Backstage with Julia

by Nancy Verde Barr

  I think that in order to live life at eighty with gusto, you have to have a somewhat elevated degree of fearlessness. Never do I remember Julia refusing to do something because it might be dangerous. And if something such as being knocked out by a fall or splitting a lip wide open did occur, she didn't agonize about how much worse it could have been. When a hot-air balloon dumped her out of the basket upon landing, she told the story not with an emphasis on how it could have broken her legs or her back but with a dramatic swooshing of her arms and imaginative sound effects to describe "what a ride it was!"

  During a trip to Miami, we got lost driving to a restaurant. Julia was in the backseat, my latest boyfriend was driving, and I was sitting in front without benefit of a map. Cell phones were a thing of the future, so we pulled into a gas station and I got out to call the restaurant for directions. My boyfriend got out to pump gas. A man sprang out of nowhere, opened the back door, grabbed Julia's purse, and disappeared in a flash. No one but Julia saw him, and when she calmly told us what happened, I was in a panic thinking that he could have had a knife and slashed her, or punched her, or hit her over the head with a heavy object. Julia was concerned only because her purse held her address book and she wondered how she would reconstruct the information he stole. It wasn't that she conquered her fears; she just didn't have them, and that gave her love of adventure a wide scope. I sometimes found that unnerving.

  When Judith Jones turned seventy in 1994, a small group of friends arranged a surprise birthday party for her at Lutèce in New York. The owner, André Soltner, was a good friend of Judith's and such an excellent chef that it just sounded like the best time ever. Julia, Marian Morash, and I excitedly arranged to travel together, flying from Boston in the morning and back in the evening. But the day of the party it began to snow, and when Marian and I arrived to pick up Julia, it was really coming down. "Maybe it's not such a good idea to go," Marian and I suggested.

  Julia promptly called the airport, learned that planes were flying, and said we were off. The weather got worse, however, and planes were delayed; Marian and I began to think that it was a very bad idea. Maybe we'd get down there, but we all needed to be back home that night, and could we make it? "Well, I'm going," Julia said, and we boarded the nearly empty plane. As we sat on the runway, takeoff on hold, snowfall getting heavier, Marian and I were white-knuckling our armrests and wondering if they'd let us off. Julia was reading Newsweek.

  "Aren't you just a little nervous?" I asked her.

  "About what?" she responded, turning the page.

  Julia was right to think that her age in years was insignificant. Her spirit was ageless and that is how we thought of her—ageless. Those rare occasions that reminded us of how old she was were always a bit startling. I once lamented to Judith Jones how I wished I could conjure up the colorful language and expressions that Julia did so easily. "Don't forget," Judith told me, "Julia has eight decades of colloquialisms to choose from." Eight decades! Julia had been around eight decades! Somehow I'd missed that.

  Chapter 10

  Passion is energy. Feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you.

  —Oprah Winfrey

  "Find something you're passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it," Julia once said, and in her eighties she was as passionate about food and cooking as she was the day she discovered oysters and Dover sole in Rouen. For thirty continuous years, her enthusiasm for her work, coupled with her unflagging energy, kept her on the move and in the public eye, and she wasn't about to slow down when she still had things to say and much to teach. Television was her favorite classroom and several new TV opportunities became available to her. In 1993, she accepted an offer to host a new PBS television show, Cooking with Master Chefs. It was a fifteen-program series that featured a different chef each week, taped on location in the featured chefs' kitchens.

  Usually, for cooking shows of this type, the production crew tapes the chef cooking and the chef gives the written recipes to a recipe tester, who tests and edits the recipes for a book that will accompany the show. In fact, that is how the producers had planned to do the show when they asked Julia to narrate the series. They had not expected her actually to be on the road with them, but for her to watch the edited shows and tape her comments and enlightenments from a comfortable chair in her Cambridge home.

  "Just like Alistair Cooke on Masterpiece Theatre," Julia told me.

  "Only she'll be Alistair Cookie," her assistant, Stephanie Hersh, added.

  But then Julia agreed to allow the accompanying book to carry her name, and true to form, there was no way that she would lend her name to any material whose quality and trustworthiness she did not personally oversee. She wanted to be on the scene to taste, smell, and measure the food she would describe to her audiences.

  So, with a great deal of enthusiasm, Julia left for California to capture the culinary secrets of Alice Waters, Jeremiah Tower, and Nancy Silverton on her laptop computer. Because the book had to be available for purchase by the time the show aired, Julia was in an Iron Chef–like race with the presses. She did not have the luxury of waiting to view the tapes at home but had to write most of the book on the road. It was an overwhelming job.

  When she returned to Cambridge about a week later, she called immediately to ask if I could go up to her house for dinner and spend the night. "I need to talk to you," she said in an unfamiliar tone.

  As we stood side by side—actually, the top of my shoulder to her side—at her kitchen counter preparing dinner, she said to me, "I don't think I can do it. It's just much more work than I thought." I was dumbfounded. It seemed as though nothing had ever been too much work for her, and if it ever had been, then, in her words, she bulled it through anyway. "Can you come with me and help write the rest of the book? I need you."

  I was in the middle of ghostwriting a cookbook for another publisher and was up to my ears in work. How could I possibly say yes? How could I say no? "Of course. That will be great."

  "Thank you. I am very grateful."

  It's what friends do for friends, and I didn't think very much of it, so I was extremely touched by Julia's kind words in the acknowledgments of the book, Cooking with Master Chefs: "Deepest and special thanks go to my friend and colleague, Nancy Verde Barr, 'Without whom . . . We first met while I was doing a fund-raising cooking demonstration some years ago for Planned Parenthood in Providence, Rhode Island. She appeared as a young volunteer from that organization, to help us out with buying, arranging, cooking, and so forth. She was wonderful in every way and we all said, 'Let's hang on to her!' And we did, and we have all been together these many years—doing television series, book tours, demonstrations . . . When I found, while working on this book, that I'd never survive and get all the writing done on schedule by myself, I called for help, and Nancy came. We spent hours glued to the set, taking down every chefly word on our twin laptops, and she helped with the writing, and the chefs' biographies, and reediting, and the proofing. We work well together and my thanks are infinite."

  I packed my bags, my half-finished ghosted manuscript, and my laptop and joined Julia for work in New York, Washington, D.C., and New Orleans. I immediately understood why she had asked me for help. She didn't lack the energy to do the work; it simply was not a one-person job, especially given the rushed time frame. We spent most days on the set, where we wrote down every detail of what the chefs did, and then we translated their actions into recipes that were doable for the home cook. Other days we were on airplanes flying to the next gig. We worked on the planes; we worked every morning in her hotel room before five; we never saw bed before eleven at night. It was a grueling schedule for anyone, let alone someone in her eighties, but Julia set the pace and kept to it with remarkable energy.

  She also set the standard for the book. A stenographer could have recorded the words, but Julia needed more. She wanted to measure the exact length of André Soltner's bacon lardons, describe the placement of herbs in Charlie Palmer'
s potato maximes, and verbally capture the exact aroma of Emeril Lagasse's crab boil. She insisted that the recipes be of the type that was her stock in trade—detailed with explanations, suggestions on equipment, and elaborations on ingredients.

  The recipes themselves were a problem, since few of the chefs gave us material that would make sense to the home cook. In some cases the recipes were little more than ideas, a dish that the chef prepared by the seat of his pants and then attempted to scratch out in writing on paper to fit what he did. Those that were written out in detail were often recalculated from a restaurant recipe designed to serve a large number of people. Dividing a recipe for two hundred into servings for six or eight leaves the reader with silly amounts such as 31⁄2 cups plus 1⁄2 teaspoon of flour, or 16 tablespoons of oil instead of the equivalent but easier to measure 1 cup. One chef agreeably computed his restaurant recipe so that the meat served a nice tidy dinner for six; the sauce served a hundred and fifty!

  Julia organized our work so that it was a lot like two people doing a crossword puzzle in tandem. We each recorded what the chefs did and then passed a disc back and forth to combine our notes, add missing directions, and correct ingredient amounts until we had one document that held workable recipes. She made me responsible for interviewing the chefs and writing their culinary biographies. It was a workable system, although Julia had a computer mishap that threatened to sidetrack it.

  I was writing about Charlie Palmer's career when she handed me the disc with his recipes.

  "Here's Palmer," she said.

  "This should be fun," I said.

  Two days before, she'd spilled coffee on her computer, destroying the E key, and there hadn't been time to have it repaired. After her initial annoyance with herself for her clumsiness—and subsequently a new rule, which she noted with several Post-it notes, that there should be "NO DRINKS NEAR COMPUTERS"—she decided to substitute #'s for the E's. Sometimes she just forgot and punched the unworkable E key anyway, which produced nothing. I opened the file marked "P#ppr-Sar#d V#nison Staks with Pinot Noir and Sun-Dri#d Ch#rris" and was glad I'd been at the shoot and knew that those hieroglyphics translated to "Pepper-Seared Venison Steaks with Sun-Dried Cherries."

  I've often wondered why it took the producers so long to realize that Julia did not belong in the back of a room pecking away at a computer. She belonged on camera, and eventually that's where she wound up. She still had to write the book, but she could also do what she loved most, perform for her audiences. And when she appeared on camera with Jacques Pépin, she was vintage Julia, sassy as ever. She joined Pépin in his kitchen while he made a lobster soufflé. With the cameras rolling, Julia asked Jacques how he removed the lobster meat from the claws. As he demonstrated his method, Julia picked up the lobster tail, removed the meat from the shell, and said, "Here, Jacques. I have a nice piece of tail for you." Everyone laughed, the cameras stopped, and the crew set up to reshoot the segment. She said it again.

  Julia and Jacques together on camera were magic, and it was natural that the producers decided to pair them again for more TV shows. There were two Cooking in Concert specials and a PBS series, Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home. They were good friends who greatly respected each other's abilities even as they disagreed, often adamantly but always amusingly, about such things as the necessary amount of butter and cream in a recipe, or how thick a hamburger should be. The playful arguments never undermined what each was about, and that was the same thing. Jacques explained what that same thing was in his introduction to the book that accompanied the Cooking at Home series. "On the whole we agreed as to what is important: taste over appearance, simplicity in recipes, using the proper techniques, using the best-quality ingredients, following the seasons, keeping an open mind to new food preparations, and of course, sharing both wine and food with family and friends."

  Julia adored being on television, but as Jacques pointed out, she never lost sight of her goal to promote the art of cooking. She drew the line when that goal was compromised. For a number of years, she made appearances on Late Night with David Letterman. David, whom she really liked, did a lot of crazy shtick with her food. She made crepes and David threw them like Frisbees out to the audience, but she kept teaching. On another show when she espoused the joys of real butter, David picked up a stick and bit off nearly half of it, yumming his agreement with her. She smiled and continued with her lesson. On the night she showed David how to make the perfect hamburger, the electricity, not David, messed her up. The electric cooktop was set in a rolling cart, which we kept backstage until she was ready to go on the set. The pan was hot and ready to cook, but when the stagehands moved the cart out front during a commercial break, they discovered that the electrical source on the stage did not work and the pan gradually began to cool until it could no longer cook anything. Undaunted by her inability to fry the hamburger, Julia walked David through beef tartare even as David made mayhem of the spot. Somehow, in spite of his foolishness, she always managed to keep her cooking professional. Then the producers asked her to appear on a show in which she would chop a bunch of watermelons up with an axe. She refused. "That's kiddy stuff," she said to me. "Not what we're about." She never did another of his shows.

  The success of Julia and Jacques together on camera led to more programs that featured Julia with other successful television personalities. At a fund-raiser for the International Association of Culinary Professionals Foundation in San Antonio, Texas, we paired her up with Graham Kerr for the first of three television shows they would do together. In spite of all the years the two had been performing, they did not know each other very well. But when Graham walked into our San Antonio suite with that glorious smile and snappy tartan kilt, I think Julia fell in love. Their onstage presence was delightful. Like Julia, Graham is serious about his cooking, but he also knows that the name of the game is entertainment, so he was ready to give the audience what they wanted.

  After much faxing back and forth, the two decided to make a bouillabaisse-style fish soup garnished with rouille, the traditional paste made with hot chilies, garlic, breadcrumbs, and olive oil. Since Graham concentrated on healthy cooking, he demonstrated his light version of a rouille using a food processor. Julia made hers with a mortar and pestle.

  Graham's processor rouille went quickly, and he asked Julia to taste and sign off on it. She approved and then went back to her work, pounding away. When she considered her rouille done, she gave Graham a taste. His whole body reacted and he made small gasping sounds.

  "Whoa!" he said with a little laugh. "What happened?"

  "It's all that garlic," she said, challenging him to handle the enormous quantity of garlic that she had added.

  Graham tucked one arm behind his back, lifted the other above his head, and did a few flamenco steps to demonstrate that such a sauce belonged in a very hot climate, or maybe it was to say that her rouille brought out the Latin lover in him.

  Julia gave him a flirtatious smile.

  "Darling," he said to her, "as an Englishman, I think I've just been violated." The audience roared.

  Julia looked down appreciatively at her rouille. "I didn't know it would be that easy," she said, leaving Graham speechless and the audience in stitches.

  With shows on PBS and her network spots on Good Morning America, what else could television offer her? Cable. In 1993, the Food Network was in its infancy on cable television, and they asked Julia if she would do a series of shows for them. Julia didn't want to do a cooking show, but she agreed to be a regular monthly guest on the network's program Food News and Views, appearing with one or the other of the show's two hosts, David Rosengarten and Donna Hanover. She also suggested to them that they should hire me as her producer.

  The production crew and talent on the set of the Food Network's Food News and Views.

  My job for each taping session of five shows was to come up with a number of timely culinary issues, run them by Julia to see which ones she liked, and then write up a number of suggested
questions for the hosts. It didn't take me long to realize that I was no Barbara Walters. Unlike producing pieces where food is the star, producing news of any ilk demands journalism skills I just didn't have. Julia never thought the shows were as dreary as I did, but I would have given my new KitchenAid K5A stand mixer with copper egg white bowl for one hour with Barbara, Lesley Stahl, or Diane Sawyer, who could say, "These are the questions you want to have the host ask." The spots with David weren't so bad, since he was passionate and well informed about the topics and was able to bring his own knowledge and questions to the table. As professional as Donna was as a television news person, however, she wasn't as tuned into the food world as David was, and so she relied on my sappy questions.

  Sample Topics from Julia's Appearances on the Food Network's Food News and Views

  The Weighting of America

  Americans are more overweight than ever. I think it's been estimated that one out of three adults is overweight. The Snack Food Association (who are they?) predicted that on Super Bowl Sunday Americans would consume 28 million pounds of potato chips, Doritos, and corn chips. Could this be the problem?