Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (22 page)

If Paul made his own comparisons with earlier trips, it was Julia’s trail that was the more historically interesting. Her journey eastward made a revealing if not ironic reversal of the journey her grandfather McWilliams took westward to California in 1849. Indeed, she crossed his path in the Sacramento River valley, at the Columbia River, and on the Lewis and Clark trail, where he “had to decline [Chief Alikit’s] liberal offer” to marry his daughter. While her seventeen-year-old grandfather and his wagon train companions were refreshed and thrilled by the mighty Columbia River gorge, Julia and Paul, nearly one hundred years later, found the rugged, 115-degree journey from Briggs to Spokane hellish. Where McWilliams found dense forests and Indians, Julia and Paul saw endless “dry tortured canyons” and the “naked horror” of a mighty river. In contrast to her grandfather, who carried the Bible and Plutarch’s
Lives
in his wagon, Julia brought along in her Buick eight bottles of good whiskey, one of gin, and a bottle of mixed martinis. Julia’s reversal of her grandfather’s pioneering voyage was modern and illicit. She and Paul spent each night together in a $2.50 to $5.00 trailer park or motel. Yet, as was her grandfather, Julia was a pioneer in leaving her family and blazing a trail, not westward, but eastward, and eventually back toward Europe.

As much as they delighted in the enormous redwoods wrapped in fog, the dramatic Crater Lake, and the snowcapped mountains of Idaho and Montana, they delighted most in the discovery of each other. They talked and read to each other from newspapers or
Time
and
Life
. Paul’s physical prowess and ingenuity were tested by a tire blowout in the sage-and-lava-strewn wilderness of Oregon. Her strength and sportsmanship were demonstrated daily. “She is a splendid traveling companion,” wrote Paul from Crescent City, California, on July 19, “loves to look at everything, likes small places with local color flavor better than big ones, for both eating and sleeping—is jolly, objective and considerate.” Five days later, in Billings, Montana, he wrote:

Julie is a splendid companion, uncomplaining and flexible—really tough-fibered, a quality which I first saw in her in Ceylon and later in China. She has great charm and ease with all levels of people without in any way talking down to anybody. She’s got a much tougher stomach than I have, and in the 3 years I’ve known her in War and Peace, in tropics and in USA, has never been sick from anything. She also washes my shirts! Quite a dame.

She used that “great charm” on the border guard when they crossed into Canada for a day (he allowed them to take in more than one bottle of liquor). In a rugged little town in Montana, she got out of the car in her bare feet with red-painted toenails and, without concern, walked into a lumbermen’s restaurant with Paul, sat down, and drank a beer. It was July 22, 1946. Everyone was “goggle-eyed” reported Paul, “but no cracks.”

A
CABIN IN MAINE

After leaving Highway 102 and passing through the tiny town of Bernard, Maine, Paul drove to the end of the peninsula, Lopaus Point, crossing what he now called “Burma Road,” a gnarled and dippy lane he warned Charlie not to cement over. Here on the rugged coast of New England, southeast of Bangor on Mount Desert Island, Julia and Paul spent an exhilarating ten days, during which Julia became a member of the Child family. She was the first woman since Edith whom Paul brought “home.” They were rechristened JuPaulski. Paul holidayed here in the years before the war and used a Lopaus stone as a paperweight on his desk in India. This family and this land were his stone.

Julia and Freddie were instant friends, and the photographs of them reveal their freckled sisterhood, though Freddie was half a foot shorter with flaming red hair. The only criticism Julia would ever make of her was that she was very protective and defensive of her family and household. She was a marvelous and inventive cook, and Julia relished the fresh lobsters during this first visit. Because the quarters were still partly tented and without running water and electricity, their intimacy and compatibility were immediately tested.

Julia closely observed her lover and his double as they dragged in the logs for a new section of the house, working without need of verbal communication. Both were physically strong, both jujitsu experts and artists, and now employees of the Department of State. Their long devotion as well as their prickly relationship became evident to her. In part this was a result of their different temperaments and in part, Julia thought, because of Charlie’s guilt over Paul’s blind eye. As a child, Paul had turned to look over his shoulder and the needle Charlie was holding went into his eye. Charlie’s children, years later, described the twins: “Paul was pessimistic, introverted, and didactic. Charlie was optimistic, extroverted, and spontaneous. They gave each other these roles and played them to the hilt!”

Charlie was smitten with Julia’s “tall willowy” figure and “blue, blue eyes, as jolly and gay as Paul was serious.” Thus he would describe her in his memoir of Maine and their cabin building: “She possessed more than a touch of the unexpected: she was a tough relentless worker.”

The children loved Julie (or Aunt JuJu), as everyone called her, especially Rachel, who was the most like her. “When Paul brought her to Maine, it was a significant event,” says Rachel Child, who fifty years later still remembers the color of Julia’s dress and her long, beautiful legs. “They talked about war stories, and she was so funny. We kids were mesmerized. I was infatuated with her. For one thing, she was the kind of person who would drop things, and so was I. She was a wonderful addition to our family; she arrived like a breath of fresh air. She was a great mentor for me, being so positive and optimistic, and taught me that life does not have to be so considered; you can just DO IT. It was like having our own Auntie Mame.”

The entire family observed Julia’s qualities, qualities that Paul listed in his last letter crossing the country. This first analysis of Julia remains the best we have. Though her balance and logic, which Paul praises, are McWilliams qualities she seriously cultivated to please him, the strong and natural woman he adored is the California girl she always was:

She
never
“puts on an act,” or creates a scene. She’s direct and simple about natural functions such as defecation, urination and belching, and has no measly Mrs. Grundyisms concerning sex. She frankly likes to eat and use her senses and has an unusually keen nose. She appreciates the special local overtones of both places and people and never gravitates toward the stuffy and safe. She is unusually strong physically and marvelously healthy. She has a firm and tried character in seeing a job through and is naturally very clean and sweet at all times. She has a cheerful, gay humor with considerable gusto as well as subtlety, and appears not to be frightened easily and is therefore emotionally steady rather than hysterical when things get tough. She has a frank and warm liking for men, and no apparent bitchiness about other dames. She loves life and all its phenomena, a quality which shows to great advantage in traveling…. She has deep-seated charm and human warmth which I have been fascinated to see at work on people of all sorts, from the sophisticates of San Francisco to the mining and cattle folk of the Northwest. She would be poised and at ease anywhere, I should say; she tells the truth, and for the most part uses balanced rather than extravagant language. In this connection I believe that her thinking has become much more careful, logical and objective in the last two years, and I find her interesting and fun to talk to at any time. And I love her dearly.

In turn, Julia loved this close and devoted Child family. According to Rachel Child: “She bought the Child family and what it stood for and it stood for good eating and good wine and talk—preparation for the table, rituals.” Most important, Julia was deeply in love with Paul. She always admired and respected him: she fell in love with him in China, but now she trusted him. She knew that if she gave Paul her life, he would not drop it. The rest seemed “inevitable.”

“We are going to get married, and right away,” Paul announced to his family.

“Well!” said Freddie and Charlie with one voice. “We thought you’d never come out with it!”

Chapter 9
F
LAVORS OF
M
ARRIAGE
(1946 – 1948)

“No matter what happens in the kitchen, never apologize.”

JULIA CHILD

T
HE APPROACHING
truck lost its brakes; Julia saw it heading straight for them. Paul could not swerve the car out of the way in time. He and Julia had left Lumberville on this three-lane road that almost became the end rather than the beginning of their life together. “It was nip and tuck,” reports Jack Moore (Paul’s colleague at State). “If the truck had been just six inches closer, they would have both been dead. I remember being heartbroken.”

Paul bruised his ribs on the steering wheel, hit the windshield, and was thrown out the car door. Julia remembers that she “hit the windshield and was thrown out the door and my shoes came off. I was knocked out and covered with blood from a head wound.” The car was totaled. “A woman and her husband who were passing by took us to the nearest hospital emergency room somewhere in New Jersey. After they patched us up, we called my father.” Before the accident Julia and Paul left Charlie and Freddie’s Pennsylvania home to meet her family, who had gathered for a McWilliams engagement party at the River Club in New York City the day before the wedding.

A
BANDAGED BRIDE

Julia insisted on going ahead with the ceremony. “We were married in stitches,” Paul said, “me on a cane and Julia full of glass.” The civil ceremony was held at noon on September 1, 1946, at the home of prominent lawyer Whitney North Seymour (a friend of Charlie’s) in Stockton, New Jersey, where the legal waiting time was brief. Charlie stood up with his brother, Dorothy with her sister.

Across the Delaware River in beautiful Bucks County, Pennsylvania, their families and closest friends gathered to celebrate the union of Julia Carolyn McWilliams (thirty-four) and Paul Cushing Child (forty-four) with a garden party in the backyard of the Childs’ home. It was a country wedding lunch, very casual, with big dishes of food lining groaning tables. The men shed their jackets and rolled up their white shirtsleeves under the late summer heat. Food, like mashed sweet potatoes stuffed into oranges, and wine were plentiful.

The bride “had the most beautiful, bean-thin figure I’ve ever seen … slender but curves in all the right places,” declared Fanny Brennan, a longtime friend of the Childs’. Julia’s nieces reported, “Julia was exuberant and warm and gorgeous and had beautiful legs.” She wore a slender, short-sleeved, belted dress that looked like a summer suit with high heels that made no attempt to disguise the fact that she was taller than Paul.

Coppernose, Charlie and Freddie’s house in Lumberville (seven miles from the popular New Hope village), was as polished and decorated as possible on such short notice. Only a month before, Paul and Julia had arrived in Maine with no definite plans to marry. Now the wedding, appropriately and symbolically, was on the Child family property; Freddie Child, who came from a wealthy family, had inherited a nearby house in 1927 and bought Coppernose when the owner died. Paul, who had his own room here, had helped Charlie lay the large brick terrace with Charlie’s diamond pattern. There was a brook and a small waterfall, and a swimming pool. The wedding guests ate their lunch on the terrace and lawn. This grand home, with its gardens and brook, was Paul’s only home since the death of Edith in Cambridge early in the war.

When Julia and Paul cut their wedding cake, they shared a bit of it together—a tradition dating from the Middle Ages that bonds a couple at the moment of their first shared food. Julia’s family gathered around. Stepmother Phila came with Julia’s father from Pasadena; Dort from New York City where she was working in the theater; brother John and his wife, Jo, drove down from Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Present also was Aunt Bessie’s daughter, Patsy Morgan, from New Canaan.

John McWilliams, as a traditional father, wanted to give the wedding. But it was a Child event, which “got Julia and Paul off on the wrong foot with Pop,” admits Dorothy, who is even today reluctant to acknowledge that Julia was “rejecting” her family. Indeed, the break for Julia was a necessary and significant one. Paul’s nieces believe that he was not “disapproving of the McWilliamses, he was bored by them.” His attitude had its basis in his unstable childhood and his prejudice against business, particularly money made in land speculation. “It was a kind of fear of money,” they add, pointing out that both twins married women with money who took over their finances. The political antagonism between the two men in Julia’s life was unambivalent and mutual.

The wedding guest list was as meaningful as was the reception site for Julia’s future, for included with the two immediate families were the people who comprised Paul’s larger family: the Myerses, the Kublers, and the Bissells—all part of Paul’s Paris and Connecticut life before the war, a group that continued a gourmet “orgy” of food and drink at the Mayflower Inn each New Year’s Day. These people would become Julia’s new family.

Tall and stately Richard Myers in his crocheted St.-Tropez beanie came from New York City with his daughter and son-in-law, Fanny and Hank Brennan (his wife, Alice Lee, could not attend). Daddy Myers was Paul’s connection to the world of food, wine, and music in Paris, where the Myerses lived for nearly thirty years. He was part of the F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gerald Murphy group of wealthy expatriates who lived in Paris and on the Riviera. Myers then worked for American Express and served as head of
The Ladies’ Home Journal
in Europe (where Charlie painted his portrait), before serving with the OSS in London during the war. Fanny, who was younger than Julia, thought Paul was “very, very masculine.” Everyone, she adds, “was very happy for Paul because Julia was so ebullient.”

George Kubler met Paul when the latter taught at the Avon Old Farms School and George taught art history at Yale. The two men traveled together in Mexico in 1938, where Kubler met his wife, Elizabeth (Betty) Scofield Bushnell, a Smith ’33 classmate of Julia. Because of this double connection they would henceforth be among the closest friends of the newlyweds.

Completing the Avon-Yale circle of Paul’s friends, his extended family, were the Bissells, its social center and probably the family that unofficially adopted him. Paul’s artistic blossoming occurred at the salon of Marie Bissell, a wealthy patron of the arts in Farmington, Connecticut (near the Avon Old Farms School). In fact, Paul helped design some of her charity balls. Marie and Richard Bissell had three children. Son Dick (Richard Jr.), who was of Paul’s generation, had been in the OSS and was now headed to MIT as an economics professor. Later he would become the top planner in the CIA and meet his Waterloo with the Cuban Bay of Pigs debacle. He was married to Ann Bushnell, Betty Kubler’s sister.

Thus the reception included the extended family to which Julia would become sister and daughter for the remainder of her life. As they enthusiastically touched wineglasses, Paul called out
le carillon de l’amitié
—the bell of friendship! Though Julia and Paul were an integral part of this expansive clan, they remained a tight unit of two, “emotionally dependent upon each other” (as one family member says). “They each needed someone who would never leave…. They were devoted to each other.” He never had parents upon whom he could depend; she left her family for him.

Because they had had their honeymoon on the cross-country journey and Paul needed to return to work, they moved immediately to Washington.

W
ASHINGTON HOUSEWIFE

The nation’s capital, once a port on the Potomac River, was a sleepy Southern town in the late 1940s, colored by postwar drama—a dozen Nazi war criminals were hanged at Nuremberg that October—and visions of European peace and recovery, bolstered by the United Nations and the Marshall Plan. Columnist Drew Pearson set the tone of political gossip in this one-industry city. Black servants worked in the homes of government officials. And every weekday morning, Dean Acheson walked to the State Department with Felix Frankfurter, having agreed never to talk of Palestine or Zionism. Georgetown’s cobblestone streets and neighborhood grocery stores were the ideal setting for a new bride.

Julia set about becoming the consummate housewife so typical of this period later defined by Betty Friedan in
The Feminine Mystique
. Paul left for his office at the Department of State, and Julia planned the evening meal and social appointments. Because the city was full of their friends, there were frequent cocktail and dinner parties with Dick Bissell, Guy Martin, Dick Heppner and Betty MacDonald, Joe Coolidge, and others from their OSS years, as well as Charlie and Freddie, who lived nearby.

They settled in a small house at 1677 Wisconsin Avenue, where they plastered, papered, rewired, and painted to make it home. Julia had twenty-five cookbooks on a shelf above her stove, and Paul hung six of his favorite OSS photographs on the wall of the stairs. As soon as the curtains were hung, they began inviting friends over for cocktails.

Though Paul’s Washington ties went back as far as 1943, both had a wide network of associations there. Paul’s 1943 diary, written the year after the death of his beloved Edith, contains the names of many people he worked with who later went on to politics (Paul Nitze, Bob Vance, Dick Bissell, Sherman Kent) and to the arts (Budd Schulberg, Garson Kanin, Ruth Gordon, John Ford, Sol Kaplan, Eero Saarinen) as well as OSS friends Cora DuBois and Jeanne Taylor. He records two funerals this year, for Dickie Myers, who was shot down while flying for the RAF, and Steve Benét, who had read drafts of his “John Brown’s Body” to Paul in Paris (his friends staged a rereading after the funeral). The introspective, lonely, illness-plagued Paul who wrote the 1943 letter-diary seems in sharp contrast to the contented married man of 1947 and 1948.

One Christmas Eve, Julia met Paul’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, “family” after a drive to Boston: Robert, Fitzroy, and Edmond Kennedy, sons of Edith. Bob and Gerta Kennedy—he was a professor of architecture at MIT—welcomed Paul and his bride to their home and family, which included two children. Paul had been closest to Bob, who was fourteen when Paul became surrogate father to Edith’s sons in Paris and Cambridge. Also there were Joan and George Brewster, he an architect and she a poet and longtime friend of Paul who attended Edith Kennedy’s salon and short story course in 1936 or 1937. “Paul’s wife is a big tall girl with an open, friendly face; not good-looking but immensely attractive. I liked her at once and was delighted he had married ‘a golden girl’ and not some rarefied creature,” Joan Brewster wrote in her diary that evening. Today she adds: “Julia was loved by all the Kennedy family, and why not?! She was ebullient … [and] uncomplicated Paul’s life a bit.”

It was just a month after a wonderful holiday season, including the New Year’s Day reunion at the Mayflower Inn, when Paul and Julia were awakened by the smell of smoke at four o’clock one February morning. When they opened their upstairs bedroom door, a wave of vinegar-smelling smoke poured into the room and they could hear the crackling flames downstairs. The lights and phone were dead. “We spent an explosive three minutes pitching into the street below whatever clothes we could lay our hands on in darkness,” Paul later told the Kublers. Julia pitched out her shoes, always the most difficult apparel to acquire in her size. They managed to crawl through the hot smoke, unlock the window in the next room, and jump out on à lower roof and to the ground. They had nothing on under thin robes and the weather was twelve degrees in a stiff wind. While Paul went to warn the woman next door, “Julia stood in the middle of Wisconsin Avenue and, fingers-in-mouth, whistled a night cab to a stop.”

The fire, which started in an unoccupied house next door, blackened everything; the firemen knocked holes in all the walls and scattered their belongings everywhere. Julia and Paul retreated to the home of Charlie and Freddie, where they remained until their house was renovated. During the nearly two months it took to restore lights, heat, water, gas, and walls, their little house was burglarized twice. At the same time Charlie and Paul learned that they would be “let go” from the Department of State on March 15. Many people were dropped from State because of budgetary and political troubles (the Republicans had seized power from the Democrats).

For one year, Paul would remain self-employed. The loss of his government job left him in a “pool of confusion,” as he described it, and convinced that Life is not regulated by an Omnipotent Intelligence. The two Child families were not destitute, however, because Paul had his OSS savings account and both Julia and Freddie had annual incomes from their inheritance. John McWilliams bought his daughter and son-in-law a 1947 Buick, “a steel-blue wonder-chariot presented to us as a consolation prize by my father-in-law. The possession of this thunderbolt has ironic overtones, however, in a context of joblessness,” he told the Kublers. He and Charlie spent a lot of time painting and applying for jobs at organizations such as UNESCO, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the United Nations. By spring Julia and Paul were back in their little house, and Charlie was making plans to move his family permanently back to Lumberville, where he would continue his portrait painting.