Backstage with Julia (10 page)

Tarte Tatin is not a difficult recipe to prepare in one's own kitchen, but showing all the steps in three and a half minutes was a challenge. Our calculations told us we needed ten cast-iron pans and a seeming orchard of apples.

Early Monday morning, we all got to work on the setup for the Tuesday taping. We peeled and cut apples until our fingers ached, then sprinkled them with sugar and lemon juice so they wouldn't turn brown overnight. Then we set up the pans: a pan for Julia to show the ready caramel and how to start layering the apples (only one backup since we would have time to wash out the pan and pour in caramel if things went wrong); a pan with all the apple layers in place and cooking on the stove to show the texture of the cooked apples and perfect thickness of the caramel (three backups); a ready-cooked tart for Julia to unmold (definitely three backups in case she dropped it).

(This is probably a good place for an aside on Julia dropping things. The truth is, she never did drop all the things people claimed they saw her drop on her shows. I've heard viewers describe in great detail how ducks, chickens, and éclairs slipped from her grasp and landed on the floor at her feet when it really was only the potato pancake that flipped from her pan to the stove. Anything else that landed on the floor she threw there on purpose.)

We were all proud of ourselves when we arrived at the studio the next morning and examined our flotilla of pans and apples all perfectly at the ready for their audience presentation. They looked great. It would be a fabulous spot—just not that day. As we began to assign the pans to trays, Sonya came into the kitchen with the news that assassins had killed Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt, in broad daylight and in front of crowds of people. The entire
GMA
studio and all its staff were to be turned over to the news division of ABC immediately, and we couldn't tape.

We were all stunned at the news. And then we were in awe as a sort of controlled, practiced chaos erupted around us and several producers jumped into action to change their focus from a morning variety show to world-altering news. They hung on every phone desperately trying to contact authorities on Mideast affairs who could get to the studio as quickly as possible. ABC news anchors rushed into the studio to replace the
GMA
hosts.

Julia found the news as shocking and the studio changeover as fascinating as we all did, but being the exceedingly practical person she was, she felt that such events did not mean that everything else should stop—and at that moment, everything else to her was the makings of a Tarte Tatin sitting in the ten pans around us. "Well, see if we can do it tomorrow," Julia told Sonya. "Otherwise it's an awful lot of work gone to waste."

After several discouraging minutes of staring at all those expectant apples, we were relieved when Sonya returned with the news that we could return the next day and tape the spot. We remained at the studio long enough to tuck the pans and apples back into safe places.

The chaos we faced the next day was far from controlled and in no way practiced. The long wait in new cast-iron pans had turned all the apples a hideously unappetizing shade of gray. They were unusable. Racing against time, we sent out for apples—any apples—and repeated the entire setup, trying not to believe that the segment was doomed—and it wasn't. We filled all the pans for swaps and backups in time for the show, and Julia whizzed through the spot in one take. When the Tarte Tatin recipe appeared in her book
The Way to Cook,
Julia described the taping: "Whether many of our viewers were able to follow the final intricate proceedings, I don't know—but we did it all in one take, in 3 1/2 minutes, and we felt triumphant." Our team effort did manage the chaos and we shared in the triumph, but ultimately it was her game plan that made it work. She was the one who broke a multistep recipe into stages that fit into three and a half minutes. We just kept our eyes on the target she set, and when we thought the game was lost, she stepped in to carry the ball.

After the episodes with the peas and Tarte Tatin, Susy and I felt pretty savvy and confident about television food preparation. After all, we had mastered swaps and backups and even conquered the occasional snafu. But no one told us about the beauty shot.

A beauty shot is a close-up of a finished dish—usually without the talent—and it's used to entice audiences to stay tuned. A set designer arranges the food on the set along with decorative accompaniments such as napkins, appropriate utensils, perhaps flowers—anything that makes it look appealing. During the first and or second hours of the show, the dish appears on the television screen while the host tells viewers to "stay tuned because Julia Child will be here to show you how to make this delicious dish." If the dish is part of a live segment, it has to be cooked and shot early in the morning, before the show; otherwise, the cameras wait until after the show has been taped. They don't take beauty shots for every recipe, and Susy and I had not heard of it. What we did hear every time we finished taping was the delicate stampede of stagehands and camera operators into the kitchen to get a sample of Julia Child's cooking, and we gladly laid the remains of the day out on large platters so that everyone could have a taste.

We were introduced to the beauty shot on the day Julia taped a segment on how to roast a turkey. When the spot was over, the usual suspects filtered into our prep kitchen to pull bits and pieces from the juicy bird. They had made it through one entire side when the word came into the kitchen that the director wanted a beauty shot.

"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.