and demeanor worthy of any undercover operative, said to me, "Switch the names so we can sit next to each other."

  Of course, she could have just asked headquarters to switch our places and they would have, but that would have eliminated her fun of standing guard while I crept up to the table and switched my place card with that of whoever was right next to her. I regretted it the minute the doors opened and the crowds came in.

  Julia wanted to sit next to a friend so she would have someone to gab with when there was a lull. But for Julia there never was a lull. People swarmed to our table and stood in long lines waiting to meet her. She generously introduced me to her hordes of fans as "a good Italian cook, with a good Italian book." People would politely if vaguely acknowledge me, perhaps glance at my book, and then put their coffee cups, wineglasses, purses, and small shopping bags down in front of me, hand me a camera, and ask me to take a picture of them with Julia. It is very hard to sell books with that kind of competition seated next to you. I decided that the following year I would sit where the alphabet said I should, but when the fair mercifully ended, Julia said what a long afternoon it had been and added, "It's a good thing we had each other," and I decided it had been a very fruitful time after all.

  That summer, I took the boys to France and we spent part of our time at her house in Provence. Julia was in Oslo with Russ and Marian Morash shooting an hour-lo
ng piece for WGBH, A Taste of Norway with Julia Child. I couldn't wait for her to return to Cambridge so I could call her and let her know that Simca's brother-in-law, Herr Fischbacher, whom Julia had warned us could be gruff and unfriendly, was generously squiring us around the beaches along the Riviera and joining us for cocktails.

  Brad and Andrew staged this photo to send to Julia from her home in France.

  But she called me before I called her. The phone rang, and the minute she said, "Nancy," I knew something was wrong. Her voice was loud and shaky.

  "What's happened, Julia?" I asked.

  "Liz died."

  Liz? Liz Bishop, a good, good friend who for so many years was there with her quick wit, who was always expertly running interference for Julia through a crowd, always managing the schedule to balance work and fun? "Oh, my God. How?"

  Julia told me that Liz and her husband, Jack, had been out on their boat. Liz had a headache; she lay down in her cabin and died in her sleep of a brain aneurysm. Of all the setbacks that Julia had faced in the past years, I think Liz's death was one of the most difficult for her to grasp. It was too sudden. There was no slow winding down, no previous illness to warn that it might come. It just happened. Sometimes "always something" just does.

  Chapter 9

  In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.

  —Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance

  Julia gave me only two pieces of advice about getting older: be prepared to wear shoes with straps that hold them on your feet, and have your chin waxed at least twice a year. Shoes with straps and chin waxing. That was it.