Kerry Diamond:
Now, here's my chat with Stephanie Hersh.
Kerry Diamond:
I have so many questions for you. I don't even know where to start. But let's start from the beginning. Where are you from?
Stephanie Hersh:
Originally from New Jersey. I was born in North New Jersey and grew up in Northern Central New Jersey. I went to Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Then I went to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York.
Kerry Diamond:
What year was that?
Stephanie Hersh:
That was in 1983.
Kerry Diamond:
I've heard some stories from folks who went to the school back in the '80s, that there were not a lot of female students.
Stephanie Hersh:
No, there were very few, as a matter of fact.
Kerry Diamond:
How did your interest in things culinary begin?
Stephanie Hersh:
When I was six years old, I got a Betty Crocker Easy-Bake Oven, and I decided then and there, I am going to be a pastry chef. Because when you give a six-year-old something like that, and for those people that don't know what a Betty Crocker Easy-Bake Oven is, it's a little replica of an oven, it's plastic, and inside is about a 400 watt light bulb. It comes with a bowl and some packaged mix, and you put the package mix in the bowl with some water, mix it up, put it in the special pan or tray and it goes into the oven, and then you set a timer and when it dings, you use a special stick, and it pushes it to the cooling area.
Stephanie Hersh:
Then you mix up another packet that makes the icing and when it comes out, you ice the cake. It probably tastes like cardboard, I have no idea. But I know that when a six-year-old presents an adult with something that they've made, they get the response that I got, which was, "Oh, you're a wonderful pastry chef." I decided that was my calling, that's what I was going to do because it was what I was good at.
Stephanie Hersh:
Everybody thought that was cute and nice and lovely. But you have to remember that, back then, cooking was manual labor, restaurants were known for the restaurant, nobody knew who the chef was, and you could start off as a pot washer, and if you stayed somewhere long enough, you could work your way up to executive chef because you'd go from pot washer to prep cook to line cook, to sous chef, to chef to executive chef without anything other than hands-on training.
Stephanie Hersh:
While I was in high school, I still had my heart set on being in the culinary world. Again, because people just didn't know, I should have been told, take chemistry, take French. Nobody told me that, so of course, I took earth science and Spanish, but at any rate, when I was graduating from high school, I wanted to go to culinary school. I went to a private, all-girls high school, and they were worried about statistics. So, they said, "Look, we think you should follow your dreams, we think you should do what you want to do, but for our purposes, you have to apply to and get accepted to at least three good colleges or universities because we need it for our stats."
Stephanie Hersh:
My parents felt that I was too smart to be in the culinary profession, that that's what people want when they couldn't do anything else. My father was an attorney, and he said, "We're going to take you out of the will if you don't go to college." I didn't really care about the will so much, but I just didn't want my sisters getting something that I was entitled to, that sibling rivalry thing. I said to my dad, "Where do you want me to go, and what do you want me to study?" He said, "Go to a liberal arts college, I don't care where you go."
Stephanie Hersh:
I applied to colleges thinking I can't get into any of these, I won't get into them, and then I can just go to culinary school. Of course, I got into everywhere that I applied to. I chose Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It's a big pre-med, pre-law college, and I majored in theater, English, and anthropology.
Stephanie Hersh:
I have a lot of friends who are doctors and a lot of friends who are lawyers, and I always say that I decided to pursue a different torch. So, I went into the culinary field. But anyway, when I graduated from Franklin and Marshall, there were not a lot of jobs for people with theater, English, anthropology backgrounds.
Kerry Diamond:
I'm shocked, Stephanie.
Stephanie Hersh:
Well, the funny thing is that I think my father secretly wanted me to join his law firm. But he knew that if he told me that, that my immediate response would be no, so he figured if he just got around it circuitously. But the truth is that the people that he hired into his firm, he didn't take people that majored in government, he wanted people that majored in English because he wanted people that could speak well and write well, and compose briefs in a way that made sense. You can always learn the law, but you need to have practice in terms of having a good liberal arts education.
Stephanie Hersh:
I think probably had I put a little more effort into it, I could have found some sort of a job. But I didn't really because it wasn't where my heart was. I got into the Culinary Institute of America, and I went, I was so excited, and then as I said, I did my apprenticeship down in Williamsburg, Virginia, and then when I graduated, I moved to Boston, and I worked in several hotel kitchens, and was absolutely loving it, and started a little pastry business called ‘Chef Steph,’ that was doing wedding cakes and pastries.
Stephanie Hersh:
I was doing quite well, but I wanted to see... This was in the 1980s, and I wanted to see food in another region, beyond New England. I loved New England, but I had been there for a couple of years, and then I thought, okay, I want to see food somewhere else in the US. I didn't have enough money to pick up and go, and I didn't think that I had enough clout to say, pay for me to move. I thought, how do I get from here to somewhere else? I'll get a job in corporate America, and work for a year or a year and a half, whatever it takes until they'll transfer me out of state.
Stephanie Hersh:
Wherever they move me to, that's great, I'll quit and then work in restaurants wherever they've moved me to. That was my brilliant, very naive plan. There was a small tiny hitch to this plan, which is that I was the last group of students to go through high school and college without needing to learn how to use the computer. You couldn't get a job in corporate America if you didn't know how to type or use a computer. So, off I went to the Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School. They have a three-year program but they also have a three-month program that's called their entree program, that's really for career changers to give them entree into a new business.
Stephanie Hersh:
In my interview, I remember saying to them, I'm in the food business. I know what an entree is. They did not quite get my sense of humor, but they did let me enroll in the school. I took the three-month program, lined up a job with a big banking firm, everything was absolutely falling into place, and the day before my graduation, I was lined up for my final exam, and one of the ladies from the placement office came over and she said, "We just got a phone call from Julia Child, she's looking for a secretary with a culinary background, and in the history of the school, you're the only student we've ever had with that background. Would it be okay if we send her your resume?"
Stephanie Hersh:
Well, duh, yes, send it right away. I went in, I took the typing exam, and then when I was done, I went racing over to the placement office, and I said, "Does she want to interview me? When do I start? What's the job? Tell me, tell me, tell me." They said, "Unfortunately, she doesn't want to hire you, she wants us to find other candidates."
Stephanie Hersh:
I said, "Okay, why didn't she want to hire me?" They said, "Well, she wasn't specific. She just said that she wanted to look at other candidates." I said, "Well, could you please call her and ask her why she doesn't want to hire me. She doesn't have to hire me, but I'd like to know what was wrong with my resume so that I can change that for the future." I said, "Could you please call her." They said, "No, we're not going to do that." I said, "Well, could you give me her phone number so that I can call her?" They said, "No, we're not going to do that."
Stephanie Hersh:
I thought, okay, being the quiet, diminutive wallflower that I am, I planted my feet into the carpet, and I said, "Dial the phone and hand it to me." For whatever reason, they did. I had a conversation with Julia Child with the five placement office ladies staring at me, and only hearing my side of the conversation, as I launched into this amazing conversation for 45 minutes or thereabouts, with Julia Child. Who started with, when I said, "Hello, Mrs. Child, this is Stephanie Hersh." She said, "Hello, dearie, and call me, Julia." I thought, oh, my God, it really is her.
Stephanie Hersh:
She wanted to know what it was like to be a student at the Culinary Institute when it was mostly male. She wanted to know each and every one of the instructors that I had, because she knew them all, and she wanted the dirt behind the scenes. She wanted to know what it was like working in the restaurants in Boston and what I thought of those chefs, and the whole Boston scene of food. She wanted to know what I thought about food nationally.
Stephanie Hersh:
In between all of these questions, I kept saying to her, "What's the job, and why is it that you don't want to hire me?" I finally managed to get her to tell me that she had office gridlock, and that she didn't want somebody who was going to come in and try and get into kitchens, she wanted someone that was going to come in and work in the office.
Stephanie Hersh:
Of course, these placement office ladies kept hearing me say, "I understand. I don't want to be in the kitchen. I just spent all this money learning how to type, I want to be in your office, not-"
Kerry Diamond:
You were completely lying.
Stephanie Hersh:
Absolutely. It's the first time in my life I ever remember deliberately telling a lie. I'm sure I must have when I was little, but I don't remember purposefully doing it. This was an absolute, straight out, I thought, get me in there, and then I'll get myself into the kitchen. After several times of saying, "I know I won't cook. I know I won't cook. I understand completely."
Stephanie Hersh:
Then finally she said to me, "Are you afraid of the computer? Because I have a secretary now, but she's afraid of the computer, and it's why we have this office gridlock." I said, "Julia, I'm not afraid of anything." She said, "Well, then good. Can you start tomorrow?" It turns out, it was a 12 hour a week job. It was Monday, Wednesday, Friday for four hours each day. The other secretary worked Tuesdays and Thursdays, so we would never even cross paths.
Stephanie Hersh:
She said, "Can you start tomorrow?" Well, tomorrow was Friday, and I said, "Yes, I can." She gave me directions on how to get there, and I got off the phone and I was over the moon.
Kerry Diamond:
You're in the placement office, and you're having this conversation with Julia in front of all the people who work in the placement office. When you told them, "Dial the phone, and I want to talk to Julia Child myself." What had possessed you?
Stephanie Hersh:
I was determined to find out why it was that she didn't want to hire me, because I thought I had really good culinary credentials, and I had really good academic credentials, and I couldn't understand what it was about my resume that was not portraying that. Plus, I really wanted to talk to Julia. I had no idea she lived in Boston. I thought she was either in California or in France. I truly didn't know that she was there.
Kerry Diamond:
You need to set the scene for us a little bit more because a lot of folks might not realize like, okay, this is back in the '80s, Julia Child was the king and queen of the culinary scene.
Stephanie Hersh:
Absolutely. Julia was in the right place at the right time to launch The French Chef, because what happened was she ended up getting on educational television on WGVH. There was one of Paul, Julia's husband, Paul, had a student and called and asked for a favor. He was working at the WGVH, he had a show called I've Been Reading, and they would bring on three different people to do a 10-minute interview, it was a live show for half an hour. Each of these authors would talk about their books.
Stephanie Hersh:
Of course, public television is very dependent and certainly was back then, on viewer dollars. They didn't have commercial sponsorship. Budgets were always very tight. This guy called his old professor, Paul and said, "Listen, it would save us heaps of money, if your wife would come on and talk about her new book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, because we won't have to pay to get her to Boston, and we won't have to pay for a hotel. So, we'd really appreciate it if she could come and talk to us."
Stephanie Hersh:
Julia said that she was worried that she wouldn't be able to talk for 10 minutes about the book. Now, mind you, the book was out and it was selling, but it certainly was not a well-known book at all, by any means. It was just doing okay, and she wasn't sure that she could talk for 10 minutes. They sent over the questions by courier, and they said, "It goes by really quickly, and we'll ask you the questions, you answer the questions, you won't believe how fast it goes, and it'll be done.
Stephanie Hersh:
She agreed that yes, she would do it. Then they called that morning, and they said, "One of the guests has canceled or can't get here, or something's going on, you're going to talk for 15 minutes, instead of 10. Do you want to see the extra questions that we're going to be asking?" Julie said, "No, that's all right, I'll wing it."
Stephanie Hersh:
When she got off the phone, she said to Paul, "My book is about using the right equipment, using the right ingredients, using the right technique. I'm going to show how to make an omelet." Paul said, "You can't do that." She said, "I can and I will." She packed up her copper pot and her big balloon whisk and some eggs and the whole thing, and when she got there, and it was her turn, she got there and she started whisking away.
Stephanie Hersh:
They got deluged with letters and phone calls and all kinds of things saying, "Who's that crazy lady? Bring her back on." Now, this is a time when television was the head and shoulders shot. That was it, there was no three-camera shoot. When they decided they were going to run this pilot with Julia shows, Paul, who was a photographer and an artist set up the three-camera shoot. It's the DIY format that is still used today. It's the wide-angle shot, the close-up on the presenter and the close-up on hands, what's going on in the pot or being by the hands. That had never been done before.
Kerry Diamond:
That was Paul? I didn't know that.
Stephanie Hersh:
That was Paul child, and that method is still used today. The funny thing is that Julia said she couldn't remember which of the cameras to look at. So, they ended up sitting one of Paul's hats on the Julia close up, so she would talk to Paul's hat, and know that she was at the right camera. When they were doing it, they knew that people were going to look for the TV show in the TV guide because everybody back then, that's what they bought, they bought the weekly TV guide to see what was on one of the three channels that aired television programs.
Stephanie Hersh:
They knew that Mastering the Art of French Cooking would not fit on one line in the TV guide, and that they would have no control over how it got abbreviated. Then if it said Mastering the Art, people wouldn't know, or if it said The Art of Cooking or whatever, they were afraid that people wouldn't know what the show was. So, Paul counted out the spaces, and they went round and round around and finally decided that they would call it The French Chef, thinking that first of all, she was teaching French technique, but secondly, she was thinking that if this show progressed, that maybe they would bring on French chefs as guests.
Kerry Diamond:
I had no idea that's how the name came about either. But that makes sense. Stephanie, you basically won the professional equivalent of a lottery ticket getting a job with Julia. I want to hear how that first week went. What did you do when you started and how did you fix the office gridlock?
Stephanie Hersh:
Okay. The first thing that happened was on my very first day, I showed up. Now, she had given me directions to get to her house, and Cambridge, Massachusetts for anybody that knows Massachusetts and knows Cambridge, or Boston area, the streets are all kooky, because there's no grid, there's no rhyme or reason, and if a street is wide enough for two cars, it's one way and if it's wide enough for one car, it's two ways.
Stephanie Hersh:
I thought, I don't want to get lost or have a hassle in the morning. When I left Katharine Gibbs that afternoon, I drove past Julia's house to make sure that I knew where it was and how to get there. The next morning I woke up with this knot in my stomach, because one of the reasons that Julia told me that she didn't want to hire me was that I had never worked in an office, and that she really wanted somebody that had office experience.
Stephanie Hersh:
Here, I woke up in the morning with this knot in my stomach, not because I was working for Julia Child, but because I've never been a secretary before, and I haven't asked what kind of computer do you have, what kind of software do you have? How many people are there? What am I going to be doing? So, I had no idea what I was walking into.
Stephanie Hersh:
I parked my car, and I'm walking up the driveway, and it's just total mayhem at this house, craziness. I ring the doorbell and Julia Child comes down and opens the door herself, and she said, "You must be Stephanie." I said, "Yes, that's me." She said, "I forgot, they're filming a ‘day in the life of Julia Child’ for Canadian Public Television.'"
Stephanie Hersh:
My first thought was, holy crap, if she forgot this, she needs me. She handed me three Xeroxed pages from The Way to Cook, and she said, I'm supposed to make lunch for myself, please get this ready in the kitchen. I'm in this room over here with the interview. She turned and she walked to the left, the kitchen was to the right. They had the cameras rolling. The interview continued. I knew I couldn't ask any questions. The knot in my stomach disappears. Cooking, I know how to do that.
Kerry Diamond:
Day one, you got to cook.
Stephanie Hersh:
Day one. Oh my gosh.
Kerry Diamond:
That's it, because I was going to ask you, because I don't know you, but I'm imagining that in your head, you're like, okay, I'll do this secretarial office thing for a little while, but I'm going to worm my way into the kitchen.
Stephanie Hersh:
Absolutely. That was my original plan. Now, she gives me this recipe for Santa Barbara fish stew. I'm thinking to myself, how much did she forget? Does she have fish in the kitchen, or do I need to run out to the grocery store? I read through the recipe and I think, okay, it gets done in stages and then put together. Does she want me to just measure it? Does she want it in stages? Does she want a finished one? I have no idea.
Stephanie Hersh:
I opened the refrigerator, and thankfully there was a ton of fish in there. I divided it into three equal amounts, and then I did one measured, one in stages, one completely done, and then I gave Julia a high five of, it's ready, and I stepped out of the way, and Julia said, "Now, I'll make myself some lunch." They follow her into the kitchen, and she comes into the kitchen and she takes the one that I've done in stages and combines it, no cooking. Then she adds it to the finished one. Again, no cooking.
Stephanie Hersh:
Then they stopped filming, and Julia, the cameraman, the interviewer, the hair and makeup lady, the interviewer and me, we sit down at Julia's kitchen table, and we eat the lunch that basically I have cooked that Julia has put together in one pot.
Stephanie Hersh:
There I am sitting in Julia Child's kitchen, eating lunch with Julia Child sitting next to me, and I'm thinking this is just totally a dream. I have not yet awakened. Julia leans over and she says, "This is very good, dearie." You know how sometimes you say things before your brain has that chance to filter? I said, "Well, it's your recipe, of course it's good, and I'm really glad that I won't be cooking that I'll only ever be in the office."
Stephanie Hersh:
She laughed. She said, "Well, I see you have a sense of humor." Anyway, then she said, "Could you tidy up?" This was Friday, "Could you tidy up and then I'll see you on Monday." I said, "Okay, fine." Off they went back into the other room to finish the interview, I tidied everything up. I get out to my car, I turn the key in the car, and I look and I think, I can make it to graduation."
Stephanie Hersh:
I zoom across town to Katharine Gibbs, and I climb... Now, I'm in this entree program. It's a rolling admission. They have just finished giving diplomas to the three-year students, and they're now about to get the three-month students to stand up. I sneak in with my fellow classmates and right behind us are staff and faculty, and the placement office ladies say to me, "What kind of computer does she have? What kind of software does she have? How many people are in the office?"
Stephanie Hersh:
I turn around and I smiled and I said, "I don't know. I cooked lunch." That was day one. But I think she quickly figured out that I had a background that was helpful to her. Because I had majored in theater, I understood staging, I understood television I understood setting up for a demo. Because I had English, I knew the difference between writing a letter to a fan, versus an article for a newspaper, versus an article for a book or a magazine. There are all those nuances, and I understood that.
Stephanie Hersh:
Also, Julia, having gone through the OSS as a file clerk was a stickler-
Kerry Diamond:
Tell everyone what the OSS is, because some folks will have no idea.
Stephanie Hersh:
Sure, the Office of Strategic Services was the precursor to the CIA, and Julia had wanted to be a spy, but didn't qualify because she was too tall. I think she would have been the perfect spy, because, frankly, who in their right mind would ever have suspected her to be a spy? But anyway, she had top security clearance and she worked with spies, and I'm pretty sure that Paul was a spy.
Kerry Diamond:
This was during World War II, when they were first stationed in what is now Sri Lanka, right?
Stephanie Hersh:
Yes. She was a real stickler for filing, and she was also a stickler for grammar, and punctuation, and all of that stuff. My English major was a major benefit, and my anthropology was also a huge benefit, because anthropology is the study of culture, and no culture exists without food and food ritual, who plants it, who grows it, who harvests it, who serves it, who cooks it, who eats it, which foods when, all that stuff.
Stephanie Hersh:
If an editor would come back to Julia and say, we need another 280 words, I could say to Julia, do you know about this ritual, or have you looked into this, or have you seen that? She would say, "Oh, that's a great idea." Then go off on that tangent. It was a perfect match for each other. We also have the very same sense of humor. We used to laugh and laugh and laugh all the time. It was really great.
Kerry Diamond:
What was Julia like as a boss?
Stephanie Hersh:
She was awesome. It was like working for your best friend and your grandmother at the same time. No day was the same. Everything was different, but she was thorough and serious about what she was doing. But she was also extremely spontaneous, and very funny. For example, we would have gone to either a meeting or a cooking demonstration or something, and we'd be driving home and we pass a movie theater, and Julia would say, "Do we have time for a movie?"
Stephanie Hersh:
If there was nothing on the next morning, I would say to her, "Sure." We would pull in and she was absolutely non-discriminatory about what she saw. She just liked going to films. We would go in and say, what's the next thing to start?
Stephanie Hersh:
We saw some really good films, and we saw some really bad films. But we used to go all the time, just willy nilly and see these shows. I've been with her for about a month, and we went to go see Meryl Streep's Postcards from the Edge. Now, at the end of each movie, when they run all of those credits, and this is before Disney started doing their thing, and then everybody followed with having stuff at the end of the credits, so people would stay. Julia used to read all those credits, because she was, first of all, fascinated by how many people it took to produce the film. But also she felt that those people worked really hard and deserve to have the recognition of their names being read.
Stephanie Hersh:
We would wait until the very last name rolled on that screen before it went up. We were sitting there with Postcards from the Edge, and all of a sudden this credit comes up that says, executive personal assistant to Meryl Streep, and Julia said, "That's a really nice title." I said, "Yeah, it is." She said, "I think you should have that title." I said, "Julia, I don't think Meryl Streep knows me."
Stephanie Hersh:
Julia laughed, and she said, "Not for Meryl, for me, silly." That's how I got the title of executive personal assistant to Julia Child.
Kerry Diamond:
I'm so curious how she handled it all, because one of my takeaways, and I've fallen down a big Julia rabbit hole getting ready for the Julia Jubilee. I read the biography, Dearie. I've read My Life in France several times now, and everything else. One of my biggest takeaways is just how astounded I am by her work ethic.
Stephanie Hersh:
We would start at about 5:30 in the morning, with Julia getting hair and makeup done. By 6:30, we were ready to roll with cameras and everything. We would film and they would be... As things were coming off the set, they were being photographed for the companion cookbook. Then when we would finish that day's shooting, we would take about a half an hour break or so, and then we would do a quick verbal run through with the next day's chef to make sure that we had everything set up and that we had everything that we knew what was going to happen next.
Stephanie Hersh:
Then we would have about a half an hour break and then we would have dinner with that next day's chef. Then everybody would go home and fall asleep, except Julia who would write the companion cookbook pages for the day she had just worked on, so that it was fresh in her mind and she knew what she had done.
Stephanie Hersh:
Then she would go to sleep, and then the next thing would start the next day, we would do it all over again. It was absolutely nonstop. I remember one day Jeff Drummond saying to me that, if we would finish something it would be like 10 o'clock at night, we were all falling off our pins, and Julia would say, "Can we go out?" It was like, wait, where's this energy coming from? But she was just-
Kerry Diamond:
Where did that energy come from?
Stephanie Hersh:
She was so totally enthusiastic and got so much energy from sharing her passion about cooking. Each one of those shows, it's genuine. If she says, "I didn't know that, or I'm learning something new," she really was. She was fascinated by what was going on.
Kerry Diamond:
Was Paul very involved at that point?
Stephanie Hersh:
No, unfortunately, at that point, Paul had been put into a nursing home. That had started, I think the week before I started working with her. She had moved him into the Fairlawn Nursing Home in Massachusetts.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay. She had an incredible travel schedule.
Stephanie Hersh:
When she was in Boston, she would go every single day to visit her husband, Paul. When she was traveling, she didn't care if it meant getting up at two o'clock in the morning, she called him at the time that she would physically have been visiting him had she been in Boston. But she went everywhere, and did everything and it was just go, go, go. We had such fun. She was so amazing.
Kerry Diamond:
When you were working with Julia, what was her relationship like with Judith Jones at the time? Because it definitely evolved over the years.
Stephanie Hersh:
By the time that I started working with Julia, they were already well and truly ensconced as dear dear friends.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay.
Stephanie Hersh:
Judith would come up for a visit, she'd bring her little doggie, yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
What was Judith like?
Stephanie Hersh:
Judith was amazing. What a brilliant woman she was. She was just so smart and so clever and so funny, but very serious. But still fun to be around, but she was a very detail orientated person as well, like Julia.
Kerry Diamond:
Stephanie, where does your optimism come from?
Stephanie Hersh:
I don't know. I was born with it. Probably my parents, I guess.
Kerry Diamond:
The glass is half full.
Stephanie Hersh:
Yeah, or glass is refillable.
Kerry Diamond:
That's even better. Oh my gosh. You worked for Julia for so long. Julia had a long, full life, but I would have imagined-
Stephanie Hersh:
She did. When she was 89, she said, "I have to start thinking about my future." We closed up the house in Massachusetts, and moved permanently to California. It took 13 years, but my original plan of getting a job and getting moved out of Boston worked, because I now moved to California.
Kerry Diamond:
Julia did pass away somewhat unexpectedly.
Stephanie Hersh:
Yes.
Kerry Diamond:
I just can't even imagine what that was like for you. How did you handle all of that?
Stephanie Hersh:
It was absolutely heartbreaking. She was just so amazing and so stoic. She had had a knee replacement that had gone bad, because back then when they put knee replacements in, they never expected people to live into their 90s, she was in her 70s and it wasn't designed for 20 years of use. It got infected and they tried to clear the infection with antibiotics and it wouldn't clear and it wouldn't clear and they finally decided to take the knee replacement out and to immobilize her leg.
Stephanie Hersh:
They put in, what Julia called an antibiotic bouquet garni. They put this big thing of antibiotics, and they put it in there, and they closed her up, and she had an allergic reaction. They had emergency surgery, take that out, and it put her into kidney and liver failure. They got her sorted, and then they finally got the infection cleared, and they finally got the knee in and months and months and months of rehab, she was so amazing and so stuck with it.
Stephanie Hersh:
We finally got her up and walking. You could imagine she had been immobilized for almost six months. Even the good leg had atrophied. She was really a trooper about it, and so positive and so upbeat. Then she finally got ready, but she was still on dialysis, because of the kidney. They were hopeful that that was going to clear but they weren't sure.
Stephanie Hersh:
But anyway, every time that she would have dialysis, she would just be totally wiped out. We wouldn't schedule anything for that day. But then the next day, she'd be up and going again. She was working with Alex Prud'homme, Paul's nephew, on that book, and she was working with Jeff Drummond on planning a new TV series, and she was working with Judith Jones on another book altogether. We just had tons of stuff going on.
Stephanie Hersh:
But when they did dialysis, I think because it was a teaching hospital, or maybe they just do this all the time, I don't know. I don't know enough about it. But they run all kinds of tests on the blood because it doesn't affect the patient. The next morning at like six o'clock in the morning, or 6:30 in the morning, when I showed up, the phone was ringing when I walked in the door, and I answered it, and it was the hospital and they said, she has a serious infection, and she needs to come in here for intravenous antibiotics immediately.
Stephanie Hersh:
I said, "Okay, Julia, we're going to cancel today's events, and we're going to go to the hospital." She said, "I'm not going back to the hospital. I just spent how many months in the hospital? I'm not going back." I called them up and I said, "Can she just have the antibiotics here?" They said, "Well, you'll have to call." Because Julia lived in a community that was... She was in the independent dwellings, but it was a progressive care community.
Stephanie Hersh:
I called the medical center on-site, and I said, can we work it out, so that she can have her antibiotics here? They said, yes, sure, just bring her to the medical center." Julia said, no, she wasn't going to the medical center that they'd have to come to the apartment. They said, legally, they couldn't do that. Because if they put an intravenous line in, she had to be in one or the other. Julia said she wasn't going to do it.
Stephanie Hersh:
The doctor came over to her apartment, and he said, "Julia, you have to do this, we can put you in a wheelchair, and we can sit you in the lobby, and we can give you the drugs, and then we can unhook them, and we can Will you right back to your apartment. You don't have to stay in the medical center. But we just have to legally, that's where we have to give them to you."
Stephanie Hersh:
Julia said, "If I get these drugs, can you promise me that I'm going to get better?" He said, "Yeah." She said, "Can you promise me that I'm going to get off dialysis?" He said, "No, we can't promise that. We hope that, but we can't promise that." She said, "Okay, dearie, then it's my time." He said, "No." I started to cry, and he started to cry, and she said, "What do you mean?" He said, "You're going to die within 48 hours." She said, "Starting when?" He said, "You're not going to be here more than two days if you don't treat this. This is a lethal disease."
Stephanie Hersh:
Then she said, "Then it's my time." That's what there is. I called all of her relatives because it was two days before her birthday, and they were all going to be coming in for her birthday. I said, "Get your now if you can, because that's it." She laid down to take a nap at about 10 o'clock in the morning, and she never woke up. But people came in to say goodbye. She was a very heavy breather in her sleep. But when people would come in and talk to her, her breathing got very quiet and very calm. So, I know she heard them. I know, she knew they were there. Then she very peacefully went at about three o'clock in the morning that night.
Kerry Diamond:
I'm going to start sobbing.
Stephanie Hersh:
Then of course, we had to coordinate because we were on West Coast, and I needed to make sure that relatives and everybody knew first before it hit media. Then I told media people, and that all went out, and then was telling West Coast people. But every time I would get off the phone, there'd be like eight messages of people to call back. It was overwhelming.
Stephanie Hersh:
Then finally at one point my parents got through to me, and they said, "Oh my God, how are you?" At that point, I think I was in shock. I was so in the business mode that I wasn't... I was trying to be stoic for all these people that I was calling, that it hadn't set in. My mother who was trying so hard to be comforting and wonderful, and I know she meant well, she said, "I know you've lost your friend and your mentor, but you've also lost your job." Of course, that hadn't even occurred to me, and then I became-
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, my God. When I got up to that part in the book, Dearie, and it just similarly just broke my heart, and I burst into tears. Julia, she worked into her 90s, which was just remarkable. I think reading the book, I can't even imagine what it was like for you. But for me, reading the book, I just felt like Julia would live forever when it got up to that part of the book. She gave up, it was heartbreaking. It's still heartbreaking hearing you tell the story.
Stephanie Hersh:
But the thing is that she died on her own terms. It was her decision, and her choice, and she made the decision to be at home and she was there with her little kitty by her side on the bed. It was-
Kerry Diamond:
My God, I'm going to start crying again. She had such a long, full life. It's incredible.
Stephanie Hersh:
Yeah. It's funny, because very often when we would go places, the media would ask, what she called media questions. She hated those. She wanted people to ask her about things that were relevant or important and not, "What's your favorite this or what... " But one of the questions that people still even ask today is, what would you want your last meal to be? She hated that, and she'd say, well, something that was long. Then she would give a long, elaborate menu of things.
Stephanie Hersh:
I remember when she died and people would say to me, "What was her last meal?" It was funny, because I had made her French onion soup from her recipe, and I'm pretty sure that was the last thing that she had eaten the day before.
Stephanie Hersh:
Because it was so close to her birthday, we had received a gift package from the Berkowitz family from Legal Sea Foods, and I know that she had had oysters and she had had clam chowder and a few other things. But after that, I know that the onion soup was her last meal.
Stephanie Hersh:
Oh my God. All right, I'm going to pull myself together and stop crying. As you know, right before you and I started speaking, we did the event with Ina Garten and Stanley Tucci, and they talked a lot about the movie Julie & Julia and the making of. Did you like the movie?
Stephanie Hersh:
I liked the movie a lot. I did. I didn't think that I was going to, because I thought, how in the world can this movie work? They didn't meet each other. How can this story work?
Kerry Diamond:
Meaning that Julie and Julia didn't meet each other.
Stephanie Hersh:
Right. But Nora Ephron did such an amazing job of juxtaposing the two lives and the two stories and how well that they mirrored each other in many ways, and I thought it was great. Amy Adams was lovely. How could you not just adore her as Julie Powell?
Kerry Diamond:
What do you think of Meryl's portrayal of-
Stephanie Hersh:
I thought Meryl Streep did a great job of Julia, and I think Julia would have been thrilled to have known that it was Meryl that did it. I do know that Julia was not too keen on the idea of a movie being made, and would not give her permission while she was alive. That movie was not made until after Julia had passed. All the people that want... Why did Julia think she never saw it, she didn't know.
Stephanie Hersh:
Julia made it her lifetime policy of not doing product endorsement or letting people make money off of her name and image for themselves. Unless the movie was going to be making money for the Julia Child Foundation, I don't think that she would have wanted it to have been made. I have no idea what the proceeds went to, or how that was divided, who gave permission or how that was done, but I know that they originally asked her while she was alive, and she said no.
Stephanie Hersh:
It's why she didn't want to do the interview for the LA Times when Russ Parsons wanted to write the article about the blog, was that Julia said, "I don't want... " It didn't have to be Julie Powell, "I don't want anybody using my name and my image for their financial gain."
Kerry Diamond:
I want to ask about Paul, and then we can go back to the blog. But what did you think of Stanley's portrayal of Paul Child?
Stephanie Hersh:
Stanley Tucci was Paul Child, spot-on, right down to the way he held his hand with that ring on his finger, he could not have been more Paul Child than he was, as far as I know. Now, I only knew pole briefly, but he was such a lovely, wonderful, brilliant, funny, kind, man, and he adored Julia, and Julia adored him. They had such a wonderful special relationship with each other. I think Stanley looked the part and acted the part, and it was perfect.
Stephanie Hersh:
Julia told me a story one time about Paul that sums up their relationship. Julia had, had breast cancer back in the days when that was like a death sentence for all cancer, there wasn't just breast cancer, it was cancer, they didn't even designate kinds of cancer. They didn't really know what they were doing or how they were doing it or what treatments should be done.
Stephanie Hersh:
Then she basically ended up going into the hospital and they made a scar that went from her shoulder almost down to her navel, and they just, as she said, lopped everything off. Then they sent her home. She went home, and she said she was in the bathtub and looked down at herself and just started sobbing. Paul heard her and came into the bathroom and said, "What's going on?" She said, "How are you ever going to love me? Look at me?" Paul said, "I didn't marry you for your breast, I married you for your legs."
Stephanie Hersh:
That was it. She just never gave it another thought.
Kerry Diamond:
Wow. Did you like the blog? When you found out about the blog, what were your thoughts?
Stephanie Hersh:
Well, first, we had trouble finding it, and then when we finally found it, the thing about that blog was that it was a new phenomenon. When Julie Powell started writing, I think it was the third blog ever. Julie could have been writing about making shoes, it would have been a popular blog because it was a new phenomenon. I was not impressed with Julie's writing style, and I think that at least at the beginning, I did not follow the blog the whole way through. But at the beginning, which is when we saw it, it seemed a little bit disrespectful to cooking.
Stephanie Hersh:
I think that Julia sensed that. Julia was one of those people that truly lived the adage, if you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all. When Russ said to her, "Do you want to do this interview?" She said, "No, I don't. I just don't want to do it." Russ, kind of like me doesn't like taking no for an answer, and he went to Judith Jones, and he said, "Judith, this is going to sell books. Can I interview you and Julie Powell together?"
Stephanie Hersh:
Judith said, "Sure. That'd be great. Wonderful. I don't know anything about it. But wonderful. Sure." He said, "Gee, do you think you can get Julia Child to join you?" She said, "Well, I'll try." Judith Jones called up Julia Child and said, "What do you think of this blog, and do you want to go do this interview with me? It looks like fun and blah, blah, blah." Julia said, "Have you read it?" Judith said, "No." She was like, "Stephanie, Fax that blog thing to Judith."
Stephanie Hersh:
I faxed it over and Judith called back about 10, maybe 15 minutes later and said, "I've canceled the interview. She's not a good writer." In the movie, they portrayed Judith badly, I think, because they make it that she doesn't go to the meeting because it's raining and she's old and afraid to go out in the rain, and the reality is that that isn't why Judith didn't go. But it makes a nicer story in the movie.
Kerry Diamond:
Did you secretly like the blog?
Stephanie Hersh:
No.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay. One of the big things we're trying to answer with the Julia Jubilee is what is Julia's legacy today? I will say one of the things that really strikes me is Julia didn't love the blog, you're confirming that, we all knew that, I think. But the blog led to the movie and the movie has kept Julia alive now in multiple generations.
Stephanie Hersh:
Yes.
Kerry Diamond:
It's very ironic.
Stephanie Hersh:
It's very funny because in New Zealand, they don't really know Julia, and they loved the movie, but they had no idea was based on a true story.
Kerry Diamond:
Interesting.
Stephanie Hersh:
They just thought it was a fun, fictional movie.
Kerry Diamond:
Do you ever stop and think, if it hadn't been for that blog, a lot of people wouldn't even know about Julia today?
Stephanie Hersh:
It's probably true, although I think that there still are enough chefs out there that learned from Julia and what they pass on to their sous chefs, and those sous chefs pass on to the next... That's where Julia lives. Julia lives in the kitchen. To grandparents that cook with grandchildren, that's where Julia lives, because Julia was about having fun and enjoying the food.
Stephanie Hersh:
I think that, that would live on regardless. Yes, recognition of her face and her image and who she was, certainly was advanced by the movie. There's no question about it. But I think that Julia's legacy will live on regardless.
Kerry Diamond:
Well, Stephanie, it also lives on in you, and we are so grateful. You've given us so much time to tell your story and your Julia stories, and you're a treasure. I can't thank you enough.
Stephanie Hersh:
Oh, thank you. It was my pleasure.