Katie Lee

Advertisement

Supported by

Send any friend a story

As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.

By Frank Bruni

It could have been the Cannes film festival, the way the water glittered in the background and the fans swarmed their favorite stars and the photographers clicked and clicked. One of those photographers, scruffy and lavishly tattooed, appeared suddenly as Katie Lee walked from her grand hotel, where the event's organizers had ensconced her in a junior suite on a high floor, toward the temporary city of beachfront tents where her presentation would take place.

"Katie!" he shouted as he stepped nimbly backward, so that Lee would remain centered in his frame as she moved nonchalantly forward. "Katie!"

"Paparazzi," she said to me with a smile, a shrug and a little laugh — she was clearly tickled by the attention, maybe because she tended to get less of it than the event's major players, even though she was a repeat performer. "They always hang out here."

"Here" was a patch of squat dunes between the hotel and a fleet of electric golf carts poised to carry her and other headliners to the tents, so that they didn't have to struggle through the Miami sand or melt in the Miami sun, which shined down like a spotlight in these last days of February.

Lee hopped in a chauffeured cart, was at the tents in under a minute and had plenty of time, before her 12:45 p.m. show, to hang out in the "greenroom," a private tent for the talent that required a special pass. She took sips from a flute of free Champagne as a technician threaded a microphone cord from the waist of her blue jeans toward the collar of a long-sleeved crew neck, white with blue stripes. Her outfit — a costume, really — was supposed to evoke a summer picnic, though not all of it was quite that casual. On her feet she wore gold, elaborately detailed Bottega Veneta sandals, and on her toenails she had vivid peach polish.

"Tart Deco," she said the shade was called.

Showtime. Lee ascended the stage, which faced hundreds of seats in neat rows. The majority weren't filled, but the scores of fans who turned out paid close attention as she put lime juice, cantaloupe chunks and mint into a blender, cooing about cool fruit on a hot day, and then pressed a button that turned all of it into a soup. "How easy is that?" she asked. The audience clapped.

She made a marinade for vegetables that would be grilled and placed on baguettes, and defended two of the marinade's ingredients. "A lot of people are kind of snobby about garlic powder and onion powder," she said, her faint Southern drawl seeming to flare just then. "I happen to love them." When the sandwiches were done, there was more applause, and there was more still when she left the stage after about 35 minutes, her assembly of a picnic lunch complete.

The setting was the South Beach Wine and Food Festival, an exuberant Foodstock where burners substitute for drum kits, recipes replace lyrics and exhortations to eat supplant invitations to sing along. Since its inception in 2002, it has grown mightily, to $3 million in corporate sponsorships from $300,000 and to 50,000 attendees from 6,000. And it provides as good a mirror as any into how large, lucrative and starry the world of food entertainment, for lack of a better term, has become. ("I wish there was a stock — I wish I owned it," says Lee Schrager, the festival's founder and director.) In South Beach, many fans pay hundreds of dollars to get within a few dozen feet of the most famous restaurant chefs and television cooks, who are besieged with requests for autographs and bask in a balmy climate of unfettered adulation. Is it any wonder that a pretty young striver like Lee wants a chunk of it?

She doesn't come armed with any fancy degree or professional kitchen experience, but that may not matter in the end. More relevant is whether she's hungry and sparkly enough, and how adept she is at chatting amiably as she sautés. She has the benefit of name recognition in lifestyle magazines and gossip columns, courtesy of her marriage to the music legend Billy Joel, which ended last year. Her success so far suggests the way celebrity begets more celebrity and fame is fungible, in a manner that allows, say, a figure skater to convert Olympic gold into a Food Network show. "What Would Brian Boitano Make?" just entered its second season.

Lee is in many ways a perfect emblem and byproduct of the culinary industry's absorption into the broader cosmos of show business. As the food world expands, it beckons the kinds of dreamers that Hollywood and Broadway and Nashville always have, promising them a sort of lottery in which pluck, luck, looks and poise are as pivotal as anything else. Lee, who is 28, has already published two cookbooks, the first of which sold well by industry standards, and has a regular home-entertaining gig on CBS's "Early Show." It's not "Today," and it's certainly not her own Food Network showcase, which is what really sets a culinary celebrity in motion and accelerated the careers of Rachael Ray, for example, and Paula Deen. But it's a start.

Both Ray and Deen have inspired Lee. "Rachael didn't go to culinary school," she said. "Paula didn't go to culinary school. They opened the doors for people like me. Fifteen years ago, I couldn't have had this career in food."

On the same day of the festival that Lee assembled her picnic, she dropped in on a cooking demonstration that the bawdy, often bewigged Deen — Dolly Parton with a deep fryer — was supposed to be doing, and marveled at the way Deen's appearances can play out. "Her food's all set up, but she's just telling jokes and taking questions from the audience," Lee told me. "It's like a stand-up routine. She never gets to cook."

When Lee and I were in the greenroom, we ran into Ray, whose retinue included several agents, her publicist and the editor of her most recent cookbooks. The editor, Emily Takoudes, was still talking about, and stunned by, the way people had pressed in to get close to Ray at the festival's Burger Bash, which Ray hosted two days before. So that she could move smoothly from one burger station to another, Takoudes said, Ray had a posse of bodyguards clearing her path.

The Food Network went into just 6.5 million homes in 1993, its inaugural year; now it reaches nearly 100 million. Its ratings have risen continually and sharply, both during the day and in prime time, where its most popular program, a competition called "The Next Food Network Star," takes relative unknowns and puts them on a path to riches.

Guy Fieri, who runs an unremarkable group of restaurants in Northern California, was a past season's winner, graduating to four Food Network vehicles of his own, two best-selling cookbooks and a traveling road show that plays in 5,000-seat arenas and involves a disc jockey and a 25-gallon, six-foot-tall margarita blender. You could think of him as the Cuisinart Liberace, with copious jewelry, bleached white hair and a sun-smacked face on the burned side of tan. It's a look, and he's bullish about it. Just by showing up at a corporate event, saying a few words and mingling with the folks there, he can make tens of thousands of dollars. "It's incredible how much they’ll pay us," says the chef Mario Batali, who provided the voice of a rabbit in the recent animated movie "Fantastic Mr. Fox." Batali was referring to himself, Fieri and the chef Bobby Flay, and he added that a $100,000 payday wasn't out of the question.

Then there are the product lines. Deen is the queen of these. In addition to her pork loins, pork shanks, pecan cookies, coconut cakes, Vidalia onion marinades, blueberry preserves, coffee grinds, salt crystals, pots and pans, she has her own brand of rugs and, in collaboration with Serta, has developed what she describes as "a yummy mattress."

"It's kind of taken my breath away, the opportunities that have come my way," she told me on the phone recently. "I have trouble keeping it all straight!" She apologized for the audible ruckus in her Savannah home, where, she explained, she was having several slot machines moved in: "I’m a slot slut. I can just sit down at those and forget about everything — except jackpot, jackpot, jackpot."

Deen has had three separate cooking shows on the Food Network over the last eight years. Ray has had the same number, plus a syndicated talk show. Their ubiquity would seem to leave little room for latecomers, except that the appetite for culinary programming has not yet been sated. Fox, Bravo, the Learning Channel, the Travel Channel — all have developed more food-related shows, and in May the Food Network will spin off the Cooking Channel. The new content requires new talent, and the Food Network's downtown offices are flooded with about 2,000 audition tapes a year, from restaurant chefs and home cooks alike.

Being cast boils down to something less quantifiable than a set of kitchen skills. It requires "that mysterious ability to break through the TV set," Brooke Johnson, the Food Network's president, says. "Some just have the personality to do it, and some just don't."

Ray, Deen and Fieri all did, their combined energy enough to run every kitchen in Hollywood for a decade. So did other Food Network stars like Giada De Laurentiis, with her refined aura of Hollywood royalty (one of her grandfathers is the producer Dino De Laurentiis), and Patrick and Gina Neely, a fun-loving Tennessee couple who sass, bicker and barbecue. Over on Bravo, Padma Lakshmi's exotic beauty was obviously as big a factor in her "Top Chef" assignment as any culinary bona fides. Sure, she had a cookbook and some food-television appearances to her credit, but she had received as much notice as a fashion model and sometime actress.

Each has a niche, gimmick or back story that transcends whatever food they’re whipping up or merely talking about, and although Lee, in many interviews over many weeks, never copped to any extensive calculation, I got the sense that she had figured that out — or that people around her had. In the introduction to her first cookbook, "The Comfort Table," she calls herself a "hillbilly princess," setting the tone for the pages that follow. The hillbilly part is captured in recipes for meatloaf, brown-butter bacon, sausage gravy and fried green tomatoes.

And the princess part? That's captured in the photographs of Lee: in a long white dress on the beach; slipping into gold pumps just outside the gilded master bathroom in her town house in Greenwich Village; standing next to Joel on their wedding day. There are many pictures, each and every one of them glossy and fastidiously composed.

The way her mother, Kim Becker, remembers it, Lee "loved putting on little plays and shows — she got a lot of attention that way." And on a couple of occasions her mother videotaped her. When she was about 12, she had her mother get out the camera and record the preparation and presentation of the first full meal she ever made: beef stroganoff. Neither of them can remember if she had already begun to watch cooking shows on TV, or if the idea came to Lee independently.

This was in the town of Milton, W.Va., population approximately 2,200, where being the only child of a single mother — Lee's father moved away when she was 2, and Becker, a middle-school teacher, didn't remarry until Lee was about to go to college — made her a bit of an oddity. Becker's parents lived just two doors down and helped out. In fact, the neighborhood was filled with extended family, who gathered on weekend mornings for starchy feasts of redeye gravy and "cat heads," which is what they called the biscuits Lee's grandmother made, "because they were as big as a cat's head," Becker says.

Lee's grandfather often baby-sat for her, and one of the things she recalls most vividly about him was the way he ate — slowly and methodically, so he could concentrate on the pleasure and so it would last — and the way he always asked everybody for the details of their meals. He made grilled-cheese sandwiches the way she liked them best: heavily buttered bread, Velveeta, mayonnaise. And when she was a teenager, he turned her on to Emeril Lagasse, the Food Network's very first star.

"My grandpa and I loved Emeril," Lee said. "It was all he wanted to watch when he was in the hospital dying. When I met Emeril later, it was so emotional."

As a teenager, Lee thought about a career in TV journalism and briefly anchored a local TV newsmagazine program aimed at, and staffed by, kids. Journalism was her major at Miami University in Ohio. She also cooked, more and more, and moved off campus so she could have a kitchen. In her senior year she applied to the French Culinary Institute (and got in). It was during a visit to Manhattan to check out the school in late 2002 that she literally bumped into Billy Joel. She was rooting around in her purse, she told me, as she walked out of a hotel-lobby bathroom.

She said she didn't recognize him, but a friend who was with her did, and invited him to join them for a drink. The next six hours were a modern fairy tale, during which Lee called her mother twice with breathless updates. Joel treated her and her friend to a lavish dinner that included white truffles at one of his favorite Italian restaurants, then spirited them to a Broadway theater for the final minutes of "Movin’ Out," the Twyla Tharp production based on his music. He even got up onstage to sing. Lee assumed it was a regular gig but learned much later that he was trying to impress her. "It's a good bag of tricks to have," she said.

One of the people watching the show that night was Barbara Bush, the president's daughter, who sent word backstage that she wanted to say hello to Joel. The evening ended with all of them drinking Champagne at Pigalle, a restaurant nearby, under the watchful eye of the Secret Service.

Joel, who was in his early 50s, called Lee about a week later, and kept calling, their initial courtship conducted entirely by phone. She bought one of his "Greatest Hits" collections, because she knew only a few of his songs, and at his urging she traveled to the Hamptons to spend a weekend at his house, where they cooked pasta and he showed her "The Godfather," which she’d never seen.

"I thought: I could love this person," she told me, adding that their 32-year age difference ultimately seemed less compelling than how well they got along. "We just had a really good chemistry together."

And so she traded culinary school for the Hamptons — in 2004, she became Joel's third wife — but indulged her interest in food by writing for Hamptons magazine and starting a culinary Web site. Through the social circles he inhabited she made valuable connections in the media and entertainment industries and got opportunities seemingly beyond her degree of experience. She recorded a cooking segment for the TV show "Extra!" and when the producers developing the show "Top Chef" were casting around for a food-enthusiastic hostess of sorts to pair on the program with the acclaimed New York chef Tom Colicchio, they chose Lee, though they replaced her with Lakshmi after just one season, telling her it just wasn't the right fit.

Still, the show brought her visibility and with it an entertainment agent, a literary agent and a cookbook contract. She had relatives in West Virginia send her the lists of ingredients and the cooking instructions for those family classics that she didn't already know how to make. Some she reproduced exactly; some she tweaked. She rounded these out with dishes that evolved from her own regular trial-and-error sessions in the kitchen, and she consulted the Internet, other cookbook authors and her editor at Simon & Schuster about the proper style for recipes. List the ingredients in the order in which they’ll be used. Describe the desired consistency of a sauce not merely as thick but as being able "to coat the back of a spoon."

She did all of that, and then, days before "The Comfort Table" came out in April 2008, she landed an appearance on "The Oprah Winfrey Show": she would get to promote her recipes; her husband would perform "Only the Good Die Young."

She recalled how petrified she was beforehand. "I was doing yoga with my yoga teacher," she said, "and I said to her, ‘I’m so nervous.’ And she said — so simple, but it made so much sense — she said: ‘Being nervous is actually being really selfish, because you’re making the situation all about yourself when really it's about the TV audience. They’re there to have fun, and you’re there to entertain them. So stop making it all about you and just breathe.’ "

It worked, she said: "I just had the best time." And according to Nielsen BookScan, "The Comfort Table" went on to sell about 33,000 copies: not a runaway success, but a showing respectable enough to guarantee a follow-up.

About six months later, there was more good fortune, but of a much different nature.

Permitted to compete against restaurant chefs, including Colicchio, in the Burger Bash at the New York Wine and Food Festival, she set up a griddle in an open-air hangar and bucked the tide. They made big, brawny, multidecker concoctions; she produced ultrathin patties of, really, meatloaf — beef, grated onion, garlic powder — that were bracketed by yellow American cheese and swaddled in heavily buttered slices of white bread. When she won the popular vote, it touched off considerable griping, some of it just whispered, much plastered on food blogs. Were Lee's sandwiches really burgers, or did they more rightly belong in the category of patty melts? Had she worked the crowd too assertively?

Ben Leventhal, a prominent blogger in attendance, remembers loving Lee's Logan County Hamburgers, named for an area of her home state. But he also remembers "the William Morris buzz machine around her," meaning the agents who roamed the area near her booth "acting as hype men."

Even months afterward, Lee was still fielding questions from bloggers and reporters about the contest, the hubbub directing more attention to her victory than it would have otherwise received. "I think it was one of those situations where any press is good press," she said. In its wake she was no longer just a pretty face. She was also an adorable cheeseburger — or, maybe, patty melt.

Over the last two years she has branched out in multiple directions, and to take stock of them is to get the sense that she's throwing as many darts at the board as she can. She graduated from an occasional presence on "The Early Show" to a near-weekly one. She produces a monthly cooking column, "Eat This Up," for Cosmopolitan that typically spotlights a themed lunch or dinner. For "A Meal That Will Mesmerize Him," she suggested such dishes as pan-seared filet mignon and a layered parfait of chocolate pudding and amaretto-flavored whipped cream. "When cooking for a man," she advised, "treat all of his senses."

She signed a contract with Simon & Schuster to write a novel, to be shepherded by the editor Tricia Boczkowski, who handled the best-selling "Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea," by the late-night television comedian Chelsea Handler. Boczkowski described Lee's book to me at one point as a roman à clef "loosely based on her and Bill" — meaning Joel — that will have just enough "that piques people's curiosity to wonder how much of this is fictional and how much of this is real." Lee said that it would have nothing to do with her marriage, that it is still evolving and that its female protagonist surfs. (Lee picked up surfing in the Hamptons.)

In addition to literary pursuits, she has toyed around with opening a restaurant and dreams of her own frozen-food line. What has eluded her is her own cooking show, the piece of the puzzle that makes everything else fall into place. "If you look at the cookbooks that sell the most," she said, "it's almost always people who have their own TV shows." Sales of Lee's sophomore effort, "The Comfort Table: Recipes for Everyday Occasions," published last October, have been less than a third of those of its predecessor. There was no "Oprah" appearance behind it.

" ‘The Early Show’ definitely helps," Lee said. "But by having your own 30 minutes — that's 30 minutes of exactly who you are, not just 3 minutes that's just about soups and gadgets. It showcases your style and your personality and helps people understand what you’re doing. Ultimately, it makes them like you."

She has knocked on the door of the Food Network, the principal sponsor of both the South Beach and New York food festivals, but it hasn't budged. Food-world insiders say that the network's chieftains don't find Lee's style — which falls in the languid wing of Southern manners, not the sassy one inhabited by Deen — to be catchy enough. Not long ago, Lee recorded a pilot for a cooking show that was shopped around, but there were no takers. While the television marketplace has a growing number of slots for food programming, it doesn't have nearly as many as there are eager aspirants to fill them.

But that pilot, Lee says, was a fairly straightforward culinary demonstration, and she's now developing a more thoroughly conceptualized one, with more impressive ingredients. It is backed by Brett Ratner, whom Lee met a few years ago at a party on the island of St. Barts. That the man who directed the movies "Rush Hour" and "X-Men: The Last Stand" has turned his attention to a culinary show underscores just how far food entertainment has evolved.

He and his deputies have a conceit for Lee: a young woman in the city, making meals and making her way. A single young woman, that is. She and Joel separated last June and were divorced in October. Although tabloids insinuated that she had been involved with an Israeli fashion designer who frequently accompanied her around town, she said that that was ridiculous, and that she and Joel were undone by "just being at different places­ in our lives." She emerged from the relationship with the Greenwich Village town house, which has four floors, its own backyard and a dream kitchen. There's a chance that her show with Ratner will be set there.

A few months ago I accompanied her to a meeting in Beverly Hills with the two young producers working directly on her pilot. Over peppermint tea on a patio outside the Four Seasons, they and Lee spitballed scenarios for the "Untitled Katie Lee Project." They envisioned her inviting a small group of girlfriends over to her town house for a "spa night" of healthful eating and facials. They pictured Lee bolting to the home of an acquaintance who is less skillful in the kitchen than she, surreptitiously helping her cook, then dashing away before the acquaintance's date arrives to a sumptuous meal.

One producer: "The ideas are endless."

The other producer: "You’re like the girl next door, everybody's friend. People relate to you."

The producers said they should ideally show enough of Lee's life at home so that she could put her stamp on a variety of products — like linens or clothes. "If you’re wearing a sweater, people will want to know what it is," one of them said. "They should be able to go to a Web site."

The other: "Yeah, because you’re very stylish."

"Why people want to watch people cooking and eating on TV — I’m still trying to figure that out," says Anthony Bourdain, a longtime restaurant chef whose phenomenally successful best seller, "Kitchen Confidential," became his pivot into information-packed food-travel shows. "In the beginning," he adds, harking back to Julia Child and even Emeril Lagasse, "some believable ability with food, some kind of credential, was at least implied." He doesn't think that's the case anymore, and says, "Just as teenage girls need nonthreatening teen idols, whether they sing or appear in vampire movies, America clearly needs likable people who appear in the kitchen."

Lee's enthusiasm for cooking — and eating — seems genuine. She talks constantly about recipes and restaurants. She has eaten out widely, and in many countries. And she knows what she knows. Before a December appearance on "The Bonnie Hunt Show," when production assistants told her that the sausage balls she would be showcasing were crumbling and falling apart during test runs, she diagnosed the problem instantly, asking the assistants if the grated cheese they were using was prepackaged. It was. "The recipe calls for freshly grated," Lee explained. "You need the extra moisture." When the fix was made, the balls were fine.

Then again, they were sausage balls — from her second cookbook, Page 48, illustrated with a shot of Lee's legs. While many of the book's recipes are uncomplicated in smart and appealing ways, others are almost comically simple, like the one for "Buffalo chicken quesadillas." It begins by calling for "one store-bought rotisserie chicken," already cooked and ready to be shredded into quesadilla filling.

Her "Early Show" appearances reflect as much attention to theatrics as to mechanics. The theme for one that I watched her shoot in December was a holiday-season cocktail party, and she spent nearly half an hour in hair and makeup, two women flitting over and around her like pit mechanics fussing with a race car. The tips that she went on to give included moving nonessential furniture out of the room to make more space and cleaning the bathroom before guests arrive.

At the South Beach festival last month, Lee was one of four cooks who contributed to a Kiss My Grits Sunday brunch headlined by Deen. Each cook was positioned at a serving station in a vast ballroom; at hers, Lee presented "Nutella French toast sandwiches," layered with banana slices and made with a great many eggs, to give them the fluffiness of a soufflé. They were busy, messy — and undeniably delicious. Several people returned for seconds.

Some attendees, like Patty Steinhoff, a retired teacher from Ellenville, N.Y., asked to have their pictures taken with Lee. "I got Emeril," Steinhoff said, referring to a photograph taken earlier in the festival. "I got Guy Fieri."

When Deen arrived, she didn't go to a serving station but got up on the stage, where a hefty singer performed gospel music. Deen joined in, cracking to the crowd, "I can't carry a tune in a bucket, but let's try!" Badly, buoyantly, she belted out a succession of amens while playing with a bright yellow tambourine. Then she summoned her supporting cast of cooks to join her.

Lee was the first of them to reach the stage. She took hold of the tambourine, raised it even higher than Deen had and shook it for all it was worth. She danced; she beamed. She looked ecstatic.

Frank Bruni is a staff writer for the magazine.

Advertisement