Julia Child Rules (4 page)

Whether Julia and Dort McWilliams could or couldn’t cook was immaterial; as adults they would have enough money to attract a suitable mate, or live high on the hog as eccentric spinsters. In any case, they would have their own Cooks.

When I was an undergrad at the University of Southern California, there was a special, appalling football cheer trotted out in the fourth quarter, when it looked as if the Trojans were going to lose. “Whether we win! Whether we lose! We’re rich, we’re rich, we’ll buy you!” I doubt Julia’s parents harbored such crass notions, but the sense of entitlement was there in the heartbeat of the house, in the complete freedom that Caro accorded her children, especially her daughters, girls who were average-looking and born to be taller than almost everyone else in the room. Because they were wealthy in love, attachment, and money, they didn’t need to be pretty, petite, and docile, predictable bait for a future husband that would improve the family’s fortunes.

Disclaimer

Once I sat on a panel at a book festival, where the topic was how to fashion a productive writing life. My copanelists were celebrated first novelists who, it was said, came from money and were married to money and did not suffer in the way that so many writers do, holding soul-sucking day jobs, or cobbling together freelance gigs that pay on a regular basis (and without fail pay ten or more months after the job is complete). They were lovely, intelligent women with shiny hair, well-turned ankles, and solid habits, and just enough specific requirements (a special type of bendy straw for their Diet Coke, an ergonomic chair) to show how seriously they took their creative temperaments. I, who prefer to cultivate the foreign war correspondent mode of creation, training myself
to write anywhere at any time with anything at hand, was in equal parts impressed by their awareness of what “worked” for them and appalled by their fussiness.

A woman at the back of the room raised her hand. She was the mother of very young children. Even from that distance you could see her exhaustion in the slump of her shoulders. It didn’t help matters that she was wearing an earflap hat and fingerless gloves. As it turned out, my lovely copanelists were also the mothers of very young children, and the question asker wondered if they had any advice about how she, the mother of toddler-age twins, might also fashion a productive writing life.

One of them suggested hiring a nanny for the morning hours, and the other said, “You must get yourself an office out of the house. With the recession, I’m telling you the rents are
cheap
.”

Disbelief registered on the woman’s face. An invisible thought bubble floated above the heads of pretty much everyone in the place: It may be cheap for
you
.

After having written about the McWilliamses money and the McWilliamses’ five-bedroom yellow colonial and the zany, loving mom and reserved but mega-bread-winning dad,
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and the love and freedom Julia experienced every day of her life, I wonder if I sound like the lovely debut novelist—well-meaning
and completely out of touch. Obviously most of you have not enjoyed anything close to Julia’s fabulous upbringing. Yes, there’s some misery to come, but by and large it was as good as it gets. Until they invent the way-back machine, we’re all stuck with who and where we came from.

Still, Julia’s life wasn’t perfect.

Live in a temperate climate.

Money makes our childhoods so much easier, except when it screws us up; were it not so, the phrase “poor little rich girl” would never have entered the vernacular, nor would the hearts of the nation go out to Suri Cruise, with her tiny designer heels and peculiar father.

But no one can argue with the salubrious effects of nice weather, in this case in Pasadena, California, pre–internal combustion engine. Here, then as now, there are no brutal seasons to interrupt the fun, no frigid winters paralyzed by blizzards, nor humid, daze-producing summers. Those old adages that worriers from other, harsher climes live by have no meaning in Southern California. “Make hay while the sun shines” and “Save your money for a rainy day” is advice for someone else, someone whose world is not their oyster.

If you have a good childhood, it’s a very good one in that climate, where the weather cooperates to the extent that the world seems benign and supportive of all human endeavor, where you can play outside all yearlong and no one ever yells “Don’t forget
your mittens.” In Pasadena, twelve months a year, excluding three rainy weeks in February during an exceptionally wet season, you spend your entire life outdoors, bombing around on your bike. The world, with its golden light and dry air, does nothing to impede your desire to play. The message is that nothing in the natural world, aside from perhaps an earthquake—which is short, to the point, and cannot be predicted—will ever get in your way.

The fine weather colluded with Caro to support Julia’s junior-anarchist style. She was a freewheeling tomboy who loved to hike, swim, play tennis, and golf. Julia was the girl in the neighborhood who could pitch a softball overhand.

“Jukes” was full of ideas for adventures that were rarely evaluated for their merit. The point of her young life seemed to be to make something, anything happen, regardless of the outcome. I should stop here and say there’s a flip side to living in such an agreeable climate. Living in a world unmarred by the threat of impending weather, cloudy on occasion but with no chance of snow, ice, or sleet, does make a kid feel that if anything exciting is going to happen, she’s going to have to be the one to make it so.

Above all, Julia loved not knowing what was going to happen next. From the time she was a girl, her eyes popped open in the morning and one of her first thoughts was
How can I have fun and make some trouble today?

She was the ringleader of the neighborhood group of kids who, completely unsupervised, rode around the oak and pepper
tree–lined streets, up into the scrubby hills, down into the dusty arroyos, and over the newly built bridges, where they would stop only to drop mud pies on cars passing below.
*

They routinely stole material from construction sites and broke into vacant houses in the neighborhood. Mrs. Greble, the neighborhood “witch” (she yelled at Julia for hiding out in her oak tree, smoking Pop’s purloined cigars), was the target of Julia’s pranks. Once they broke in and stole a chandelier and buried the crystal prisms.

Sometimes Julia would get caught, and then she would get dutifully spanked by Pop, but did it make her feel bad for what she’d done? Did it make her refrain from stealing Pop’s cigarettes, cutting the braids off the head of the pastor’s daughter, or hanging out with the hobos down at the train yard? Not at all. For Jukes getting spanked was simply the price of doing what amused her.

By the time she was a preteen, Julia had developed a habit of stealing Pop’s cigarettes, and also the cigarettes that belonged to the parents of her friends. Pop, who by this time had recognized the futility of traditional discipline, instead gathered his kids for a powwow. He promised that if they stayed away from cigarettes until they were twenty-one, they would each receive a thousand-dollar bond.
^†
Julia, recognizing a great deal, abstained until the stroke of 12:01 a.m. the day after her twenty-first birthday, then
smoked a pack a day well into middle age. She gave it up briefly on July 26, 1954, and took it up again on July 27, 1954, failing to see any reason then why she should deny herself the pleasure.

Play the emperor.

When she wasn’t breaking and entering, or seeing what happens when you melt a piece of pavement tar on the stove, Jukes wrote and performed her own plays. She was entranced by the local community theater and would go with her mother by streetcar into Los Angeles to catch the latest Charlie Chaplin “photo-play,” as movies were then called. From grammar school on up she acted in any play that would cast her, and it was here she learned an intractable lesson, one that couldn’t be mitigated by freedom, affluence, or the love of Caro and Pop.

Julia was simply too tall to play the female roles.

Too tall to play the damsel-in-distress, too tall to play the lady-in-waiting, too tall to play the ingénue or the princess. If she wanted to participate—and when did Julia ever not want to participate?—she would be forced to accept the roles usually reserved for boys. Thus, she was cast as a lion or other large, fierce beast, or as the emperor. At Katharine Branson, the college preparatory school she attended before going to Caro’s alma mater, Smith, she played Michael the Sword Eater in a production of
The Piper.

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
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—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.”