Backstage with Julia (23 page)

Recently, I was talking to my son Andrew about Julia and told him that I couldn't remember when he last saw her.

"It was at the Summer Shack in Cambridge," he said, being young enough for instant recall. Jasper White, the popular Boston chef, cookbook author, and good friend of Julia's, had recently opened that branch of his seafood restaurant, so we were there sometime around 2000.

"We were with Susy Davidson and another friend of yours," Andrew added. He had known Susy since he was four years old, so he had no problem remembering her name. It sparked my memory of the day. Our other friend was Fern Berman, who runs her own Manhattan-based culinary public relations firm. Fern and Susy had come to Cambridge the day before, and the three of us cooked dinner with Julia and then had a regular old-fashioned girls' overnight.

"Oh, yes. That lunch was fun. Do you remember what we ate?" I asked him.

"Well, I remember we had clam chowder and sweet corn. And we shared a large bowl of steamers. And Julia ordered a hot dog." Of course she did.

Chapter 7

I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.

—Willa Cather, novelist

At the age of seventy-two, when so many of her contemporaries were exchanging work schedules for cruise itineraries and office spaces for lake houses, Julia embraced no such wishes. In many ways, she was just hitting her stride. She had a new PBS series on the air
(Dinner at Julia's),
a set of instructional videotapes on the market
(The Way to Cook),
and a book of the same name in the works. She was writing a monthly feature for
Parade,
appearing regularly on
Good Morning America,
and traveling around the country in her crusade to build state chapters of the burgeoning American Institute of Wine and Food. Those are just the high points. The fact is that after nearly a quarter of a century in the public eye, she was as active and productive as ever.

"When you rest, you rust," she said, and "When you stop, you drop." I don't know if she would have felt the same had she been in another field of work. "It would be a shame to be caught up in something that doesn't make you tremble with joy," she often mused. For Julia, there was no waning culinary passion, no disillusionment, and definitely no retiring.

Some of what kept her going was her abhorrence of being bored or, worse, being boring. "Retired people are boring," she once remarked to a reporter. Hyperbole, perhaps, but it was her typical pithy response to retirement questions, which irritated her like lumps in cake batter. Interviewers who asked such questions overlooked a fundamental facet of Julia's personality: she had an extraordinary inner drive to accomplish things. It's hard to say what created that drive, but my money's on a gene from that pioneering grandfather who pushed west for the California gold. The culinary frontier of the early 1980s was expanding, and Julia intended to participate in that expansion. In 1983, she updated
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
to include the use of equipment that was unavailable when she first wrote the book—food processors, handheld electric whisks, electric mixer attachments. She ventured into the world of media technology with videos and DVDs. I have no doubt that were she alive today, she would have her own interactive Web site with animated recipe demonstrations.

Fortunately, Julia sustained the energy she needed to support her unflagging passion and drive. In her seventies, she began to bolster her stamina with catnaps. Once or twice a day, for eight minutes—not seven, not nine, but eight—she'd put her head down and fall soundly asleep. If possible, she'd find a spot where she could stretch out unobserved. "Wake me in eight minutes," she'd say, but it was hardly ever necessary because she had an internal alarm clock that woke her. She'd reappear fully awake and ready to resume whatever activity required her attention. When there was not an available place to which she could steal away, she napped wherever she was—in her seat at the movies, in lectures, on airplanes. That's nothing unusual or noteworthy, but Julia snored. It was a gentle snore, but audible within a considerable radius. I knew she was sensitive about it, because I snore too—although not so gently, according to my family—and she and I chided ourselves ashamedly for being victims of such an unfeminine trait. She wanted me to wake her if she was snoring, so whenever I noticed heads turning in her direction, I would nudge her gently, and she'd wake and raise her eyebrows questioningly at me. I'd nod, she'd mouth, "Thank you," and then she'd doze off again and snore. I hated disturbing her, so I began to just let her sleep and snore her gentle snore. After eight minutes, she'd wake up secure in the belief that she had snuck in her eight minutes without a sound because I hadn't jostled her awake.

I let her sleep and snore one time on an airplane but missed that she had nodded off with her finger pressing the
D
key on her laptop. When she woke up, there were pages and pages of
D
's.

"Why, that's amazing," Julia said, and started to count them.

"Please, Julia! Go to the top and copy the material we wrote and paste it into a new document."

"You're right," she said. I'm kind of sorry now that we didn't count them and I keep meaning to sit down one day, rest my finger on the
D
key, and leave it there for eight minutes.

In 1985, the seventy-three-year-old French Chef set out to conquer Italy, or at least lend her spin on Italian food. "Julia Child in Italy" was a weeklong sequence of episodes that
Good Morning America
taped in five Italian cities. When the trip first came up, I didn't expect to be included, since ABC usually hired production assistants even the film crew on location for such projects.

One morning at the studio, Julia was upstairs in makeup and I was doing my thing with masking tape and cafeteria trays in the prep kitchen. Sonya walked in looking quite pleased with herself. Producing live television is a demanding—most would say stressful—job, and Sonya usually did not smile like that until the show was off the air.

"How's your Italian coming along?" she asked me. She knew that I'd signed up for language classes after my last trip to Italy, when I'd concluded that in order to travel easily in any foreign country, it is obligatory to know exactly how to use the telephones, where to find a bathroom, and, above all, precisely what is said after the train station loudspeaker demands that we pay immediate
attenzione
.

"My kitchen Italian's pretty good and the classes are helping with the basics. I think I can move around without getting lost, anyway."

"Good, because you're coming with us."

Sonya was never much of a hugger, but I had her in a big one when Julia walked in. "I guess you've told her," she said.

Our Italian itinerary included shoots in Parma, Bologna, Florence, Siena, the wine region of Chianti, and the Adriatic city of Ravenna—in other words, delicate pink Parma prosciutto, nutty Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, plump
tortelli
, rich
panforte
,
bistecca alla fiorentina
,
ragù alla bolognese
,
brodetto
,
biscotti di Prato
, and
Vin Santo
. What made the trip especially appealing was the fact that we were not just going to tour Italy, we were going to "work" Italy, going behind the scenes into the kitchens to "see how it's
really
done," as Julia put it.

Sonya had more than food in her production plan. She wanted to portray the history and traditions of Italy as well as the cuisine, and ABC's staff of researchers pored over facts about
la bella Italia,
leaving no morsel of food or cultural tidbit unturned. They provided us with reams of information that included tales of Verdi in Parma, education and medical firsts in Bologna, horse races in Siena, Dante, and eels in Ravenna.

Leaving the cultural investigations in the hands of the researchers, Sonya arranged for the culinary talent who would appear on camera with Julia. She chose two already familiar to American audiences—Marcella Hazan, whom Julia called "my mentor in all things Italian," and cookbook author and teacher Giuliano Bugialli. The others were known in Italy for their expertise in preparing dishes typical of their regions. Food itself was the primary talent, and Sonya "booked" a seafood
brodetto
in a tiny restaurant by the Adriatic Sea; a classic meat sauce,
ragù alla bolognese
, in Bologna, its birthplace; and
bistecca alla fiorentina
in a Florentine restaurant. Julia, who boasted at every opportunity that she was "a card-carrying carnivore," was most excited about the
bistecca
, a plate-sized porterhouse steak that can weigh as much as two pounds and is the product of the rare, porcelain-white Tuscan Chianina cattle. The itinerary was shaping up into a gastronomic dream. Then Sonya ran into a snag.

The trip was to include a cooking segment in the Chianti region of Tuscany at what was purported to be the oldest winery in existence, the tenth-century renovated fortress of Baron Ricasoli. About a month before our departure, Sonya discovered that Seagram's of Canada owned the winery and she wanted every place we visited to be truly Italian. We had to regroup. (Since then, the Ricasoli family has bought back the winery and it is once again as it should be, Italian.)

As serendipity would have it, less than a week after this disheartening discovery, I was at Julia's when the phone rang and the call was for me. A soft-spoken woman with a heavy Italian accent introduced herself as Lorenza de' Medici of the Badia a Coltibuono winery. She explained that she was in Rhode Island promoting her wines at a local banquet room and wished to meet with me about a cooking school she was planning to start the following year at her vineyard.

"How long will you be in Rhode Island?" I asked.

"I leave in the morning." There was something about her graciousness and her earnest but unassuming tone that made me want to meet her. I looked at my watch. "I can be back in Rhode Island by six. How long will you be where you are?"

"I'll stay until you get here," she said.

With the exception of a few waiters clearing used glasses and removing tablecloths, Lorenza was alone in the banquet room. She was sitting at a table with two clean glasses and a bottle of her Badia a Coltibuono wine. She poured me a glass and then told me about her home near Gaiole in Chianti. "Home" was a converted ninth-century Benedictine abbey with vineyards that yielded the elegant Chianti we were drinking and olive groves that kept her kitchen well stocked with peppery Tuscan extra-virgin olive oil. The extensive gardens on the property provided vegetables and fruit for the classes she wanted to teach in her kitchen. It sounded incredible, but I knew about monks' lives and wondered if she could entice American students to endure a cell-like existence in order to learn to cook. Then she showed me a brochure of her Abbey of the Good Harvest, which she called a "farmhouse villa." The warmly decorated bedrooms, spacious and efficient kitchen with workspace sufficient to accommodate at least twelve students, gracious dining room that could seat five times as many, and reception room with a fireplace that appeared larger than the room we were occupying at the moment were hardly monastic.

I called Julia to tell her that Badia a Coltibuono had everything Sonya was looking for—the respected Chianti label, the magnificent estate, even the chef to cook with Julia (Lorenza wrote cooking
and
gardening articles for Italy's premier culinary magazine,
La Cucina Italiana
).

"Call Sonya immediately!" Julia urged. "It sounds just like the sort of place we want."

Sonya agreed, we put Badia a Coltibuono on the itinerary, and for a number of years after that I brought groups of students to Lorenza's classes. Not one of the happy, satisfied students ever referred to their experience at Badia a Coltibuono as "monastic."