Ina Garten’s first foray into television was a disaster.
Martha Stewart’s TV production company approached the beloved cooking personality about hosting a show following the success of “The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook.”
Published in 1999, the book was a surprise bestseller, selling over 100,000 copies in its first year.
Garton recalls in his memoir, “When destiny happens, be ready,” That two giant trucks arrived at her home in the Hamptons in preparation for filming, forcing her and her husband Jeffrey to live in two upstairs bedrooms for eight weeks of shooting.
Every day some producer would give Ina a script and every day Ina would toss it.
“Their way of working sometimes amazed me,” she writes. “They would shoot every step of the recipe, but then forget to film the ‘beauty shot,’ which captures the finished dish in the mouth. The image was watering so people could see how delicious it was.”
Garten remembers that she spent her time telling the director, “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 comfortable. She writes that “the atmosphere was tense. , , Those eight weeks were the hardest and most exhausting work I have ever done.”
The last crisis came when 50 people using the same toilet overloaded the septic system and “sewage started bubbling up in the middle of my lawn. A cesspool truck arrived to solve the problem, but there was mud in the grass. , No problem! , And the wheels of the truck got stuck in the mud.”
The director became so distressed by the chaotic scene that she “wrapped herself in a pashmina shawl, went to the back garden and vomited.”
Garner was so disappointed by the shooting that she vowed never to film a television series again.
Thankfully, a TV executive named Eileen Optut didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer and understood that Ina’s charm was to let her be.
“Barefoot Contessa” debuted on The Food Network in 2002 and attracted many celeb fans, including Taylor Swift.
Garner writes that she was pleasantly surprised when she learned 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 pavlova together.
The following year Ina took her team on Swift’s 1989 world tour and went to the after-party.
There, he played a slightly drunken game of beer pong against the then-current US women’s national soccer team.
At one point, famous player Abby Wambach decided to become Garten’s coach.
His advice included, “Just get the f–king ball in the f–king glass!”
It’s no surprise that much of the book deals with Garten’s long marriage to Jeffrey, whom she married after a chance meeting at Dartmouth in 1968, when Ina was still in high school.
The couple ran into difficulties after 10 years of their marriage, when Ina was running a food specialty store, “Barefoot Contessa”, in Westhampton and Jeffrey was visiting from Washington, DC on weekends.
Ina felt trapped by traditional marriage roles and “felt like I was not an equal partner in our marriage. “She also admits that she didn’t pay enough attention to Jeffrey when he came over on the weekends.
“I feel so bad every time I think about it,” she writes. “I wanted to spend all my time working, learning.” After a painful conversation, Ina admitted that she needed some time. There is a need to remain separate. “I asked for a separation from the only man I ever loved, knowing I was taking a terrible risk,” she writes. “I needed to find myself, but what Was I really prepared to lose her in the process?”
Ina insisted that Jeffrey had done nothing wrong, but rather “he was just doing what every man before him had done.”
But the foodie was no longer happy with those old roles and suggested he see a therapist so Jeffrey could “see me differently, not as a child or a wife but as a partner whose voice is his.” The kind was important.”
Jeffrey agreed and a few weeks later, the estranged couple met, Ina thrilled to learn that she was not the only one feeling free to throw away the tired old playbook.
Garten also details his unhappy childhood growing up with an older brother in Connecticut.
She did not want children of her own due to her traumatic childhood with an anger-prone father and cold mother.
She writes, “Because I had such a terrible childhood with my parents, with emotional and sometimes physical abuse, I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to recreate that family.” “After my experience, my mind was turned away from the possibility of having my own child.”
Instead, Garten has built a career that includes more than a dozen cookbooks and two TV series.
The fruits of that hard work allowed the couple to buy an apartment in Paris, which they had dreamed of when they were first married.
