Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir (19 page)

The other motivating factor was that this time the job was not for a private commission, but for a Lavazza calendar! Lavazza is one of the oldest companies in Italy. Like Pirelli, they commissioned great photographers to shoot an annual pictorial calendar. So I guess the coffee company didn’t require full bush! Not only would I not have to put my nether regions on display, but people would also actually see my work with Newton.

Daniele drove me to Monte Carlo. The shoot was in a suite at the Grand Hotel. When we arrived, I went upstairs, and Daniele sat on the hotel patio reading
Corriere della Sera.
I reached the suite only to find that one of my closest friends, Antonio Gazzola, had been booked as the makeup artist. His presence was a good omen. In those early days, he was somehow always there at the right moment. Backstage, he used to whisper to me in Italian that I was just as beautiful as all the other models and that my scar made me special. He knew how anxious I was about the scar and would tell stylists they didn’t have to worry about putting me in short sleeves, because he would make the scar disappear. Of course, they always put me in long sleeves anyway.

Now, though, he left the scar alone, because Mr. Newton didn’t mind it—or so I’d heard. Antonio was finishing up when Mr. Newton came in
to say hello. He treated me gently and kindly, as a grandfather might. He spoke about his wife, a comfort to a girl about to spend an hour topless with a strange man in a hotel room. I began to feel at ease in my own skin. Then he caught a glimpse of my arm. “What have you done!” he gasped.

I began to panic. After the agony of turning down his first offer, the thrill of a second chance, and the years of wondering whether my scar was a deal-breaker—whether the accident had permanence—Mr. Newton’s reaction could be the ultimate rebuff, the moment at which my wondering whether I could make it as a model was met with a definitive “No, you cannot.”

“Didn’t they tell you about my scar?” The words barely escaped my mouth. “Yes, yes,” he said, “but why have you erased a part of it? You’ve ruined the beauty of it. Antonio, get your paints out and restore that mark to what it was.” I couldn’t believe it. I can still remember Antonio smiling with a brush between his teeth as he touched up the scar, adding wine-colored lipstick to the lightened areas. “Crazy business,” he murmured under his breath. While I was there, Mr. Newton booked me right away for another project. In these photos, my scar, not my boobs, was front and center. I felt so comfortable with this man, so safe. And when I posed for a picture for
Big Nudes 2,
you could see only the side of my face in the Polaroid he showed me. The scar was the star. The Lavazza calendar I wouldn’t see for ages yet, but he did send me a print of my own of the
Big Nudes
portrait.

Antonio knew what I didn’t: when the designers found out I had shot with Helmut Newton because of my scar, not in spite of it, they would all want to use me. Already grunge was in, and models with tattoos and piercings were showing up in American ads for Calvin Klein, and Europe often followed America’s lead. Helmut would give everyone in Milan and Paris the courage to use me without camouflaging my scar, Antonio said.

He was right. And it helped, I’m sure, that my agent milked the shoot
for every drop—oh, did I mention that she just shot with Helmut? That he loved her? That he rebooked her on the spot? I was soon booked for an eighteen-page shoot for Italian
Elle
and I shot Roberto Cavalli’s first campaign with Aldo Fallai. I was booked for many shows in Paris, from Ungaro to Sonia Rykiel. At the shows stylists still checked my sleeves—but now they were checking to make sure the sleeves were short, so that everyone would know who I was under all that makeup.

Bigger jobs presented more opportunities to improve as a model. I learned how to walk from the legendary modeling agent Piero Piazzi. “You walk great,” he told me, before essentially advising me to change everything I was doing. I shouldn’t move my shoulders or my head. Just my hips. I had been overdoing it, walking the way my young daughter does today when she pretends to model. Gradually I got better at the strange craft of modeling. I learned to hold my body in a nonchalant way for editorials in that nineties grungy attitude that seemed to be screaming, “I
don’t care
if you take my picture.” I learned to move in a way that made the clothes swing and look fun on the runway. I also began to understand how to make my body seem slimmer and longer in lingerie and swimsuits on film. My growing success came in part from Mr. Newton’s photos, but also from my newfound confidence, which his embrace provided. All of a sudden, agents at castings were excited to see me. The spring in my step showed in my work.

For the next four years, I lived most of the clichés that come with modeling success. There I was partying on yachts, going to conspicuously cool restaurants, and heading to Ibiza for the weekend. I’d awake on a boat with Daniele, parked near just a few others in the Mediterranean Sea, and go to the prow wearing only my bikini bottom. I knew that men and women on the other boats might see me. And if I knew someone was watching, I might turn so my scar was visible. My scar became adornment,
like a string of pearls. Almost overnight, it had transformed from a stain into a sort of talisman, a source of power and confidence.

Today, I love my scar. It is so much a part of me. I wouldn’t remove it even if a doctor could wave a magic wand and erase it from my arm. I’ve started seeing my body as a map of my life. I can tell a story about every imprint life has made on my skin: the mosquito bites on my back from when I slept under the Sardinian sun the summer I first fell in love with Daniele; the scrapes on my leg from the rocks in the Cuban sea during the filming of my first movie. In her introduction to
Women,
by Annie Leibovitz, Susan Sontag asks, “A photograph is not an opinion. Or is it?” I believe it most certainly is. A photograph can change the way you look at yourself, though it’s more complicated than that. Perhaps it was under the right light, or through the right lens, that I really saw myself for the first time. I have Helmut Newton to thank for that. People have told me that my scar makes me seem more approachable, more vulnerable. Ironically, the greatest gift fashion has given me is the courage to expose that most vulnerable part of myself. By facing the shame of my own body’s disfigurement, I was able to liberate myself from that shame, and instead draw confidence from my scar.

I
never decided to stop modeling.
By
1997 or so, I was getting bored and less and less ambitious. I would work only if I needed the money, but I had no healthy desire to really make as much money as I could. And it’s hard to get anywhere with m
o
deling if your look goes out of favor with fashion and its trends. I was not a waif. I once got fired from a Sonia Rykiel show because I gained too much weight between seasons. I was bored and it seemed modeling was bored with me, too.

Fortunately, another career began to take shape. Because I was a foreigner who spoke Italian—a relative novelty—I was a sound bite favorite of the news crews that covered the fashion shows for the style-conscious Italian media. Eventually, RAI television asked me to join the cast of
Domenica In,
Italy’s version of the
Today
show. I asked the director about showing my scar on TV. “Everyone knows that you have a scar,” he said. “Don’t cover it up.” I spent every Sunday for six months on live Italian TV in Rome and lived the rest of the week in Milan. The show provided a sort of training ground for every TV job I’ve done since. Each live show lasted six hours, and it aired without even a five-second delay. The anxiety this induced motivated me. I could finally make use of my mind. Sure, I was
more Vanna White than Katie Couric, but at least I finally had a job where the goal wasn’t to shut up and look pretty. Plus, these were those heady pre-Internet days when a slipup wouldn’t make it around the world in a matter of hours. No one from back home would even watch the show.

The producers played up my role as the screwball-comedienne foreigner still learning the language. I had my own segment on the show called
Parole a Parole
(Word for Word): I had to attempt to provide the definition of a difficult Italian word and an elementary school student would get to guess whether I was right or wrong. In my dressing room, I had hundreds of letters from kids vying for the honor. The producers loved that sometimes my Italian would fail me. By then, I could speak the language rapidly and intelligibly. I just happened to speak a strange pidgin dialect that was part cab driver—my unofficial teachers—and part profane fashionista, thanks to Daniele and his friends. This occasionally made for exciting television. When one of the show’s other hosts teased me on air, I teased back, attempting a gentle insult like “jerk” but accidentally using the word
stronso,
which essentially means “piece of shit.” The slipup earned me a clip on
Blob,
the Italian version of
Talk Soup,
a show so popular it spawned a verb—
blobato,
as in “
Mi hanno blobato
!” (“They blobbed me!”
).

Soon after, a film agent signed me on and cast me in an Italian costume drama set in Cuba at the time of the conquistadors. They needed an “exotic girl” who spoke a bit of Spanish to play a Cuban native. Never mind that I had gone from the high-art world of Helmut Newton to a period piece that had cast a Tamil woman as a Cuban “savage” (topless in a loincloth, though I insisted that they give me hair extensions that would cover my breasts). Never mind that the peoples who populated pre-Columbian Cuba didn’t speak Spanish. I couldn’t exactly be picky—this was my first acting gig, five long years after graduating from Clark with a degree in theater. I was thrilled.

More roles followed, including another in a miniseries where I played
a swashbuckling Malaysian princess from the nineteenth century, and a guest role on an Italian TV series with Nino Manfredi where I played a character that IMDB dubbed “Indian lady.” I hadn’t made it big, but I did feel like I was making it. I loved being on the set with the PAs and cameramen and grips, the hairdressers and costumers and producers and directors. I loved that our prepacked lunches included a small plastic container of red wine, like those little plastic juice cups with foil tops they give you on airplanes. (Even craft services are better in Italy than anywhere else.)

I liked acting better than modeling for a number of reasons. It was more stimulating, but beyond that, it didn’t feel like a blatant exercise in selling something. I wasn’t exactly doing Shakespeare in the Park, but for the first time since college, I felt the satisfaction of coming together with others, all of us with the same script in hand, bringing to life something bigger than any one of us could achieve on our own. The best modeling and photography does tell a story, of course. But with acting I felt that I had the chance to tell a story that unfolded, to be a part of a narrative that changed over time and provoked in the viewer a myriad of emotions, beyond the brief reaction provoked by a still image. I also loved meeting so many talented technicians on the set. I was curious to learn about how they approached their work, and I wanted to learn from them how I could be better at mine. My director on
Domenica In
, Michaele Guardi, taught me as much about improvisation as I had learned in four years of college.

So when the Food Network offered me the opportunity to host a show, I jumped at it. I had just published my first book and was eager to figure out what to do next. Even though it wasn’t an acting job per se, it was about food. I couldn’t wait to get back on a set. Little did I know that slowly, while waiting for that big break in acting, I’d actually become
good at the work I’d found I loved. The experience I had on
Padma’s Passport
and then
Planet Food
would later be topped by
Top Chef
, which would wind up being the perfect mix of the things I loved: travel (we went to a new city every season, and another for the finale), food (I learned from the best), and hosting on television (something, that, by the time I started, I had ample practice at). Part of what I love so much about the
Top Chef
experience is that because it travels from city to city, much like the movies I filmed, the set really feels like a big circus: an improbable place built quickly out of nothing, and just as easily dismantled and stored for the next adventure. It’s especially unlikely given how complex the set is.

The
Top Chef
set is divided into two major parts. There’s the part you see on camera—the kitchens and Judges’ Table, and other sights like the pantry sporting the
Top Chef
logo—and there’s the part you don’t see. Wherever we’re filming, whether we’re in the desert or the rain forest, the production staff sets up a control room, or, as we all call it, Video Village. Video Village is where the elves work. Magical Elves, in fact—or at least that’s the name of the production company that puts on the
Top Chef
circus. These are the people who make the show the success it is.

Video Village migrates depending on the shoot location each day. It winds up in some pretty janky places: an alleyway near a Dumpster, a muddy field, a parking lot next to a construction site. If you show up on the set and wonder why there’s a tent in the middle of the sidewalk, you’ve found Video Village. Inside, there’s a low hum. People sit and hunch in front of laptops and tablets, jotting down time codes and snatches of dialogue for postproduction. Audible above the hum are the voices from the shoot, emanating from the monitors: Tom critiquing a sauce; the contestants fretting in the Stew Room, where they sit and wait before we send one of them home.

There’s a bank of a dozen or so monitors, each showing a different setting or angle. Two people always sit in front of the monitors, staring at
them and talking, it seems, to no one in particular. The most vocal of the two is Paul Starkman,
Top Chef
’s director and resident mensch. At the bottom of each screen in front of Paul is the name of a different camera operator. Like a high-tech puppeteer, Paul controls filming by calling out their names followed by his instructions, his eyes seemingly everywhere at once.

“Send them in, Brenda,” says Paul, and he watches one of the monitors as the chefs trudge single-file toward Judges’ Table. “Give me Emeril. Okay, zoom in. Stay on Brook, she gives a better reaction. Look at that, Tom’s taking tickets! That’s so good, Eric! Give me Padma.
Padma.
PADMA! God damn it!”

In this way, the story line takes shape. As Paul gauges the unscripted judge and contestant reactions, he looks for theater in truth. Paul hears John Besh say, “That’s a very difficult dish to pull off.” In that line, Paul sees a dramatic element, snapping his fingers and exclaiming, “That’s good!” When a contestant stands out, in a way that’s good, bad, or both, Paul lets it guide him. “Is Dale the story tonight?” he might wonder aloud.

Next to Paul is the show’s executive producer, for the past several years a woman named Nan Strait (although we’ve had several others), who is the little voice in my ear. While Paul commands, Nan quietly guides me. I hear her often in my earpiece, helping me play effective host and occasionally protecting me (and therefore the show) from myself. I might be sitting beside Tom or Wolfgang Puck when my must-prove-I-belong-here reflex kicks in and I take a stab at culinary erudition. Suddenly, there’s Nan to tell me, as only she could, “Padma, save it for PBS,” or “That was great, but three million people just changed the channel.”

She’s also there to remind me that not everyone at home knows all the food words we’re tossing around inside our little bubble, where we all know the difference between brunoise and julienne. When I launch into praise of the African spice called grains of paradise without identifying what the heck it is, I hear Nan bringing me back to the real world.
“All right, for those of us cowpokes who watch the Super Bowl and make Velveeta nachos,” she says, as gently as she can, “can you explain what the hell grains of paradise are?” When I do, Tom, not knowing I’ve been instructed to hold forth, looks at me like he wants to fillet me. I’m not telling
him.
I’m just looking at him while I tell the people at home.

Sometimes keeping my lips moving is part of the job. In my efforts to steer or maintain the conversation among judges to please the producers, I often embarrass myself. I awkwardly toss around cheffy terms like “expediting” and “pickup time.” I pronounce someone’s rendition of the root vegetable salsify delicious while pronouncing the word “salsif-eye” instead of “salsif-ee.” (I’ve also at various times rendered quinoa as “kin-oh-ah” and calcium as “cal-shum,” thanks to the many accents and languages in my head competing for access to my mouth. Realizing I’m mispronouncing a word always makes me cringe. It’s even worse when I do it in front of Thomas Keller and fourteen rolling cameras.)

Nan goes through the scripted parts of the show with me, not just to give me extra practice, but because some of the wording must be very carefully followed.
Top Chef
is technically a game show and therefore governed by FCC regulations. The contestants are supervised at all times. Their phone calls are monitored. If a contestant talks to me off camera, a producer jumps in to say, quietly and seriously, “Please step away from the judge.” The tone is such that you almost expect him to follow with “. . . and put your hands behind your head.” The slightest whiff of collusion is a no-no. I’ll be on the set, gabbing with a producer, and I’ll hear “Chefs within earshot!” Any talk about the show stops immediately. I’ll be in the bathroom stall and I’ll hear, “Chef walking!” as a contestant comes into the bathroom with their escort. Who knows, the thinking goes, whether or not I’m on the pot talking to Gail on the phone about a recipe?

Occasionally, the only filming going on is of the chefs in the kitchen. That’s when I like to visit Video Village to watch the cooking happen in
real time on the monitors. Even though the chefs are typically working in a giant professional kitchen, the scenes conjure for me the solitude and quietude of cooking at home. The soundtrack is more familiar, too: the low buzz of silence broken up by the occasional slurp, clinking of spoons, rustling of cotton, the tinny scraping of whisk against bowl. It’s a testament to the skill of the producers, cameramen, editors, and the rest of the production team that the show is such a thrill to watch. Because without splicing, cliff-hanging commercial breaks, and music, the footage can be decidedly unexciting. Unexciting, but lovely, too, the happy tedium of cooking on display.

Whether you have an office job or one on a television set, the days and years pass and the next thing you know, the people you were thrown together with by chance become more than colleagues. Time fosters connection. And over time the people on
Top Chef
have become a sort of second family to me. After I moved out of the home I had shared with Salman, I felt totally rudderless, but the show gave me something to hold on to. It was a real thing that I could be proud of and count on when I had little else. I felt immense gratitude to have a job that required my full attention, so that I was forced to set my personal heartbreak aside, even if only for the duration of filming.

It was the same summer of my divorce that the show received its first Emmy nominations. It hadn’t really occurred to me that that might happen; it wasn’t even on my radar. But in some important way, our show being taken seriously by the Television Academy made me take myself more seriously, made me sit up and take notice of my own work. Until that point in my career, I had mostly waited for the phone to ring, for someone to give me an assignment, whether it was modeling, writing, acting, or hosting. Awards aren’t the reason you do things, or important in themselves, but the Emmy nominations were a turning point—I went from hoping things would work out to seeing that they
were
working out.
I am
actually doing this
, I thought.
Maybe I’m not just flying by the seat of my pants.
I didn’t want to be passive anymore, personally
or
professionally. In that moment, I came into being as my real and present professional self
.

Top Chef
and its success gave me the courage to think proactively about shaping my career, and I began to explore what I wanted it to look like. For the first time, I began to consider my goals and my interests in a clearer and more pragmatic light. Until then, I had chased every lead because those were the only opportunities I could see. I had to publish two cookbooks and host three different food shows before I finally took my culinary hobby seriously and gained a modicum of true professional confidence. It had taken me well into my middle thirties to begin to come into my own, but no matter. I now had a direction to point myself in. I began to think about other work I would find rewarding that I could pursue when
Top Chef
wasn’t filming. The greatest gift that
Top Chef
gave me was the blessing of living intentionally, with agency, and doing what I really loved.