Backstage with Julia (20 page)

Sometimes for dinner at Julia's there were just the three of us, Paul, Julia, and me, but often friends and colleagues joined us. Either way, we ate dinner in the kitchen, where the Childs preferred to entertain unless a sizeable guest list required the dining room table, which could seat twenty if necessary. The size of the guest list, not its pedigree, determined which room they used. The simple wood table in the center of the kitchen was permanently clothed in one or another of three colorful, Marimekko-style padded vinyl tablecloths that the Childs had purchased several years before. "We can just wipe them down. Whoosh!" Julia told me as she made a quick swiping motion with her arm. She used a round raffia mat, chosen from a large multicolored assortment, to cover each person's place at the table. Oversized light wood chairs with sweeping half-circle backs surrounded the table. Julia and Paul had purchased them in the 1950s when Paul was stationed in Norway with the diplomatic corps, and they made for good, comfortable lounging long after dinner.

There were two pantries lined up in tandem off the kitchen. The first, closest to the kitchen, was the "baking room," where a slab of marble sat atop the under-counter freezer used primarily for butter, nuts, and sundries used for desserts, clearly marked in the attached Post-it note. Sitting atop the marble top, several French wire baskets and American crockery pots held bouquets of wooden rolling pins in all sizes and shapes. The pegboard attached to the wall next to the top was covered with copper egg-white bowls, balloon whisks, an assortment of baker's tools and a variety of Norwegian pastry molds strange to me.

The second pantry had glass-front cupboards that stretched from a waist-high counter to the top of the very high ceilings, and wide, deep drawers from the counter to the floor. It held a visual history of Julia's travels with Paul and especially her television career in the form of the dishes, glassware, and colorful napkins she had used for her early shows. From the time I first began sharing those casual dinners at her house, she asked if I would set the table, and I loved choosing from this nostalgic collection.

"Which dishes would you like me to use?" I asked the first time, thinking that some must indeed be too special for her to risk breakage on such a casual night.

"It doesn't matter. Whatever you like."

Next to cooking in that kitchen with Julia, nothing gave me more pleasure than standing on a stool—or on the counter itself when necessary to reach to the very top of those cupboards—and choosing dinnerware. "Maybe the slightly chipped, deep green Provençal dishes with gently scalloped edges," I'd mutter to myself. "Or the pink-flowered faience." That pantry also held the liquor and wine, and Julia might well have thought I was in there nipping, I took so long to choose.

It never took me any time to decide on the breakfast setting: definitely the Scandinavian china coffee cups called "breakfast bowls." Decorated with a graceful pattern of blue and white flowers, each held the equivalent of at least two cups of coffee, and both the look and feel of the delicate china were lovely. When I watched Julia pour milk into her coffee from a small sterling-silver creamer in the shape of a cow, I regretted drinking mine black. I loved that cow. The tail curled saucily back onto itself to form a handle, and the milk poured from its mouth. I'm not sure why that cow enchanted me so, but even today I can picture every sculpted line of its miniature bovine body.

On the nights when Julia asked others to come to dinner, everyone cooked or at least helped some way in the kitchen. We delegated simple tasks such as trimming beans and washing salad greens to non-cooks. Philip mixed drinks, and Paul was responsible for selecting and opening the wine. When the need arose, Paul was the official knife sharpener. He would stand at the table expertly and patiently honing Julia's massive collection of knives on a whetstone. I've never known anyone who could bring the sharp edge back to a knife as Paul could. Going to dinner at Julia's was exactly as she described it—"cooking together is such fun."

Julia's casual manner of having her guests cook with her took the headiness out of the stature of her guests. I met Jacques Pépin and his wife, Gloria, at one of Julia's cook-along meals. They arrived with a pâté, and after setting it out on a platter with all the appropriate garnishes, Jacques jumped right in to cook with us. One of my idols, the late British cookbook author Jane Grigson, came to dinner once, and after chopping vegetables next to each other, we decided to continue our relationship with future correspondence. I met the very tall, very brilliant economist John Kenneth "Ken" Galbraith, President Kennedy's ambassador to India, numerous department chairs from Harvard, people with titles and Pulitzers and enough published books to start a library. They were all just cooks in the kitchen.

With or without company, Julia's meals were unpretentious. The only hors d'oeuvres were Pepperidge Farm Goldfish unless someone arrived with an appetizer or the ingredients to make one. Dessert was often store-bought vanilla ice cream with very good bourbon drizzled on top.

The meals were simple, but the conversations never were. Julia loved to stir up heated discussions with subjects that would top Emily Post's taboo list—legalization of drugs, abortion, animal rights, and (a Julia favorite) politics. She was a passionate, liberal Democrat who believed that her party was the true champion of the people, the one that could save the world. And, etiquette books be damned, she didn't hesitate to ask those around her where their loyalties lay. She asked me about my politics when a small group of us was enjoying a casual supper in her kitchen.

"Are you a Democrat or a Republican?"

"I'm an independent voter," I replied, confident that my independent stance was a highly discerning one. "I vote for the man."

Her index finger shot up. "No!" she responded emphatically, letting me know my answer was neither discerning nor acceptable. "You have to be one or the other. How are you registered?"

"W-Well," I stammered, "I'm registered as a Republican, but that's only because I did volunteer work for Senator John Chafee. I vote for as many Democrats."

"Chafee's a Republican?" The R-word came out as though it tasted bad.

"A very moderate Republican and a remarkable man. The best Rhode Island has ever had to offer." I went on to extol Chafee's many "Democratic" points of view, but Julia would have none of it. She was what my parents' generation called "a yellow-dog Democrat," that is, someone so staunchly loyal to the party that a vote for a yellow dog on the Democratic ticket was preferable to a vote outside party lines. Our friend Sally Jackson defended my position by declaring that I had a liberal heart in spite of my party registration. Nonetheless, for years Julia never missed an opportunity, when politics was the subject, to announce to a tableful of people, "Nancy's a Republican," always with a teasing glance in my direction.

Conversation was no less stimulating when there were just the three of us at dinner, although I have to admit that I often brought our talk around to the subject of espionage. I was relentless in questioning Paul about his experiences with the OSS during World War II. Julia already knew that I was certain that she had been a spy, or maybe I just wanted her to have been. I was even more suspicious of Paul. After all, he held a black belt in jujitsu, spoke French like a Frenchman, and could ski down the steepest mountains on barrel slats. How much more James Bond can you be? He'd worked in the secret, strategic map room of the OSS, and when the war ended, the French awarded him the Legion of Honor, the highest civilian medal, for his wartime efforts. When I begged Paul to tell me if he had been a spy, he always denied it, but I watched for signs of dissimulation, such as furtive eye movements and shifts in body position. All to no avail, so I worked on Julia. "Was Paul a spy?"

"No. He drew maps," she'd say.

That sounded like hedging to me. "But they were strategic maps. And that sounds like a great cover for a spy."

"Well, if he was, I didn't know about it," she'd respond to my litany of reasons why he just had to be.

It was during the company dinners that Julia and I met many of each other's friends and families. She invited hers and told me to include mine. Julia's good friends and neighbors, Pat and Herb Pratt, were regulars at those dinners. The Childs and the Pratts were good friends and had connections to each other that predated their friendship. Herb's twin brother had been a student of Paul's at Avon Old Farms School, and Pat had graduated from Smith College seventeen years after Julia. But even without those connections, I'm sure they would have been friends. Pat could have been Julia's sister, raised in the same family. She has that same down-to-earth, unguarded way of greeting life, the same intense interest in people and things around her, the same sense of fun and whimsy that Julia had.

A landscape designer by profession, Pat was also a cooking assistant and recipe tester for Julia's PBS television series, for
Parade
issues, and for several of her cookbooks. Wearing her landscaping hat, Pat designed the enchanting garden that surrounded Julia's house. The yard was not large, but it seemed so by the way Pat created spaces and movement with her plantings. When Julia complained that she couldn't enjoy sitting out in her lovely new backyard because the yellow jackets were so bothersome, Pat designed a screen-wrapped, wrought-iron gazebo that sported two whimsical wire sculptures of oversized, nervy yellow jackets on top. Julia and Pat called it "the folly," and sixteen or more of us could sit comfortably at tables for an al fresco meal. Appropriately, Pat often showed up at dinner with a newly discovered variety of vegetable for us to cook.

Paul and Julia had no children of their own, but they both had siblings and an army of nieces, nephews, grandnieces, and grandnephews between them. I met many of them around Julia's table. It took me a while to learn which hailed from the Child side of the family and which from the McWilliams side; they all seemed like one big clan. Whenever a niece or nephew arrived with a new offspring, Julia referred to the offspring as "our baby."

I met Charlie Child, Paul's identical twin brother, in Julia's kitchen one morning at breakfast. I was alone in the kitchen making coffee. He looked and sounded so much like Paul that at first I thought it was. We introduced ourselves, I poured coffee into our breakfast bowls, and we sat down at the table and talked. He was a delightful man. Strong, confident, and self-reliant, Charlie was in his late seventies at the time and on his way to the Maine cabin that he and Paul had built years before with their own hands. There was no heat or running water in the cabin, so he would be up there chopping wood and hauling water all alone. Not only did I like him immensely, I was extremely impressed. Were there no slackers in that family? A biography of Julia says that Paul nicknamed me "Sparkle Plenty," but it was actually Charlie. Paul and Julia thought it fit, so they began to use it.

I shared meals at that kitchen table with Julia's sister, Dorothy (or Dort the Wort when she was a kid), but I met her first in New York, and I am unlikely ever to forget that meeting. It was about a year after I began working with Julia, and Dort, who lived in California, was visiting the city when we were there for
GMA
. We were staying at the Dorset Hotel, and Julia arranged for us to meet her sister for drinks in the hotel bar, then go out to dinner afterward. "We'll meet Dort at the entrance to the bar at seven," she told me as I left the elevator to go to my room.

I entered the lobby a few minutes before seven and stretched up so I could see over the heads of the convention-size crowd that was milling about between the bar and me. I saw someone I thought was Julia at the entrance to the bar and began to weave my way through the crowd. Several feet into the crowd, I heard an unmistakable
boop-boop
coming from near the elevators. I turned around and saw the real Julia several people behind me. She had her arm raised well above her head and her hand was making a castanet-like motion as she continued to
boop-boop
.

I looked back toward the bar just in time to hear counterfeit Julia return the
boop-boop
in the exact same voice. Her arm was raised and her hand was playing the same imaginary castanets. The lobby crowd was as amused as I was, their heads turning back and forth to follow the sound, and probably wondering along with me if we were seeing double. Julia and Dort seemed to be the only two in the room who were oblivious to the attention their
boop-boop
ing generated.

Dorothy is slightly taller than Julia was, but if you didn't see them standing together it was easy to mistake one for the other. Some years later when Julia, Dort, and I were traveling in California, we were waiting in line outside a popular breakfast spot when Dort and I decided to go inside to the ladies' room. Two or three customers greeted her and said, "I love your shows," "Love your books," Keep cooking." Dort smiled and thanked them in that same Julia warble.

Julia and Paul also came to dinner at our house, and although I don't recall what I cooked, I know I was long past thinking I had to cut paper booties for a rack of lamb in order to impress anyone. Something else, however, did concern me. The Childs were going to spend the night, since the next day they were driving to Connecticut and Providence was halfway to their destination. It was a sensible plan. I knew how Julia felt about sharing a bathroom, and although our master bedroom had its own, the guest room shared the one across the hall with the boys. Our house had been built before indoor plumbing even existed, and the bathroom had been converted from a former small bedroom, so it was a large room with two doors a distance from each other. Neither door had a lock, purposely. When I was about ten, I watched in fright as a firefighter mounted a two-story ladder next door to rescue a shrieking three-year-old girl who had locked herself in the bathroom and couldn't unlock her way out. I recalled the drama of that event when my sons were born, so no locks.