Backstage with Julia Page 5

  As it turned out, Mary was at the auditorium when we arrived around three o'clock, but when she handed me a plastic bag that held one small butcher-paper-wrapped package nestled in melting ice chips, I couldn't stop myself from asking, "Is that all the shrimp you bought?"

  "That's all you asked for." God, I love people who don't worry.

  The demonstration didn't exactly go off without a hitch, but the snag had nothing to do with the number of shrimp. The culprit was the sabayon dessert. While Julia attended to the twin woks, which were gurgling encouragingly with tomato saffron rice, sausage, chicken legs, and the shrimp, she asked me to make the sabayon. That meant standing in full view of the audience using a makeshift double boiler set up on a small hot plate, sitting atop a folding table and praying that I could whisk the egg yolks, sugar, and white wine into the sumptuous foam it should be and not into scrambled eggs. I had made sabayon countless times but never under such conditions. It was my first Julia-like experience in winging it.

  Liz perched, Julia attending the wok, and me getting ready to make sabayon on the hot plate at the De Gustibus demonstration.

  Marshaling a positive pose and determined attitude, I spun my whisk around the bowl nonstop, like a windmill in a hurricane. Lo and behold, the ingredients uncharacteristically emulsified immediately. Wow, I thought, silently crediting my rather decent tennis forehand for giving me the needed arm strength. Julia looked over.

  "That's amazing," she said of my record-breaking eggs-to-sabayon conversion. She stepped closer and dipped her finger into the egg foam. "It's beautiful," she said just before putting her finger in her mouth. She tasted and then, with an exaggerated grimace, boomed, "Ugh. It's salt!" In setting up for the demonstration, we had emptied all the ingredients from their original containers into several identical bowls, and I had obviously mistaken the salt for the sugar. The audience roared, and Julia gave me a conspiratorial wink as though I had staged the mistake. "You'll have to make another—this time with sugar," she teasingly instructed. Never again, in all the demonstrations I did with her, did I ever put similar ingredients in unmarked bowls. One salt-for-sugar mistake is sufficient to the wise.

  After my fiasco at De Gustibus, there was some comfort in knowing that even Julia could make the same mistake.

  In the end, my second sabayon was as it should be. Let me revise that: there actually was no end. When the demonstration was over, the crowd swarmed the set to receive mouthfuls of paella, teaspoons of sabayon, autographs, and several words with Julia. It was at least ten o'clock by the time she gave her final autograph and the last vestiges of the audience left the auditorium. Then the party began. The De Gustibus owners produced several bottles of chilled champagne, and suddenly we were toasting the success of the night with several glasses of bubbly appreciation.

  I distinctly recall that at the time my thoughts were running more along the lines of pillow and bed than of champagne. But the day had gone well, we were in good shape for the next morning, and Julia had arranged for me to have my own room that night near hers at the Dorset Hotel, so I didn't have to worry about getting across town on my own at that late hour. Voilà! I indulged in the champagne, gratified that I would soon be lost in a sleep devoid of nightmares about rotten pears. I had made it through my first Julia Child workday, and I was gratified. Julia was hungry.

  Signing books and tasting paella at De Gustibus.

  "Where should we go for dinner?" she asked without so much as a fleeting glance at her watch, which would have told her it was already well after ten-thirty at night.

  Dinner? Who's thinking dinner? I almost said aloud. I didn't need food; I needed rewinding.

  Liz, who of course knew this was coming, was already on the phone seeking a restaurant that was still serving dinner and was near our hotel. Even Paul, ten years older than Julia and so much frailer than any of us, failed to suggest that perhaps since we had to be at the studio the next morning at five-thirty, it might be a good idea to go directly to bed.

  "Doesn't Julia ever get tired?" I asked Liz.

  A look of horror seized her face and she came close to slipping off her stool. "We never say the T-word," she warned.

  The restaurant was Mercurio's, just around the corner from our hotel. It was Italian, unpretentious, and attentive without being fawning. I sat next to Paul and for the first time I had an opportunity to talk with him at some length. He fascinated me with stories of an urbane life. Of moving with his identical twin brother Charlie and his mother to Paris when he was three years old, of playing the violin and his mother singing in Parisian cafés. Of art and his own painting. Bits and pieces of his work in the diplomatic corps. He both charmed and fascinated me.

  At the end of what was a copious meal, I ordered a decaffeinated espresso and Julia ordered coffee, raising her finger to emphasize that she wanted "real coffee." I felt like a wimp, having ordered decaf. The cups arrived with a plate of amaretti, and since I was in a somewhat relaxed mood thanks to the champagne and the wine at dinner, I showed Julia how to light the thin paper cookie wrappers so they floated in wisps of quickly fading color toward the ceiling. She had never seen it before, and her first several attempts at amaretti-paper arson came close to burning the tablecloth before she got the hang of it and began merrily to share her new trick with the waitstaff and several patrons.

  "How do you know how to do that?" she asked me.

  "I don't know. I guess it's an Italian thing."

  "You're Italian?"

  "Half Italian, half Irish. My maiden name is Verde."

  "Verrr-de," she repeated, pronouncing it operatically, trilling the r in the Italian way. She had studied Italian in college and could still demand a bottle of wine subito while simultaneously thumping the table with her fist. "Do you teach Italian cooking classes at your school?" she asked.

  My culinary training had included a smattering of Italian, but classic French cuisine was what intrigued me. Of course, I had grown up on Italian food, but it was Italian American and in my mind not worthy of study. How foolish of me!

  "A few Italian classes," I responded.

  "Well, you should. You have to meet Marcella Hazan. You should go to her class in Italy. I'll call her tomorrow. And you should use your full name, Nancy Verde Barr, so everyone will know you know what you're doing."

  "Do you speak Italian?" Paul, who was multilingual, asked me.

  "Only dialect, and most of it not suitable for company," I admitted.

  "Well, I'll teach you some," he said.

  A very happy me in class with Marcella Hazan in Bologna.

  Part of one of the two enthusiastic, long letters I wrote to Paul and Julia from Bologna after my classes with Marcella. Both contained Italian for Paul, and this one had an affirmation for Julia that I hadn't set fire to any tables in Italy.

  That night I began my first Italian-language lesson and professionally became Nancy Verde Barr. The next day, as promised, Julia called Marcella. A month later, with the smattering of the Italian Paul taught me, I was off to Bologna to take the first of many classes with Marcella and her husband, Victor, who expanded my knowledge and love of Italian food to the extent that it became the area of my culinary concentration. The first cookbook I published, We Called It Macaroni, was on Italian American food.

  I don't remember what time we left the cozy dining room at Mercurio's and walked around the corner to our hotel, but I do remember it was after lots of food and wine, and long after Julia had exhausted the restaurant's supply of amaretti wrappers. I was not used to consuming that much alcohol in one night (in college I'd acquired the nickname "Thimble Belly"). I floated, much like the amaretti papers, back to the hotel and fell into bed.

  Part of Julia's letter to me in which she acknowledges receipt of my letters from Italy and tells me why she's glad I went.

  Julia's payment statement to me for early GMA work. I'm not sure why I received a sustenance allowance because someone fed us every meal.

  At five-fifteen the n
ext morning, I was no longer floating. As I approached our waiting car, I felt more like the ashes of the previous night's burned-out amaretti wrappers.

  Julia, already seated in the back of the car, looked refreshed and eager to get on with the day. Through the fog in my head, I had impressions of having acted somewhat less than professionally the night before, and I wondered if I needed to apologize for anything. Just in case, I said, "I think maybe I had too much to drink last night. I feel as though I was dancing on tables."

  She put her hand on my knee and smiled. "You were. But you were very good." I'm pretty sure that was the exact moment that I stopped seeing Julia Child the culinary idol and saw the person—and I really liked her.

  Chapter 3

  What is the recipe for successful achievement? To my mind there are just four essential ingredients: Choose a career you love, give it the best there is in you, seize your opportunities, and be a member of the team.

  —Benjamin F. Fairless, industrialist

  When I began to work for Julia, her appearances on Good Morning America occupied but a few dates of a full schedule that was at most mind-boggling and at the least . . . well, mind-boggling. Demonstrations, media appearances, and book signings all over the country kept her on the move at a relentless pace, and her time at home was just as busy. In addition to writing a monthly column, with recipes, for McCall's magazine, she planned and outlined her programs for live demonstrations and TV shows. Although she often recycled recipes for her demonstrations, tweaking them to fit the time and situation, she liked to develop new ones for print and for TV. Creating and testing recipes takes time. Some ideas that taste good in one's head fail to meet one's expectations when completed—perhaps the derivation of "The proof is in the pudding." Even when the pudding is good, the recipe may need adjustments to make it perfect—a little more sugar, less flour, longer cooking, a different pan. That means retesting, and if that doesn't go just right, testing again, and sometimes again. Once Julia was satisfied that the recipes were exactly as she wanted them, she then spent hours typing them in her impeccably clear and detailed Julia style, wrote headnotes for McCall's, and broke down the television and demonstration recipes into scripts and lists of required food and equipment. So when she wasn't on the road, she was usually in her office writing, or up to her apron strings in groceries in her kitchen—one of her kitchens, that is, since she divided her time between her homes in Cambridge, Santa Barbara, and France. In her "free time" she attended national culinary conferences and participated in a slew of professional events at local restaurants and cooking schools.

  I don't think the term had entered our vernacular back then, but Julia could have invented it: multitasking. And she could have taught classes in how to do it. She had the organizational skills necessary to manage her complex and demanding workload. Moreover, she had the energy, she relished being busy, and, most important, she loved what she was doing. I've no doubt that she could have whisked her way through all that work by herself, but as she said, "cooking together is such fun," so she employed a number of people to share in her good time. Depending on the task, one or a number of assistants joined her on the road or cooked with her in her spacious, slightly funky lime-green Massachusetts kitchen, her smaller but efficient California space, or her charming, quintessentially Provençal cuisine.

  Even book signings required some assistance, since the crowds were usually too large for bookstore personnel to handle alone. A personal assistant at her side helped move the lines along by passing her the books already opened to the page she would sign. This seemingly minor expediency saved time and allowed Julia to concentrate on her fans until every person had a signature and a word with her, regardless of the fact that the lines inevitably wound out the door and around the block and the signings took hours. Someone recorded the bodies at one signing as fourteen hundred, and Julia stayed until the last smiling fan departed with a book inscribed, "Bon appétit! Julia Child." Of course, authors are expected to stay, but we did all gasp at stories of some who just up and left after a certain amount of time. Julia cared far too much for her audiences to allow them to shuffle slowly through a long line only to be left hanging with unsigned books. Besides, Julia was generally interested in people and loved hearing their stories. Initially I thought she engaged fans in conversation just for the show, but then sometime later in the day, or the week, she'd say something like, "Isn't it remarkable that the woman in the wheelchair went back to college with ten children at home and an infirm father to take care of?" Gosh! I hadn't picked up on that. But as in every crowd, some people just wore out their welcome, and when they lingered a bit too long in front of her, she artfully used her assistant to help graciously shuffle them away from the table. "That's fascinating," she would say to the fan. "Here, now tell [designated assistant] all about that," thereby forcing the lingerer to step out of line and redirect attention to the assistant.

  It was at book signings and culinary gatherings that I realized one of Liz Bishop's most valuable assets as an assistant—running interference. Since Julia believed that it was "part of the job" to speak to each fan who approached her, it was no easy task to get her from one end of a crowded room to the other. Some of those who approached her were friends, and Julia wanted to ask them about their families, or how their books, schools, or new shows were going. Others were strangers, but Julia felt no less need to give them her attention. Talking to everyone was impossible on those occasions when she was on a tight schedule, and that's where Liz came in. The two of them would perfectly orchestrate their moves through a crowd, with Julia smiling but not making eye contact with approaching fans and Liz close at her side, tersely reciting a litany of efficient brush-offs: "We are in a hurry. I have to get her to an appointment. We don't have time. Please let us pass." They did it so well.

  A dog shows up to meet Julia at a book signing.

  Julia essentially divided her assistants into East Coast and West Coast teams, and for all the years I worked with her, she varied and alternated the team players and their positions. No one ever participated in every Julia event. Sometimes a team member might fly to the working coast, but, being the practical, frugal person she was, she usually employed the person or people geographically closest to the job. In a letter she wrote to me from California a few months after I started at GMA, she described classes she had taught at Mondavi Vineyards and referred to Rosemary Manell as "my West Coast Liz." Rosie was more demure than Liz but, at six feet tall, probably more effective at blocking tactics. Since the GMA studios were in New York, I was part of the East Coast team. From April through June of 1981, when she suspended her taping until fall, that once-a-month gig and the one demonstration at De Gustibus were the only work I did with her—the only direct involvement I had in the industry that was Julia Child Productions.

  Then, early that summer, Sara was offered a chef's position at the New York restaurant La Tulipe to start the following October. Julia was delighted for her, but she also wondered if Sara would be able to meet the demands of both late-night restaurant and early morning television work, so she promoted me to executive chef and gave me more responsibility for the shows. As it turned out, Sara's restaurant schedule and her energetic personality allowed her to continue working with us at GMA until 1984, when she left La Tulipe to work in Gourmet magazine's test kitchens. When, in 1987, she became the executive chef for Gourmet's dining room, she once again had the flexibility to return to GMA. She eventually became the show's regular food editor, a position she still holds today.

  "Executive chef" is the title Julia chose, and I have always felt a bit squirmy about using it. Traditionally "chef" refers to someone who works in a professional kitchen or restaurant, and the executive chef is the one in charge. Unlike Sara, I had trained not for restaurant work but for teaching, much as Julia herself had, and I never call myself a chef, nor did Julia. Regardless of the title of her The French Chef series, Julia considered and called herself a "cook" and often a "home cook." So I was
surprised she used that title for us. Sara explained that years before, while they were working on the PBS television series Julia Child & More Company, there was a bit of a muddle on the set because no one knew exactly who was responsible for what. Julia thought of her assistants as a team of equals, all Indians and no chiefs, and originally did not create a hierarchy of positions. Sara said it caused confusion, so Julia, master of organization, decided to assign a title to everyone. She named her body of assistants "Julia Child associates" and, most likely for want of a more explanatory term, bestowed the title "executive chef" on the person who would tell everyone else what cooking needed to be done and be responsible for seeing that it was. Julia was pleased with the order the titles gave. Liz was officially "executive associate," and when Rosemary Manell worked as the food stylist and not the "West Coast Liz," she was the "official food designer." An artist with her own quirky sensibilities, Rosie disliked the more common term "food stylist," so she suggested "food designer"; Julia added the "official."

  After she promoted me to executive chef, my involvement with her work increased. We spoke and wrote more often about what recipes she would do for her television shows. In a letter she wrote me that summer, she said, "Recipes, script, etc for the Gd. Morning are on their way to you via Judy Avrett. Please give them a harsh look through, and any critiques, corrections, suggestions, most welcome. I won't pick new shows, but am happy to change details, like spinach topping for the oysters Rockef, giant cookies, etc. etc. (No spinach here, which is strange.)" Me, give a harsh critique of Julia Child's recipes? Seemed to me that she'd done pretty well for herself so far without benefit of my comments. I did thoroughly scrutinize the equipment and food lists; seldom was anything missing, but I did not alter her recipe choices even when some of her ideas sounded a bit weird, such as her suggestion in a later letter that we substitute sauerkraut for the spinach on the oysters. I responded more with curiosity than with criticism: "You will have to show me oysters and sauerkraut—never experienced that!" (Since we never did make them, I'm guessing that Julia tried and discarded the suggestion on her own.)