Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (9 page)

Play Week brought all classes to a halt for a week of creative expression and hard work. The play was chosen in early spring, complete with tryouts for the roles, and lines memorized, and a professional drama coach brought in. Everyone served on at least one committee that built sets or wrote programs and invitations, acted or prompted. Because of her height, Julia always played the man or the fish, she remembered, and when as “John Sayle” she had to embrace the leading lady in
Pomander Walk
, everyone got the giggles, until the final performance for trustees and parents. She also starred in
Michael, the Sword Eater
and in
The Piper
. The final plays for the spring of 1930 were
Dickon Goes to the Fair
and
The Admirable Crichton
.

During her senior year, after mumps canceled both the Senior Dance and the spring holiday, Julia took a memorable trip to San Francisco with Roxane Ruhl. When the ferry landed at Fisherman’s Wharf, they had artichokes with hollandaise sauce and cinnamon toast oozing in butter. At the City of Paris shop they bought lipstick and Prince Matchabelli perfume (“We thought we were so elegant,” she remembers). On Market Street at the army-navy store they bought white sailor pants, a daring adventure in an era when neither girls nor women wore slacks. “We wore them with great glee during vacations,” said Roxane. “I suspect the other Branson girls our age were more interested in attracting boys than being like boys.”

At her graduation under the cedar tree, Julia garnered all the awards: captain of the Blue Bonnets, captain of the basketball team, Vagabond Chief, member of the track and swimming teams, jumping center, and president of the student council. Not surprisingly she was voted unanimously for the White Beret—the highest honor that can fall to a resident girl. When at graduation they brought out the School Cup for presentation to the “School’s First Citizen,” no one was surprised when she was called forward. Miss Branson had the last words on record: with her standard of perfection, she thought Julia’s academic work was “moderately good,” but her “genuineness” was “excellent.” Then she listed Julia’s assets: “integrity of mind and heart, joyousness of spirit, kindliness, refreshing naivete, understanding, generosity—a thoroughly lovable and perfectly delightful girl.”

Though Babe Hall was convinced that she and Julia were sent to girls’ schools so that they would become more feminine, Julia had attended a private liberal arts school because it was a tradition in the Weston family to be sent to boarding schools. She gained self-confidence, learned leadership skills, and was not distracted by the presence of boys. A recent Mount Holyoke College study shows that girls are overlooked and undervalued in most coeducational classes, especially in math and science. Years later, as if to justify her private high school, Julia noted that “girls’ academic achievement at fourteen or fifteen drops drastically when they discover boys.”

It was not surprising either, in the tradition of her family and the girls of KBS, therefore, that she would plan to attend Smith College, where both her mother and her father’s sister Annie were alumnae. Nearly all the KBS girls went to college, either directly or after another year of study or European travel. Julia would go to Smith, Mary Zook would go to Vassar, and Berry Baldwin to Bryn Mawr. Her educational track (two private schools) continued what her future husband would call her smooth move through life under “the protection of her money and position.” She was well educated and connected, a young woman confident and comfortable with herself. Julia seemed to know that she could do the work, she just did not value academic achievement. After all, her mother had been center on the Smith College basketball team, and she
was
still Caro’s daughter.

Chapter 4
S
MITH
C
OLLEGE:
I
VY
W
ALLS AND
J
ELLY
D
ONUTS
(1930 – 1934)

“The day I was born I was enrolled at Smith College … If I hadn’t gone, it would have broken her heart.”

JULIA CHILD

C
AROLYN WESTON
and Helen Janney were graduates of the class of “naughty-aught” (1900) and determined that their daughters should also go to Smith College and become friends and roommates. “Our mothers arranged our ‘marriage,’” said daughter Mary. It was September 1930 when the mothers proudly made the match in a very old house in Northampton.

In the door came Julia, this tall, very slender, very happy person smiling at me, saying, “I’m Julia McWilliams.” I have never had a roommate who was so utterly fun to be with; she was almost too much fun…. She was very tall and I was about five feet five inches, and she was very thin, and I was very plump—about 160 pounds, for I had eaten too many hot fudge sundaes.

Despite their differences in academic aspirations and physical appearance, Mary and Julia became fast friends. Mary Case, a serious and idealistic Student who would make Phi Beta Kappa, was soon christened “Fatty.” Julia, who would minor in academics and major in socializing, was called “Skinny.”

Julia made two immediate discoveries: the cot she tried to sleep on the first night was several inches too short and, horror of horrors, her clothes did not conform to the grooming habits of the Northeastern female of Ivy League lineage. The first problem was solved by a telephone call from her mother, says Connie Thayer, one of the other freshman girls on her floor. The new longer bed that the college immediately provided would be hers for the next four years. The second problem took longer to resolve:

I was a Western girl at Smith and dressed in the Western way; when I got to Smith
everything
was wrong; in those days you had Brooks Brothers crew neck sweaters; pale, pastel tweed skirts from Best & Co. and a camel’s hair polo coat fastened up to the neck; brown and white Spaulding saddle shoes; and a strand of five-and-dime pearls. I was miserable until Mother came at Thanksgiving and we went to New York City and bought all these things. Then I fit in. I was in.

What impressed Julia, as it did the other girls who came from small preparatory schools, was the size and freedom of Smith. Founded in 1871 by Sophia Smith to offer to young women a higher education equal to that offered to young men, this Seven Sisters college was opened in Northampton in the Connecticut River valley of western Massachusetts in 1875. Though it was within a twelve-mile radius of Amherst and Mount Holyoke colleges and the future University of Massachusetts, and although it was only eighty miles to Yale, ninety-three miles to Harvard, and 156 miles to Princeton and Columbia—all crucial to the dating practices of the daughters of Smith—it was three thousand miles from Pasadena. And in terms of the life of an eighteen-year-old girl, it might as well have been a million miles from home.

What eased Julia’s way into this alien climate was her mother’s experience and membership in the club. Julia immediately belonged to the “Granddaughters Club,” those whose mothers had attended Smith, and was initiated into her mother’s secret society, the Orangemen; Mary was initiated into
her
mother’s secret society, the AOH (Ancient Order of Hibernians).

T
HE CAMPUS

Julia and her mother had approached the campus from the little town center of Northampton. Driving up the hill, with the ornate campus gate and college administration building ahead of them, they forked left into West Street and immediately entered Green Street, turning right into the campus. Hubbard Hall, built in 1878, was on the left, a three-and-a-half-story brick house with ivy climbing up the side and two chimneys rising high above the attic dormer windows. The house was named after Sophia Smith’s lawyer, the college’s first treasurer and trustee, but more important to Julia was that Hubbard House was strategically located close to the downtown shopping and the hundred-year-old Rahar House (then a speakeasy) on South Street. Directly across the street from Hubbard was a drugstore and soda fountain, where Mary bought her hot fudge sundaes from Mr. Curly. There, Julia quickly found the best jelly donuts in town.

Hubbard Hall would be Julia’s home for four years. In the tradition of Smith, there were no sororities and girls lived and ate in their respective houses, which contained students from each class level. Not surprisingly, the five freshmen in Hubbard soon formed an alliance that they would call the Gang of Five: Mary Case, Julia McWilliams, Hester Adams, Peggy Clark, and Connie Thayer. Three of the five were at Smith because their mothers had attended, though Peggy’s mother attended only two years (this generation would all graduate). Peggy was a slender and shapely girl who had had polio and thus needed assistance to walk. She wore a heavy brace on her left leg, and during the winter months Julia would put Peggy, whom she adored, on a sled for the forays down the hill into town.

What united them in part was their “Mother Hubbard,” Mrs. Holly Phillips Gilchrist. Gilley, as they called her, was the housemother who held the social fabric together, or tried to. Every afternoon she had tea, to which any girl was welcome. Motherly advice was dispensed when asked for, but many of the girls found her too old-fashioned and simpleminded for words. Julia called her “nice, but not too bright.” Connie Thayer said they also called her “Pouter Pigeon” because she was stout, shaped like a pigeon, somber, and lacking a sense of humor. “Girls, girls, you’re using just too much toilet paper!” was a lament of hers they would remember for sixty years. Gifted at imitating, Julia would mimic the lament to peals of laughter.

Julia and Mary (also often called Casey) lived at the top of the first flight of carved wooden stairs in a spacious corner room with two windows. Unfortunately, Dr. Abbie Mabel O’Keefe, the faculty resident and the college’s Director of Medical Services, lived immediately below them. Dr. O’Keefe had flaming red cheeks, white hair, and a quick temper, “very Irish,” the girls thought. One afternoon when she was having a tea for other doctors and professors, Julia and Mary played a typical freshman prank: “Why don’t we lower our rug down over Dr. O’Keefe’s window and block out the light during the tea.” They were roaring with laughter, according to Mary, when the doctor burst in and “exploded.” Swiftly, they received their demerits from the Judicial Board. Forty years later, the roommates offered their “official” version to the alumni organization: they hung the rug out on the fire rope and, to their horror, “it slipped” down to cover the window below.

On another occasion, Mary locked Julia in their room with a girl whom Julia disliked (“She’s like a wet dog!”). Mary slid the key out when she saw the girl in their room, and eventually Julia crawled out through the transom with some difficulty, looking like a wreck. “How could you do that to me, Fatty? Lock me in with the ‘wet dog’?”

“When I came to college I was an adolescent nut,” Julia Child told the official college oral history project years later: “Someone like me should not have been accepted at a serious institution. I spent my time growing up and doing enough work to get by.” The confidential file of Mrs. Gilchrist revealed that though Julia may have grown up, she never lost her rebellious and independent nature: “A grand person generally but she does go berserk every once in a while and is
down
on all ‘Suggestions and Regulations.’” And “inclined to let her opinions overrule her good judgment; this spells youth mostly. I believe she will outgrow her impulsiveness somewhat—but I believe there will always be things she will balk at.” If Gilley did not think Julia was always “emotionally stable,” she at least noted that she was “charming,” “cooperative,” and “an excellent organizer and manager.”

Though her college environment resembled a sorority of largely privileged girls, Smith in 1930 was more diverse than KBS. There were a few African-Americans and a scattering of Jewish students. Of the 654 freshman students, Julia McWilliams was the tallest. “For this reason she was known by nearly everyone!” said Connie Thayer, one of her freshman dorm mates. Another classmate, Anita Hinckley, who came from Rhode Island, said, “I came from the smallest state of the Union. When I saw Julia, a great big California girl, I thought that everyone in California must be that tall.” The pictures of Julia in the 1933 and 1934 yearbooks show her standing in the back row, serious, as was the custom in photographs of the day, though both her clothes and her stance were casual. While Gilley noted in her final evaluation that Julia “managed her height well” and was “well dressed,” one of Julia’s classmates declared, “She was never very stylish,” and a professor’s evaluation offered the irrelevant opinion that she “needs to give more attention to personal appearance.” But the same friend who remarked that her skirts were not stylish and that she seemed to be all arms and legs, added that “later she became beautiful and graceful.” Julia, when asked sixty years later about experiencing any conflict between being pretty and being successful in college, said that this conflict was lessened in a college without boys: “Being very, very tall, I had difficulties from that point of view [attracting boys]. So I did not go through some of those things that a short, pretty girl does. I was always struggling to be a pretty person, but it was difficult because you could not get the proper shoes or clothes.” She confided in her diary that she felt “big and unsophisticated.”

Because her mother was a Smith basketball star at five feet seven inches, Julia was expected to continue her mother’s starring role as “jumping center” in three-sectioned girls’ basketball. But Smith changed the rules of the game and did away with the jump ball in favor of throwing the ball into the court. Julia retired: “I was not good at the rest of the game.”

Once again Julia found herself in a purportedly Christian environment, with most mornings beginning with chapel. Smith called itself a Christian college, though “entirely nonsectarian in religion.” It expected all students “to affiliate themselves with the churches of their own denomination in the city.” Julia, it appears, did not. (By her senior year she wrote “not a church member” on the religious preference questionnaire.) No more walking to the same church in two rows as they had done at KBS. Although attendance was not taken, chapel was indeed required and “we did what we were supposed to do,” explained Charlotte (Chuss) Snyder, another of her classmates. “We certainly lived by the rules.” The convocation was held in John M. Greene Hall and consisted of a hymn, a prayer, and an address. Named for the pastor who had advised Sophia Smith on the founding of the college, Greene Hall is a magnificent brick building with mighty Greek columns.

Usually President William Allan Neilson, who also taught Shakespeare, spoke to the women about current events or issues on campus that pleased or displeased him. He was forthright, witty, and personable. The women were united in their love for this Scotsman who never forgot a student’s name, even years later. Julia’s classmate Charlotte Snyder Turgeon still has his photograph hanging in her study. According to Julia, Neilson was a little man (she would point to her waist) who smoked a “twisted kind of stogie,” and he was “adorable”:

He had a pink face, twinkling eyes, a white goatee, and a white mustache … he was so cute! [In 1972 she recalled him as] a charming, charming man: [President] Neilson was just so cute you wanted to hug him, you had tremendous respect for him and he was wonderfully witty. I can’t keep from crying thinking of him because he was such a charming man. Everybody felt the same way.

One day in chapel he addressed the issue of smoking on campus: “Now I have to talk to you girls about smoking. This is a custom which is unhealthy, which is not ladylike. But it is a custom that I adore.”

Julia and her classmates were exposed to several major cultural figures during their Smith days. Julia remembered that Paderewski played the piano and Amelia Earhart spoke to them. When a woman from the Metropolitan Opera gave a concert, Julia went backstage. “She was a big fat soprano with a bosom so big and protruding that I went backstage to get my program autographed to see for myself.” Julia also attended two days of eleven Beethoven quartets played by the London String Quartet on campus (“It was quite a trial, but I went to all of them,” she wrote her mother), and she attended Gertrude Stein’s
Four Saints in Three Acts
in Hartford, Connecticut, not only because it was avant-garde and a class project; she adored the theater.

Julia took her courses seriously enough, but only as a necessary part of her college experience and to be passed successfully. “We were a big class and by the midterm about half of us were on probation,” said Connie Thayer, who thought both Mary and Julia were “brilliant.” (Mary studied and earned A’s; Julia studied little and was a B or B—student, except her sophomore year, when she earned C’s.) “I never was afraid of getting a low grade,” remembers Julia, “though I was not a very good student.”