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Commercial Appeal, The

Paula Deen, jet setter. It would've been hard to believe just a few years ago, but now here she is, squeezing in an interview on a cell phone in an airport after filming a segment for CNN and a guest spot for fellow Food Network celebrity Emeril Lagasse.

And just back from Hollywood, filming her silver screen debut.

But she's still just Paula from the block. She loves to talk about the down-home food that got her where she is today (that and a few incredible strokes of luck), and she's as gracious and down- home as she seems on TV.

If you know who she is, you probably know the basics of her story.

About 15 years ago, newly divorced and with just $200, she started a sandwich delivery service, which led to her opening The Lady and Sons restaurant in Savannah. But it was when she saved enough money to self-publish her first cookbook in 1997 that the hard work paid off and those strokes of luck came in.

Just days after the cookbook came out, a thunderstorm sent a woman running into the restaurant for cover.

She ate a meal , and called a few days later, wanting to know if there was a cookbook. It turned out she was an editor with Random House.

"I didn't know what Random House was," Deen said. "I had to ask my son if it was for real."

It was, and the publisher purchased "The Lady & Sons Savannah Country Cookbook" just two weeks after it was self-published.

Deen went on QVC to sell it; today her three cookbooks have sold more than 1 million copies.

But what Deen has just started talking about is how hard it was for her to muster the courage to leave the house.

For 20 years, she suffered from agoraphobia. The anxiety disorder sometimes confines people to their homes because the fear of being in public places (and the attendant panic attacks) is so strong.

Deen was able to leave her house, but was miserable when she was out.

She has since discovered that it was her fear of death that caused her to live with anxiety for those years.

Her father died when she was 19 and her mother only four years later.

"At 19, I started waiting to die," she said.

"There are so many people who have had so many more trials and tribulations than me. This is certainly not a pity party. I just didn't know how to cope."

So she stayed home, raised her two boys, and she cooked. "Being agoraphobic almost paid off," she said.

After she signed with Random House, Food Network personality Gordon Elliott stopped by the restaurant at the request of a mutual friend.

"We just hit it off immediately and he asked me to do a few guest shots on his show," said Deen.

She made guest appearances on his "Door Knock Dinners" and started trying to land her own show.

The network didn't bite, not until after the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

"Then they thought maybe that was time for me to come on board," she said. "People were looking for that feeling of safety, of being in the kitchen with mama."

Since then folks have been tuning in to catch Deen's recipes for the comfort foods many Southerners grew up eating. She delivers it all with heart, with tales of how her grandmothers cooked this, how her daddy cooked that, peppered with heartfelt sighs of satisfaction.

Today her real life moves at a faster pace than her show. She films in New York even though she lives in Savannah (where she still owns the The Lady and Sons with her sons, Jamie and Bobby Deen; one is engaged and she's hoping for grandchildren). And her life took another turn when she recently remarried ( she met her husband when her dog led her one way on a walk, instead of his usual route ).

Then two days before her wedding, luck struck again. She received a phone call about a movie.

A producer, home sick and channel-surfing, saw Deen on TV, and decided she would be right for the character of Aunt Dora, a role she'd been trying to cast.

And this wasn't just any movie. It was Cameron Crowe's "Elizabethtown," which stars Orlando Bloom, Susan Sarandon, Kirsten Dunst and Alec Baldwin.

"Everything's come together pretty quickly," Deen said. "The day I started taking responsibility for myself, God hasn't missed a day blessing me."

And this sums up how far she's come:

"I told that to Oprah when I was on her show."

-Jennifer Biggs: 529-5223