Backstage with Julia (12 page)

Up until
Parade,
Julia and I had communicated primarily by phone or mail, but when our work became more involved, she suggested I come up to Cambridge to go over things with her. There I observed my first at-home, in-person Julia-isms.

Actually, the first was before I even got there. We were on the phone working out the time I should be there, and she asked me how long it took me to drive from Providence to Cambridge. I told her that the drive should take a little over an hour, depending on traffic.

"Well, how do you go?" she asked.

I described my route. "That's all wrong," she said. "You have to take the little eekie off Memorial before the garden center and then the eekie off Kirkland before the fire station."

"Uh, is Eekie the name of a street?" I asked, thoroughly confused.

No, it was the term Paul and Julia gave to the shortcuts they used that resulted in the quickest drive to their 103 Irving Street home. On my one previous trip to her house, with a reliable map as my guide, I made turns onto clearly marked streets. Julia's route called for zigzags onto barely noticeable, seldom labeled, and often poorly paved streets. To this day, I can find my way to 103 Irving Street with those eekies, but I couldn't tell you the name of the streets I took, because Paul and Julia simply called them "eekies." What's more, if they did mention street names, they used their own appellations: the street with the tilting chimney was "Slanted Chimney Way," and the one with the white fence was "White Picket Street" regardless of what the street signs said.

So I followed the eekies and pulled into her driveway having cut a good eight minutes off my trip.

Julia let me in the back door—she never used the front—and I followed her up a short flight of stairs, through the high-ceilinged hallway, and into her kitchen. It was not glamorous. In fact, it was downright funky. Pegboards, painted the shade of fading grass, hung floor to ceiling on nearly every bit of wall space. Attached to them was a
batterie de cuisine
that would tax the capacity of a Williams-Sonoma warehouse. Knives, carbon- and stainless-steel-bladed, stood at the ready in descending order of size from large chef's knives to small paring ones along two magnetic strips attached to either side of the kitchen window, where a person who was more interested in decoration than function might have hung café curtains. There were more knives, including a very large Chinese cleaver, nestled in a hollowed-out groove next to a wooden cutting block abutting the counter. "I'm a knife freak," Julia confessed.

A professional six-burner Garland range that Paul and Julia had purchased used in 1956 for $429 dominated one wall, and above it hung a handsome set of long-handled, flat copper lids designed to cover any size pot or pan. Linoleum, in a spattered pattern common in the 1950s, covered the floor. Yellow Post-it notes inscribed in Julia's hand clung to numerous surfaces and instructed how things worked. The one on the dishwasher told exactly how much soap to add and which buttons to press; on the electric coffeepot were detailed calculations on how to measure the coffee (both per pot and per cup); the note stuck to the door of the small under-counter freezer used for baking ingredients listed what was stored inside. A Post-it on the bathroom door asked departing occupants to leave the door ajar, "to air the joint out." And, because at one time someone had inadvertently left a scoop in the icemaker, causing it to break down with a scrunching noise that Julia imaginatively imitated for me, that note said, "DO NOT leave scoop in ice machine."

The kitchen was the epitome of Julia's no-nonsense approach to cooking and to life—a visual expression of her practical personality. The pegboard organization, a system Paul and Julia first devised for their small French kitchen in Provence, was a sensible solution to storage constraints. Paul cut and painted the boards, and then, after each pot, pan, and tool was in place, he outlined it with a thick tracing of black marker, so when an item was lifted off the peg, the remaining ink shape told exactly where that tool and only that tool fit. The boards not only provided ample space for equipment but prevented the problems that can arise from having revolving teams of workers in the kitchen. It annoyed Julia to no end if someone used a piece of equipment and then put it where it didn't belong, thereby forcing her to hunt all over for it when she needed it. The pegboards and the knife strips showed exactly where those tools belonged, and there was no excuse for not putting them there. The Post-its prevented newcomers from clogging the dishwasher with an excess of soap or putting odor-exuding ingredients into the freezer with odor-absorbing bits of pastry and sticks of butter.

Julia Child's culinary sanctum may not have been worthy of a center spread in
House Beautiful,
but it was one of the most functional kitchens I ever worked in—except for the counters. Just as she always requested that her demonstration counters be higher than the norm, she'd had her home counters designed and built to accommodate her height. It was practical for her but a bear for me. I could manage most things at the awkward height, but I simply could not roll pastry on them. I was too short to get the leverage I needed, so Julia provided me with a child's stool to stand on. It was effective, but standing on the stool made me feel like a kid, and I couldn't help but laugh at myself as I pushed her massive rolling pin over sheets of pastry dough. Liz loved to emphasize my little-girl-in-Mama's-kitchen feeling by dragging into my vision a small sign that Julia kept in the counter corner. It read, "I wasn't there. I didn't do it. It was the little people."

The "little people" sign did not charm me nearly as much as the paintings and photos of cats that decorated the few smidgens of free wall space. When I asked Julia about them, she told me she loved
poussiquettes
. She didn't have one in Cambridge, just the wall images, but she had Minou in France, and she reached into her daybook and pulled out the cat's photo that she always carried with her. Some years later, I discovered why Julia was so fond of Minou. She was a lively ham of a cat. My sons and I stayed in Julia's house in France when she was not there, and
poussiquette
introduced herself to me in the middle of a pitch black night while I was sound asleep in Julia's bed. She entered the room from outside by leaping up to pull down the handle of the bedroom's French door and then pounced on me, frightening me nearly to death. I called Julia from France to tell her that her cat was diabolical; she told me to give her some fresh hamburger and she would stop assaulting me.

Each trip to Julia's Cambridge house was like opening a surprise package that held another dimension of her personality. On one visit, when I walked into the hallway I immediately saw a very elderly, stooped woman walking up the stairs to the second floor. She had a firm hold on the banister and was obviously struggling with each step.

"Should I help her?" I whispered to Julia, assuming she was an elderly relative.

"No. That's my housekeeper. She's used to it." The woman had to be ninety! And she did the laundry, ironed, and dusted that enormous, three-story house with a small dust rag that she kept clutched in her arthritic hand. Julia had employed her for years and wouldn't for a minute let that loyal woman feel that she had outgrown her usefulness. Julia was much too kind to let her go because of details as insignificant as poor posture and a halting gait. She did hire a professional cleaning company, however, to come in on a regular basis to wipe up what that dear old woman missed.

The two questions I am asked most frequently about Julia are "Did she ever see the Dan Aykroyd spoof of her on
Saturday Night Live
?" and "What did she think about it?" An early visit to Julia's answered both: yes, she saw it and she
loved
it. She kept a videotape copy of Aykroyd's 1979 performance under the television in her kitchen so she could show it to anyone who had missed it. Usually when people ask me about the tape, they wonder if Aykroyd's stumbling about while taking swigs from a bottle of booze offended Julia. Not at all. She had a marvelous sense of humor that was expansive enough to include all well-done parodies about her. What never did amuse her were the countless attempts to imitate her voice, as impossible as it was to resist doing. Those she dismissed with a curt "I don't sound like that." In fact, most people's imitations sound more like Aykroyd than Child.

When I admitted that I had never seen the tape, she immediately popped it into the VCR, and she and Paul laughed with me as though they were seeing it for the first time. When Stephanie Hersh began to work for her years later, Julia didn't show her the tape but acted it out, giving her impersonation of Dan Aykroyd's impersonation of her staggering around a kitchen trying to stop the profuse, fatal bleeding from a thumb gash while shrieking "save the liver" from the chicken she was cutting. Stephanie said Julia did her own staggering around her office and ended her skit "by sprawling herself across her desk and exclaiming, 'And then I died!'"

Since Julia was, by her own admission, a born ham, my guess is that she enjoyed acting out the skit as much as she liked watching Aykroyd's performance. Sometimes she planned her spoofs into her performances; often they were spontaneous.

Julia the ham took me by surprise for the first time in New Haven in the fall of 1981 when we did a benefit demonstration for the Long Wharf Theatre. Named for the wharf that ran beside New Haven Harbor, the theater occupies a previously vacant warehouse that sits in the middle of what was once a busy terminal. Two Yale alumni created the theater as a home for a resident acting company in 1965, and like all such theaters across the country, it relied on benefactors' support. Betty Kubler, one of the theater's benefactors, had been a classmate of Julia's at Smith, and her husband, George, and Paul Child shared a longtime friendship, so when Betty called Julia and asked her to help raise money with a demonstration, Julia said yes without hesitation.

The night of the show, Julia walked out on the stage, smiled, and bowed to the cheering audience. I stood behind her knowing that as soon as the cheering part of the program ended, she would walk around behind the counter and I would move forward to stand by her side. But when the applause died down, Julia didn't walk anywhere. She turned around, picked up a breadbasket from the set, and with the exuberance of a relief pitcher warming up in the bullpen began tossing the dinner rolls into the audience. There was mayhem as hands stretched up and out to snag one of the starchy missiles. Cheering and applause broke out again with renewed vigor. You could just see what a kick Julia got from doing it.

Tossing things was nothing new to Julia. It was obviously something she loved to do. She did it often on her TV shows. In fact, long before she developed a reputation as a food maven, she had one as a food tosser. As a kid in Pasadena, she hurled mud pies at passing motorists and then had to scale a fence in order to escape their wrath. And it didn't end there. When she was a student at Smith College, she and her roommate would get into such "giggle fests" that they couldn't concentrate on their studies, so they stretched a rope across the center of the room and draped a green rug over it. That way they could no longer see and disturb each other. It should have done the trick—but it didn't, because Julia couldn't resist repeatedly tossing jelly doughnuts over it.

Her slapstick performances, like the layout of her Post-it-annotated kitchen, were not convoluted attempts at eccentricity. They were, as Russ noted, wysiwyg—just who she was. Spending more time with her, I was seeing the varied ways that her public persona played out in her private life. Those ways were not always necessarily loveable.

Most viewers would agree that she came across publicly as an outspoken, opinionated woman, and she was. We loved it when she gave the "food police" hell for trashing cream and butter. During a pre-Thanksgiving radio interview with a vegan host, he repeatedly expressed his distain for the "dead meat" Julia planned to eat on the holiday. She asked him what he would cook. "I fashion a bird out of whole grains," he said, and Julia gave him a raspberry—loud and clear over the air. Her immediate, unguarded response was hilarious, but that same bluntness could be insensitive. She was often curtly dismissive of old people who acted old, "fluffies" who referred to every dining experience as "gourmet," and "housewifey types" who were not "serious" about cooking.