Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (13 page)

In talking about the social and financial advantages of being tall, John Kenneth Galbraith, Julia future’s neighbor, says:

General De Gaulle once said to me at a big gathering in Washington, “Professor, what is your philosophy of your vast height?” So I said what I’ve said before, “We tall men are taller than anybody else, therefore we’re visible, therefore we’re more closely watched, therefore our behavior is better, and the world instinctively trusts tall men.” And De Gaulle said,
“Magnifique”
And then in a wonderful rolling voice added, “There’s one thing you have forgotten. The small man must be treated without mercy.”

The advantages of height for adult men may be evident, but the price that is paid for taking up space and power as an adolescent girl is a high psychological one, despite the future advantages.

Julia spent the next several months analyzing her emotions and what men want in women. She made a list of what she wanted from marriage, beginning with intellectual stimulation and ending with “FUN and complete mutual understanding and respect.” She concluded that she had little sense emotionally and later regretted that she had written Tom that she still loved him. She called on discipline and daily heroism after reading Aldous Huxley’s
Eyeless in Gaza
. Her turn to books helped her get over her heartbreak, especially reading Huxley, for she admired his life of discipline and “greed for achievement.” Having discipline must be ecstasy, she declared, before deciding that her diary “is a catharsis of the emotions!” An immature catharsis. She was also reading Gertrude Stein, finding that her work may sound pretty clever, but lacked discipline, “like playing the piano and missing the tempo.” And she read Bernard DeVoto on James Joyce’s
Ulysses
, the novel she had tried to read at Smith (“the last chapter is … the holy devil to read until you get in the mood”). Punctuation and order were assurances she needed at this time in her life, she said in a brief essay on the subject in the back of her diary.

During a cocktail party she was giving in January 1937 to introduce Gay Bradley to friends, she was told privately that Tom and Izzy were married on New Year’s Day. She broke down in tears again. When his letter came informing her of his marriage, she wrote several bitter and childish drafts of a return letter into her diary, expressing anger at his deception, then mailed a breezy and affectionate congratulations to the newly married couple. She determined she disliked writing publicity stories, because she hated “pushing” and “selling” things. Finally, she found herself “bored with nightclubs” and champagne. “Julia of the almost spring,” she wrote self-mockingly toward the end of her diary keeping. It was April, and when she would go home for Gay’s wedding in May, she would stay.

Though later Julia believed she left New York in the spring of 1937 because her mother was ill, family letters reveal that no one knew how ill her mother was at that point. Though her diary declared she was leaving the city because “I do not want to be a business woman!” her job at Sloane’s had never been better. She received a raise to $30 a week and her boss had great confidence in her. When she informed him she was leaving in May, he insisted, “In two years, I can make you the biggest advertising woman in New York City!” She joked in her diary that she already
was the biggest!
Perhaps the compelling reason for her flight, other than emotional immaturity, was depression over the failure of her first passionate love. This girl of boundless energy had lost her confidence. She started missing deadlines in the office.

New York offered a post-baccalaureate education without specialization, though she honed her writing and management skills and acquired a bit more sophistication (Babe certainly considered her more worldly-wise; Caro called her “more methodical and business like” and “less nervous.”) In fact, Julia’s face—to echo a Graham Greene line—bore no experience beyond the school. Years later, when a friend complimented her on her “wonderfully worldly expression” in a photograph, Julia replied, “It is the face I always try to wear when I am in New York, with no success.” She was also slowly changing her social and political views, voted for Roosevelt in 1936, and was reading more socially engaged literature. One of the book reviews she tried writing was of
Give Us This Day
, Louis Java’s story of a struggling baker whose daily one hundred hand-kneaded loaves cannot compete with the machines of big business. Beneath a brief and sympathetic review of this mediocre novel, someone typed a tough statement that could have been written by her father saying that the novel was “communist” and “full of dull defeated people.”

She herself was not ready to compete in this tough city, especially not emotionally. She shared the belief of John Steinbeck, who fled the city (from her neighborhood) in defeat several years earlier, that the “climate is a scandal … traffic is madness … competition is murderous”—but if you can succeed, it has “everything.” After returning with success behind him in 1943 and making the city his home, Steinbeck added, “All of everything is concentrated here … and its air is charged with energy.” Julia also would embrace the city after her own success, but it would take her more than a decade.

C
ARO’S ILLNESS

When Julia arrived home in Pasadena, her mother was ill with what they thought was the “indigestion.” In fact years of (then) uncontrollable high blood pressure had affected all her mother’s organs. But the family was not fully aware of the extent of her deterioration. A touch of “the flu” was really kidney damage—uremic poisoning. She had already been regularly to Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla for “successful” blood pressure and kidney treatments. When her complexion became yellow and her nausea and dizziness increased, she was taken by ambulance to San Diego again. On July 10, Julia wrote Dort that their mother was “100% better.” She died at sixty years of age on July 21, 1937, two months after Julia’s return. Julia was the only child at her side because John was in Massachusetts working for the Weston Paper Company and Dort was doing summer theater stock in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

The loss of her mother—a loss that grew more devastating for Julia each month—drove her back to the diary she began in New York City at the loss of her first great love: “I had a feeling, I guess I really knew before I came out here that she would die. I knew it, I knew she’d be dead by this fall, but I didn’t realize it. I could have been much nicer to her. I could have been with her more….”

After Dort and John returned from the East Coast together, Julia Carolyn Weston McWilliams was cremated and a minister conducted a simple funeral in the family home. Unknown to the children, their mother’s ashes were kept in an urn in their father’s office.

Julia would remember staying home to help supervise the house staff and offer support for her father; but her siblings remember that Willy took over the management of the house. Instead of breaking with her father’s conservatism, Julia was brought back into his world, playing golf with him at the Midwick Country Club. Filial love softened the edges of the distance she always experienced with this reserved man.

He is a strange but wonderful man [she wrote in her diary], and doesn’t have much of the light touch or the abandon that would make this easier. He has wit and humor of course. I can see something else, he does not have an abandon for life. He sees it well-planned and sober, and, I think, pretty unexciting…. that McW family is pretty sober and serious, and he, being his Father’s only son, had a great deal of resp[onsibility] drummed into him from the beginning.

Julia’s brother remembered that during these years when he and his sisters were older and brought strong opinions of their own to the table, Mr. McWilliams sometimes stormed out of the dining room. His children could no longer “be seen but not heard.”

Julia loved the sprawling, sunny openness of Southern California, which demanded an assertion of will against its broad spaciousness. Her will, however, was not strong just then. She did not stay home just to support her father. During this fall there were two job opportunities sent to her from Smith College: assistant to the advertising manager at Harcourt, Brace & Company in New York City and secretary at Reid Hall in Paris (a residence hall for the International Association of University Women). Though Julia had long wanted a job in the publishing world, she did not respond to either opportunity. Grief-stricken and still under the influence of her father, who wanted her to stay home, she felt as though her wings were clipped. She also had a job writing a monthly column on Southern California fashion for a new magazine to be published by family friends in San Francisco.

Coast
, which she described as a
New Yorker
type of magazine, would publish in 1938 and go bankrupt in mid-1939. Julia spent the fall of 1937 contacting the major department stores in Los Angeles for information about their clothes and accessories. Before she left to spend a family Christmas with Aunt Theodora in Dalton, she sent in an article on fall suits, coats, hats, and accessories at Los Angeles stores and informed the magazine that she was stopping in New York City to contact the major department stores about getting fashion information early, as did
Vogue
and other publications. Though it was not a full-time job, her work at
Coast
had promise (even if they were late in sending her the $25-a-column fee).

The pieces she researched and wrote each month demonstrate a growing sophistication. Her style moves from a respectable “with matching accessories” style to her own jaunty voice (“On this matter of ski wear, I should like to say with sepulchral firmness: Don’t dress yourself up like a bloody Alpine Christmas tree”). The essays gave the inside tips on society and clothes, with price and location, revealing that Julia got around and talked to many people (always at Bullocks-Wilshire, Robinsons, Saks Fifth Avenue, and several other stores from Beverly Hills to Palm Springs). An essay describing a group of stores entitled “Fifth Avenue on Wilshire” (June 1938) covered the opening of Saks Fifth Avenue and included photographs of Mrs. Gary Cooper, Dolores del Rio, and Sophie Tucker. Other essays focused on ski equipment and clothes (January 1938), travel clothes (July 1938), Paris fashions available in Southern California (October 1938), and the clothing styles of UCLA, USC, and Scripps College students (September 1938). For each essay Julia arranged photographs and quoted prices. The energy and ingenuity of her administrative and artistic skills as Southern California fashion editor went largely unrewarded when the magazine went bankrupt. But they show, even in a restricted and cliché-ridden medium, that Julia’s writing skills were strengthening.

S
OCIAL BUTTERFLY

By January, Julia told her diary: “Have decided I am really only a butterfly. All I want to do is play golf, piano, and simmer, and see people, and summer and live right here.” She would later call the five years after her mother’s death her “social butterfly” years. Sometimes when she sat for interviews about her life, she would leave out this period altogether. There were moments when she was bored, restless, hopeless, impotent, and depressed that everyone else was married. “I shall be interested to see if I am ever a happy success.”

She assessed herself in her diary in 1940 and decided to have energy and enthusiasm: “Charm—get it!” she wrote. She was following her mother’s dictates: “personality is everything.” Caro had written in a letter to Dort on January 17, 1934: “You two girls certainly are following my old motto ‘personality is everything.’” Two months before she had written: “Get up and do more things and be much more—don’t be a nobody.” Thus, Julia kept active. Her albums are full of photographs of her hunting, golfing at Pebble Beach, skiing in Idaho, playing tennis. Her favorite sport was golf. She cut back on skiing after she again damaged the lunar cartilage in her knee. By May 1941 she had to have cartilage removed from one of her knees, exacerbating her early injuries. As with many people taller than average, her knees would be her weak spot all her life, yet she traveled from Tijuana, Mexico, to San Francisco, where she conferred with the editors of
Coast
and frequently visited with her friend Gay Bradley Wright. Julia was full of energy and curiosity about the world around her. Reading (Ortega y Gasset) and music absorbed her also, and she went to the Los Angeles Symphony, where Marian Anderson appeared in March 1938. In the back of her diary, she listed texts that had inspired her, and she continued to study music and language in this era of self-improvement and Dale Carnegie.

In June 1939 she attended both Dort’s graduation from Bennington and her own fifth reunion of the Smith class of 1934. Connie Thayer (now Cory) planned the reunion, which saw them dressed in Scots kilts, sash, and hat in honor of President Neilson. The day of the parade, they marched at dawn to the president’s home and sang to him and his wife, in bathrobes: “Oh, President Neilson, to you we sing / Whatever may happen, what’er time may bring …” A lot of giggling and fun, it seemed to Julia, who also observed that everyone, including Connie, was pregnant and talked a lot about babies. When her girlfriends went home to babies, living out the dream of the “socialized” young woman of that time, Julia returned to Pasadena alone.

Julia became more involved with the Junior League, which turned out to be an outlet for her playwriting and dramatic talents as well as a commitment to her civic responsibilities, following in the footsteps of her good-citizen father. The league, which met at the Huntington Hotel, gave plays for children in the civic auditorium to raise money for charities and family services. Julia played Abu, the faithful servant of an inventor in
Arabian Nights
, on February 10 and 11, 1939. Mary Frances Russell and other friends saw in these performances the star quality, drama, presence, stature, and commanding voice of would-be famous Julia Child. As she had done for the attic productions of the McWilliams and Hall gang, Julia wrote several of the plays for the Junior League, including “Bean Boy,” a two-act musical set in Monterey in 1820, “The Bells of Brittany,” a two-act fantasy, and “The Mississippi Belle,” set in 1875. In each, she placed young people in period clothes either on the water or in caves, escaping an evil figure. Among these scripts in her private collection is a tight and cynical black radio drama set in New York City, “A Helping Hand,” which is certainly not intended for children.