Julia Reed - Dispatches from the Gilded Age: A Few More Thoughts on Interesting People, Far-Flung Places, and the Joys of Southern Comforts

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To Clarke and Judy

by Roy Blount Jr.

Such a downer to think of Julia as departed. Better to remember how she would arrive. For instance at Joans and my half-of-the-year house in an out-of-the-way New England village. As my wife recollects:

She came in the door carrying bags and bags of presents and sat herself down as if shed been here thirty timesso comfortable being in a new place, she made you feel comfortable. Not in some take-charge way, but in a subtle way, an elegant way. And amazing food and bowls and things shed brought, and shed determined that we could get the best fried chicken in the world at a place twenty minutes from here. I cant think of any of our other friends arriving like that. She knew how to play it so well. Her confidence could sometimes be irritating, but you didnt have to put her at ease, she made you feel at ease. And bringing the whole world in, not just Mississippi brown water and Nashville la-di-da, but Vermont cheese, tales of Algiers

It feels like that to read Julia. As it did to dine out with herfor instance one Thanksgiving at her house in New Orleans, all of us dressed as either Pilgrims or turkeys, or one long afternoon during Mardi Gras, at Pche, as she geared up to reign atop a mammoth high-heeled shoe on a float in a parade that she brought to a halt outside a friends house so she could pop in and powder her nose. She had many friends, including me, who didnt know one shoe from another, but years later, when she parted ways with one cancer specialist, she would pointedly mention that doctors hopeless taste in shoes.

Very few notable humorists have been virtuoso hands-on organizers of elaborate events. Julia was. Four years ago we were in Julias Cadillac. Julia was drivingand sipping a Scotch, and running late, and yelling at irresolute drivers up ahead, and working her phonetoward a food-and-drink-rich reception at a cotton gin, as part of her annual Greenville, Mississippi, Hot Tamale Festival. Just recently, I learned that Joan switched on her audio-recording function during this ride. The tumult is hard to reconstruct, except for the laughter. If while reading Julia you can hear her chortle and cackle, then you can fill in that element here.

Julia: Siri, call Hank on mobile. See how she can handle that one. Shit. Oh, nailed it! Hank Im in my car, thats where. On the road, just hauling it, but Im not driving back cause Im getting ready to be the drunkest person in the room. Have you got Dave D. and all those AllrightAllrightAllright, I dont want to hear it. Thank you so very much for doing this youre an angel bye.

Julia to us: [A food provider] calls this morning and says, Can you order me two pounds of brussels sprouts? What am I, a wholesale grocery? You are in Memphis, Tennessee. Its not like youre flying in from Dakar. Get some brussels sprouts, and get somebody to clean and fry em Trying to save money? Dont save money if it means expecting me to do all the work!

Her father, Clarke, calling: Hey, Sister? Which road do we take after

Julia: Theres some breaks in the median, but its the first left you can take that cuts all the way across onto a new road.

Clarke: What else can I do for you?

Julia: Hang up the phone that would be excellent bye. [Clarke hangs up.] MomnDaddy were having their usual getting-dressed brawl, and I had to clear out of there cause I was laughing so hard. Mommas holding up earrings to me, Dont you like those better? Nom, I really dont. I thought those were your favorite. I thought these were the ones you didnt like. Im liking them tonight! Im thinking, Put the fuckers on!

A rousing party in the cotton gin that night. And next morning downtown Greenville, Julias usually life-challenged hometown, was bursting with hot-tamale stalls, distinguished chefs, notable food writers, and voracious folks. And the next day, festival participants picnicked on a sandbar in the Mississippi River, Calvin Trillin recollecting Greenvilles relatively unmalign role in the Civil Rights Movement, Julias friend Bo Weevil taking Jessica Lange out in a boat to dodge huge leaping Asian catfish, and Julias friends-from-childhood (all of her friends seemed to be lifelong) the Brent sisters picking and singing something lovely.

One political note:

Just about all of my other Southern writer friends, and I, have been confirmed staunch Democrats. Julia, from childhood, was a Republicanof a decidedly secular, anti-Trump, anti-death-penalty, gender-and-race-friendly, Delta-proud variety all her own. So its not just lip-smacking evocations of food and lipstick she leaves us with, but also spicily incorrect punch lines like the one at the end of her yarn about a train ride with competitively engag feminists. And time-capsule spritzes like this:

If you are lucky you learn about fashion from watching your mother. She took a suitcase full of minidresses to the Republican Convention in Miami in l968 and brought back a pile of paper dresses, The Thing that summer. I still have a gold one, with a big ruffled collar, so shiny you can see yourself in it. But I also see NIXONS THE ONE and Bebe Rebozo and SPIRO IS MY HERO and my mother at a party on a yacht docked outside the Fontainebleau Hotel. Four years later I can see her in a cool white linen suit covered in paint thrown by antiwar protesters, and Abbie Hoffman wearing a dress thats really a flag, and this time Kay Grahams there, and Kissinger just back from China, and Joe Alsop got drunk and ate spaghetti with his hands.

Let them read the goddamn book, Julia is saying.

Okay youre an angel bye.

Had Jean Harris not murdered Herman Tarnower, her longtime lover and author of the wildly successful The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet, I might not have had a career.

This, in asort ofnutshell, is what happened: During my junior year at Madeira, the almost entirely all-male board decided with typical wisdom to replace our brilliant but decidedly masculine headmistress (who went on to become town supervisor of Shelter Island, New York) with Jean Harris, even though her most recent job had been manager of sales at a Manhattan-based company that sold cleaning contracts to office buildings, and when I later interviewed a former board member at a previous school where shed been head, he blamed her for its ultimate demise. When she was introduced on the hockey field during the spring Fathers Weekend (in a bow to the number of divorced parents, the traditional Parents Weekend had been split in two), I took one look at her, turned to my father, and said, One day they are going to come get that woman in a truck.

My father, like most of the rest of the assembled dads, had already pronounced her attractive in her knockoff Chanel suit, and mumbled something about my dislike of authority (which is not exactly trueI just prefer it when the people nominally in charge of my well-being possess some modicum of sanity). At any rate, the following year proved my instincts right. She walked through campus head down, yanking at her hair; once, at a relaxed meeting at her house, she sat with us on the floor and pulled up huge clumps of carpet. We had no way of knowing that she was taking the methamphetamine Desoxyn (along with Valium, Percodan, Nembutal, and other goodies revealed to have been in her medicine cabinet), or that she was in the grips of an increasingly desperate obsession with the famous Dr. Tarnower.