Backstage with Julia Read online

  Backstage with Julia

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Postscript

  Resources

  Backstage with Julia

  My Years With Julia Child

  Nancy Verde Barr

  Also by Nancy Verde Barr

  Cookbooks

  We Called It Macaroni: An American Heritage of Southern Italian Cooking

  In Julia’s Kitchen with Master Chefs (with Julia Child)

  Make It Italian: The Taste and Technique of Italian Home Cooking

  Fiction

  Last Bite: A Novel of Culinary Romance

  This book is printed on acid-free paper. ∞

  Copyright © 2007 by Nancy Verde Barr. All rights reserved

  Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 750-4470, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

  Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

  For general information on our other products and services or for technical support, please contact our Customer Care Department within the United States at (800) 762-2974, outside the United States at (317) 572-3993 or fax (317) 572-4002.

  Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. For more information about Wiley products, visit our web site at www.wiley.com.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

  Barr, Nancy Verde.

  Backstage with Julia : my years with Julia Child / Nancy Verde Barr.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-471-78737-2 (cloth)

  ISBN 978-0-470-27637-2 (paper)

  ISBN 978-1-118-06016-2 (ebook)

  ISBN 978-1-118-06017-9 (ebook)

  1. Child, Julia. 2. Cooks—United States—Biography. 3. Barr, Nancy Verde—Friends and associates. I. Title.

  TX649.C47B37 2007

  641.5092—dc22

  [B]

  2007001696

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Interior Design: Lee Goldstein

  To the memory of Julia, without whom . . .

  Acknowledgments

  When I began to work for Julia, my friend Jane Andrews told me to keep a journal so I would have a record of the dates and events of that special time. If I had followed her advice, I would now have a chronological, detailed accounting of the twenty-four years I knew Julia. I didn't and I don't. But somewhere I read that life is not about the dates that mark the beginning and end of one's life or the events in it; it's about the dashes between the dates.

  Those dashes are indelibly recorded in my mind. And for those that needed illumination, I am grateful to friends of Julia's and mine who supplied the light. Zanne Stewart, Judith Jones, Sally Jackson, Dagmar de Pins Sullivan, Jody Adams, John McJennet III, Russ and Marian Morash, Debbie Moxham, Nan McEvoy, Mary Higgins, Hope Hudner, Philip Barr, my sons, Brad and Andrew Barr, Merle Ellis, Ed Dudkowski, and Ira Yoffe all ignited memories of events that made us smile when they happened and then again, when we remembered them. I am particularly grateful to Susy Davidson, who went so far out of her way to supply me with information, whether it was from her memory or the massive stockpile of materials she saves. She is, as she always was to Julia, "that darling Susy." For information I needed, and didn't have, I thank Jennifer Esposito for spending time with me at the Schlesinger Library hunting through the many boxes that contain Julia's papers.

  When my agent Jane Dystel suggested this project to me, I vacillated and procrastinated. What would I write about a woman who was a friend to so many people and known to legions of others? Jane and her partner, Miriam Goderich, showed me the story that only I could tell. To Julia, saying someone was a "true professional" was high praise indeed and Jane and Miriam are true professionals. I am proud to be among their client list. Still, the process of writing this book had its traumas, and through them all Jane was always there to make the rain go away. For that alone, I wish her a life that is never without licorice.

  I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my brother, Tom Verde, an award winning print and radio journalist, who was there, as he always has been, to help me say what I wanted to say a whole lot better than I might say it. I am particularly appreciative for his help since he took time from his Master's work and the production of a new radio show to read what I wrote and remind me when he thought Charles Dickens was in possession of my computer.

  Many authors thank friends who read their manuscripts and give them valuable feedback. Others don't and I suspect they are like me. We hover over our works unable to reveal them to anyone until the publisher demands we pass them in. Instead, we share with friends our angst over what we are or are not writing, and for their patience in listening to my frustrations, I am grateful to Nelson Doubleday, my stepdaughters Vicki Cooley and Lydia Bailey, Lydia's husband, Dave Pac, Rosie Connors, and Nicky Nickturn. For some generous reason, they still answer my phone calls.

  I hope Christine DiComo, Editorial Program Coordinator at John Wiley & Sons, knows exactly how much I appreciate the careful attention she paid to coordinating my materials into a book. And, thank you Justin Schwartz, Senior Editor at Wiley, for your enthusiastic support of this book. It was just like receiving one of Julia's postcards stamped with stars and bravos all over again.

  Preface

  The telephone rang just before dawn on August 13, 2004. Without opening my eyes, I rolled over and groped for the receiver. Tucking it under my chin, eyes still closed, I rolled back over and mumbled a sleepy "Hello."

  "Nancy?"

  More asleep than awake, I didn't recognize the voice. "Yes."

  "It's Stephanie," was all Julia's longtime assistant said before pausing to let the early hour of the call register with me. She was in California. It was the middle of the night for her. I kne
w why she was calling.

  "Oh, Stephanie," I said with resigned sadness but no exclamation of shock. Julia had not been well; it had been expected. "When?"

  "A short time ago."

  Stephanie told me that Julia had simply said it was enough and declined to go to the hospital yet once more; she passed away at home with her family and her kitten, Minou, by her side. It was two days shy of what would have been her ninety-second birthday. According to her wishes, there would be no funeral. I hung up the phone and allowed the tears to flow.

  They flowed for the loss of a friend who had been part of my life for over two decades. Yet they were also tears of empathy. In that moment, I finally understood a feeling Julia had expressed ten years earlier when her husband, Paul, died. Her extreme sorrow at his loss was palpable and understandable, but when she wept to me, "It's the end of an era," I didn't fully understand, couldn't quite grasp her feeling. On August 13, as I lay there quietly weeping, I understood.

  An era—a signal, definitive stage of history; a definable period in which a new order of things prevails; a special time. For Julia, Paul marked the beginning of her culinary awakening. Until they married, when she was thirty-four years old, she hadn't cooked at all, and she admitted that as a new wife her culinary attempts were mostly disasters that seldom made it to the table even close to a reasonable dinner hour. It was Paul who introduced her to French cuisine while they were living in Europe, and he did it with the knowledge and zeal of a man who was himself a connoisseur. She enrolled at the famous Paris Cordon Bleu cooking school in 1949, taking the first step that led to her long and equally famous culinary career. Paul walked with her every step of the path, accompanying her with enthusiasm, support, and devotion. Julia viewed her culinary birth and the course it took as the era of Paul and Julia.

  For many of us, Julia was our culinary awakening. Our kitchen timers all started buzzing at once in 1963 when, at fifty years old, she debuted on public television with her show The French Chef and roused us first with the sound of her voice and odd galumphing about. Then she shook us awake and seduced us into her world with food that looked beyond delicious, even on black-and-white television and with names hard to pronounce. Were the recipes time-consuming and tedious to make? Were the ingredients hard to find? Who cared? Look at the fun she was having with it.

  With eyes wide open, we went to great lengths to participate in the new order of her culinary world. We knocked down house walls and expanded our kitchens to accommodate monster-sized restaurant ranges and spacious Sub-Zero refrigerators with price tags that were startling. We purchased oversized sauté pans, fish poachers, stockpots, porcelain soufflé dishes with unglazed bottoms, and a batterie of small kitchen tools that we had never before seen or even knew existed. No longer was the one drawer that held a metal spatula, a handheld eggbeater, and a few mismatched knives enough. We needed room for a bench scraper, a bulb baster, several sizes of whisks, rubber spatulas, and flat-sided wooden spoons, as well as a place for a large set of well-honed knives. Kitchen counter space had to be generous enough to hold a K5A stand mixer, a food processor, and, for the truly passionate, a duck press. We stocked our refrigerators with "exotic" leeks, rare cuts of rare animals, and a very small glass jar that held two imported black truffles. Not only did the look of the home kitchen change, but so did its denizens. Once the domain solely of the housewife, it suddenly became a hobby center for men who embraced Julia's culinary world. At the same time, the previously male-dominated sanctum of the restaurant kitchen became the workplace for women chefs.

  With a passion she sustained for over forty years, Julia continued to shape and influence the new order she had created, never allowing it to become stagnant. In addition to her monumental two-volume set, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which provided a definitive education in traditional French techniques, she wrote nine more cookbooks that guided us through the application of those classic techniques to all good cooking of any ethnic genre. She headlined nine television series that followed the same progression from learning the proper foundation to applying it to "plain, good cooking." Over the course of her culinary life, she weighed in publicly and consistently with common sense and pithy wit on every food fad and culinary trend that caught our attention. She was the single most influential figure in the culinary world.

  Her death was indeed the end of an era.

  Like countless chefs, food writers, good home cooks, and even feckless pot-burners who would that day mourn her loss, I grew from cooking infant to adult culinarian in the age of Julia Child. Long before I began to work for her, I was already steeped in the era she created. I owned a large copper egg white bowl and an oversized balloon whisk, a conical fine-mesh chinois strainer, and a freezer full of homemade stock. I knew how to bone a whole chicken and how to make an omelet three ways. What I didn't know was what it took to be the kind of person who could define an era.

  Julia always credited her success to timing: "I just happened to come along at the right time. If it hadn't been me, someone else would have done it." Perhaps. But could someone else have done it as well for so long? Could anyone else have made it as much fun to generations of audiences of all ages and interests, culinary or not? Would another person have devoted the time to developing the professionalism of gastronomy and provided such generous, personal mentoring to generations of culinary professionals?

  Julia was right about her timing, though. At the beginning of the sixties, America was ripe for a new culinary age. After World War II, air travel to Europe was more accessible and affordable than it had ever been. Travel to France became increasingly popular with Americans who came face to fork with food the likes of which they had never tasted at home. The Kennedy's were in the White House and Americans became so enamored of their lifestyle that the First Couple became the country's standard for style. Jackie Kennedy brought a previously unseen elegance to state dining and entertaining and she did it with the aid of a French chef, René Verdon. French food became synonymous with fine dining, and the next best thing to hiring a Gallic cook was to learn how to make the dishes yourself. Julia was there to show us how. She was right: her timing was perfect. Still, she was not without precedent. James Beard and Dione Lucas had each published popular cookbooks, and Beard was on television with his I Love to Cook, while Lucas had her show, To the Queen's Taste, and could even occasionally be seen flipping French omelets in Bloomingdale's display windows.

  So why Julia? Because more than the right time, she had the right stuff—what it took to go beyond simply filling a need and become synonymous with cooking itself. She had what the entertainment industry simply calls "it." On television her particular style of "it" told audiences that she was just like us, and if she could transform a large, unwieldy fish into dinner and turn common chunks of beef into a sophisticated Boeuf Bourguignon, then we could too. It was a masterly act of convincing, because in truth there was nothing common about Julia Child.

  Everything about Julia was exceptional, from her strapping height and warbling voice to her zest for life, dauntless constitution, and interminable energy. To borrow a combination of phrases from George Carlin, she was "super-sized, long-lasting, high-definition, fast-acting, oven-ready, and built to last." She was unselfconsciously outspoken, smart, witty, and by her own admission a natural ham. Her discipline, work ethic, and organizational skills made me weep with envy, and her decisiveness and strong will sometimes just plain made me weep. She was curious and thorough, if not to a fault, at least to the point of making me beg her not to tell me another fact about the difference between sweet potatoes and yams. She was exceedingly practical, a trait that reflected her stern Presbyterian ancestry, and exquisitely nonjudgmental, which probably contradicted it.

  Backstage with Julia is a memoir of the years I spent with Julia, years that showed me what kind of person could launch a culinary era. This book does not pretend to be a chronicle of her life and work. A detailed biography already exists; more may well follow. Neither do
es it explore Julia's culinary awakening. She told the definitive story of that time in My Life in France, the last book she wrote. These are my memories of the Julia who was my mentor, my colleague, my friend; my story of what made her so special.

  That August morning, I lay in bed a long time thinking about Julia. I thought about the last time I'd seen her. It was a few months before the call, when I visited her in California. She knew I was writing a culinary novel loosely based on the television work we had done at Good Morning America, and she wanted to know all about it. I filled her in on the details of what I had written, and she thought it was a hoot. The events sparked memories that made us both smile. "That's wonderful!" she said with genuine glee, and then she rested her hand on my knee. "We had such a good time. Didn't we?" she said. Oh, yes. Indeed we did.

  Chapter 1

  You live but once, you might as well be amusing.

  —Gabrielle ("Coco") Chanel, French couturier

  "It's an honor to have you on board, Mrs. Childs," announced the handsome flight attendant neatly clad in midnight-blue slacks, white shirt, and logoed tie. Bending over our seats, he whispered conspiratorially with a Texas drawl as broad as the state itself, "I'm such a huge fan. I have all your cookbooks."

  Julia smiled demurely, tilted her head in acknowledgment, and said, "Thank you," without mentioning the erroneous addition of an s to her name. In the thirteen years that I had been working with her, the faulty pronunciation happened with curious regularity, and some years before, I'd remarked how odd I thought it that so many people put an s at the end of her name.

  "Not really," she responded. "Before I was known at all there was a popular New York eatery called Childs. People knew of it and it helped them remember my name."

  On that March day in 1993, three decades of public fascination with Child, the French Chef, had eclipsed whatever fame Childs the eatery had once enjoyed. That eclipse began the moment in 1963 when, from the display kitchen of the Boston Gas Company, she trilled her first WGBH-TV "Bon appétit." Cooking enthusiasts became dedicated fans, and even viewers who would never make friends with their stoves tuned in religiously to catch the antics of this Lucille Ball–like character with a rolling pin. I watched all—was it 134?—episodes of The French Chef for the cooking, but I reveled in her humor. Spontaneous humor—such as the time she pulled a bouquet garni out of a bubbling stock and said of the used bundle of herbs, "It looks like a dead mouse," and the time she announced, to cover for a bell that inadvertently rang during taping, "That must be the plumber!" Unable to resist, she licked a rich chocolate batter from her spatula and told us with a smile, "That's not part of the recipe." I laughed out loud when the long, slim baguette of French bread she planned to slice for onion soup slumped lazily in the middle when she held it up, so she declared it pathetically lacking in character and flung it dismissively over her shoulder.