Ina Garten’s first attempt at television was a disaster.
Martha Stewart’s television production company approached the beloved culinary personality to host a show following the success of The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook.
The book, published in 1999, was a surprise bestseller, selling more than 100,000 copies in its first year.
Garten recalls in her memoir, “Be Ready When The Luck Happens,” that two giant trucks arrived at her Hamptons home to set up the shoot, forcing her and her husband, Jeffrey, to live in two bedrooms upstairs for eight weeks of the year. shoot.
Every day a producer handed Ina a script and every day Ina threw it away.
“Their way of doing things sometimes mystified me,” she writes. “They would film every step of a recipe, but then forget to film the ‘beauty’, the delicious image of the finished dish, so people could see how delicious it was.”
Garten recalls spending the time telling the principal, “No, that’s what Martha does! You already have Martha. You want me to do it the way I do it, which is simpler and more casual.” She writes that “the atmosphere was tense. . . those eight weeks were the hardest and most exhausting work I’ve ever done.”
The final tip was when the septic system became overloaded due to 50 people using the same toilet and “sewage began to blow into the middle of my lawn. A sprinkler truck rushed to take care of the problem, but the grass was mud – it doesn’t matter! – and the wheels of the truck got stuck in the mud.”
The director was so disturbed by the chaotic scene that she “wrapped herself in a pashmina scarf, went out into the back garden and jumped”.
Garner was so disgusted by the filming that she vowed never to film a TV series again.
Thankfully, a TV host named Eileen Opatut didn’t take no for an answer and realized that Ina’s charm was to let her be herself.
“Barefoot Contessa” debuted on The Food Network in 2002 and garnered a host of celebrity fans, including Taylor Swift.
Garner writes that she was pleasantly surprised to learn that the “Love Story” singer credited Garten with inspiring her to be more confident in the kitchen.
The two met at a photo shoot in 2014 and made pavlovas together.
The following year Ina took her team on Swift’s 1989 World Tour and went to the after party.
There, she ended up playing a slightly drunken game of beer pong against the US women’s national soccer team.
At one point, the famous player Abby Wambach decided to coach Garten.
Her advice was, “Just get the f-king ball in the f-king glass!”
Not surprisingly, most of the book deals with Garten’s long marriage to Jeffrey, whom she married in 1968 after a chance meeting at Dartmouth while Ina was still in high school.
The couple hit a rough patch 10 years into their marriage when Ina was running the specialty grocery store, Barefoot Contessa in Westhampton and Jeffrey was traveling on weekends from Washington, DC.
Ina felt trapped by traditional marriage roles and “the feeling that I was not an equal partner in our marriage. “She also confesses that she didn’t pay enough attention to Jeffrey when he visited her on the weekends.
“I feel terrible every time I think about it,” she writes. “I just wanted to spend all my time working, learning. A painful conversation ensued with Ina confessing that she needed some time away. “I had asked the only man I had ever loved for a breakup, knowing I was taking a terrible risk,” she writes. “I needed to find myself, but was I really ready to lose him in the process?”
Ina points out that Jeffrey had done nothing wrong, but was “doing what every man before him had done”.
But the foodie was no longer satisfied with those outdated roles and suggested that she see a therapist so that Jeffrey “would see me differently, not as a child or a woman, but as a partner whose voice was yes as important as him”.
Geoffrey agreed, and after a few weeks, the estranged couple met, with Ina thrilled to find she wasn’t the only one who got free by throwing out the tired old book.
Garten also details her unhappy childhood growing up in Connecticut with an older brother.
Her painful childhood with an anger-prone father and cold mother left her unwilling to have children of her own.
“Because I had such a horrible childhood with my parents, with emotional and sometimes physical abuse, I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to recreate that family,” she writes. “After my experience, my mind was closed to the possibility of having my own child.”
Instead, Garten built a career that has included over a dozen cookbooks and two television series.
The fruits of this work have enabled the couple to buy an apartment in Paris, something they dreamed of when they were first married.
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