Backstage with Julia (3 page)

When standing and walking seriously began to tax her knees, she reminded everyone around her to heed her call to arms: "Save the knees!" The Ritz-Carlton Hotel, our lodging in Houston, had rallied to the cause and arranged for an airport cart to pick us up.

"It will be at the gate at the end of the walkway. I'll make sure it is," the attendant informed us as he walked away with his armload of trash.

"There it is," I said, leading Julia toward the cart where a beaming woman driver was holding a sign that read, "Julia Child." We loaded our carry-on bags, our computers, and ourselves on board. When the cart began to back up, sounding its tooter to alert travelers that we were on the move, I said, "This is great. I've always wanted to ride on one of these."

Julia responded without missing a beat. "I've always wanted to
drive
one."

Her bright blue eyes smiled at me with a look I had grown to know and love in the more than a dozen years, and thousands of miles, I had been with her. It was the twinkling, teasing, conspiratorial smile that implied a connection, an understanding, a secret; it was a smile that she often gave me across a crowded dinner table when someone said something that we both knew more about but weren't going to tell. The one she flashed with a wink of her eye to me during long demonstrations that said,
Hold on, we'll be finished soon, and enjoying a cocktail and dinner.
That moment in Houston, the smile was saying,
Of course I drive. It's my cart.

There never was any question that Julia drove the cart. I was just lucky to go along for the ride!

That ride began in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1980. I was thirty-six years old and married with two toddler sons, had graduated from culinary school, and was running two cooking schools of my own. The husband and the children were intentional; teaching cooking was a delightful fluke.

In 1969, I married Philip Barr and we moved to Washington, D.C., where he attended dental school and I found a job teaching hard-of-hearing children. I quickly became fast friends with a fellow teacher who was supporting her husband through law school.

"We can't just sit at home nights while our husbands study," she stated emphatically while turning the pages of the latest brochure of community classes. "Here's something interesting," she said, handing me the catalogue so I could read about the cooking classes a local woman gave in her home.

I signed up for the classes not because I had a particular interest in food but because it was something to do with a friend. But from the moment I placed a nugget of herb-infused butter on top of a boneless chicken breast, rolled it, and fried it into an elegant, stuffed Kiev, I was hooked. When I tasted the crisp explosion of unfamiliar flavor that a quick dip in hot olive oil made of a small, unimpressive bouquet of parsley, I wanted to know more about this food thing. I bought my first Julia Child cookbook,
The French Chef
, and watched her shows with a pad and pencil. Philip began to photograph our meals. When I watched Julia make something she called "Glamour Pouding," I took copious notes, invited friends to dinner, and wowed them with the "handsome molded dessert" that Julia promised me I would have if I did what she did on TV.

I became a community cooking class junkie, and one of my teachers suggested that I might want to assist. She put me in touch with Madame Teresa Colonna, a colorful Polish-French woman in her sixties who ran a cooking school from her home in Bethesda, Maryland. She had immigrated to the United States as a young woman with a certificate from the Cordon Bleu and training as a French milliner. When ladies' custom-designed hats became passé and cooking classes all the rage, she taught full time. For two years, I spent two nights a week at culinary boot camp—setting up the preparation for hands-on classes, fetching ingredients, adjusting students' grips on knives, and washing the dishes that remained. I couldn't have been happier. By the time Philip graduated from dental school in 1973, I knew I wanted to be Madame Colonna.

We returned to Providence, and I immediately enrolled in Madeleine Kamman's Modern Gourmet cooking school in Newton Center, Massachusetts, where I systematically worked my way through the classic techniques of French cooking. In 1975, I passed my Modern Gourmet exams, received my diploma, and opened my own schools.

I had been teaching classic French cuisine for five years when, in the spring of 1980, a friend, Tina Frost, telephoned me.

"I'm calling for my husband, Fred. He's heading up the committee for Providence's Planned Parenthood fund-raiser in October, and we'd like you to help out."

I'd done volunteer work for Planned Parenthood before. I knew there was a need. "Sure. What can I do?"

"Julia Child has agreed to come to Providence and give two cooking demonstrations. We need help organizing them."

Ta-da! I was not just going to meet the most important culinary figure in the country—I was going to work with her. It was akin to tossing a football around with Joe Montana or jamming on guitars with Eric Clapton. Tina was giving me dates and venues, and I was mentally kneading images of me standing next to Julia, passing her utensils and ingredients with the efficiency of an OR nurse. She would say, "Bismarck," and I would know exactly which pastry tip to pass her. "Brioche pan" and the fluted, tin mold would be in her hand.

I was lost in truffle heaven, but Tina's next words brought me back to earth. "Julia's bringing her own assistants, but she said we needed someone local with cooking experience who could take care of the food and the set. Do you think you can do that?"

Okay, I would be an orderly, not head nurse, but I would be there. "Absolutely! It's what I do," I said, stepping up to the plate with exaggerated confidence. True enough, it was what I did. I just didn't do it for
Julia Child
.

I made myself focus on the job and not the star. We needed food shoppers, dishwashers, and prep cooks. Since the demonstration site was to be the Rhode Island School of Design's auditorium, which in no way resembled a place where one could cook, we needed a cooktop, ovens, a refrigerator, small appliances, makeshift sinks, pots, pans, whisks, spoons, measuring utensils, food.

Julia mailed us detailed lists itemizing everything she would need, along with some specific instructions: the demonstration counter was to be thirty-nine inches high, four inches above the norm; the electric stand mixer should be a heavy-duty K5A—the "real McCoy"—and the rolling pin should be a proper ball-bearing one, at least sixteen inches long, and "not some toy." As did most Julia devotees, I'd formed my impression of her by watching her television shows. I'd seen the messes, the dropped potato pancake, the loaf of bread flung over her shoulder. She was someone who effortlessly winged it and didn't sweat the small stuff. Those lists said that there was a finely honed structure behind her madcap exterior.

Julia even told us precisely what she would like served for lunch on the set: smoked salmon with a "nice salad" one day and a "
real
Rhode Island red clam chowder" on the next. A popular local caterer volunteered to do the salmon buffet, and I asked my mother to make the chowder. It wasn't nepotism; her recipe was my great-grandma Feely's, and it was the best Rhode Island red clam chowder I'd ever tasted.

The day before the first demonstration, the Julia entourage arrived by train. The plan was for me to meet them at the auditorium, where Julia would check the set before going to the hotel. Sylvia Walker Quinn, one of my team of helpers, called me that morning.

"I told the committee we'd pick Julia up at the train station," she said.

"You're kidding!" I'm sure I must have thought a limousine would pick her up. At least it never occurred to me to offer to do it. Such things
always
occurred to Sylvia.

"Why would I kid you? I'll pick you up first."

The train was early, so when Sylvia and I arrived, Julia was already outside with her husband, Paul, Liz Bishop, Ruth Lockwood, and several pieces of mismatched luggage, some emblazoned with enormous, yellow masking tape X's for identification and others hand-lettered with a bold black P surrounded with the letter C. A few oversized tote bags, bloated with an assortment of aprons, food, and cooking utensils, were leaning against the suitcases. This small culinary cortege looked more like an AARP group back from a weekend tour than a television star and her roadies. At a lofty six foot two, Julia towered over the group, and I realized why the counters needed to be so high. In later years, she became somewhat stooped, but on that day, the sixty-eight-year-old undisputed queen of cooking straightened up to her full height and greeted us with enthusiastic warmth.

"Hooray! You're here!" she warbled, taking Paul's arm with one hand and hoisting a tote bag with the other.

I smiled, or maybe I laughed. It is impossible not to the first time you hear that unmistakable voice in person—especially when it is accentuating the word
hooray
.

"We are," I said, accepting the bag she handed me. After multiple introductions, we squished ourselves into Sylvia's small blue station wagon, with Julia, Liz, Ruth, and me vying for space in the backseat.

"Up and back, Ruthie," Julia said. Ruth, a neatly coiffed, smartly dressed, efficient-looking woman, was Julia's friend, her original television producer, and clearly someone who had been squished into many backseats, because she'd devised the up-and-back seating arrangement that gave the derriere plenty of space. The person nearest the door slides well back in the seat, the next person sits just on the edge, the next back, and so on. Julia was sitting next to but well behind me, yet her long legs stretched out as far as mine. Many people dream of rubbing elbows with celebrities. There I was rubbing knees with Julia Child, who was telling us how happy she was to be in Providence. I guess we all have different reactions to being in the company of famous people. Mine was to ask innocuous questions about the trip and mention the weather. Sylvia's was to take a hostage. "Would you like to stop at Nancy's house to freshen up? It's along the way," she lied. It was close to the auditorium, but it was a roundabout way to go.

"Why not?" said Julia, demonstrating how delightfully ordinary my extraordinary idol was.

While I made coffee and rooted around in the cupboards for something to serve with it, Sylvia dragged my complete collection of Julia Child cookbooks off the shelf and asked Julia to sign them for me. All the books were food-spattered and dog-eared, and I half expected bits of parsley and pieces of onion peel to trickle out. I thought ruefully of the protective Plexiglas bookstand gathering dust in the closet.

"How nice to see that they are so used," Julia said, flipping through the smeared pages. Chalk one up for being a messy cook. Years later, after publishing my own cookbooks, I realized just how gratifying it is to see proof that someone actually cooked from them.

As she signed each book, she passed it on to Paul, who wrote his name in a fine bold hand, with a jaunty scroll beneath it.

"Thank you," I said, giving what I thought was a nice grateful smile and reaching for the book. He held it open in front of him and gazed reproachfully at me—for what, I didn't know.

"You have to wait for the ink to dry," he said authoritatively.

"Of course," I said, meekly sliding my hand away.

When he determined that the ink was dry, his tone became gentler and he directed my attention to the photographs and drawings in
From Julia Child's Kitchen
, or "JC's Kitchen," as I learned it was always called by all those who had anything to do with it.

"I took the photographs over her shoulder so readers would see the food from the cook's angle," he explained. It was an innovation in food photography, since most food photos aimed at tantalizing the appetite and not at teaching. Up until that moment, it had escaped my notice that the photographs and artful sketches in Julia's early books were Paul's. For all I knew about Julia's cooking, I knew little about her personal life. I'm not sure I even knew there
was
a Paul, so I certainly didn't know that Julia's husband, ten years her senior, had suffered a heart attack in 1974, followed by a small series of strokes from which he had never fully recovered. That day she made no apology or explanation for Paul's peculiar scolding tone.

He turned to the front of the book and pointed out what he told me was a favorite photograph—Julia silhouetted in shadow in front of the window in their Marseilles apartment. "Julie looks really good in this," he said, becoming the only person I would ever hear call her Julie. Somehow it instantly revealed the closeness that was theirs and gave me a glimpse of the extremely charming man who had governed Julia's heart for some thirty-four years.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the kitchen, Liz Bishop was perched on a stool—knees crossed, top leg swinging sassily—surveying her surroundings. Liz had been working with Julia since the first television series. They were good friends. She was in her forties, brash and entertaining with a quick, bawdy wit and a sharp tongue that Julia found terribly funny. So did I. Then Liz said something that caught me off guard.