Julia Child Rules Page 4

  Even as a girl Julia was tremendously adaptable, and once she realized she would never play a princess, she found she preferred playing the emperor, with his great strides across the stage, his roaring proclamations. As the emperor, she was free to indulge her inner ham, something she would never be able to do otherwise. She was free to be herself.

  Julia’s height informed her life, in the way being a McWilliams of sunny Pasadena ultimately didn’t. At age four she was the tallest girl in her Montessori school. She would be, for the rest of her life, among the tallest, if not the tallest, person in any crowd. In her beloved France, she would be a foot or more taller than everyone she met.

  A woman as tall as Julia could never be transformed by a new dress or tube of lipstick. No makeover would ever make over the part of her that failed to comply with traditional standards of feminine beauty.

  To what degree did it bother her? To what degree did she try to slouch or smoke in order to stunt her growth—actually, she may have smoked in part for that reason—or wished upon a falling star that one day she would wake up to find herself a foot shorter? Probably not at all. Julia was never one to indulge in “what if.” She never pined for the impossible; if there was one thing that nothing could be done about, it was her height, and fairly early on she made peace with it.

  Her practical nature asserted itself, and she realized she had a choice. “Why languish as a giantess when it is so much fun to be a myth?” she wrote in her diary. She may have been whistling in the dark, or practicing a sassy attitude, but she seemed to have understood, even then, that a girl could choose to behave in a way that would distinguish her. Perhaps that was her only choice, given the alternative was to “languish.” Still, given how sociable she was, how free-spirited and energetic, she knew this was something she could pull off. By sheer force of her personality, she could escape her fate.

  Years later, she could joke about it. When she and Paul moved into their apartment at 81 rue de l’Université, their bed was so short, Paul built an extension, about which Julia said, “At last, I could fit my size-twelve feet comfortably under the covers, rather than have them sticking out like a pair of gargoyles.”

  Once in a great while, she was distressed by the way she looked. As she was rounding the bend to forty she would write to Avis DeVoto that whenever she read Vogue she “felt like a frump … but I suppose that is the purpose of all of it, to shame people out of their frumpery so they will go out and buy 48 pairs of red shoes, have a facial, pat themselves with deodorizers, buy a freezer, and put up the new crispy window curtains with a draped valance.”

  Julia was able to deconstruct the disingenuous motives that drive women’s magazines with the ease she normally reserved for deboning a duck, seeing quite clearly that while ostensibly offering inspiration and useful advice, the stories and articles quietly pummel the reader’s sense of self, the better to drive her into the arms of the advertisers.

  What is most instructional about this little anecdote, however, is that even by average woman standards, Julia’s sense of style was pretty basic, mostly because how could it be otherwise, given that it was next to impossible to find any skirts, trousers, blouses, or jackets in her size. Even with the help of a series of good tailors, the pickings in the shops and department stores were slim. Only when she read Vogue did she feel a little frumpy, even though, in actuality, she was a lot frumpy. But her ability to accept, work with, and even celebrate her own idiosyncrasies made the truth of the matter irrelevant.

  Change nothing.

  One of the trends that caught fire in the wake of the most recent global recession is the Buy Nothing movement. It goes by a variety of names—The Compact, the Minimalists*—and there are various cells and offshoots, but the point is to reduce debt and clutter, to recycle, reuse, and simplify, and also to help defuse our panic over having no disposable income, or perhaps any income at all.

  There are the inevitable blogs about living a year without buying anything, and websites where people post about their experiments in growing and canning their own tomatoes and using the recycled newspaper from Starbucks as toilet paper, and also, confess when they “slip.” A whole argument can be made about how the health of the global economy relies on consumers breaking down and buying a pair of shoes once in a while rather than foraging for them in the Dumpsters behind the dorms the day after the students have gone home for the summer, but that’s another polemic for another time.

  Inspired by the Buy Nothing people, let’s resolve to Change Nothing about ourselves. By now, most first-world women don’t even need to go online, pick up a magazine, look at a billboard, or turn on the TV; we’ve completely internalized the message that everything about us can be improved, and that if we’re not actively working on the endless remodeling project that is Us, then we lack self-esteem. That every last one of us can and should be thinner, firmer, smoother, more radiant, more supple, more plump in the parts that are supposed to be plump and less plump in the parts that aren’t, with lots of swingy shiny hair up there and no hair down there, barely warrants mention, so old-school is that brainwashing.

  In recent years the wheel has turned a little. Women’s magazines have heard the criticism that every woman on the planet who reads them for any length of time winds up despising herself so thoroughly that her options have been narrowed to throwing either the magazine or herself off a bridge, and so now their focus is “spiritual.”

  Now, while effortlessly rocking our skinny jeans, we must also be working to live a life of abundance, and to recognize said abundance, and to learn how to feel properly grateful, and to become the hero of our own journey. Wait, your inner critic is somehow as resilient as a post-apocalyptic cockroach and keeps chiding you for failing to be the hero in your own journey? Not to worry; here are eighty-seven foolproof ways to silence that inner critic.

  On and on it goes. Julia wasn’t having any of it, and neither should you.

  Here’s an experiment: For one day, walk the earth in your fat pants and raggedy cuticles. Do whatever you do in the morning to get yourself together, beauty-wise,* then, forget about it. If you’re not feeling grateful, then don’t be grateful. Quit practicing whatever inner thing you’re practicing. Don’t take the stairs instead of the elevator. Don’t choose the banana instead of the bag of chips. Every time that chiding little voice inside says you should be working on changing yourself, silence it. Instead, play the emperor. The emperor doesn’t live on an endless self-improvement regime, and the emperor doesn’t apologize for who she is. And as for the inner critic, our bête noire du jour: If there’s nothing to criticize, she’s out of a job. Do this, for one day, and see what happens. Sometimes, simply accepting our imperfections serves to lay the groundwork for confidence. Who knew?

  I’m not saying you’re fine the way you are. Julia, certainly, for her time, was not “fine” the way she was. Instead, by embracing all that she was, she redefined fine.

  RULE No. 3:

  LEARN TO BE AMUSED

  One’s best evenings are composed of a good dinner, and nothing else is necessary.

  IT WAS NEVER OBVIOUS TO ANYONE THAT JULIA MCWILLIAMS would make anything of herself. Neither the most observant teacher nor an empathic, crystal ball–reading college career counselor predicted any kind of real career for Julia, much less a groundbreaking, world-changing one.

  When Julia entered Smith College, Caro’s alma mater, in 1930 at the age of eighteen, she was that wild roommate you love to death but can’t live with because you fear flunking out.* Then as now, there are no dormitories at Smith; rather, every student is assigned to a house with other students from all four grades. Gilley, the housemother at Hubbard House, where Julia lived, kept notes on her charges, and about Julia she wrote, “A grand person generally but she does go berserk every once in a while, and is down on all ‘Suggestions and Regulations.’”

  Northampton, Massachusetts, with its refined culture that valued the arts and intellectual pursuits, was a world away
from provincial Pasadena, and Julia felt acutely like the huge galumphing Westerner that she was. Once again she was the tallest in her class (of 634); once again she was faced with the stark choice of whether to be a wallflower or a myth. It was a difficult adjustment, but Caro came east over Thanksgiving and took Julia shopping in New York for the requisite preppy wardrobe—crew neck sweaters, tweed skirts, saddle shoes, and pearls—and once she looked the part of a proper Smithie, she was able to devote herself fully to what she loved most, causing trouble.

  For Julia, her first two years of college were an extension of high school, with the exception of an added bonus: The local speakeasy was within walking distance of Hubbard House. She spent her time partying and continued to specialize in pranks large and small. Moment to moment, if there was an opportunity to do something unexpected, to change the course of the next five minutes, Julia did it. Her impulse to engage, to get involved, to mix things up, to see what happens when you do x instead of y was compulsive. If there was a chance to lock someone in or out of a room, she would do it. Anything that involved having to climb out a window was right up her alley. When her roommate, Mary, hung a rug between their beds so that she could study, Julia would toss jelly doughnuts over the makeshift wall. I’m sure modern psychiatry has a name for this compulsive need to disrupt, distract, and get a laugh. It made Julie, as her classmates called her, popular. Her professors observed her sparkle and spunk; they appreciated her vivacity, but felt she lacked the ability to persevere. She was not serious.

  Caro had been a basketball star at Smith, but Julia lacked both the drive and the aptitude.* Although she did play tennis, hockey, and baseball and ride horses at some nearby stables. She was a solid C student her sophomore year and enjoyed a somewhat outlaw reputation among her friends for failing to care. They had no idea that for Julia’s father, good grades equaled being an intellectual equaled being a communist, and if there was one thing worse than a communist … well, in Pop’s world, there was nothing worse than a communist. A serial killer who voted Republican was better than a Democrat with the Nobel Peace Prize.

  None of this really mattered until junior year, when the young women were expected to declare a major, which mostly served notice to those who weren’t dating anyone steadily to buckle down and focus on their husband hunting. Despite the heady academic environment at Smith, most of the students were there to find a proper husband, culled from their male counterparts at Amherst, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia. Girls who landed a guy were rarely motivated to graduate. Getting engaged and dropping out within the same week wasn’t uncommon. And on the slim-to-nonexistent chance a newly minted Mrs. did want a job outside the home, the only real career that promised advancement, a decent salary, and prestige was teaching, which was subject to the so-called marriage ban, a federal law that prohibited the hiring of wives.

  Why women who were expected to spend their lives overseeing the help needed to be conversant in Homer and Descartes was never discussed. Even Sophia Smith, who founded the college in 1875 with money inherited from her father—“… with the design to furnish for my own sex means and facilities for education equal to those which are afforded now in our colleges to young men”—never quite addressed what the young women who would benefit from her largesse were actually supposed to do with the education they received there.

  First, Julia declared a history major, then decided that maybe she would be a “lady novelist” instead. She was in a more precarious position than most; as popular as she was with her classmates and even her professors who, if not impressed with her scholarship, still admired her “savoir faire,” the young men of the Ivy League just weren’t interested.

  One of Smith’s vocational counselors suggested that since marriage was obviously not in the cards for Julia, and since her family was well-off, she would not need to pursue a career, or even have a job, but could devote herself to charity work. Even the brain trust at Smith believed Julia’s sole option was to return home to Pasadena and join the tribe of Ladies Who Lunch.

  A BRIEF REFLECTION ON THE MERITS OF COLLEGE

  Before moving on to Julia’s inopportune early adulthood, let us pause to appreciate how her college education, an excellent one by all standards, did next to nothing to inform her future. Throughout her life Julia adored her alma mater and was a devoted alumna until the day she died, but while she was an undergraduate there, she may as well have been at the University of Southern California, my alma mater and the local party school of choice for many Pasadeneans. There was no reason for Julia to be at Smith, other than that her mother went to Smith. Like so many four-year colleges, Smith was merely a four-year holding tank for Julia, while she matured not at all.

  And that was okay.

  My intent is not to put anyone out of a job who has made a lucrative career consulting with high school seniors and their energetic parents about how to find the perfect college; how to prepare to take the SATs and ACTs;* how to compose a brilliant, provocative essay;† how to create a standout application;‡ and how to present a top-notch case for admission using every tool in your family’s personal arsenal of awesomeness, but if the life of Julia Child tells us anything, it’s that where you go to college doesn’t matter.

  I’m not trying to console you because your kid didn’t get into HYPS* or her first choice, or your beloved alma mater. Nor am I saying it to make you feel better because, gentle reader, you’d dreamed all your life of going to NYU and you wound up at a state college, and now you worry that you’ll never achieve anything. Steven Spielberg attended no famous film school but the California State University Long Beach. Conversely, a friend’s brother-in-law graduated from Harvard and now is a checker at Trader Joe’s.†

  What matters is what’s going on with the student, and if you’re young, naive, and “unserious,” as Julia would describe herself years later, and without any real interests, where you wind up is irrelevant. “I only wish to god I were gifted in one line instead of having mediocre splashings in several directions,” wrote Julia in a letter home to Caro near the end of her college career.

  “Passing tests doesn’t begin to compare with searching and inquiring and pursuing topics that engage us and excite us,” said the esteemed philosopher and cognitive scientist Noam Chomsky. Julia passed the tests, but all the searching, inquiring, and pursuing was decades down the road.

  In June, after commencement, she drove Eulalie home to California, accompanied by her mother, sister, and brother, who’d taken the train across the country to meet her. It was the summer John Dillinger was on the loose. Eulalie’s top speed was forty miles an hour. At home, in balmy Pasadena, Julia played tennis and golf and threw huge parties where she secretly spiked the punch. She enjoyed herself. Still, she was too much the daughter of practical, tough-minded, hardworking John McWilliams. In 1935 she went back East, where she enrolled in the Packard Commercial School to learn “secretarial skills”; after a month the tedium drove her bonkers and she quit. She eventually found herself in New York City, working in the advertising department of W & J Sloane, a home furnishings store. She was good at her job, organized and able to get along with just about anyone. In her small apartment she subsisted on Birds Eye Frozen Food.*

  Despite her success at W & J Sloane, Julia struggled in New York. She felt “big and unsophisticated.” She fell in love for the first time with a “literature major” named Tom, who was in New York looking for work. She was smitten; he was only kind of smitten. She was a bull in the china shop of love, falling over herself to assure him of her love and devotion; probably he was her first lover. Eventually, he wound up betraying her by up and marrying a fellow classmate from Smith.

  Even the boisterous, seemingly indestructible Julia McWilliams was knocked sideways by love. She wanted to go home. When she gave her notice at work, telling her boss she was moving back to California where she belonged, he sputtered, “But Julia, I can make you the biggest advertising woman in New York!” To which she replied, “I alrea
dy am.”

  In Pasadena, all was not well. Caro had suffered from chronic high blood pressure for years. In the 1930s, high blood pressure was thought to be a natural part of aging; the heart needed to beat harder to squeeze the blood down those aging, narrowing arteries, so it went untreated. But after Julia returned home, the normally spirited Caro started complaining of headaches. One day Pop rushed her to the hospital with a raging fever. The doctors brought down her fever and declared her well, but something wasn’t right. She suffered from dizzy spells and nausea, and her skin had taken on a yellow pallor. Caro’s entire family, both parents and five siblings, had all succumbed to the ravages of high blood pressure, and on July 21, 1937, only a few weeks before Julia turned twenty-five, Caro did, too. Julia was beside her when she died.

  Julia was lost. It was as if at the age of twenty-five she retired. Her youth, which had yielded nothing much in the way of discovery about who she was and what she should be doing, seemed to be behind her. In the fall, after Caro was laid to rest, Dort returned to college at Bennington and John returned to college at Princeton and Julia was left, as the oldest daughter, to “take care” of Pop. As the McWilliamses live-in domestic staff had grown to include a housekeeper, cook, butler, and several gardeners, there was nothing for Julia to do, really, but keep her increasingly difficult father company. I’m being gentle; the man was grief-stricken. The truth is, by all reports, Pop was a nasty-tempered bigot, who grew only more so after Caro and her humanizing influence departed. Conservative doesn’t begin to describe his hatred for anything that resembled change. He despised anyone from the East Coast, Europe and Europeans, Democrats and moderate Republicans, intellectuals, and the brand-new Pasadena Freeway that connected his personal utopia to the corrupt metropolis of Los Angeles. Julia loved her father, and she had grown up tolerating his tirades, but her time living and working alone in New York had changed her in ways that she could not yet quite understand. All she knew was that there was a big world out there.