Barefoot Contessa star Ina Garten said she had to face down her mother’s blunt disapproval before marrying her now-husband of 56 years, Jeffrey Garten.
In 1968, Garten’s parents paid her a visit to express their opinions ahead of Jeffrey’s impending proposal. “My mother walked into the room and said, ‘I don’t think you should get married,’” Garten said on Tuesday in an interview with Hoda Kotb Today. “She thought she knew better for me,” she continued.
Garten said her response in that moment was the first time she’d ever stood up to her mother. She told her, “‘I’m very sorry,’ and I said this with as much love as I could—‘This is the first time I’m ever going to say this to you. I don’t care what you think, I’m marrying Jeffrey.’” Garten said it “took a lot of courage,” and her mother didn't take it well, as she left the room in silence. Garten’s father, in contrast, called her marriage to Jeffrey the “smartest thing you’ve ever done.”
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Garten married Jeffrey, now an economist and Yale educator, while she was still a student at Syracuse and he was taking off to the army. Though the couple hit a rough patch and separated due to Garten’s commitment to her Barefoot Contessa store and shunning of traditional housewife duties (he had “expected a wife that would make dinner,” she previously told People), they reunited and enjoyed a stronger relationship thereafter. She detailed much of that time apart in her memoir released last month, Be Ready When the Luck Happens, as well as the emotional and at times, physical abuse she suffered growing up at the hands of her parents, who've both since passed away.
Garten recalled some of that abuse in the interview. “[My father] was mad about something, I have no idea what. And he said, ‘Nobody will ever love you.’ And do you know what I love? I love walking up Madison Avenue and somebody leans in and says ‘I love you.’ It’s this great cosmic joke to me. It’s like, ‘Oops, I guess he was wrong.’” She said that during one of her father's physically abusive episodes, she thought “he was going to kill me.” Her mother was often “neglectful,” but Garten shared her realization that her mother may have been on the autism spectrum, and potentially unable to connect with her. “But as a child, it was very hard to have a mother you couldn't have a relationship with,” she added.
“I was so restricted,” Garten said, further describing her childhood. “I wasn't allowed to think for myself, I wasn’t allowed to do things, my ideas were thwarted, I was always told whatever I wanted to do wasn’t a good idea—so I wasn’t myself. I was scared and I was alone.” Her marriage has been her refuge, because “When I met Jeffrey, he was just the opposite,” she explained. “The life that I want to live, [meeting Jeffrey is] where it started.”
