Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (6 page)

No child’s neighborhood would be complete without a Mrs. Greble, whose very name could evoke their collective screams. “Mrs. Greble was the witch of the neighborhood,” Julia remembers. “She had two haunted houses that were vacant. We managed to get into one and took down the chandelier; it had long glass things and was triangular; we buried them; she was not nice; everyone hated her.”

Mrs. Mary D. Greble lived on Columbia and owned the land between the McWilliamses and Orange Grove Boulevard. There was a thick oak tree on her land that Julia remembers well: “We took Father’s cigars up into the oak tree and smoked. It must have been funny to see the smoke puffing up.” Babe Hall, her accomplice, remembers that they chose that spot in order to glimpse any approaching adults, for they were smoking “for the sake of getting away with it.” Charlie Hall said that his sister and Juke “smoked everything in pipes, which they kept in cigar boxes mounted in the tops of trees or buried in some remote area. In addition to purloined tobacco, they smoked prunes, corn silk, etc. I don’t believe there was anything they didn’t try to smoke!”

Julia, who would always test the boundaries of authority, experimented at length with smoking before her father eventually called his three children together and offered a thousand-dollar bond to each if they would not smoke until they reached twenty-one years of age. “We did not smoke after that,” claimed Julia. “I kept my bargain. At one minute after midnight on my twenty-first birthday I began smoking and smoked for thirty years, at least one to two packs of cigarettes every day.”

In reality, Babe and Julia feared little, even from Mrs. Greble. They discovered a way to slide a piece of paper under the lid of Mr. McWilliams’s musical cigarette box and press it down just right so that they could lift the lid in silence and steal a cigarette. It was a more difficult procedure than lifting one of Mr. Hall’s cigars, so they smoked more cigars. One day when the mud was oozy and malleable they molded mud pies on a garage roof on Freemont Street, where the road was narrow, and threw them at passing cars, then ducked. One victim of their prank suddenly appeared at the back of the roof. The girls jumped and ran, with the man close behind them. He caught Julia’s leg as she got to the top of the next fence. “I am taking you to the police. Come down!” he demanded. She cried and pleaded to be released so she could come down. When his hand relaxed, said Babe, Julia leapt over the fence and they ran like hell over lawns and fences until they could hide in safety. “Julia made the most of every opportunity,” says Gay Bradley. “She was always the leader, the center of things, the instigator. All activities centered around Julia, who was a lively prankster.”

When Julia found a piece of tar (left from a new roof), she and Charlie decided the gang would melt it in a pan on the stove of the laundry room. “This is not a good idea!” protested John. Nothing deterred her until the hot tar took the bottom off the pan and flowed over the top of the stove. Charlie now believes the McWilliamses, whom he considered his second parents, were “long-suffering” saints.

The two girls one day noticed that one of the windows was open in a vacant house belonging to Mrs. Greble. They climbed onto the roof and hand by hand inched along a trellis to the window and went inside. On the way back Julia got her finger caught on a wire nail and could not free it. In desperation, she jumped to the ground below, leaving an inch of skin behind. The following day they returned and Babe retrieved the skin as a memento of their daring adventure. Their mischief was physical and sometimes downright dangerous. Julia and Babe sent for a mail-order blank cartridge gun under the name of Babe’s older brother. When their parents were away, they fired the gun from the roof, or dropped rocks on the Santa Fe passenger train from Columbia Street, sneaked rides on streetcars, milk wagons, and trucks, played telephone tricks, and hung around with the tramps at the railroad tracks. Julia got caught in the chimney of a house under construction and they had to break parts of the chimney to free her, according to Babe. She climbed too high into a cave in the Arroyo Seco and had to be rescued. When she cut off the long braids of Beatrice Freeman, the pastor’s daughter, Beatrice’s family temporarily forbade them to play together. They collected broken polo mallets at Midwick and played polo on their bicycles (they were adept at replacing the spokes in their bikes). Her brother John remembers Julia placing a bag inside a Robinson department store package, placing it in the middle of the street, and running a string from the package to the other side of the hedge between the McWilliams property and the street. The streets were paved, but the cars, slow-moving, were few. Cars would stop to examine the package and just as they reached for it, Julia would yank the string.

Twelve months a year Julia and Babe played outside. Bicycles and roller skates (key always worn on a string around the neck) were their mobility and freedom from parental supervision. Every Christmas brought a new pair of skates and the wheels of the old were promptly attached to a coaster and box; if you were really daring you went down the hill on Arbor Street. Pasadena had long been hospitable to the bicycle, having planned at the turn of the century to build an elevated bike road into Los Angeles (only 1.4 miles of it was completed). And every New Year’s Day they hung around the preparations for the Tournament of Roses on Orange Grove Boulevard just a block away.

The physicality of Julia’s childhood centered on her hands, on action, tactile contact, physical results, and sensual pleasures. She was a physical and social being. She grew up into a mighty oak, like the one in Mrs. Greble’s yard, but also grew deep into the earth. She was what is called an “extrovert … fond of movement, recreation, change,” a girl “marked by activity, vivacity, quickness, and opportuneness rather than by persistence and consistency.”

S
UMMER TRAVEL

The McWilliamses, as their parents before them, enjoyed travel and passed this adventurousness on to Julia. “They took us on some wonderful trips,” said John, nearby to Mount Lowe, Squirrel Inn at Lake Arrowhead, Palm Springs, La Jolla, and Mount Whitney in the High Sierra.

The more extensive trips sometimes involved business travel back to Arkansas, when their father often took one of the children with him for his annual inspection of the rice land. Julia ate delicious squirrel on one of these trips, she said. The land lay east of De Witt, where the Arkansas and White rivers came together, their father calling it “the Old Home Place.” They visited his childhood home in Odell (it had become a gasoline station), and visited relatives in Dwight, Illinois, as well as Dalton, Massachusetts. One summer Caro took her family to a dude ranch in Wyoming for a reunion with members of the Weston family from all over the country. Her mother organized horseback riding, setting up Indian tents, and canoeing, and, according to Julia, wore a riding jacket and handsome laced-up boots. It was a memorable trip for Julia, who was impressed more by their Weston connections than by the McWilliams tribe, who were familiar.

City women took their children away to the sea for the summer, with husbands joining them each weekend when possible. Thus California beaches, along with well-patched inner tubes, weekend fathers, and sunburns, were a large part of every child’s summer. After one summer in Santa Monica, Caro settled on the Santa Barbara area, where she and John had courted in 1905 (according to her diary) and where so many Pasadena families lived. The McWilliamses drove in their touring car from Pasadena to Montecito Park, adjacent to Santa Barbara, where Julia learned to swim in the city swimming pool (“I can still remember the wet swimming pool smell”).

They rented an old gray-shingled house in a circle of homes built around a green lawn and surrounded by bamboo groves (in 1927 the homes would be moved to make way for the Biltmore Hotel). They took the maid, the nurse, and Eric the Red: “When we went out to eat there on Sunday noon, we ate at the Miramar Hotel in a big circular dining room. I was fascinated by the fact that they served sherbet in the middle of the meal. We used to go swimming there; Mother wore a black swimming costume and black stockings. She was well covered up.”

There was “quite a nice beach there until they built the marina in Santa Barbara. It changed the entire coastline.” Eric the Red would romp on the beach with the children. As far as Julia was concerned, she wrote in a letter to Babe, “just about all the people in this park are sissys.” It was not long before Julia discovered she could make a pipe with the local bamboo and smoke corn silk. While the mothers chatted on the beach, the children ran about, inventing fantasies of smugglers arriving on the shore at night; when a ship wrecked at Point Magu and they saw a Chinaman washed up onshore, it confirmed their sea and piracy fantasies.

Julia attended Camp Asoleado the summer of 1921 before entering the Polytechnic School. Because it was at Hope Ranch (where her mother took her first fully straddled horseback ride in 1905) on the mesa just north of downtown Santa Barbara, her parents were not far away. She was certain “they were glad to be rid of me.” The camp was run by “Aunt Sally” Leadbetter, to whom Julia ran for help one day when an older girl told a younger group of them about this “terrible thing” that happened when you got blood in your pants. The girls were horrified to hear about “the curse,” but eventually during the following summer camp it came to them all. “My mother may have told me, but it did not make any sense until I heard it at camp. I don’t know when I learned everything else. I guess I gradually learned the rest.” Calling menstruation a “curse” had as much to do with the physical trauma of bleeding as it did with the pre-Kotex ritual of belt, pins, and cloth-wrapped cotton, which had to be unwrapped and hand-washed.

At Camp Asoleado, the girls wore knee socks and elastic-bottomed pants above the knee. For three years Julia attended this camp with her cousin Dana, the daughter of her father’s sister Annie McWilliams Gans, from Hagerstown, Maryland. Also at the camp was “sweet and pretty” little ten-year-old Barbara Hutton, who had to do KP duty, according to Mary Stuart and Dana Parker. Later Julia would reminisce: “The camp was owned by two women who were very good cooks. Every Sunday there was a pancake race to see how many we could eat. That was before the days when everything was restricted.”

Julia had other cousins who lived in Santa Barbara, for her father had a second sister, Elizabeth McWilliams Patterson. Aunt Bessie’s two daughters, Harriet (who had the Dana dark skin and would marry Noble Cathcart) and Patsy (with blond hair and Celtic skin), were around Julia’s age. She adored her older cousin Harriet, who taught her to sew: “Harriet taught me how to fix my nails. That was very important.” Harriet was an older, well-dressed role model for Julia. Aunt Bessie, who terrified Julia when she was very young (“she was not a loving person”), would spend the last years of her life in the El Encanto Hotel, in the hills of Santa Barbara.

During the school year, Grandfather McWilliams presided at the head of the long table every Sunday afternoon. He usually finished saying grace at about one o’clock. His eyes looked up from behind his wire-rimmed glasses. Despite his ninety years, he sat erect, his gray beard riding high above the suit and vest he wore to the Presbyterian church that morning. As if by magic, his butler, Richard Thompson, appeared, invisibly summoned by the small button John McWilliams, Sr., pressed under the table, carrying the primary dish of the meal, a large leg of lamb, roasted to the color of a gray headstone. Mint jelly glistened in an elegant cut-glass bowl nearby. Other Heinz condiments, offered in family crystal, were symbols of the wealth, progress, and modernity of the McWilliams family. Though the avocados and oranges were ripening on the trees outside the window, there was little smell of the earth on their plates.

The three grandchildren, who until a certain age ate their evening meals with the cook and butler, always attended Sunday midday dinner, which alternated weekly between their parents’ house and their grandparents’ house. One Sunday at the senior family home, the clan was expanded by McWilliams relatives from Illinois. The talk over dinner began with the coming Jack Dempsey fight and President Harding’s signing of the formal peace with Germany. But the presence of William McCarty, the bugler in Grandfather’s Civil War company, ignited the old man’s memories of the war and Sherman’s march to the sea. Young Julia had just finished the third grade and could not wait to conclude the lengthy ceremonial meal. Nearly nine years old and already a head taller than her playmates, she ate rapidly, paying scant heed to the gray lamb, white potatoes, turnips, and carrots; she could hardly wait until she was playing with her best friend, Babe, and planning their summer camp. She preferred her company to that of her cousins, and the warm outdoors to the dining room or kitchen.

Restless though she was, Julia and her sister and brother continued to observe the family customs of saying grace, learning kinship obligations, and listening to her grandfather’s stories of courage and adventure. As in most families, the McWilliams’s culture was transmitted largely around the table, and her patriarchal grandparent was omnipresent. He would die in the fall of 1924 at his office, with his boots on, so to speak, leaving what the local newspapers called a “frontier legacy.”

Chapter 3
E
DUCATION OF AN
E
XTROVERT
(1921 – 1930)

“Why languish as a giantess when it is so much fun to be a myth?”

JULIA CHILD

J
ULIA JUMPED
on her bicycle and came to the back door of the Halls’ house, as she would every school day morning for six years to pick up Charlie. The two nine-year-olds rode up the street and turned right onto Glenarm Street, which took them across Fair Oaks and Los Robles to Oak Knoll Circle and Arden Road to “Poly.”

P
OLY

The Polytechnic School, which Julia attended from the fourth through the ninth grade, was on the south side of California Boulevard, opposite the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). There were no streetlights and few stops signs then. Once they “hooked” a ride home on the back of the bus that ran down Los Robles to Glenarm, says Charlie Hall, then west to South Orange Grove and South Pasadena avenues. Suddenly a loud explosion of the engine and a cloud of black smoke frightened them silly. The bus driver had cured their hooking by dangerously backfiring the bus. John remembers that they then hooked trucks, which moved slower. After school they would ride horses, play kick the can, croquet, or tennis. The Halls’ Welsh terrier, Gyp, retrieved their tennis balls. There were so many dogs on their street that there was a major dogfight at least once a week. On rainy days, they would set up the curtains and footlights in the big attic.

Poly, which eventually expanded to ten acres, was a typical California school with numerous accesses and covered outdoor corridors in its single-level, H-shaped frame. It was atypical in the beauty of its campus: large oak trees lay beyond the tennis court, and there were acres of green grass. Julia would remember few of her teachers except for one in English, “one of those inspiring teachers; we loved her.” There was a young, slender brunet French teacher, and Miss Grace Henley was the headmistress from 1915 to 1946 of this private school, which eventually added grades through twelve.

After school the children rode their bikes down to a sandy, desolate area of the Arroyo Seco to watch the construction of a stadium out of what was once a dump. The big scooping machine dug out a “bowl” (actually a horse-shoe-shaped hole) and loaded tons of dirt onto horse-drawn wagons. By October 28, 1922, the first unofficial football game of this “Rose Bowl” stadium was played by the University of Southern California Trojans and the University of California (Berkeley) Golden Bears.

That summer the McWilliamses were again at 9 Montecito Park when Julia wrote letters to Babe, whose family visited relatives in Maine every other summer. The McWilliamses also traveled this year to the East Coast for a lengthy trip that included the Yale-Harvard boat race (in her letters to Babe, she was more impressed by the drunken fans) and a visit with Aunt Annie’s family in Hagerstown, Maryland. Letters to Babe were signed “Yours till Ivory soap sinks.”

Not only a creative prankster, Julia was considered a great athlete—more because of her height and strength than her dexterity, it turns out, as one classmate remembers Julia tripping over things. She was a gifted scene stealer, acting in plays through grade school, high school, and college, always playing the emperor or the lion, never the princess. As a popular member of the class, she participated in everything, including entering their dog Eric the Red every year in the pet show. “He never won anything,” she claims.

Julia later confessed to her diary that she believed she was “like no one else,” the possessor of “unique spiritual gifts” and “meant for something” special. Her sense of being “unique” stemmed in part from being the firstborn, in part from her height, and to a large measure from her mother’s approval. She had the firstborn’s presumed dominant position, but rather than be her parents’ lieutenant, as are most firstborn children, she was the instigator of mischief. The firstborn’s conscientiousness (expressed in responsibility, organization, and drive for achievement) would kick in later in life. She was assertive and verbal; she looked down physically as well on her two siblings and her classmates: “I was always one size bigger than you could ever buy. And why languish as a giantess when it is so much fun to be a myth?”

The neighborhood gang remained strong, enjoying weekends up at the Halls’ two cabins (one for boys, one for girls) two and a half miles above Sierra Madre in Santa Anita Canyon. They had no running water, and took their food and supplies up the hill on a donkey from Sierra Madre station. After unloading it, they turned the donkey loose and it returned to the station. They embraced the adventure.

The mountains also offered a popular resort in those days: both families took the funicular railway up to the train to Mount Lowe, next to Mount Wilson. The Halls pooled their Christmas money for a stay in the hotel up there. Although Julia does not remember their mother pouring maple sugar on the snow to share one of her New England experiences with them, her siblings do.

Julia paid little attention to religion until it started to become an irritation, particularly long sermons. Caro and John McWilliams were “churched out” and attended infrequently and then at the nondenominational Neighborhood Church, which no longer exists. This lack of interest in religion was probably strongest on the Weston side, for a reading of Caro’s mother’s diary at the turn of the century reveals that her illnesses usually coincided with the all-day church services in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Grandfather McWilliams, on the other hand, was a serious churchgoer who took his grandchildren to the Pasadena Presbyterian Church. The Reverend Dr. Robert Freeman, the city’s most prominent minister, who served on the board of directors of nearby Occidental College (which the three Hall children would attend), ran the most child-friendly church in town (though the children complained about the length of his prayers). The skating rink, the dinners at the community center at the church, and playing with the Freeman children, especially after the McWilliamses moved to a home at 625 Magnolia, near her grandparents, were treasured activities in Julia’s life. Later, when the children walked to church on their own, they took the dime for the offering and often never made it as far as the church, according to sister Dort.

It was in November 1924, when she was in the seventh grade at Poly, that twelve-year-old Julia experienced her first family grief. Her grandfather, driven every morning to the office by his chauffeur, died at his desk. Her parents had taken Grandmother McWilliams to Hawaii (with their Aunt Annie), so the chauffeur drove to the house to tell the McWilliams children of their grandfather’s death. The children would long miss this imperious grandparent, remembering his false teeth and Smith Bros. cough drops, which he always kept on the top of his grandfather’s clock.

After grieving at his father’s death, John experienced a sense of freedom in making his own professional decisions. He moved to a new office at Union Street and Fair Oaks Avenue, expanding his business connections into downtown Los Angeles. Caro McWilliams also traveled more to Los Angeles, taking the streetcar (there was no Pasadena Freeway until 1930) down Orange Grove, past the ostrich farm on Huntington Drive to the city, where she bought her clothes from East Coast clothing representatives (De Pinna and Brooks) who set up their exhibits in the hotels there. Julia loved to accompany her mother into Los Angeles, especially to the Biltmore Hotel: “My mother would take us to lunch. We loved the Biltmore because it had revolving doors. Los Angeles was so exciting in the twenties.” If her mother was indulgent and unquestioningly affirming, their father was a stern disciplinarian. He emulated his own father’s strict demeanor. According to Dorothy: “My father was too hard on Julia because she was the oldest. He could be very intimidating!”

When Julia was thirteen and in the eighth grade in 1925, the Pasadena Community Playhouse was built on Fair Oaks Avenue and became an integral part of city life. Charlie Hall was involved in running the lights, and Julia was captivated by the new theater. The Halls and the McWilliamses also listened to the radio on Sunday nights to hear the charismatic preacher Aimee Semple McPherson. “Mother needs a new coat, everybody be generous … I do not want to hear the sound of money [coins],” she declared from her Angelus Temple in nearby Echo Park. Anna Pavlova gave a dance performance in a local auditorium, and musicals were popular—
Desert Song, Hit the Deck, Indian Love Call
, and
The Student Prince
. Julia shared her mother’s interest in films (called “photoplays” in the newspapers) starring Fatty Arbuckle, Charlie Chaplin, and Mary Pickford, and showing at the Strand. There were lectures at the Shakespeare Club, where Julia’s and Babe’s mothers sent the girls to the Little Artist Series each Saturday morning for lectures on painters, artists, and musicians.

Julia’s height and her voice kept everyone from suggesting that she follow a theatrical career, though in fact she eventually became a star. She spoke in a standard youthful California manner, but she had an expressive voice like her mother and sister, resonating less from her chest than her head. A high-pitched, breathy sound drew Julia’s vowels up and down a musical scale in such a way that her sentences turned into arias. When she was excited, her voice sounded like a honking falsetto. When she was ecstatic, her voice might chortle, guffaw, crack, or half yodel.

For two summers Julia went camping at Lake Tahoe in the High Sierra, at a summer camp for girls. It was on the north shore near Kings Beach (the boys’ camp was near Ponderosa) and had horses, which the girls learned to take care of, boats on the lake, and tents with wooden floors. The two women who ran the camp strove to give the girls self-confidence and survival skills; they were “strong,” said Eleanor Roberts; Babe believed their name, Bosse, was appropriate. Julia thrived. She packed in with mules, fished, rode, and swam several times a day (they learned the Red Cross swimming program). Babe, who attended one summer, wrote home to her mother: “Juke went up to Watson Lake and went in swimming in her B.V.D’s. Miss Fuller asked Miss Cherry what she considered swimming and Cherry said ‘up to the neck’ and seeing Juke had only been in up to her waist she wasn’t punished.” The second summer, Eleanor Roberts (who would later serve as West Coast representative of
Vogue
magazine) told Julia that she looked like a taller, skinnier version of the leading movie star, Mae Murray
(To Have and to Have Not
, 1919), a flapper with short, curly hair: “Jukie had a slender nose and beautiful silhouette. She was not a big, gawky girl, but a real beauty.”

One of the big events in Julia’s life in 1925 was the earthquake in Santa Barbara, which registered 6.3, damaging buildings in Pasadena and taking her father away to numerous meetings of the hospital board. Eventually a new hospital was built with money from the family of Mr. Henry E. Huntington and the following year, in January, Pasadena had a new city hall. It was the same year that the McWilliams family listened to the first radio broadcast of the Los Angeles Symphony. Julia was more excited about the flooding of the Arroyo Seco gorge on Easter Sunday. She and the gang rode their bicycles past the Craftsman homes and down into the gorge to check on the damage to their favorite cave.

Sports strengthened Julia’s body and helped her overcome some of the awkwardness of her ungainly height. One boy in her class said that she once walked into a classroom with a tiny rise at the door and fell flat on her face. She was lovely, but not “pretty,” which then as now meant petite and feminine. Mary Kay Burnam was the “pretty” girl in the class and Bill Lisle was smitten. The boys were reading
Penrod and Sam
by Booth Tarkington and beginning to notice the girls. Betty Parker was becoming more of what she called a “society girl” and interested in boys, while Julia remained the gamine. Her appetite for food and physical exercise was larger than life.

Dancing class was one of those stomach-churning social necessities in Julia’s youthful circle. Beginning in the fourth grade, the children took dancing lessons from Mrs. Travis, who conducted them in the Vista del Arroyo Hotel and then at the Shakespeare Clubhouse: “As I recall, neither Julia nor I was very good,” wrote Joseph Sloane, an art history professor whose father had graduated from Princeton with Mr. McWilliams. Robert P. Hastings, who would found a distinguished international law firm in Los Angeles, remembers hiding from the dancing classes and the girls in the men’s room. Charlie Hall, who said they started in the third grade and went through high school, claims the classes were really about manners, not dancing. The boys had to wear white gloves, and everyone had to wear patent-leather shoes. Bill Lisle, the class president, believed that if his grandmother bought him black patent-leather shoes he would automatically know how to dance. Short for his age then, he still shrinks at the thought of the McWilliamses hosting the eighth-grade dance in their home and his mistake of catching Julia’s eye and having to dance with her: “She blocked out the light. I came to her bosom. She was a fine girl.”