Ina Garten’s first foray into television was a disaster.
Martha Stewart’s TV 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 best-seller, 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 to her home in the Hamptons to set up filming, forcing her and her husband, Jeffrey to live in two bedrooms upstairs for the eight weeks of the shoot.
Everyday a producer would hand Ina a script and everyday Ina would toss it.
“Their way of doing things sometimes mystified me,” she writes. “They’d shoot every step of a recipe but then forget to film the ‘beauty shot,’ the mouth-watering image of the finished dish so people could see how delicious it was.”
Garten remembers that she spent her time telling the director, “No, that’s the way Martha does it! 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 most difficult and exhausting work I’ve ever done.”
The final straw was when the septic system overloaded due to 50 people using the same toilet and “sewage started bubbling up in the middle of my lawn. A cesspool truck rushed over to take care of the problem, but the grass was muddy with — never mind! — and the truck’s wheels got stuck in the muck.”
The director was so distressed by the chaotic scene that she “wrapped herself up in a pashmina shawl, went out in the back garden, and threw up.”
Garner was so disgusted by the shoot that she vowed to never film a television series again.
Thankfully, a TV exec named Eileen Opatut wouldn’t take no for an answer and understood that the charm of Ina was to let her be herself.
“Barefoot Contessa” debuted on The Food Network in 2002 and garnered a slew of celeb fans including Taylor Swift.
Garner writes that she was pleasantly shocked when she found out that the “Love Story” singer credited Garten with inspiring her to be more confident in the kitchen.
The two met on a photo shoot in 2014 and made pavlovas together.
The following year Ina took her team to Swift’s 1989 world tour and went to the after-party.
There, she ended up playing a slightly inebriated game of beer pong against the then US women’s national Soccer team.
At one point celebrated player Abby Wambach decided to be Garten’s coach.
Her advice consisted of, “Just get the f–king ball in the f–king glass!”
Not surprisingly much of the book delves into Garten’s long marriage to Jeffrey, whom she wed 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 food specialty store, the “Barefoot Contessa” in Westhampton and Jeffrey was commuting in on the weekends from Washington, DC.
Ina felt trapped by the traditional roles of marriage and “the feeling that I wasn’t an equal partner in our marriage. “She also confesses to not paying Jeffrey enough attention when he did visit on the weekends.
“I feel terrible whenever 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 apart. “I’d asked the only man I’d ever loved for a separation, knowing that 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 stresses that Jeffrey had done nothing wrong but “was just doing what every man before him had done.”
But the foodie maven was no longer happy with those outdated roles and suggested that he see a therapist so Jeffrey would “see me differently, not as a child or as a wife but as a partner, whose voice was as important as his.”
Jeffrey agreed and after a few weeks, the estranged couple met up, with Ina was thrilled to realize that she wasn’t the only one liberated by throwing out the tired old playbook.
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 not wanting 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 re-create that family,” she writes. “After my experience, my mind was closed to the possibility of having my own child.”
Instead, Garten built up a career that has included over a dozen cookbooks and two TV series.
The fruits of that labor has afforded the couple to buy an apartment in Paris, something they dreamed of when they first got married.
