Backstage with Julia Page 7

  "What's that?" Susy asked.

  "I have no idea," I said, and didn't until Sonya hurried in and told us to bring the turkey to the set to have its picture taken. Oh, my God! Julia had roasted a whole turkey, and we only had half a bird left.

  It was Liz who saved the day. She must have faced this before, because she propped the turkey up with a small can and grabbed a bunch of parsley to cover the devoured side. The set designer finished the camouflage with tools from his bag of tricks. Essentially, those tools are spray bottles of water and/or oil to make food glisten, colorful napkins, and objets d'art to direct the eye to a specific part of the picture. I worked with Liz for many years after that, and always when I looked in panic at some dish that didn't seem quite as it should be, whether it was soup or custard or cake, Liz and Julia would tell me to "cover it with parsley."

  With so much to absorb about setups and swaps and deflection of problems for short food segments, I spent most of my early months on the job either prepping in the small kitchen, checking and rechecking setups and backups, or running back and forth between the kitchen and the set. I rarely saw Julia's performance except for snippets on the prep kitchen monitor. It was only weeks later, on my home television, that I would see the entire segment from start to finish. But once our team had mastered the game of swaps, backups, and the ominous beauty shot, we found the time to remain in the studio and watch Julia in action in front of the camera. That was when the real show began, and what a thrill it was to be in the live audience!

  Those Julia-shows-within-the-shows explained so much of why she was a television success. She had such a remarkably keen sense of timing. Three and a half minutes is not a lot of time, and even though Julia carefully planned beforehand what steps she needed to demonstrate the recipe from start to finish, sometimes something unpredicted ate into that valuable time. They were usually simple things such as a stove not being hot enough to begin a sauté, an unexpected question from a co-host, or searching for a dish or utensil that was misplaced. A floor manager stood near the cameras signaling how much time was left, and Julia paid close attention. She knew what she had to squeeze into the remaining time to make the segment work, so she adjusted her actions to fit. She did it so smoothly that the finished segment never appeared truncated. Because we had the scripts in front of us, we knew what she had skipped or altered; audiences never would.

  Watching her in action, we saw that Julia was truly and utterly unflappable. No matter what complications preceded a segment or what disaster might befall it while the cameras rolled, she flowed with it and made it work. Moreover, she was able to pull energy out of some secret source even as those around her dissolved into used dishrags.

  One morning, after arriving at the studio at five-thirty, doing a live show at eight forty-five, and then taping four shows, Julia started in on her fifth taped segment—showing how to cut up a roasted chicken so it would feed eight people. We didn't start the segment until after eleven forty-five, and the GMA budget required that our work be completed by noon, since every minute after that sent the production crew's pay scale into a staggering rate of overtime. Sonya suggested that we hold the spot for another day, but Julia wanted to do it. The cameras rolled, Julia cut up the chicken, and she finished by saying something like, "Now that will feed eight people." There were flaws; the director asked for a retake. She did it again and finished with the same tag line. Again, there were problems with the spot, and now there was only five minutes of studio time remaining. Sonya again suggested that we postpone the spot, but Julia assumed an authoritative stance and said, "I'll do it again." Sonya stepped aside and we put the backup chicken in place. Members of the crew standing near me began to mutter their doubts aloud: "She'd better hurry—she'll never do it." Just you wait, I said to myself. With a remarkable burst of energy born from sheer determination, she cut up that bird, added a witty "or two hungry teenagers" to her tag line about it feeding eight people, and finished exactly two minutes before noon. The studio erupted in clapping and laughter. She'd done it, and what's more, she'd showed them the Julia way to do it. You don't just hit the target; you hit the bull's-eye. Who else would have thought of equating two hungry teenagers to eight adults at that tense moment?

  British author and poet Rudyard Kipling said it best in his 1895 poem, If: "If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs . . . / Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it." Someone in the studio passed out copies of a parody of that poem that read, "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, you clearly do not understand the situation"—apropos for the hectic world of television production, but not for Julia. She always most clearly understood the situation, yet was always able to keep her wits and her wit about her.

  No matter what was going on behind the scenes or how many times the director or Sonya asked for retakes, Julia's humor never failed her. Hers was such a quick wit; it was smart and natural, never corny, sarcastic, or strained. She could ad-lib at the drop of a hat and define a situation or create an image with a few well-chosen words. In response to questions about her opinion of a low-fat diet, she retorted with such pithy statements as "You'll get dandruff and your fingernails will fall out," and "The only time to eat diet food is while you're waiting for the steak to cook."

  For the most part, her on-camera humor was spontaneous, but she also enjoyed inserting an orchestrated bit of funny business into her shows now and then. She was good at it. She said that her fondness for both producing and performing began in the family attic when she was a child and wrote and performed in her own plays. From then into adulthood she acted in a number of amateur performances for her local Pasadena community theater, for the Junior League, and in school plays, always pleased to take a role that required some manner of goofiness. I don't think that Julia ever aspired to an acting career, but if she had, she would not have received much support from her fellow amateur actors. Shortsighted as they were, they felt she didn't have a serious chance of making it in the performing arts because of her unconventional height and unusual vibrato, which tended to sound somewhat like yodeling when she was excited. It's nice to know that her theatrical passions and abilities played out in a different venue, and best of all, she got to play herself.

  No matter how humorous she made her shows, she always maintained the integrity of what she was doing—teaching cooking. So by the time she said, "Bon appétit," audiences had not only had a good laugh but had a recipe. I remember as a kid how I loved to watch pianist and humorist Victor Borge. I thought him so funny, but I also wanted him to finish playing the song, and he never did. The humor, not the song, was the point of his performance. For Julia, the recipe, not the humor, was the point of her performance, but she well understood that television is entertainment and if you want to get your message across, you need to be entertaining.

  The first "Julia shtick" I recall her producing for GMA involved cheese. Besides being our new Julia Child associate, Susy worked at Hay Day Country Farm Market in Greenwich, Connecticut, as a cheese consultant. When Julia decided to demonstrate a recipe that used Emmental cheese, she decided that we should open the spot with an entire wheel of the Swiss-made cheese. That's a lot of fromage. How would we get one? Susy had one at the market. So on the day of the show, a limousine gathered Susy and the humongous, two-hundred-pound wheel of cheese in Connecticut at four in the morning. I don't know if they tied the cheese to the roof, roped the better part of it into the trunk, or crammed it with poor Susy in the backseat, but I do know that when they got to the studio it took several stagehands to wrestle it to the set. Julia loved it. She had a prop—one almost as large as she was—and she knew it was amusing. Just as it had so many years before when she held up an entire horrid-looking monkfish for the opening of a French Chef episode, the prop caught the audience's attention.

  Unaccompanied, Julia was a very funny one-woman show, but she went into comedic high gear when she had a straight man, and GMA provided one. She did most of her
live spots with one of the show's co-hosts, and when I started at Good Morning America, the hosts were David Hartman and Joan Lunden. Both Joan and David loved working with Julia, and she with them, but her rapport with David was special. She liked working with men and she never hesitated to say so. Some years later, when David left the show, Charlie Gibson took his place, and Julia was as enamored of him as she had been of the former host. But there was something very special about her connection with Charlie. Her off-camera exchanges with him were downright cute, a word not often said in the same sentence with Julia Child's name, but she was. Her demeanor was blatantly coy, flirty, and charming, and on the screen it was magic.

  Charlie obviously adored her back. At one point he said to Paul, "I hope you don't mind, but I'm in love with your wife."

  "Not at all. I'm in love with her myself," Paul responded.

  When Julia scripted a segment that would include one of the co-hosts, she gave a good deal of thought to what would make it most entertaining. The blowtorch was a good answer. Today there are small blowtorches made especially for kitchen use, but when she discovered its usefulness, it was the ordinary, three-foot-long hardware-store type. Without waiting for the broiler to heat up, she could caramelize the top of crème brûlée, ignite wine sauces, and brown the meringue on a baked Alaska. She loved her blowtorch and immediately saw its appeal for television. On one hand, it meant that food could be "broiled" directly on the set, without ever leaving the camera's view to go to the oven. On the other, it provided Julia with an infinite number of humorous opportunities to surprise. She liked to keep the bright red, utilitarian tank hidden under the counter and whip it out, startling her TV host. "Now you will need your trusty kitchen blowtorch," she'd announce before lighting it with a loud whoosh.

  Knowing it made for such good television, she thought in detail about how and when she'd use it for the best effect. When she sent me her ideas for an upcoming gig at Good Morning America, her list started out with the names of what she wanted to do without any specifications until she got to number ten, which was more detailed: "Baked Alaska with blowtorch & David." The blowtorch spot turned out to be all the more entertaining because at first the flame actually incinerated part of the meringue and then it went out altogether. David tried to relight the torch and then tried to turn off the gas, but he was laughing too hard to get a handle on what he was doing. Meanwhile, Julia forged ahead, explaining what she was doing, and then poured even more liqueur on top of the meringue. The piece of cake she served David would have inebriated ten men. Relaxed and unflappable, Julia had turned a goof into a hilarious piece of television.

  Steve Bell inadvertently became her ultimate straight man. Steve was an ABC anchor who was accustomed to reporting serious news from behind a desk. Occasionally he filled in for David on Good Morning America, and one of those times happened to be a morning when Joan Lunden was also away. I don't think he expected that cooking would be part of his duties that morning, but he approached it with good humor.

  Julia was making crepes, and the script called for her to have one pan on the stovetop in front of her and a second pan a few feet down the counter on a hotplate for Steve. As usual for our setups, there was a crockery pot of utensils sitting between their stations. With the cameras rolling, Julia poured batter into both pans and began to explain to the audience how to proceed and how simple it was to make crepes for a crowd. It's a good guess that Steve didn't spend a lot of time in front of a stove. As his batter turned black on the bottom of the pan, he tried in vain to flip it over as Julia was doing. Even if he'd had the flair to flip a crepe, it wouldn't have done him any good at that point because the once light and shimmering batter was now smoking like a teenager behind the gymnasium at a school dance. In a desperate attempt to salvage the crepe, Steve reached for a tool from the pot of utensils, but his crepe was already history. Unruffled, Julia swooped down on the situation like a fire brigade that's seen it all and simply lifted the crepe from the pan and flung it to the floor. "That's okay," she said, pouring more batter into his pan. "Just start over." Then the problem escalated beyond that of a burnt crepe. Steve had chosen a rubber spatula as his tool and because he was laughing so hard at Julia's crepe toss, he left the spatula resting directly on the surface of the hot pan and the rubber melted, gluing the tool to the pan. Steve and the entire control room were convulsed in laughter, but Julia continued on as though nothing unusual had happened—and I'm not sure she did know exactly what had happened until we tied a bow around the sadly deformed spatula and asked her to sign the handle for Steve.

  Julia was never shy about tossing a few risqué ad libs into the mix—not surprising, considering she was the same person who in 1956 sent a Valentine card to friends that bore a photo of her and Paul in a bathtub covered only with bubbles and inscribed with the message, "Wish you were here." Given her nature, it was natural that her provocative playfulness would surface when the cameras were rolling. So we may have gasped, but we weren't altogether surprised, when at the end of a segment, after David smiled warmly, clinked his wineglass against hers, and wished her "Bon appétit," Julia smiled back and responded, "Or as we often say, bon appe-titty." Cookbook author and television personality Merle Ellis told me that it was Julia's unselfconscious naughty side that had landed her the regular gig on GMA in the first place. Before Julia became part of the GMA family, he was a regular on the show, appearing weekly in a popular spot as "The Butcher." Merle, of whom Julia was very fond, invited her to join him for a tour of a meatpacking plant. Julia, a butcher wanna-be, jumped at the chance. When the small group that included Merle's GMA producer came to the "kill room," the consensus was to pass it up, but Julia wanted to see all aspects of the butchering and insisted that Merle escort her into the room.

  Merle, Julia, and the producer viewed the killing, gutting, and skinning operations and then arrived at the tenderizing station. They watched as men placed two large paddles on either side of the carcass. When a large bolt of electricity shot through the paddles, it caused the animal's tail to suddenly shoot upright and rigid. "I can think of other uses for that!" Julia gleefully exclaimed. A few weeks later the producer called Merle to ask for Julia's phone number, and she soon had a contract with ABC.

  In spite of the usually overwhelming amount of work, the very early hours, and the occasional snafu, it didn't take me long to realize that I loved—no, adored—television food work. What's more, I seemed to have a knack for it, because Sonya soon hired me to work on segments with other visiting chefs and celebrities. For the next seven years I worked with more celebrities, cookbook authors, and chefs than I can recall. It was all such fun, but no one ever brought the same magic to the show as Julia did. Julia Child plus food plus television was simply a winning combination.

  And there were perks involved in working with her. Not the kind of employee incentives associated with health plans, retirement benefits, or the right to participate in office football pools, but the sort that expanded our knowledge of what was notable in the food world, what was evolving into becoming notable, and who was making it happen.

  When Julia arrived in New York for her monthly gigs at GMA, she did so with a stack of invitations to restaurant openings, wine tastings, book parties, luncheons, and dinners. There were always more invitations than time allowed, but she accepted the ones she could, and always requested that she be able to bring her assistants as guests. I ate my first lunch at the famed 21 with Julia, as well as my first dinners at Union Square Café and Montrachet, which then were not famous but would become so. It was with Julia that I tasted my first, exquisite bite of American foie gras and met the delightful Ariane Daguin, who was just establishing her foie gras business, D'Artagnan, in the United States. As I savored the delicacy in front of me, Julia gave me a brief history lesson about Ariane and her renowned father, André Daguin, who was then chef-owner of the Hôtel de France in Gascony and a towering figure in the gastronomy of that area. And, being Julia, she stretched her neck way up and
gave me a visual description of gavage (the way geese are force-fed). She finished by giving all of us at the table her opinion that it does not offend the hungry birds to be fed in such a way, contrary to the views of many people in the business and virtually everyone who was an animal rights activist. Gavage remains a point of controversy, and whether Julia was right or wrong in her opinion will most likely never find a definitive answer; it's been argued since Egyptian times. But the point is that before she made her determination about its cruelty or lack thereof, she made sure she had all the facts and saw the process for herself. I think I was a bit on the fence on the subject, probably because I adore foie gras. So on a trip to California, she decided we should visit a Sonoma foie gras producer so I could see for myself. Unfortunately, the owner said they were not feeding the geese at the time of our visit, so I was unable to make my own analysis. It would have been futile for me to give an opinion after that, since Julia would have said, You haven't seen it for yourself, so you can't say.

  Perhaps the party that most beguiled me was a dinner at the Four Seasons where I met the legendary British culinary writer Roy Andries De Groot. I needed no explanation from Julia of who he was. My copy of his book Recipes from the Auberge of the Flowering Hearth, published in 1973, was tattered and worn, not from my use but because I had only learned of it when I discovered it in a used-book store. I was so taken with it that I read most of it sitting cross-legged on the dusty bookstore floor. His story of how he went to France seeking the history of the liqueur Chartreuse and in the process discovered the existence of two women who cooked with the seasons is not only an influential culinary classic but also one of the most beautifully descriptive accounts of gastronomic discovery—all the more incredible since De Groot was blind.