Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (11 page)

The Olympic Games were held in Los Angeles in the summer of 1932 and Julia’s friends were caught up in the excitement. When a group of them gathered in San Malo, they staged their own Olympics and played to the point of exhaustion day after day. To her brother, who was dating lovely Southern California girls, Julia’s physical play and short hair and girl’s school manner indicated that she did not want to be a girl. She was interested in boys, he thought, but her associations were more like being “one of the boys.”

Before returning to school, Babe Hall came over to lunch with Julia and her mother. “Julia seemed much older than I, much more sophisticated,” said Babe, who was attending Occidental College. But Mrs. McWilliams had not changed a bit. She was just as lenient and whimsical as ever: When Julia told her mother and Babe about staying out all night with a group that included boys, her mother’s only comment was: “Did you have any breakfast? Don’t do that again, dear, until you have gained ten pounds.” Babe was amazed that Mrs. McWilliams was not warning her daughter against sneaking in, but against failing to eat out.

While protecting the intelligence and virtue of America’s finest young flowers, Smith nurtured their leadership abilities and experience. Eleven years before, the Board of Trustees established a student government association that gave the women some power in establishing the rules and regulations of their social life: Student Council, the Judicial Board, the House of Representatives, and the House Councils. In her junior year, Julia was elected Junior Class Representative to the Student Council. Madeleine Evans, a prominent campus debater, served as president; Connie Thayer was vice president, and Mary Case was treasurer of their class. Julia was again appointed to the Grass Cops along with Marjorie Spiegel, Dorothy Fosdick, and Mary Case, and was refreshments chair for the prom committee, headed by Marjorie Spiegel. During this year she became friendly with a senior named Elizabeth (Betsy) Scofield Bushnell from New Haven, who more than a decade later would become her best friend when Julia married into the Bushnell-Bissell-Kubler-Child-Prudhomme tribe of friends.

J
UNIOR YEAR

“I certainly hated to leave our Sunkist paradise,” she wrote her mother from the train headed back to Northampton, “But I do think it is much better for you not to have all of us around to worry about.” She was traveling with Gay Bradley, her childhood friend who after flunking out of Smith her freshman year was attending (and would graduate from) Radcliffe. They played bridge most of the way. During this junior year the Gang of Five was joined by Happy Gaillard, who, like Hester Adams, with whom she roomed, was from New York City. Happy had gone to Vassar, hated it, and transferred into Hubbard House and Smith. As a transfer student, Happy would not match the campus leadership roles of the other girls, but she would enjoy the fun. Charlotte Snyder, who lived in Ellen Emerson Hall on the other side of Paradise Pond, said, “That group had a great sense of humor. I was in awe of them. I was terribly serious [and pious] at the time.”

Another change in the gang was the distraction of young men who came to call. Connie remembers that Hester, a freckled girl with an old-fashioned face and wide smile, would come home at the last minute and just as the bell was ringing and her friends were looking out the window, Henry, her future husband, would kiss her good night. That summer Connie also met her future husband, a senior at Yale, and drifted away from the weekend activities of the gang.

One of the most important events of the junior year was the declaration of a major. Though Julia took more classes in music (a passion she shared with Mary), she chose history: “It had more options.” Yet a majority of her friends—Peggy, Connie, and Mary—chose the same major. Perhaps they used the same reasoning, though Julia remembered, “In those days there were not many options: secretary or teacher or nurse seemed the only [ones],” but marriage was the priority. Maybe they were influenced by politically liberal teachers, one of whom took his students to a walkout at the textile mill in Northampton (much to the dismay of Anita Hinckley’s father, who believed she was becoming a “flaming communist”). The history teachers were popular, as was Roosevelt, who won in a landslide in November 1932. Julia, who still thought like her father, wanted Hoover to defeat FDR and was still largely unaware of union leader Harry Bridges and the crippling strikes on the West Coast.

Julia took Dr. Leona Gabel’s Renaissance and Reformation course (History 351) and earned B+ both semesters. She thought that Gabel was “a real brain.” Gabel wrote in Julia’s academic record that she admired Julia’s “qualities of leadership,” her “droll, humorous, likable personality,” and her ability to take “criticism not only kindly but responsively.” Julia’s paper on one of the promiscuous Renaissance popes caused quite a sensation in the class, remembers Mary Ford (Cairns), one of two sisters from Pasadena who were ahead of Julia at Smith.

Because of the popularity of English professor Mary Ellen Chase, a famous “lady novelist” or “authoress” as they called her in those days, many students thought about writing careers. Chase gave a very good course on the novel to crowded classrooms. Though she did not take Chase’s course, Julia decided to become a “woman novelist”: “My plan was to be a woman novelist … there were some famous women novelists in those days.” During an interview decades later for the oral history of Smith, Julia could only explain her failing to take a course with Chase as pure romanticism, thinking “I had to live first and then I’d write. I was … an utter adolescent. The idea was to get everything else so that you can get the writing later. I was a very adolescent person all the time up till I was about thirty.”

Later she partially justified ignoring the novel-writing class by saying that when she went to hear Chase give a lecture in Washington, DC, in the 1950s, she was disappointed, calling her a “semi-charlatan” and a “show-off … it was like watching a piece of theater. You were there to see her, not to learn anything.” Julia told an interviewer in 1980 that she was “inspired” to be a writer by reading the stories of Somerset Maugham. Instead she became something of a Maugham character, meeting her husband-to-be in a Ceylonese teahouse and following him all over the world.

She was particularly impressed with Marjorie Hope Nicolson, then the Dean, who later became the first woman full professor in graduate studies at Columbia University. Her admiration began when Nicolson took over a chapel talk in which the students expected to hear their beloved President Neilson. “I am Banquo’s ghost,” she said at the beginning of a witty talk that would make her career with the students. She was a Renaissance scholar, and Julia took a course in Milton with her. Julia remembered little about her classes, except breeding drosophila fruit flies in her biology class.

Julia had originally asked Alex McWilliams (their grandfathers were brothers) to the junior prom, but he was busy pole-vaulting for Princeton, and she settled on another young man with a connection to her family. Julia was a junior usher for the 1933 commencement, an honor accorded to those contributing the most to college life. Hester Adams, another member of the gang, was head of the junior ushers. The experience of participating in the final ceremonies was the best motivation for a successful senior year ahead.

S
ENIOR REWARDS

A second motivation was a car. Seniors with high enough grades could have a car on campus, and that was inspiration enough for Julia to improve her grades and for her mother to buy her an open 1929 Ford, which she named Eulalie, the first model with gear shifts. It was black with two seats and the top folded back. “I am reveling in my automobile and haven’t walked a step since I got it here,” she wrote her mother on April 25, 1934.

During the campaign for the repeal of prohibition, the Smith girls, particularly the Gang of Five (which included Happy but not innocent Connie), partied more than ever. Julia had certainly drunk alcohol before, but never in these amounts: “I remember it well. During prohibition a group of us drove in the Ford to a speakeasy in Holyoke that was on the top of a warehouse; we all had one of everything. Luckily we had an open car, because we were all quite sick. That was very terribly exciting.”

On December 5, 1933, at 5:32
P.M
., the repeal of prohibition was ratified. Now they could openly and legally drink at the Hotel Northampton. But one happy night they created such a commotion that Gilley asked Mary to come down and demanded that as house president she had to restore order. Mary went back upstairs and discovered Julia on her hands and knees in the hall.

Drinking had always gone on during Christmas vacation, especially on the train to and from Pasadena. One of the Pasadena girls who was a year ahead of Julia at Smith remembers that during her senior year she traveled home on the Twentieth Century to Chicago and the Santa Fe to Pasadena. Julia also remembers that trip: “We had some rather wild times on the train…. Everyone came back for Christmas and there was a lot of drinking going on. Those were the days!” Gay Bradley adds, “Those were wonderful trips in which nearly fifty of us would party for four or five days.”

With all the celebrating and student activities, it is not surprising that Julia let her English and music grades slide a bit in her final semester. She chaired the Community Chest, which put her on the Activities Board, was a Grass Cop and assistant editor of the
Tatler
, the school paper, which was headed by Margaret Hamilton. Hester Adams, one of the Gang of Five, was the editor of the yearbook and Catherine Atwater her associate editor. Julia learned a Latin carioca dance for the Rally Day show, and acted in the musical variety show jointly presented by Smith and Amherst.

Julia took three memorable courses her senior year and did well in all of them. From Merle Eugene Curti, professor of American history, she took modern American history (after 1870) and earned B’s. He was the professor who had assigned the study of propaganda and its effect on the strikers in Northampton. When asked for the “most interesting and profitable class” of her college career, Julia named the one taught by Curti, who earned a national reputation for his textbooks after he left Smith to teach at the University of Wisconsin. He won the 1944 Pulitzer in history for
The Growth of American Thought
.

She took a course in writing one-act plays from Samuel Atkins Eliot, Jr., which tapped into the fun she had had writing plays for the McHall acting troupe in her mother’s attic and would lead to her writing several short plays for the Junior League. Eliot had a severe stutter, but he inspired her to write about the traumatic event of her first year at KBS, the Stevens triple murder-suicide. She told an interviewer from Smith years later that her play was “terribly dramatic” and had “wonderful potentialities”: “About a friend of my family’s who found he had heart trouble. And unfortunately he had two boys, one of whom was a moron from birth and the other one who developed dementia praecox and he was horrified about dying and leaving his wife with these two idiot boys.” Julia followed the murder and suicide as closely as one can tell from the newspaper accounts, but included a scene in which her own mother, Caro, went to the tennis court with the mother of the murdered boy and offered to drive the car home. That is when they found the second murdered son. “So it made a wonderful play, you can imagine. It was never performed, of course.”

She also took international relations (Government 39) from Dr. Alice M. Holder, who gave Julia her only two A’s. Miss Holder, who believed that Julia had “the reputation of being very humorous,” commended her “good intelligence and keen interest in what she does” as well as her “general enthusiasm … considerable personal attractions and plenty of
savoir faire.”

Her final semester was, as all commencement speakers point out, a looking backward and a beginning. In January her mother arrived for the funeral in Dalton of Julia’s uncle Philip Weston. Julia bought a copy of James Joyce’s
Ulysses
because Noble Cathcart, married to her cousin, had published an essay on the novel in his
Saturday Review of Literature
. She did not have time to brush up on her Homer, as she told her mother, and read only part of the novel. But she was stimulated by the courses she was taking from Professor Curti and Associate Professor Holder. And she was distracted by a boy named Luther, on whom she was sweet. Since February she and her classmates had been wearing their graduation gowns to chapel, sometimes over their pajamas. But behind the daily distractions and plans for commencement was the ever-lingering question of vocation.

When Julia enrolled at Smith, she listed her vocational choices as “No occupation decided; Marriage preferable.” She was typical of her class. When Mrs. Gilchrist wrote her reference evaluation of Julia she said that her family was “wealthy” and thus she “will not need ‘a job’ I do not believe. She would do well in some organized charity or social service work.” Such were the expectations to be lived up to. Five years later President Neilson told them that they were “not the brightest class that ever graduated from Smith, but you were the marryingest class.” However, Charlotte Snyder Turgeon claims that 80 percent of her Smith house went into the foreign service. The lack of a sense of direction was something Julia shared with most of the women of her class. Because Julia could not anticipate the marriage track, she abandoned her “lady novelist” fantasy and was looking at journalism. “I only wish to god I were gifted in one line instead of having mediocre splashings in several directions,” Julia wrote her mother on November 26 of her senior year.

Julia invited a boy named Fred Allen to the senior prom, but he could not get away from Harvard because of his grades. Then she tried Win Crane, who worked at the Weston paper mill and whom she had met at her relatives’. If the latter had not accepted, she was going to send the entire sex to Hades, she told her mother. Accustomed to being chosen first for any team of girls, she did not have the same score with boys.