Michael and Ellen Albertson found fame and fortune as The Cooking Couple, but they abandoned their lucrative gig to pursue separate dreams. Michael's now doing stand-up comedy; Ellen's a personal trainer.

Michael and Ellen's Lesson: One of the pieces of wisdom that midlife brings is realizing that being successful isn't the same thing as being happy. A career that sounds perfect on paper may not feel that way. Sometimes you have to gamble on happiness.

MICHAEL AND ELLEN Albertson had a career many people dream of. Authors of a successful cookbook, they hosted their own syndicated radio show and traveled around the country giving speeches and appearing on TV. It was glamorous, it was exciting, there was plenty of money coming in. Then one day they turned their back on the limousines and the cameras. In the most grown-up decision they'd ever made, they set their lives on a risky new course.

Their story begins, appropriately enough, with a romantic encounter over food. "Michael picked me up in a grocery store," Ellen says, laughing. When they married in 1993, Michael, a former chef, was staging concerts and corporate events for a Boston company, and Ellen worked as a hospital dietitian. One night, Ellen mentioned that she'd like to write a cookbook. She knew nutrition; Michael knew media and marketing. "So we just did it," Michael says. "Remember the old Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney movies - 'Hey kids, let's put on a show'? That was us." They came up with a great title - Food as Foreplay - and wrote a lighthearted book backed by serious science, celebrating the crossroads of cuisine and romance. They published the book themselves, contracting with a distributor and filling orders from a sea of cartons in the basement of their suburban Boston home. "To our shock, the book was a big success," Michael says. In the first year, Food as Foreplay sold a hundred thousand copies, sparking three hundred radio interviews and dozens of TV appearances. Ellen and Michael quit their jobs to launch a joint career, billing themselves as The Cooking Couple. "It wasn't scary at all," Ellen remembers, "because I could feel the universe pulling us in this very exciting direction." They started a Boston radio show, which multiplied among Massachusetts stations, then went national.

When the media blitz struck, Ellen was pregnant with their first child, and her swelling belly became part of the schtick. "See," Michael would say when they appeared on TV. "Food as foreplay: It works." Several major publishers took notice of all the excitement, and the Albertsons signed a six-figure deal for a second book. It would be a crash project to produce the book in time for Valentine's Day 2002. Once again, amid all the hubbub, Ellen and Michael decided to have a child. After giving birth to their son, Ellen took four days off, then returned to a punishing schedule creating the book. "I was breast-feeding, writing, breast-feeding, writing," she says. "The entire summer was a blur."

If the timing was ideal for Food as Foreplay, it couldn't have been worse for Temptations: Igniting the Pleasure and Power of Aphrodisiacs. Between spring 2001 when they signed the deal and the following February when Temptations was released, al-Qaeda attacked the United States and the stock market bottomed out. "It changed the whole mood of the country," Michael says. "People were no longer asking 'What's going to happen to my orgasm?' They were asking 'What's going to happen to my life?'" Temptations fell short of sales goals, and the publisher didn't renew their contract.

The Cooking Couple were far from washed up. "Our radio show was going gangbusters in over a hundred markets," Michael says, and they were picking up lucrative product endorsements, from companies as diverse as CorningWare, Glen Ellen wines, and Dunkin' Donuts. They'd had overtures from production companies to create a TV series starring The Cooking Couple. But signing a deal meant giving up ownership of the trademark. "Ellen was forty, I was older than that, and we're no fools," Michael says. "I always felt the agenda was to make us executive producers and hire some blonde and a hot young stud to go on air."

The golden life was beginning to lose its luster. Ellen and Michael were always on the go, crisscrossing the country to appear at product promotions and wedding shows. The turning point came on the return from a ten-day trip. When Ellen reached down to pick up her baby son, he crawled backward into the nanny's lap. "It was heartbreaking," Ellen says. "I thought, What are we doing, leaving our kids with strangers, and my son is scared of me?" Michael adds, "That's when we both knew we had to get off the bicycle we'd been madly pedaling for eight years.

"Would we have quit The Cooking Couple at thirty-two? Absolutely not," he continues. "It takes the experience of another decade to ask yourself whether this is the roller coaster you want to be on. When you're thirty-two, any roller coaster is a good one. But we had become windup toys; everybody wanted The Cooking Couple schtick. We didn't want to be telling people how to gum their aphrodisiacs twenty years from now."

Copyright © 2007 by Susan Crandell

Tags: Midlife

About the Author

I got my first job after college not because I was the smartest applicant - I wasn't - but because I was the only one with a pilot's license. I'll be grateful forever to Bob Parke for hiring me at Flying magazine because that's where I met the love of my life, Stephan Wilkinson (the author of two wonderful books, The Gold-Plated Porsche and Man and Machine). Thirty years later, Steve and I are still working together, both freelance writers with offices in our little Hudson Valley farmhouse. Our daughter Brook, who's an editor at Conde Nast Traveler, is the only one with a real job. More