Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (4 page)

These Weston grandparents of Julia McWilliams were reared amid the influence of the Reverend Sylvester Graham (1794–1851), who lived in the neighboring town of Northampton. Graham’s influence reached far beyond western Massachusetts. A former Presbyterian preacher and temperance lecturer, Graham was a self-styled doctor of medicine, specifically a dietetic expert, who bathed daily in the Miller River and preached against meat and white flour. The central staple of his diet was slightly stale bread made from coarse, unbolted flour and oats. This inventor of Granola, graham crackers, Grape-Nuts, and Kellogg’s, had influential followers: the founder of Oberlin Institute, revivalist Charles Finney, Bronson Alcott, and, for a while, Joseph Smith, Horace Greeley, and Thomas A. Edison. Such revivals/rituals, whether they be spiritual or nutritional, do not outlast the generation or overcome family habits, so the later Westons were meat eaters, for Byron loved to hunt, and the family frequently had pigeon, goose, duck, partridge, or rabbit on the table.

In addition to family wealth and household servants, Julia Carolyn (Caro) Weston grew up surrounded by family, gifted with the freedom that filled the space left by busy, inattentive parents. Caro’s mother was either traveling with her father, socially engaged, or giving birth (Philip Bryant, Dorothy Dean, and Donald Mitchell were born after Caro). When Caro is mentioned in her mother’s diary, she is always in trouble for climbing or falling or reading adult books. She was “the more adventurous one,” according to niece Dana Parker. She loved her dog Gaston, playing tennis and basketball, and driving her motorcar about town—the first woman in the county to have a driver’s license.

At Smith College, Caro was the outstanding athlete, basketball captain, and winner of first place in running, high jump, and sprinting. She had hair more pink than carrot, and a prominent nose, features that led some people to believe she was Jewish. Full-lipped, eyes riding high on her face, she wore her luxurious and wild hair in a mass atop her long oval face. “Slender” and “graceful” were the words her classmates used in their Smith yearbook to describe her striking appearance. The only ungraceful note was her voice, which wavered in the high ranges, never seeming to emanate from her chest. Her strong presence and authority was balanced by her tiny feminine waist, cinched in by a fashionable corset and accentuated by huge puffy sleeves from elbow to shoulder. Her friends noted in their yearbook her “striking individuality,” a New England inheritance nurtured by childhood freedom and money, a legacy she would give her two daughters, Julia and Dorothy.

When she was a sophomore at Smith, her father had a stroke; when she was a junior, he died and her thirty-two-year-old brother, Frank, took over the Weston Paper Company. Two years after her Smith graduation in 1900, Caro’s mother died at fifty-eight of Bright’s disease, an event that would alter Caro’s life by leaving her the oldest Weston daughter at home. “Momma died at ten minutes to two. We are all orphans. We need her so,” she wrote in her diary. She would care for Donald (eleven years), Dorothy Dean (fifteen), and Philip (twenty-one). When Dorothy came down with consumption (tuberculosis), Caro took her to California and Colorado in hopes of a cure.

If her daughter Julia McWilliams Child inherited the McWilliams intelligence, organization, and stubbornness, these were moderated by the charm and
joie de vivre
of what was called the “Weston twinkle.” It was a strong dose of the natural, sometimes naughty, child’s delight in nature and the company of others, exuding a warm, uncritical acceptance of life and other people. It came not from old Byron Weston, the patriarchal gentleman who founded the Weston paper mill, but from Grandmother Julia Weston, who, as a Brewster, descended from William Cullen Bryant and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Julia McWilliams Child never met her maternal grandmother, Julia Mitchell Weston, but grandmother passed her “twinkle,” her name, Celtic complexion, independent attitude, and joyful heart to daughter and granddaughter. Though Caro was tall (for that day) at five feet seven inches, her daughter Julia would grow seven inches taller than that and her daughter Dorothy eight.

Caro, displaying an early feminist attitude, claimed not to like her father, Byron Weston, because he “wore out” her mother by giving her ten children. Of these ten children born over a twenty-five-year period from 1866 to 1891, three died before they were three years of age and only one lived past sixty. It was the Weston curse: high blood pressure and strokes, despite Caro’s parents frequently taking the waters, from California to the Continent. Caro, who would have her first stroke when her youngest, Dorothy, was thirteen, was sixty when she died; fortunately her children inherited the McWilliams longevity. Which is why Caro chose John McWilliams in the first place: she was determined to bring “new blood” into her deep but narrow New England gene pool. She brought in his strength and intelligence and Scotch Presbyterianism as well, while passing to her children her independence and joy.

P
ASADENA PARADISE: POP AND CARO

Julia’s father, John Jr., was a second-generation pioneer, born into the comfortable home of a man who once crossed the country by wagon and panned for Eureka gold, before building a family estate of farm and mining lands. This father’s legacy was a heavy enough burden for young John, but he also had the father himself at his elbow each day until the old man died at ninety-three years of age in 1924. Such a mixed blessing could have broken a man less quietly determined and controlled.

Born in Odell, Illinois, on October 26, 1880, young John inherited his father’s height and his mother Dana’s coloring (an olive complexion, so the story goes, from family roots in Sicily). John was sent to prestigious Lake Forest Academy for the last two years of his high school education before enrolling at Princeton University one month before his seventeenth birthday. He graduated in history in the Class of ’01.

After college, patriarchal destiny drew him immediately back to and through the doors of his father’s Bank of Odell (Illinois), where he began as an assistant cashier and helped his father manage their rice farmland in Arkansas. Only when the elder McWilliams sold his interest in the bank and established the State Bank of Odell (to take over their business interests) did young John become president. It was 1909 and his father moved to California to manage his land near Bakersfield. Young John joined the University Club in Chicago and began his courtship of Caro Weston. The family tells the story—whenever they want to illustrate his stubbornness—of one visit on horseback to his future bride. When his horse would not cross the stream, John forded the stream himself to see his Caro; returning later, he forced the horse to wade the stream.

Caro Weston met John McWilliams, Jr., in 1903 in Chicago through mutual friends. Thus began what Caro’s brothers called “the eight-year war of their courtship.” Both the war and the courtship continued as John followed Caro and her sister Dorothy Dean from one spa to another in search of a remedy for the tuberculosis with which Dorothy had suffered since youth. Caro would not leave her sister to marry. They went to Santa Barbara and Colorado Springs, where John stayed with his Princeton classmate H. Alexander Smith, then an attorney with Judge Lunt (and later a U.S. senator from New Jersey, 1944–59). The Weston girls were part of Smith’s social clique in Colorado society. Once Dorothy Dean met and married Wilber Hemming, son of the president of the El Paso National Bank, Caro was finally free to announce her engagement to John McWilliams.

John and Caro, with Alexander Smith as their best man and Dorothy Hemming as the matron of honor, married on January 21, 1911, in Colorado Springs. John and Caro went by train to Pasadena, honeymooned at the Coronado Hotel in San Diego, then moved in with his parents in Pasadena (the old forty-niner had recently moved from Bakersfield to this community of Midwesterners just east of Los Angeles).

Caro remained a free spirit even as a married woman. “See the world before settling down,” she would tell her daughters. By the time she married John, she was thirty-three years old and her independence a practiced virtue. She was always considered daring, living on her own for several years; now she seemed locked into her husband’s life and the lives of his parents, who expected Caro and John to share their time and Sunday meals. She adapted to the confines of a traditional marriage in the manner women have used through the centuries: by doing exactly what she pleased within the context of propriety. When her thrifty husband was out of town on business, she redecorated the downstairs and bought new china. “I do what I want,” she told her children.

Her free spirit dictated that since she was in California, she would adapt to the place and drop the traditions of her childhood. “She probably threw all that New England tradition away when she came to the West,” says her oldest child, Julia, who would behave in like manner as she moved about the world. Her father had expressed the same attitude when he wrote to the Princeton class’s tenth reunion committee that he intended to remain in the “Golden West” and “grow up with the country.” He, like his father, became a pioneer, now of modern Pasadena, and what his elder daughter called a civic “do-gooder” in this paradise.

First Indians, then Spanish explorers and missionaries (including Father Junípero Serra), and finally Mexican ranchers occupied the rich, fan-shaped land beneath Mount Wilson. The shape of the land was formed by alluvial deposits from the streams that flowed from the San Gabriel Mountains. The transcontinental railroad brought the next wave of settlers from Indiana, Iowa, and Illinois, who planted vast orange groves. The land was called the Indiana Colony in 1874. Escaping the industrial revolution, these Midwestern pioneers determined to make every home a garden and to resist modernity, even a post office. But the 1880s brought a rail line in from Los Angeles, about ten miles away, and then a connection to the Santa Fe Railroad to Chicago and the East. Mr. Walter Raymond of Boston built the first grand hotel, the Royal Raymond, which cleverly offered free rooms for writers (who soon spread the word to readers in the East). Pasadena was a city built by sunshine and the promise of good health.

The city, incorporated in 1886, became famous as a winter resort for George Pullman, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller. By the 1890s, Armenians fleeing the Turks brought ambition and industry to the city. When the first McWilliams arrived—actually it was a twentieth-century return—this was a paradise inhabited by visionary and ambitious men. By the time Julia McWilliams was born in 1912, 34,000 people lived in Pasadena, the city tripling its population in a decade.

Pasadena was an entrepreneurial paradise, a fertile time and place for the birth of Caro and John’s first child, Julia.

Chapter 2
A
P
LACE IN THE
S
UN
(1912 – 1921)

“She was wild, really wild.”

DOROTHY MCWILLIAMS COUSINS

J
ULIA CAROLYN McWILLIAMS
was born in Pasadena, California, on August 15, 1912, when the orange groves were fragrant beneath the snowcapped San Gabriel Mountains and the Tournament of the Roses was already planning its twenty-fourth local parade. It was an era when telephone lines were shared by several families, and horse-drawn wagons delivered ice, vegetables, milk, and eggs daily to the house. “These were the days of ‘the iceman cometh,’” Julia likes to remember.

She was born in Paradise. Across America, Pasadena represented the utopia for those who could afford the transcontinental train ride to spend their winters settled into one of the palatial hotels in this sunny haven. Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft each had visited the year before Julia was born. Members of the Valley Hunt Club, including the McWilliams family, drove flower-adorned carriages in a rose parade from hotel to hotel (where the Easterners were staying), passed family homes bearing the names of Wrigley, Busch, Steinway, Huntington, Gamble, Libby, and Armour. Pasadena was an entitled world, feeding on the fruits of American capitalism in a balmy climate where children and oranges grew well.

John and Caro took their firstborn home from Pasadena Hospital to 225 State Street, just a few blocks from Adolphus Busch’s famed gardens, a major tourist attraction that summer. The August heat had ripened the orange trees and the McWilliamses (parents and grandparents) were planning to move to a larger house farther west at 627 South Euclid Avenue. Grandfather McWilliams’s three-story Euclid house, which remained in the family until 1957, was built four years earlier to re-create the nostalgic Midwestern farmhouse, with large verandas trimmed with balustrades. Now a protected monument, its Victorian and Edwardian features include protruding porches, a two-story bay window, and high narrow windows with pillared trim. When asked for her first memories, Julia replied:

Earliest memories are always of traumatic things. I locked myself in the bathroom and they got the fire department to get me out. Another memory is of a train trip with my grandfather to Santa Barbara where my Aunt Bessie, my father’s sister, lived. We were sitting in the parlor car when I realized that I was leaving my mother. I began to scream. They finally had to come get me and take me back. A third traumatic memory involved driving up to Santa Barbara when I was about three years old to the Miramar Hotel, where there were wooden steps going down to the ocean. I refused to go down, thinking that the ocean would swallow us up, and I sat there screaming.

One of her happiest early memories occurred at Christmas, when she, her brother, and her sister would awaken early:

First we’d do the stockings, which were filled with candy canes and apples and a lot of small presents. Then we’d have a big breakfast with eggs and bacon and fruit, but we’d all be panting for gifts. One year Santa Claus left his pipe on the mantel. It was a meerschaum filled with tobacco and had been smoked. We children marveled over it for years.

When Julia was two years old, her brother, John McWilliams III, was born. It was August 27, 1914, following what for Caro and John was a night in Natty’s Tavern and a bumpy ride in the hills above Santa Barbara. After her confinement and their summer holiday ended in Santa Barbara, Caro and John Jr. sold the State Street house to the Stevens family and moved their growing family to their own home at 625 Magnolia Avenue, a block away from his parents. Fortunately for Julia, Mrs. Davies’s Montessori school was located just around the corner and eight houses from her grandparents.

M
RS. DAVIES’S SCHOOL

From birth until the third year of age a child has an absorbent mind, believed Dr. Maria Montessori. According to the Italian doctor’s influential theories, the following three years of the child’s psychological development are a “sensitive period” of adapting to her surroundings. Thus the child should begin the Montessori program before she is four and a half. The McWilliamses enrolled four-year-old Julia in the school of May and Augustus Davies, who had studied with Dr. Montessori.

Their ungraded, open-space school was located in a former stable or carriage house behind their home at 693 South Euclid. “Juke” (variously Jukie, JuJu, or Jukes), as Julia was called by the children, learned to use her fingers with skill. “I started doing hand work when I was three,” she told two journalists in 1981, crediting the Montessori hand work of ringing little bells and buttoning buttons for the coordination so important in her profession. Always the tallest, she was reed thin and freckled, with curly reddish-blond hair. She learned coordination of movement and posture (eighty years later she still remembered the exercise “Walkie, walkie, walkie on the line”). She learned grace and courtesy and the early foundations of language and mathematics. “We rang bells, learned the scale, put buttons on button frames … and once when we were having tea we threw the cups out the window in some kind of mass hysteria. I do not remember why we did that.” Her brother, John, who enrolled two years later, remembers learning penmanship without being allowed to touch the paper with his fingers.

During her first year at Mrs. Davies’s school, Juke had her tonsils removed; the second year she learned to sing “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,” and “Over There.” The country entered a world war in the same month (April 1917) that her baby sister, Dorothy Dean, was born, named after her mother’s deceased sister. The third year, in 1918, when Juke turned six and the family moved for the last time, she led the schoolchildren in single file around the block while they beat on pans in celebration of the end of the war.

Kaiser Bill went up the hill to take a look at France
Kaiser Bill came down the hill with bullets in his pants

Juke felt personally involved because since the end of August her father had been stationed in the Field Artillery in Kentucky. He was honorably discharged on December 11, commissioned in the reserve corps, and continued his service by becoming business manager of the Pasadena Red Cross.

The election of President Wilson and the ratification of prohibition would not affect Julia until later years, nor would the oil gush at Huntington Beach that brought a decade of oil boom and scandal to the Los Angeles basin. What directly influenced her was the family’s final move to a large tract of land near their original Pasadena neighborhood.

Place is important in any childhood, and the McWilliamses’ warm wooden house at 1207 South Pasadena Avenue had a sleeping porch across the back of the second floor, a laundry room behind the garage for the children to wash their Airedale dog, and a playhouse, tennis court, shed, rose garden, large lawn, and small orchard of citrus and avocado trees. Here the children built memories out of acting plays in the attic, rearing rats in the playhouse, entertaining tennis matches and school dances.

Julia’s room was the top room in the left-hand corner of the house, which she used for her clothes and toys and as a place to sleep when she was ill. She had her own bathroom. Her strongest memories were of sleeping on the outside porch, which was partitioned into areas for each family member in the manner of the day.

When Julia was born, the Arts and Craft Movement of California, which had its roots in Victorian Britain, was coming to a close after twenty years. Pasadena had been fertile ground for this aesthetic that shunned the machine age, emphasizing a building’s harmony with its environment and “the good life” of simple living and high thinking—a philosophy reflecting the progressive beliefs of people who came to the city at the turn of the century, who supported public gardens and national parks, woman suffrage, progressive education, and healthful living. Their buildings had upper-floor wraparound sleeping porches, low-slung roofs, cool rooms of polished wood full of handcrafted Mission furniture. Chief architects of these homes were Greene & Greene (whose bungalows had massive timbers), Louis B. Easton (redwood shingles), Ernest Batchelder (tile maker and friend of Igor Stravinsky)—all of whom designed their homes down to the doorknobs.

“Our house was right out of
Upstairs, Downstairs,”
Julia said years later. “We had help, Irish or German immigrants.” As did most families at that time, the McWilliamses had an upstairs maid, who kept the house; a little Scottish nurse named Annie Hignett, who cared for baby Dorothy and whom the children did not like; an Irish cook; and a gardener named Clearwater, who kept up the acre of land, the orchard and garden, tended the chickens, and groomed the tennis court. Eventually Miss Williams (Willy) came to care for Dorothy and to help Caro with the household management. She was a part of the family, eating at the table with them. Willy was from the South and was a good friend of Mrs. Fairfax Proudfitt Walkup, the teacher at the Pasadena Playhouse. “Willy was a lady,” remembers Dorothy.

As a typical older sister, Julia could be bossy and controlling, and a tormentor of her siblings. Dorothy was enough younger (five years), and under the supervision of Willy, to avoid her sister’s influence until later in life, when Julia became her mother figure. As a child, Dort was volatile and cranky, given to tantrums and anger, feeling neglected, always passed off on nurses. Julia did not help when she gave Dort’s favorite doll to a neighbor.

P
OP’S GIRL

Julia was reared by two socially active and athletic parents who loved the outdoors and belonged to several country clubs, including the Valley Hunt Club for swimming and horseback riding, the Midwick Country Club for polo and golf, and the Annandale Country Club for golf. They and their friends, the Myerses, Cliffords, Carpenters, and Stevens, provided community leadership. Today one of their neighbors remembers that the McWilliams clan was considered “wealthy” and “aristocratic (in the best sense).”

“Pop” had his office with his father at 42 North Raymond Street, intersecting Colorado Avenue, along which the commercial section of the city had grown up. Today this area, after long disrepair, is called Old Town and has the most active nightlife in the region. Together father and son managed their four thousand acres of Arkansas rice land (owned from 1905 to 1935) and mineral rights in Kern County lands as well as their investments. For the first thirty years of her life, Julia harbored a godlike idealization of her father. He was building his place in the community, serving as president of the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce, regional trustee of Princeton University, and a member of numerous boards. His example of community service and leadership became a motivational force in Julia’s later creative compulsions. She learned what she
should be
from him, what she
was
from her mother. Like the snowcapped San Gabriel Mountains that loomed over the town, her father was a steady and reassuring presence. His opinions were firm, his attitudes conservative. In 1953, his older daughter would describe him in more objective terms, but still with a reverence for his leadership capabilities:

My Pop [and I are] on such different beams. Can’t mention politics or philosophy [to him, but] he is a darling fellow, a most generous father, a real “do-gooder” in the community (how he would hate that term) as he is on the Community Chest, the Chamber of Commerce, the Republican Committee, the School and Hospital Board[s]. He just has everything it takes to be a fine citizen and a responsible member of his community; except he is violently emotional over politics (so am I, but I am trying to be intellectual about them … but they roll around in my stomach rather than coming out in a quietly poignant yet devastatingly unanswerable thought-piece). He could really be a world-beater if he had had more intellectual training, which would have opened his mind and would have made him more tolerant and inquiring. He is an example of how not to be, and how one must continually struggle for understanding and experience and wisdom.

His presence each evening called for quiet, implying deference for his work and responsibility outside the home. His children thought him reserved. He was stern because
his
father was stern, and he was of the generation that had feelings but kept them to themselves, thereby “enriching” them. Julia’s best friend, Orian (Babe) Hall, remembers that “you always wanted to do things the right way around him.” His friends thought that this handsome Ivy League man was sociable; women found him charming in his bowler hat, wire-rimmed glasses, and deep-set eyes; a man’s man who enjoyed playing golf and hunting with men. Today, several family members observe that Julia is most like her father, particularly in her strong will, her reserve in private matters, and her public service. She too would become practical and organized, sociable and charming, athletic and outdoorsy.