Backstage with Julia (14 page)

Marian, the vegetable expert, explained it to me. "When potatoes stay too long in storage, the starch begins to turn to sugar."

"It makes them sweet and unappealing," Julia added, just as our very young waitress came to the table to ask how everything was. Julia told her that the sweetness of the potato was unacceptable, and just as I had done, the waitress looked at it, saw it was white, and didn't know what to say, so she left to get the manager. He was only slightly older than our waitress, and in a gesture too grand and serious for his age, he knelt down next to Julia. I think he even laid his hand patronizingly on her arm. "Is there a problem, Mrs. Child?"

"The potato is sweet," she said, and for the third time someone looked into the vegetable to see what color it was.

"I don't understand," he said.

Julia was obviously finished with having to explain. She asked him to open his mouth, and when he did, she shoveled a large forkful of potatoes into it. "Here, taste it," she said. I'm not sure he detected the offending sweetness. It was impossible to know if his shocked expression was a response to the taste of the potato or to being spoon-fed by Julia Child.

Having the courage of one's convictions does require, of course, that you have a good fallback strategy if your convictions turn out to be wrong. I don't know if Julia uttered those words for the first time on television during the infamous potato pancake show, but I remember them best from that episode. She said them just before she started to shake the pan so the potato pancake would jump up, turn over, and flop back into the pan. But it didn't; it landed on the stove in front of the burner. Julia's fallback strategy was to pick up the pieces, put them back in the pan, and admit, "That didn't go very well." She didn't beg the cameras to stop so she could do it again, she didn't complain that someone had given her the wrong pan or the wrong potatoes, and she never expressed even the remotest sense of agony that she had flubbed up in front of an untold number of viewers.

Whether it was flipping a potato pancake or something life-altering, Julia had a remarkable ability to put her mistakes behind her and move ahead. She refused to get all twisted up about something that she couldn't change. It was done. Over. Move on. It wasn't that she didn't learn from those mistakes; she did. But once she decided what had gone wrong and why, she dropped it and refused to dwell on the consequences or belabor whose fault it was. "Shoulda, coulda, woulda" were not in her vocabulary. A reporter once asked her, "What is your guilty pleasure, Mrs. Child?"

"I don't have guilt," she responded, and she did not. Moreover, she did not expect that we should either. And that was a beautiful thing, because I had my share of flubs that made me cringe and it was good to know that Julia would make light of them and not banish me to the dishwashing station. Not even when I single-handedly trashed one of the most beautiful covers for
Parade
magazine did she blame me.

Parade
was my initiation to food photography on a grand scale. Each of the articles occupied four center pages of the magazine and contained several recipes and plenty of full-color how-to photographs. The cover was a knock-'em-dead full-page photo of all the recipes that followed. Each production session required a week's worth of work and a large team. I served as executive chef and Marian as co–executive chef when she was on the East Coast, and together we supervised a kitchen staff that consisted of one or two assistant cooks and a dishwasher/cleaner-upper. When Julia wasn't upstairs in her office writing the recipes that we would prepare, she was part of our kitchen team. Liz was there, of course, organizing the schedule and making certain that we had what we needed—from her stool. When a shoot called for a pan that we didn't have but she did at her home across town, she crossed her legs, put on her glasses, and phoned for a taxi to go to her house, collect the pan from her son, and drive it back to Irving Street. When I answered the door, there was a rather confused taxi driver asking if someone was expecting a pan.

Someone of course had to take the photos, and our East Coast photographer was the delightful, keen-eyed, and oh-so-easy-to-work-with Jim Scherer, who had worked with Julia before on the cookbooks that accompanied her
Julia Child
&
Company
and
Julia Child
&
More Company
books.
Parade's
art director, Ira Yoffe, and senior editor David Currier joined us for the week and we all fell madly in love with both men. They were excellent at their jobs, great at fostering and maintaining a team spirit with everyone, and—probably what made us love them most of all—they ate everything we fed them with the appreciative appetites of hungry teenagers after lacrosse practice.

Because Julia wanted the look of the food in each issue to be consistent, she asked Rosemary Manell to work with both the East and West Coast teams, and so I met the "official food designer" for the first time. Rosie and Julia's friendship began in the 1940s, when Paul Child worked with Rosie's late husband, Abe. About ten years younger than Julia, Rosie was almost as tall but with a much larger physique, and she lumbered with slow, plodding steps around the kitchen. She had a great long mane of white hair that she pulled back into a ponytail with a rubber band. She eschewed makeup, wore sensible shoes, and was not into clothes, as Julia was. Paul called her "earth mother," and I thought of her as an aging hippie.

Rosie had a fine artist's eye, knew exactly what look she wanted to create for the covers, and was so fastidious and exacting about getting there that we all learned to stay out of her way when she was creating. It was her painting, and we didn't mess with it. Had she not been so open to our good-natured teasing about her fussiness, her rigidity might have spoiled our fun.

She, Ira, and Jim collaborated to create some astonishingly artful and often award-winning covers—but they took a great deal of time. For each session, they cleared out Julia's large dining room and swept yards of colorful cloth onto the floor, which became the photo's background. Atop that, they constructed a virtual collage of the food we cooked, and then they accented it with decorative serving pieces from Julia's large collection.

All that did not happen in a one-two-three motion. Ira often tried several colors of cloth for the background before finding the one that he felt best complemented the food; Rosie chose and rejected a series of dishes; Jim checked and rechecked the lighting, opening and closing blinds and moving his lights around the room. During this setup phase, we used stand-ins, just like movie stars use stand-ins to frame a shot, but ours were look-alike food dishes that resembled the real ones waiting in the kitchen.

When the stage was set, they called for the food, but it would still be a long time before we were finished. In the days before digital camerawork, taking a magazine photograph was not the simple snap-edit-and-upload it is today. First Jim had to take several Polaroid pictures to check the lighting, positioning, and multitude of other I-haven't-a-clue-what details that food photographers check with such tedious and meticulous care.
All
food photographers. I've never worked with a food photographer who was speedy, and Jim was no different. That is how food stylists got so popular in the first place: after a lovely, glistening chicken had sat for hours and endured endless moving hither and yon into position, the photographer would remove his frowning eye from the lens and announce, "That chicken looks dull." The stylists then pulled out a trusty basket of tools and sprayed, brushed, oiled, and blowtorched the glow back onto the bird.

So, to return to my story about trashing the cover, on that day, the subject of the article was a summer wedding lunch, and the design team had transformed the dining room floor into a captivating flurry of pink lace and romance. But Rosie wasn't satisfied.

"We need something else," she said. "It needs more celebration."

"How about the Baccarat champagne glasses?" Julia asked, referring to two exquisite crystal glasses she'd received as a gift the day before.

"Perfect," agreed Rosie, who asked me to retrieve them from Julia's office upstairs. Although Julia always appreciated the many gifts that fans and industry personnel sent to her, she seldom kept them because there simply was not enough room in her house—despite its ample size—to accommodate the nonstop deliveries that arrived at her door. But she wanted to keep those particular champagne glasses, not only because she appreciated their beauty and value but also because they were a gift from a French official who was dear to her. So when the glasses arrived, Julia put them upstairs in her office, out of harm's way.

I ran upstairs and then tiptoed carefully back downstairs with one costly glass in each hand, as if I were afraid to wake them. Rosie cleared a spot for them and, keeping my eyes on the empty space, I moved toward it. I should have kept one eye on my feet because I didn't see the upturned edge of the cloth on the floor. It caught my toe and sent me headlong on top of the artful arrangement of petit fours and tea sandwiches. The once beautiful setting of pink lace and dainty delicacies was smashed to smithereens and, worse, so were the glasses. Shards of what had been once finely cut crystal were everywhere. I was horrified. With a good bit of effort, I knew, we could replace the food, but Julia's precious Baccarat was history. Rosie let out the most excruciating wail, and I could tell by the look on her face that she was getting ready to hang me upside down from an upstairs window and leave me dangling there by my felonious foot.

"I'm so sorry about the crystal, Julia," I nearly wept as I wiped bits of pink icing and homemade mayonnaise off my clothes.

"What would I have done with just two anyway?" she said without the tiniest hint of remorse for her loss or blame for my blunder. "We'll use my old champagne glasses." And then, winking at me, she added, "I have plenty of them."

Over the days, weeks, and eventually years I spent with Julia, the many layers of her personality constantly unfolded, and I can express no more simply what I felt about her than to say I adored her. Moreover, so many of her attributes amazed me. Right up there at the top of my list was her energy. Anyone who worked or played with Julia couldn't help but be awed by how energetic she was. As Russ Morash observed, "energy was her secret weapon."

I was aware of her incredible energy from the first day I worked for her, but I eventually learned that it was more than a genetic inheritance; it was a mind-set. She simply did not allow herself or others around to consider the T-word. It visibly annoyed her if they did.

One late night, after a hideously long day at a conference where Julia participated on a panel, gave a demonstration, and hosted a reception, a woman, brow furrowed and head shaking, approached Julia to express her concern. "Oh, Mrs. Child. You did so much today. You must be exhausted." The pathetic whine in her voice emphasized the level of distress she felt for the septuagenarian and sent Julia into a stern, defensive stance.

"I
don't
exhaust," she brusquely snapped back before abruptly turning away from the startled woman and leading our small entourage into the hotel bar for a nightcap. Julia didn't just not exhaust; she steadfastly did not
want
to exhaust.

Also noted in my mental inventory of what fascinated me about Julia was her total lack of pretension and nonchalance about her fame—how unaware she was of her own celebrity. She certainly never acted like one. She lived her life in a most ordinary fashion, taking daily walks to the local variety store for her newspaper, pushing her own cart through the supermarket, scooting around town in a very recognizable red car with a wooden spoon taped to the radio antenna—ordinary daily activities (except perhaps for the antenna spoon) that made her seem just like the neighbor down the street. She liked it that way because that was how she thought of herself.