Backstage with Julia (34 page)

I was frantic thinking of what might have been the outcome of her going to sleep after a fall that left such an obvious injury. "Why didn't you call me right away when you woke up from the fall?"

"Well, I woke up, so I figured I was okay."

It was only at my adamant insistence that she agreed to see the local doctor, who confirmed that she was indeed okay, and I wondered what it would take for her to holler for help. I found out in 1994 during a trip to The Greenbrier.

The annual Symposium for Professional Food Writers at The Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, is something Julia and I loved to attend. It was always a small, congenial group of food writers watched over with efficient, attentive concern by its director, Antonia Allegra, and held in a resort teeming with the grace of past decades. One year I was scheduled to be a speaker at nine o'clock in the morning, and although public speaking does not make me nervous, going over what I am planning to say often keeps me tossing and turning all night. Hoping to avoid that, I took a sleeping pill and fell into a deep sleep. When the phone next to my bed startled me awake, I thought for a moment it was my wake-up call, but it was still dark outside and the clock said one. I anxiously grabbed for the receiver, certain that something had happened at home. It was Julia.

"I think I need your help, dearie. Can you come to my room?"

I threw on my bathrobe and let myself into her suite. She was sitting on the bed holding a towel to her mouth. There were two bloodied hand towels on the floor by her feet.

"My God. What happened?" I asked, walking over to stand in front of her.

She lifted the towel away from her face, and I could immediately see the source of all the blood. Her lip was split.

"I got up to go to the bathroom and tripped over that bench at the end of the bed. I fell into the dresser. So stupid."

I turned to look at the dresser and grimaced at the sight of all that brass hardware that had done battle with the full force of Julia's face as she went crashing down. My own face ached just to think of it. I sat down on the bed next to her and took a closer look at the damage. "I think I'd better call for a doctor," I said.

"I think you're right."

Fortunately, besides being a luxurious resort, The Greenbrier has a medically staffed clinic. A very young doctor took us immediately into an examining room and had Julia lie down on an examining table.

"You'll need stitches," he told her after assessing the damage.

"Fine," said Julia.

As he began to numb her lip with a needle that seemed the size of a crochet hook, Julia took hold of my hand. I was awfully glad she did, because I wasn't very good at watching needles going into someone else's body parts. Besides, the sleeping pill was still doing its thing, and I was fighting an overwhelming inclination to simply slide under the table and close my eyes. Her hand steadied me.

While we waited for the local anesthetic to take effect, I tried to comfort her, although she hardly seemed to need it as much as I did. I was in serious danger of passing out. I gripped the table with my free hand and told myself to focus on Julia—she must need something. The working side of her mouth was moving, and she was saying something to the doctor. Was she delirious? She was discussing meat.

"I don't think the meat is very good here," she mumbled. "Tonight they served us a slab of . . ."

Oh, God,
I thought,
please don't talk about the meat.
I already felt queasy. Now not only was I going to slide under the table, but my stomach was going to rebel against that night's dinner.

The doctor looked perplexed; he had no answer for the meat dilemma. Julia continued to give her assessment of the problem, and I gripped her hand and the table harder. She squeezed back to let me know she was okay—or more likely because she saw the state I was in and wanted to save my life.

With a bit of prodding, Julia agreed to take a wheelchair back to the room, although God knows I needed it much more than she did. She accepted the painkillers the doctor gave her, and I tucked her into bed just seconds before I collapsed on her sofa. I bolted awake early the next morning and immediately checked on her; she was sleeping soundly. I nudged her gently to make sure she was . . . well, you know. I asked a mutual friend to stay with her while I gave my talk, and when I returned, she was still asleep. I began to worry. I nudged her again, and she responded but remained in deep sleep. She woke just after noon and said she felt tired but okay.

"Are you hungry? I asked.

"A little."

"Do you think you could eat some soup or soft-boiled eggs?"

"Ice cream. Vanilla."

I got the ice cream, but she ate only a few mouthfuls before going back to sleep. I really began to worry and called the doctor. He came down and checked all her vital signs and said she was fine, just understandably worn out and sleepy from the medication. After a few more mouthfuls of ice cream at dinnertime, she went back to sleep and I went back to the couch. I checked on her repeatedly during the night and wondered if I should try to get her back to Cambridge. But how? Ambulance? Stretched out on the backseat of a car? Private plane?

At five the next morning she was sitting up in bed. "I look a fright. I think I won't go to the lectures today."

"I'd hardly think so!"

"I think it would be nice, though, to ask Anne and Mark up for cocktails tonight," she said, referring to good friends Anne Willan and her husband, Mark Cherniavsky, who own the French culinary school La Varenne, which has a branch at The Greenbrier. "Let's see if the kitchen will send up some food and drinks." So although she opted not to attend any of the symposium programs because she "looked a fright," she partied in her room that night and the next, exhibiting not a smidgeon of infirm behavior.

Two days later, we decided it would be best to return to Cambridge. Her assistant, Stephanie, rightly convinced her that she should see her own doctor and perhaps a plastic surgeon, since the stitches were in such a conspicuous place. The Greenbrier provided a car to drive us to the airport in Washington, D.C. Since Julia was sensitive about being in public with a lip that was still quite swollen and discolored, she wrapped a long lavender chiffon scarf around the lower part of her face. At the airport, a woman approached her and began the usual litany of adorations, ending with the proffered piece of paper and request for an autograph. When she left, Julia turned to me with a look of surprise registering on the visible part of her face. I thought she was aghast that anyone would bother an obviously injured person, so her comment took me aback. "How do you think she recognized me?" she mumbled through the chiffon.

I think that in order to live life at eighty with gusto, you have to have a somewhat elevated degree of fearlessness. Never do I remember Julia refusing to do something because it might be dangerous. And if something such as being knocked out by a fall or splitting a lip wide open did occur, she didn't agonize about how much worse it could have been. When a hot-air balloon dumped her out of the basket upon landing, she told the story not with an emphasis on how it could have broken her legs or her back but with a dramatic swooshing of her arms and imaginative sound effects to describe "what a ride it was!"

During a trip to Miami, we got lost driving to a restaurant. Julia was in the backseat, my latest boyfriend was driving, and I was sitting in front without benefit of a map. Cell phones were a thing of the future, so we pulled into a gas station and I got out to call the restaurant for directions. My boyfriend got out to pump gas. A man sprang out of nowhere, opened the back door, grabbed Julia's purse, and disappeared in a flash. No one but Julia saw him, and when she calmly told us what happened, I was in a panic thinking that he could have had a knife and slashed her, or punched her, or hit her over the head with a heavy object. Julia was concerned only because her purse held her address book and she wondered how she would reconstruct the information he stole. It wasn't that she conquered her fears; she just didn't have them, and that gave her love of adventure a wide scope. I sometimes found that unnerving.

When Judith Jones turned seventy in 1994, a small group of friends arranged a surprise birthday party for her at Lutèce in New York. The owner, André Soltner, was a good friend of Judith's and such an excellent chef that it just sounded like the best time ever. Julia, Marian Morash, and I excitedly arranged to travel together, flying from Boston in the morning and back in the evening. But the day of the party it began to snow, and when Marian and I arrived to pick up Julia, it was really coming down. "Maybe it's not such a good idea to go," Marian and I suggested.

Julia promptly called the airport, learned that planes were flying, and said we were off. The weather got worse, however, and planes were delayed; Marian and I began to think that it was a very bad idea. Maybe we'd get down there, but we all needed to be back home that night, and could we make it? "Well, I'm going," Julia said, and we boarded the nearly empty plane. As we sat on the runway, takeoff on hold, snowfall getting heavier, Marian and I were white-knuckling our armrests and wondering if they'd let us off. Julia was reading
Newsweek
.

"Aren't you just a little nervous?" I asked her.

"About what?" she responded, turning the page.

Julia was right to think that her age in years was insignificant. Her spirit was ageless and that is how we thought of her—ageless. Those rare occasions that reminded us of how old she was were always a bit startling. I once lamented to Judith Jones how I wished I could conjure up the colorful language and expressions that Julia did so easily. "Don't forget," Judith told me, "Julia has eight decades of colloquialisms to choose from." Eight decades! Julia had been around eight decades! Somehow I'd missed that.

Chapter 10

Passion is energy. Feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you.

—Oprah Winfrey

"Find something you're passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it," Julia once said, and in her eighties she was as passionate about food and cooking as she was the day she discovered oysters and Dover sole in Rouen. For thirty continuous years, her enthusiasm for her work, coupled with her unflagging energy, kept her on the move and in the public eye, and she wasn't about to slow down when she still had things to say and much to teach. Television was her favorite classroom and several new TV opportunities became available to her. In 1993, she accepted an offer to host a new PBS television show, Cooking with Master Chefs. It was a fifteen-program series that featured a different chef each week, taped on location in the featured chefs' kitchens.

Usually, for cooking shows of this type, the production crew tapes the chef cooking and the chef gives the written recipes to a recipe tester, who tests and edits the recipes for a book that will accompany the show. In fact, that is how the producers had planned to do the show when they asked Julia to narrate the series. They had not expected her actually to be on the road with them, but for her to watch the edited shows and tape her comments and enlightenments from a comfortable chair in her Cambridge home.

"Just like Alistair Cooke on Masterpiece Theatre," Julia told me.

"Only she'll be Alistair Cookie," her assistant, Stephanie Hersh, added.

But then Julia agreed to allow the accompanying book to carry her name, and true to form, there was no way that she would lend her name to any material whose quality and trustworthiness she did not personally oversee. She wanted to be on the scene to taste, smell, and measure the food she would describe to her audiences.

So, with a great deal of enthusiasm, Julia left for California to capture the culinary secrets of Alice Waters, Jeremiah Tower, and Nancy Silverton on her laptop computer. Because the book had to be available for purchase by the time the show aired, Julia was in an Iron Chef–like race with the presses. She did not have the luxury of waiting to view the tapes at home but had to write most of the book on the road. It was an overwhelming job.

When she returned to Cambridge about a week later, she called immediately to ask if I could go up to her house for dinner and spend the night. "I need to talk to you," she said in an unfamiliar tone.

As we stood side by side—actually, the top of my shoulder to her side—at her kitchen counter preparing dinner, she said to me, "I don't think I can do it. It's just much more work than I thought." I was dumbfounded. It seemed as though nothing had ever been too much work for her, and if it ever had been, then, in her words, she bulled it through anyway. "Can you come with me and help write the rest of the book? I need you."

I was in the middle of ghostwriting a cookbook for another publisher and was up to my ears in work. How could I possibly say yes? How could I say no? "Of course. That will be great."

"Thank you. I am very grateful."

It's what friends do for friends, and I didn't think very much of it, so I was extremely touched by Julia's kind words in the acknowledgments of the book, Cooking with Master Chefs: "Deepest and special thanks go to my friend and colleague, Nancy Verde Barr, 'Without whom . . . We first met while I was doing a fund-raising cooking demonstration some years ago for Planned Parenthood in Providence, Rhode Island. She appeared as a young volunteer from that organization, to help us out with buying, arranging, cooking, and so forth. She was wonderful in every way and we all said, 'Let's hang on to her!' And we did, and we have all been together these many years—doing television series, book tours, demonstrations . . . When I found, while working on this book, that I'd never survive and get all the writing done on schedule by myself, I called for help, and Nancy came. We spent hours glued to the set, taking down every chefly word on our twin laptops, and she helped with the writing, and the chefs' biographies, and reediting, and the proofing. We work well together and my thanks are infinite."