Appetite For Life_ The Biography Of Julia Child Part 1

Appet.i.te for Life.

The Biography of Julia Child.

by Noel Riley Fitch.

Chapter 1.

BEGINNINGS.

(1945, 1848 1912) "How like autumn's warmth is Julia's face"

PAUL CHILD, August 15, 1945

PERCHED ON THE railing of a veranda in Kunming, China, Julia McWilliams was aware only of the uniformed man beside her, reading the poem he wrote for her thirty-third birthday. She stretched her very long legs out in front of her, crossing them at her ankles, so Paul Child could see what he would later call "my beloved Julia's magnificent gams." She barely noticed the formal gardens beyond the porch or the miles of rice paddies stretching toward Kunming Lake. Nor did her gaze settle on the mist-shrouded Shangri-La of temples carved into the rock of West Mountain. It was his voice that captured her, each word he read a note weaving a melody through her heart: "The summer's heat of your embrace ... melts my frozen earth." railing of a veranda in Kunming, China, Julia McWilliams was aware only of the uniformed man beside her, reading the poem he wrote for her thirty-third birthday. She stretched her very long legs out in front of her, crossing them at her ankles, so Paul Child could see what he would later call "my beloved Julia's magnificent gams." She barely noticed the formal gardens beyond the porch or the miles of rice paddies stretching toward Kunming Lake. Nor did her gaze settle on the mist-shrouded Shangri-La of temples carved into the rock of West Mountain. It was his voice that captured her, each word he read a note weaving a melody through her heart: "The summer's heat of your embrace ... melts my frozen earth."

The cotton dress clung to her slim, six-feet-two-inch body. Here she was in China, a privileged girl, seeking adventure, even danger, in the civilian opportunities of World War II, and she had found it, not in the Registry of the Office of Strategic Services, nor in the backwoods refugee city of Kunming at the end of the Burma Road, but in the urbane, sophisticated, multilingual presence of forty-three-year-old Paul Child. They talked all evening, his intellect challenging her, his experienced touch awakening her. In the last China outpost of Lord Mountbatten's command, surrounded at sea by j.a.panese forces, warplanes droning in the distance, Julia McWilliams felt alive.

How like autumn's warmth is Julia's face, So filled with nature's bounty, nature's world....

The cadence of his voice, reciting his sonnet "To Julia," intensified the air of antic.i.p.ation between them, dimming for the first time the news they had received that week of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Russia was invading Manchuria to the north. Just hours earlier they had heard of j.a.pan's surrender and knew the world was changing for everyone, not just themselves.

I cast this heaped abundance at your feet: An offering to summer and her heat.

PAUL DROVE Julia by jeep to a mountain retreat for a weekend, where they talked of meeting each other's families: he had a twin brother, whose family lived in Pennsylvania, she two siblings and a father in California. The differences in their height (he was a mere five feet ten and three-quarters inches), age, education, cultural and political backgrounds, and values seemed less severe in this foreign territory where the future was so uncertain. He called theirs a "sweet friendship" in his sonnet, but she wanted much more from this wartime embrace in a strange land. When he read aloud "the awakening fields abound / With newly green effulgence," he could have been talking about her. Julia by jeep to a mountain retreat for a weekend, where they talked of meeting each other's families: he had a twin brother, whose family lived in Pennsylvania, she two siblings and a father in California. The differences in their height (he was a mere five feet ten and three-quarters inches), age, education, cultural and political backgrounds, and values seemed less severe in this foreign territory where the future was so uncertain. He called theirs a "sweet friendship" in his sonnet, but she wanted much more from this wartime embrace in a strange land. When he read aloud "the awakening fields abound / With newly green effulgence," he could have been talking about her.

They had met just the year before in a tea planter's veranda in Ceylon, when he was courting several women and seemed far beyond her reach in knowledge and experience. He had the worldly-wise caution of a man who had supported himself since he was a child, sailing the high seas, working at physically demanding jobs, and educating himself in the cla.s.sics, art, and music. Despite her degree from Smith College, the gangly girl from the West seemed to have little in common with this cosmopolitan ladies' man. "I was a hungry hayseed from California," she would declare half a century later: There were a lot of women around and he was ten years older than I. Very sophisticated. He had lived in France and I'd only been to Tijuana! So I found him very impressive, you see. And he was also an intellectual. I was a kind of Southern California b.u.t.terfly, a golf player and tennis person who acted in Junior League plays.

She was indeed a party girl, a child of well-to-do parents, who had never had to work. Though she occasionally held jobs in New York City and Los Angeles, marriage was the usual goal of her generation. Had the war not come, she said, she "might have become an alcoholic" amid the society life of Pasadena. Julia stood out in any crowd, not just because of her height, but because she was strikingly beautiful in a wholesome way. She was also like a magnum of champagne, the effusive life of the party, even, as far as Paul was concerned, occasionally "hysterical." But as he learned more of this woman, he saw the depth of her character, and her joy lifted him from his isolation and reserve. Thirty-five years after their wedding, he told a Boston newspaper, "Without Julia, I think I'd be a sour old b.a.s.t.a.r.d living off in a cave."

Chinese food brought them together, at least talk of food did. He thought she could cook, but in fact she had a keen interest in food largely because she was always hungry. They loved the Peking-cuisine restaurants in this refugee city where the first cookbook was written around 3000 B.C B.C. and the "earliest restaurant" opened during the T'ang Dynasty. They drove out with OSS friends whose parents were missionaries here and who knew the language and food, and they feasted on the many regional Chinese cuisines. Paul also spoke to Julia about the food of France, which he had enjoyed in the 1920s. Fluent in French, he talked with such a distinct inflection he seemed British to Julia. He would have been seen as effete in her native Pasadena.

Paul was unlike the Western boys she hung around with in her large circle of friends in Southern California, unlike any of the men her friends married. In hearing about his life, she soon realized he had no religion, few family connections, and held the business world in disdain. He was an artist and raconteur, a black belt in jujitsu, who could mesmerize colleagues with his stories. He represented a world she ached to know, an intellectual and European world, typical of the OSS personnel (such as anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Cora DuBois) whom she had come to admire during the past year in India and China. When she described her Presbyterian-raised father, a man of business and prominent in the civic affairs of Pasadena, Paul realized how dissimilar she was to any woman he had ever loved, for they all, including a woman he had lived with for many years, were pet.i.te, dark, and sophisticated in dress and manner. In contrast, Paul found Julia youthful, but "tough-fibered" and "natural."

"It wasn't like lightning striking the barn on fire," Paul said of their meeting in India. "I just began to think, my G.o.d, this is a h.e.l.l of a nice woman, st.u.r.dy, and funny withal. And responsible! I was filled with admiration for this cla.s.sy dame." If love grew slowly with him, for her it was the coup coup de foudre de foudre, and she made immediate plans to learn to cook for him. Like her paternal grandfather, John McWilliams, who left all he knew to follow the Gold Rush in 1849, she was ready to consider a break with her past.

CALIFORNIA GOLD:.

MIDWESTERN GRANDPARENTS.

"Pick your grandparents"

JULIA CHILD.

John McWilliams first dreamed of going to California in 1848 when he read Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast Two Years Before the Mast (1840) and when news came of the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill. While John was obsessed with going to the New Eldorado, his father, James (who served in the Illinois legislature), dismissed the idea, worried about his son's bouts with chills and the dangers from uncertain weather and Indians. But John had what he called the "going fever": "Father, I am going to California, if I have to run away. I am going, or die." (1840) and when news came of the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill. While John was obsessed with going to the New Eldorado, his father, James (who served in the Illinois legislature), dismissed the idea, worried about his son's bouts with chills and the dangers from uncertain weather and Indians. But John had what he called the "going fever": "Father, I am going to California, if I have to run away. I am going, or die."

Despite his father's wishes, sixteen-year-old John, one of his cousins, and two friends outfitted themselves for the trip with guns, ammunition, bacon and flour. John took one book with him, a copy of Plutarch's Lives Lives. On April 9, 1849, with a wagon and four oxen, they left Griggsville, in Pike County, Illinois, for the California territory. Eight days out, John, only 121 pounds on his six-foot-one-and-a-half-inch frame, turned seventeen years old. On the ninth day he found a shroud in the bottom of his trunk and realized that his family feared he would die on the trail.

During the three years he panned for gold in the Sacramento Valley of California, he gained nearly thirty pounds and a wealth of survival experience. With a gold nugget in his pocket, he took a steamer out of San Francisco to Panama and, via railroad and steamship, reached New Orleans and eventually St. Louis. He had been gone from Illinois nearly four years. The spirit of adventure and the beckoning call of California would never leave him.

Drawn West by reading Richard Henry Dana's work, her grandfather would marry not one but two Dana girls. At the death of his wife, Mary Dana, John McWilliams married her sister, Clara Maria Dana, by whom he had three children, including one son, John McWilliams, Jr., whose oldest daughter, Julia, inherited her grandfather's tall, lean frame (though not his Dana coloring), his healthy physique, and his egalitarianism, curiosity about life, eagerness for adventure and travel, and intrepidity.

When Julia was growing up, her grandfather was an elderly gentleman who had chosen to return to the New Eldorado to spend his final years. He could spin great stories at the head of the table and continued to watch over his rice fields in Arkansas and land investments in Kern County, California. (He learned to thresh rice when he ran a mill near Savannah after his march to the sea with General Sherman, and as a panner for gold in '49, he knew the value of the earth's minerals.) As Julia listened to his stories, her imagination wove pictures in which she would blaze new trails and dine with heroes, then serve the public interest with discipline and leadership. She would have him in mind when she was asked in the 1990s for her best advice on a healthy life: "Pick your grandparents." But if Julia was influenced by the pioneering spirit of her paternal grandfather, she was even more imprinted by her dynamic, redheaded mother, Julia Carolyn Weston, who married young John McWilliams, Jr., in 1911.

THE WESTON TWINKLE:.

NEW ENGLAND GRANDPARENTS.

Tall, redheaded "Caro" Weston was born into a family of old money, Ma.s.sachusetts colonial lines, and Congregational habits. Both her parents died before her daughter Julia's birth, but the Weston family influence could not have been stronger had they lived. Captain Byron Curtis Weston and Julia Clark Mitch.e.l.l, twelve years his junior, married just after the Civil War (1865) and had ten children over the next twenty-six years. They lived in Dalton, Ma.s.sachusetts, not far from Pittsfield, in a gabled, towered, and turreted mansion called Westonholme, which looked like a French chateau made of wood. The vast home, which no longer exists, was maintained by servants, nurses, a governess, a coachman, and cooks, and was supported by the Weston Paper Company, which Byron founded in 1863. Byron Weston traced his family back to the eleventh century in England; the first Weston in the New World was Edmund of Plymouth Colony. With lineage and money, Byron was a leading citizen of Berkshire County. He gave the Grace Episcopal Church to Dalton and the athletic field ("Weston Field") to Williams College. His paper won a Gold Medal at the Paris Exhibition in the summer of 1878. He served three terms (with Governor John D. Long) as lieutenant governor of Ma.s.sachusetts.

Julia Clark Mitch.e.l.l, his wife, was a direct descendant of Governor William Bradford and Elder Brewster of the Plymouth Colony and also Priscilla Alden and Experience Mitch.e.l.l, who came to Plymouth in 1623. With five ancestors in the Revolutionary War, Julia Mitch.e.l.l was a proud member of the DAR, a charter member of the Peace Party Chapter of the Colonial Dames, and a New England Congregationalist. Because she was the favorite niece of poet William Cullen Bryant, whom she visited at the Evening Post Evening Post in New York City on her honeymoon, she gave the middle name Bryant to two of her children, as she gave two others the middle name Mitch.e.l.l. By the time her seventh child was born (three babies were already dead of diphtheria), she named the girl after herself and her husband's mother (Carolyn Curtis): Julia Carolyn Weston, the future mother of Julia [Carolyn McWilliams] Child. in New York City on her honeymoon, she gave the middle name Bryant to two of her children, as she gave two others the middle name Mitch.e.l.l. By the time her seventh child was born (three babies were already dead of diphtheria), she named the girl after herself and her husband's mother (Carolyn Curtis): Julia Carolyn Weston, the future mother of Julia [Carolyn McWilliams] Child.

These Weston grandparents of Julia McWilliams were reared amid the influence of the Reverend Sylvester Graham (17941851), who lived in the neighboring town of Northampton. Graham's influence reached far beyond western Ma.s.sachusetts. 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 coa.r.s.e, unbolted flour and oats. This inventor of Granola, graham crackers, Grape-Nuts, and Kellogg's, had influential followers: the founder of Oberlin Inst.i.tute, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 Mitch.e.l.l 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 ma.s.s atop her long oval face. "Slender" and "graceful" were the words her cla.s.smates 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 soph.o.m.ore 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 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. 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 Mitch.e.l.l Weston, but grandmother pa.s.sed her "twinkle," her name, Celtic complexion, independent att.i.tude, 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 att.i.tude, 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 pa.s.sing to her children her independence and joy.

PASADENA 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 Cla.s.s 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 a.s.sistant 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 ill.u.s.trate 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 cla.s.smate H. Alexander Smith, then an attorney with Judge Lunt (and later a U.S. senator from New Jersey, 194459). 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 att.i.tude when he wrote to the Princeton cla.s.s'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 Junipero 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 PLACE IN THE S SUN.

(1912 1921) "She was wild, really wild."

DOROTHY MCWILLIAMS COUSINS.

JULIA 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. 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), pa.s.sed family homes bearing the names of Wrigley, Busch, Steinway, Huntington, Gamble, Libby, and Armour. Pasadena was an ent.i.tled 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 bal.u.s.trades. 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 b.u.mpy 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.

MRS. 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-s.p.a.ce 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 b.u.t.toning b.u.t.tons 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 b.u.t.tons on b.u.t.ton frames ... and once when we were having tea we threw the cups out the window in some kind of ma.s.s 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 part.i.tioned 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 ma.s.sive timbers), Louis B. Easton (redwood shingles), Ernest Batchelder (tile maker and friend of Igor Stravinsky)-all of whom designed their homes down to the doork.n.o.bs.

"Our house was right out of Upstairs, Downstairs," 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 (w.i.l.l.y) 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. w.i.l.l.y was from the South and was a good friend of Mrs. Fairfax Proudfitt Walkup, the teacher at the Pasadena Playhouse. "w.i.l.l.y was a lady," remembers Dorothy. 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 (w.i.l.l.y) 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. w.i.l.l.y was from the South and was a good friend of Mrs. Fairfax Proudfitt Walkup, the teacher at the Pasadena Playhouse. "w.i.l.l.y 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 w.i.l.l.y, 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 pa.s.sed off on nurses. Julia did not help when she gave Dort's favorite doll to a neighbor.

POP'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 G.o.dlike 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 should be from him, what she from him, what she was was from her mother. Like the snowcapped San Gabriel Mountains that loomed over the town, her father was a steady and rea.s.suring presence. His opinions were firm, his att.i.tudes conservative. In 1953, his older daughter would describe him in more objective terms, but still with a reverence for his leadership capabilities: from her mother. Like the snowcapped San Gabriel Mountains that loomed over the town, her father was a steady and rea.s.suring presence. His opinions were firm, his att.i.tudes 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 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 gla.s.ses, 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. 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 gla.s.ses, 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.

MOTHER CARO.

To the community she was Mrs. John McWilliams, Jr.-surrounded by tight corsets, antiques, and antimaca.s.sars. But to her friends, and later her adult children, she was Caro, who loved petting her dogs, playing tennis, and chatting with friends. She was no Victorian fussy-dusty who occupied her time in domestic concerns. She never taught her daughters to sew or manicure their nails. But she surrounded them with her approval, showing them how to love sports, laughter, and friends and follow one's own whims.

Julia and her sister Dort were eager learners. While Julia was growing up her mother was a "dynamo," to use her son's word. "She was wonderful, full of fun and spontaneous sayings, keeping all of us (father, specifically) from being too stuffy." Julia wrote in her diary about a "funny little wiggling [of] the top of her tongue the way only she could do it-faster than anyone I ever saw." With vitality and humor she ran a large household, planned the meals, and entertained friends and business a.s.sociates of her husband.

Yet, as a result of her early independence, Caro kept a life of her own and had her own dog, a bull terrier named Flicker. Caro sat at the head of the table to keep control of the dinner conversation, played tennis almost daily with her friends, and loved the theater. "She had an amusing petulance," Julia remembered, "but it was more playful than serious." Letters to her daughters when they were away at school suggest that she never missed a new theatrical production. Mrs. McWilliams had "afternoons" to receive her friends, hosted a book club (though her husband's sister Bessie exclaimed, "Carolyn McWilliams, you read more books and know less than any woman I know!"), and helped to found the Little Town Club, where her friends could have lunch (the men never came home for lunch) and one night a week-the cooks' night off-take their reluctant husbands to eat.

Caro was a laissez-faire mother, encouraging her children to "have fun." When her daughter Dort dropped Latin in high school, Caro responded by saying, "Why didn't you tell us you were overworked. There is always time to get educated." One younger family member now observes that "Caro was an upper-cla.s.s mother who did not really really spend a lot of time rearing her children." Yet Julia remembers: spend a lot of time rearing her children." Yet Julia remembers: We loved her and we did lots of things with her; she was usually there when we came home from school; she was more like a friend than a mother; I can remember as kiddies we would all lie on the couch and Mother would read to us. I remember she was reading us something like Bob, Son of Battle Bob, Son of Battle and we three were sobbing. She was very emotional. She was also very outspoken, right up front. She would be sitting at the table and would say, "Oh, hot flash, hot flash, open the window." She was open about life and the body-plainspoken, an unpretentious New Englander. Neither style nor the latest fashion was important to her. and we three were sobbing. She was very emotional. She was also very outspoken, right up front. She would be sitting at the table and would say, "Oh, hot flash, hot flash, open the window." She was open about life and the body-plainspoken, an unpretentious New Englander. Neither style nor the latest fashion was important to her.

"Julia had the most fabulous mother," thought Julia's friend Gay Bradley, the daughter of a Pasadena lawyer. "I liked best that she would sit and talk to us.... We would sit on the couch when we came home in the afternoon. She had beautiful red hair, and she was so receptive to us. She always made us feel great. She was one of those women you love to know."

THE FAMILY TABLE.

Food meant weekly Sunday dinners en famille en famille, the arrival of the milk-and-egg wagon, and learning to make fudge from Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking School Cook Book Boston Cooking School Cook Book, published in 1896. Yet the kitchen, Julia would later tell Lewis Lapham, was a "dismal place" she stayed away from. Hired cooks presided there. She remembers little of what she ate, which, according to family memories, was the traditional European meat-and-potatoes diet of the day, but with the addition of citrus, avocado, and vegetables from their garden. Oriental and Mexican food was bountiful in the Los Angeles area, but at that time remained confined to the homes of its native cooks. Few restaurants existed (prohibition held serious dining at bay for more than a decade) apart from the grand hotels where social events took place.

The only cooking news that appeared in the newspapers was coverage of a food faddist's lecture in town: Horace Fletcher, the fasting-and-bowel-regulation crank, was turning family dining into marathon slow-chewing sessions (thirty-two chews a bite!) called "Fletcherizing." Culinary historians bemoan the trends of that period, when home economists in white were incorporating frozen foods and bad att.i.tudes (eating was science, not pleasure) into their recipes. But most lecturers in Pasadena, by contrast, were healthful and sane from today's perspective. Soon after Julia's birth, her mother's Shakespeare club hosted a talk by Dr. Margaret C. Goettler, who urged that children be given simple fruits and vegetables and be allowed one and a half hours for lunch. Meat is not necessary, she exhorted the three hundred women, and "Don't eat fried food unless you can digest carpet tacks." Julia's mother listened, but trusted her own tradition when she served fried mush or, more frequently, deep-fried codfish b.a.l.l.s on special Sunday mornings. After all, had not Yankee Senator George Frisbie h.o.a.r risen on the U.S. Senate floor to declare that the dish belonged to those "whose theology is sound, and who believe in the five points of Calvinism"?

"All my mother knew how to cook was baking powder biscuits, codfish b.a.l.l.s, and Welsh rarebit," Julia would say years later. The food Julia remembers most vividly from her childhood came from her mother's New England family: codfish b.a.l.l.s, the kind of domesticated, ladylike white and creamed dish that was part of the New England cooking tradition during this century's first decades. Made from dried, salted cod soaked overnight, then poached and whipped with mashed potato and egg, molded into a ball, and deep-fried, they were served with white sauce containing chopped hard-boiled egg.

Codfish b.a.l.l.s One package of dried, salted cod Cooked or leftover mashed potatoes Two fresh eggs Fat for deep frying White sauce with two chopped hard-boiled eggs Little wonder that Ogden Nash declared this New England staple "such an utter loss / That people eat it with egg sauce." Julia remembers it as delicious.

Even though her mother was not a good cook, Julia remembers that on the cooks' night out (Thursday), if they did not go to the dining club, her mother would make baking powder biscuits. Decades later, when a newspaper asked Julia to recall her mother's cooking, she gave them the recipe.

b.u.t.termilk Herb Baking Powder Biscuits 3 cups all-purpose flour 2 teaspoons salt 4 teaspoons double-acting baking powder 1 teaspoon baking soda 4 ounces or 8 tablespoons chilled vegetable shortening 4 tablespoons fresh minced chives 4 tablespoons fresh minced parsley 2 eggs 1 cups b.u.t.termilk Into a mixture of the dry ingredients, Mrs. McWilliams cut the shortening until it was in small pieces, at which time she stirred in the herbs and then briefly blended in the wet ingredients, which had already been whipped together. (Many Yankee homes did not use the eggs.) The molded mixture was then turned onto a floured board, kneaded, and patted flat to half an inch or more and cut into rounds with a gla.s.s, its rim dipped in flour. After the biscuits came out of the 450 degree oven in ten to fifteen minutes, "they smelled so good," said Julia, "... and I liked to put b.u.t.ter, real b.u.t.ter, on them and watch it run down the sides."

Julia learned very young how a tomato tastes and smells. One of her favorite memories is "the vegetable wagon driven by the Chinaman who brought litchi nuts." The Pasadena Grocery at the time advertised that their rock cod sold for fifteen cents a pound, twenty-five cents for two pounds. Nash's department store would deliver food. Had they not had their own gardens and the year-round vegetable wagons, Pasadena women would have been more dependent on the brand-name products from the American Cereal Company, Pillsbury, Campbell's, Heinz, and Kraft that filled the women's magazines of Julia's childhood. (By 1913, according to one report, "Jell-O was distributing fifteen million recipe books a year" and Heinz had increased its canned goods production fifteenfold since 1900.) Most cooks in the United States did not always have fresh fruits and vegetables, and refrigeration consisted of a small icebox, which was cooled by a block of ice delivered each week by a man in a brown leather ap.r.o.n carrying oversized metal tongs.

Neighbor children all thought that Mrs. McWilliams was a strong advocate of rest and nutritious food. Babe Hall, who lived across the street, remembers that they were not allowed to snack after school and sometimes they would buy food at the local market or take fruit from someone's tree. If Julia or John ate across the street with the Halls on Sat.u.r.day night, they had New England baked beans and brown bread, for the Halls were New Englanders who also served fried cod cakes on Sunday mornings.

Julia grew up during rapid changes in eating and cooking habits. During the first twenty years of the century, "scientific" eating prevailed, dominated by the U.S. Food Administration and the home economists, who talked of chemistry, calories, protein, fat, and carbohydrates. The war stimulated food production and the discovery of vitamins, as well as the growth of food growers' a.s.sociations such as the Sun Maid Raisins in the San Joaquin Valley. Despite many food historians' laments about the eating habits of Americans during these early decades, the Pasadena newspapers reflected a continuing emphasis on natural produce, simple cooking, and outdoor living. For years, special speakers in town urged an active outdoor life and sunshine (an easy pitch in Pasadena). A man named J. C. Elliot called for his audience to "cut down your food supply, throw open your windows, sleep in the open screen porch, take your morning cold bath, avoid anger, hatred and fear, get out in the sunshine and breathe fresh, pure oxygen, if you wish to avoid a cold." Arthur Taylor, the chef de cuisine at the Raymond Hotel, told the Pasadena Star-News Pasadena Star-News in 1916 that his clients wanted the best of fresh produce and shunned highly seasoned dishes that "disarrange digestion." This was the year that the paper began printing menu suggestions and recipes. in 1916 that his clients wanted the best of fresh produce and shunned highly seasoned dishes that "disarrange digestion." This was the year that the paper began printing menu suggestions and recipes.

Caro had little trouble in feeding her children, though young John was thin and she urged him to take naps to grow stronger. The mantra in Pasadena may have been "remember the starving Armenians," but she never worried or used guilt on her children, who were always hungry. Caro was too busy conducting the conversation from the head of the table, where she was always served first. "We did not talk about food." Julia remembers, "and we ate as much as we could at every meal." They drank water in gold-rimmed, long-stemmed gla.s.ses, not because of prohibition, but because there was no tradition of wine-drinking. Her father had c.o.c.ktails, including one called an "orange lady." When he tried to make wine in the bas.e.m.e.nt, the children blew into the curved gla.s.s and the experiment did not work.

Sunday dinners could swell to tremendous proportions of noise and dishes when McWilliams relatives or friends of her grandfather visited. The Pasadena sun was an attraction for the McWilliams clan, especially Grandfather's nephew Charles, who came every year from Dwight, Illinois, and provided Julia with her only male cousins-Alex, John, and Charlie McWilliams, who were two to six years older than Julia and attended the Thatcher Academy in Ojai while their parents lived at the Raymond Hotel in Pasadena.

Julia learned the secret of life at an early age: appet.i.te. "I was always hungry, I had the appet.i.te of a wolf," she would say after living in Norway. The best cook in the family was her father's mother, according to Julia, "a modest and retiring little woman with gray hair in a bun at the back of her neck." Though Grandmother was always occupied caring for her older husband, Julia remembered the foods she prepared: "Grandmother McWilliams was a great cook who made wonderful donuts and some of the best broiled chicken I ever ate.... She grew up in the farming country of Illinois and her family had a French cook in the 1880s."

MCHALL GANG OF FOUR.