Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (7 page)

Julia was a tomboy who loved the rough-and-tumble life and competing with the boys in sports. There were only two drawbacks to this active life: she was not considered feminine (a fact that did not seem to bother her) and she tore the lunar cartilage of her knee, which would bother her occasionally the remainder of her life. “Julia McWilliams and Peggy Winter could throw our Softball overhand as hard as the boys did,” said classmate Betty Parker (now Mrs. Elizabeth Kase). “Peggy’s mother ran the tearoom at the Pasadena Playhouse, and Julia and Peggy were tomboys, more boy than girl,” she added, reflecting the gender distinctions of her era. Indeed, Julia devoted much of the first three decades of her life to hiking, hunting, swimming, playing golf and tennis. Not surprising then that when Julia was twelve years old, a study by Professor Horace Gray in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
showed that the daughters of the graduates of Vassar, Wellesley, and Mount Holyoke were found to be one inch taller than their mothers; young Julia was four years away from college and already moving well beyond her mother’s height.

Because her mother did not herself perform domestic chores, Julia was not drawn to the kitchen or sewing room. Interestingly enough, though her mother subscribed to popular women’s magazines with articles and advertisements focusing on domestic preoccupations, one of the major story formulas (or subgenres) of the fiction in these magazines
(The Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Woman’s Home Companion)
was the “New Women success story.” According to Maureen Honey’s
Breaking the Ties That Bind: Popular Stories of the New Woman, 1915–1930
, the women portrayed in these stories published during the first fifteen years of Julia McWilliams’s life were sporty, outspoken, and independent (“Give up my job? My job? Oh, my dear man! Go chase yourself”). The dialogue was quaint and the stories were resolved by the man’s coming around, but the heroines were closer to the life that Julia would find for herself. Both Julia and the region in which she lived had greater promise than anyone foresaw.

The 1920s in Los Angeles would be characterized by historians as a decade that idealized business and bred speculation, corruption (in the booming petroleum development), absence of government regulation, and a building boom in a city growing to over a million inhabitants. It was a city of boosters, and John McWilliams was one of them. The speculators built a harbor in San Pedro, took water from the Owens Valley, built grand city halls (in both Pasadena and Los Angeles), and nourished a new industry that would define the city called Hollywood.

Prohibition made lawbreakers of the best citizens and Tijuana into a flourishing restaurant and drinking destination. “One of my earliest remembrances of restaurant life was going to Tijuana in 1925 or 1926 with my parents, who were wildly excited that they should finally lunch at Caesar’s restaurant,” wrote Julia. Caesar Cardini had invented the Caesar salad in a day before refrigerated trains, when “salads were considered rather exotic,” she adds. “I can see him break two eggs over that romaine and roll them in, the greens going all creamy as the eggs flowed over them…. It was a sensation of a salad from coast to coast.” Fifty years later in
From Julia Child’s Kitchen
, she would tell this story and give the recipe, including the fresh Parmesan and oil-basted croutons, after a long talk with Caesar’s daughter, Rosa.

In June 1927, fourteen-year-old Julia graduated from Poly’s ninth grade with six boys and twelve girls. Her brother, John, who should have been two years behind her, was held back, according to the family, because he had dyslexia (then an undiagnosed reading disorder), though his letters do not demonstrate this. Julia’s mother, who was helping Julia plan a move to a private girls’ school to complete her high school years, was increasingly suffering from high blood pressure and related illnesses. Though she had trouble sleeping and some nights slept in three different beds, according to her son, she “was always cheerful in the morning.” Her children did not realize that her health was failing her.

Julia was poised for new adventure. She had physical daring, mental curiosity, and a need to push boundaries. Though her mental outlook lacked depth, she was intelligent and adaptable. She had no deep personal convictions, but cried easily, was friendly, approachable, positive, and related directly to others and to outward experience. She seemed to feel more than she thought.

T
HE KATHARINE BRANSON SCHOOL:
AN ENCLOSED GARDEN

The white ferryboat rolled across the blue of San Francisco Bay in the September sun. With no bridge from San Francisco to the upper peninsula, the water leg of Julia’s trip to boarding school took her to the city of Ross in Marin County. From the boat the bare hills looked like the backs of gray elephants in sharp contrast to the water of the bay. The brief trip inland was over land where once the bay lapped up, close to the College of Marin. Ross was a 60 percent Republican town nestled against the wooded foothills of Mount Tamalpais State Park. Julia and her cousin Dana rode past stables and elegant homes; when they turned from Shady Lane onto Fernhill Road, they looked up and saw 2,600-foot Mount Tamalpais to the south.

Passing under the high Spanish gates of the Katharine Branson School for Girls, they felt the cool, damp feeling of woods. Ahead rose the natural feature of the campus, a giant cedar tree. Beside it was the original house of the Martin estate—a building housing the residence, dining hall, and library. It set the architectural style of campus with its Mission style: cream and red colors, stucco, red tile, and wide veranda.

Here, on a woodsy hillside in Northern California, in a school even smaller than Poly, Julia would spend three years in a class of sixteen, the largest to date, which included ten boarders and six day girls. She would develop leadership skills to be used throughout her life. “She took responsibility, but not solemnly,” said classmate Mary Zook, the daughter of a superior court justice and founder of the school. In a prefiguring of her role in the cooking world, Julia would become “head girl,” the leader of the pack and instigator of activity. “She is much beloved,” recorded Miss Branson two years later. But it was her commanding physical presence, her verbal openness, and her physical pranks and adventure that made her “head girl.”

The Katharine Branson School was a private, rural preparatory girls’ school named since 1920 for its headmistress. It was located on the former estate and dairy farm of John Martin, acquired in 1922. The lower grades were slowly being eliminated, and the only boarders were at the high school level. It cost John McWilliams $1,500 a year to send his oldest child here, but some of her Poly classmates had been sent to far more expensive private schools around the country. The cost guaranteed a quality education and, inevitably, a certain homogeneity. Julia moved into one of the two houses—called Circle Cottage—used as a spillover from the main residence, with her cousin Dana and a roommate. The cottage was characterized by a front gable that rose to what looked like a witch’s hat.

Julia’s course of study was simple and basic: yearlong courses in English, French, Latin, and mathematics. This was a preparatory school for college, not a “finishing” school stressing “character and poise.” At graduation she would have three years of English, three years of French, three years of Latin (one year devoted to Virgil), and three years of algebra, plane geometry, and physics. The only other courses she took were in ancient and American history. The program could not have been more traditional, for it reflected Miss Branson’s Bryn Mawr degree and her close association with the Seven Sisters colleges. Miss Branson scorned vocational training, which had swept the country since 1917, when the Smith-Hughes Act was passed. No cooking or sewing classes at KBS.

All the teachers were women, with Miss Branson as the formidable and intimidating headmistress, who taught Latin. Her ancestry was English, Welsh, and Scot. She was called a “patrician with humor and gentle wit,” whose Keatsian motto was “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” The girls never felt they measured up to her high idealism—until they took national tests. She was severe-looking and high-minded. Julia remembers her “enormous blue eyes,” probably because they were often trained on her. Miss Branson “enjoyed a good laugh,” explained Clara Rideout, who remembers that Miss Branson’s “favorite” girls were “very naughty and prankish, and rather quirkish girls, but bright.” Another student, Roxane Ruhl, Julia’s classmate from Oregon, said, “I remember her often smiling with amusement at Julia.”

Julia herself was attracted to strong and independent girls, as she had been to Babe. One girl, Berry Baldwin, was a classmate who lived almost across the street from the school in her grandfather’s house, where her uncle served as her guardian. “Berry was a wonderful crazy individual,” said her classmate Aileen Johnson. Some days, after school, Julia would visit Berry and they would make themselves martinis from her uncle’s liquor supply.

In addition to Miss Branson, Miss Martha Howe, the English teacher, was an influential adult in Julia’s high school education, as she was for most of the students. When Howie, as Julia called her behind her back, repeated yesterday’s lesson, the girls did not once giggle, out of respect and fear. Howie was small and strict and “very forceful … she was a terrier nipping at your heels,” said Clara Rideout. The material that appeared in
The Blue Print
, the literary annual (there was no school paper or yearbook), is testimony to her high standards.

Julia’s essay in
The Blue Print
her senior year is a model of essay form, complex sentence structure, and articulate expression. In “A True Confession,” she admits “I am like a cloud.” With a passing reference to William Wordsworth, she attributes her childhood tearfulness to “weak tear glands,” and thus “mechanical” tears: “So think of me, if you must, as a pregnant rain-cloud, a weak-glanded maiden with hot tears laden; but bear in mind always that an X-ray would show my heart to be no softer than a rock!”

Her junior short story the year before appeared in
The Blue Print
and was entitled “A Woman of Affairs.” In it she captures her sense of unease riding on a public train by herself and her desire to appear sophisticated and a woman of the world in the train’s dining car. “The idea of going down [to the dining car] alone was not at all unpleasant to me, it gave me a sense of proprietorship over my soul.” Economizing by ordering only a salad, she politely takes a small helping from a bowl “as big as a bathtub.” Suddenly the waiter sweeps the bowl away and she is left with an inadequate meal and only a few cents for a tip. A series of other stumbles ensues, yet she forges ahead. The story is based on her train trips from Pasadena to San Francisco, where the chaperone always met the KBS girls and took them to the ferry.

She would call on these writing techniques in her future career. Fortuitously, she studied French; surprisingly, she did not do very well. This was not French taught in the language as much as the study of verb forms (explained in English), vocabulary tests, and reciting French sentences. The first year Mademoiselle Begue recorded that Julia’s pronunciation was “not as true” as it should be: “explosive consonants attributed to Scotch ancestry!” The second year Mademoiselle Liardet recorded an “inability to detect shades of sound in French.” And Miss van Vliet later said that her “grammatical and inflectional vagaries are constant and alarming!” The final record says she was musical but had no ear for French: “Oral is insurmountable.” One day she would correct these French “vagaries” on site.

In another example of failed prophecy, Julia’s science teacher recorded that with her “considerable energy, the study of medicine would be a good outlet. She wants to be a doctor or chemist.” Not surprisingly, her teachers noted that she “reads detective and adventure stories; likes poetry if it tells a story; loves outdoor activities … has a good sense of humor; shows initiative and shows auto-criticism; practical; wholesome type of girl with superior intelligence.”

Standing on the wide veranda of the central building, Julia could look through the portals and down the green hillside, past the archery tree, to see the playing fields of KBS. Here the learning that occurred outside the basic core courses—learning that years later would become institutional credits for athletics and arts—filled their spare time. A barnlike gymnasium was built her first year there, a soccer field lay beside Blue Tam Creek, and the two tennis courts, outdoor basketball court, and small baseball field were surrounded by the noisy stream and shady oak trees. Beyond the swimming pool on the right, nestled in a curve of the stream, were two classroom buildings: Oaks, devoted to languages and history, and Stairways, housing English and science. Barbara Ord, another daughter of a founding family, liked the “noisy” and “outgoing” Juke and once saved her from drowning in the swimming pool, she claims.

Though it seems ironic that Miss Branson was an avid follower of John Dewey—considering the elitist approach of her school—she was a pragmatic administrator, even in her enforced religious ceremonies. Julia’s parents’ casual attitude toward church attendance helped to prejudice Julia’s views of religion at KBS, where boarders said grace before meals and had Vespers with group singing every Sunday night. Each girl was required to bring a Bible to school with her. Because “courtesy, Christianity, and college” were treasured goals at KBS, every boarder was expected to attend church on Sunday morning. “The school was a bastion of racial and religious purity,” says the school’s historian. Except for a rare Catholic girl (the only minority allowed in the school) who walked to Mass, all the girls lined up in two rows and walked to the end of the street to St. John’s Episcopal Church. “I hated having to go to church,” says Julia. “One time we revolted by wearing our cloche hats backward; we thought it was terribly funny, but no one noticed.” This required attendance and the long sermons turned her against all religious sects. However, she would still, even in 1953, cling to what she called “the nut of Christianity (Love the Lord thy God, with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind … [and] thy neighbor as thyself).”