Laura Shapiro (2 page)

The food was front and center, the food was glorious; but to this letter writer and to Julia herself,
The French Chef
was about life in the kitchen. Julia didn't see any difference between French food and American food that couldn't be bridged with cooking lessons, though her idea of what belonged in a cookery class went considerably deeper than recipes and techniques. At the heart of every one of her television programs was a lesson—sometimes spoken outright and sometimes simply clear from the way she worked—about how to approach any task in the kitchen. It didn't matter whether you were planning to boil an egg or to spend the next two days making a galantine of turkey, the lesson was the same, and it was a moral template for American cooks. Use all your senses, all the time, Julia instructed. Take pains with the work; do it carefully. Relish the details. Enjoy your hunger. And remember why you're there.

Julia's own kitchen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she lived for more than forty years and taped three television series, officially became a national treasure in 2001. Julia turned eighty-nine that year, and as she was clearing out the house in preparation for a long-planned move to a Santa Barbara, California, retirement complex, the Smithsonian Institution put in a request for her kitchen. Julia agreed; and a team of curators and conservators quickly descended on the house to inventory everything in the kitchen, including the knives and pot holders, the dime-store vegetable peelers, and the warnings she stuck to the wall about using the garbage disposal (BEWARE ONION SKINS). Then they disassembled and transported the entire room to the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., where they put it back together. Apart from a new etched-acrylic window standing in for the Peg-Board where she hung copper pots and pans—the Peg-Board and copper had been promised earlier to COPIA, the American Center for Wine, Food & the Arts, in Napa, California—the kitchen was erected in the museum exactly as it had been in Cambridge. The Garland stove, the twenty-four refrigerator magnets, the plastic venetian blinds, the big wooden table, the copper stockpot full of rolling pins, her phone and her
Bulfinch's Mythology
and her guide to Massachusetts state government—it was all in place. Julia's kitchen had moved from her home to our history.

Her talent was cooking and her medium was food, but all the signals radiating from Julia as she sliced potatoes or carefully unmolded a dessert had to do with character. All of her fans understood this. They responded to her generous nature and abundant skills, maybe even tried to make their own puff pastry, because they knew they could believe in her. She wasn't selling them anything; on the contrary, she was giving them everything. “Be sure to taste it at this point, because it's perfectly delicious,” she advised in the course of making
riz à l'impératrice.
“It's an experience of pure vanilla and sugar and tender rice”—here she raised the spoon to her lips, closed her eyes, fixed her attention for a moment wholly on flavor, and then lifted her gaze—“that you shouldn't miss, because that's one of the nice things about being the cook.” She always tasted, not just to get the flavors right, but for the incomparable pleasure of the encounter.

PREFACE

SOURCES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

J
ULIA RARELY
turned down a request for an interview, and one of the questions that came up frequently over the years was about the food she remembered from childhood. What did she eat growing up? What turned her into a cook, a gourmand, a tireless advocate of the kitchen as the most important room in the house? She never had much to say on the subject. “It was good, plain New England food, the kind my mother had back in Massachusetts,” she once told
People
magazine. The meat was invariably cooked until well done, she recalled; the vegetables were seasonal; in those days, of course, there was no wine. The family always employed a cook, and only on her night out would Julia's mother step into the kitchen to make baking powder biscuits and Welsh rarebit. These were the memories Julia scraped from a dry well. The truth was, food hadn't been important to her when she was growing up. She was not a natural epicure, one of those food lovers who seem to remember every childhood meal all the way back to that first, transcendent mouthful of strained peaches. And she certainly wasn't a natural cook—her calamitous efforts to learn her way around a kitchen would go on for years. What she did have was a huge, unstoppable appetite. Tall and skinny, she plowed through the first several decades of her life with only one gastronomic thought—“To eat all she could hold at every meal,” as her husband put it. Food would not take on any greater significance than that until she was thirty-two years old, thousands of miles from home, and falling in love.

Julia's mother used to say that she had raised eighteen feet of children, for each of her three—Julia, Dorothy, and John—eventually topped six feet. Julia was the oldest, a gawky youngster who liked riding her bike, acting in school plays, building treehouses, and trying to smoke cigars in the orchard. Pasadena, where she was born in 1912, was a handsome city known for its wealth and civic accomplishments; and her father, John McWilliams, was a living symbol of the city's prosperity. A Princeton graduate and devout Republican, he managed the western landholdings and investments amassed by his own father, and later became vice president of the J. G. Boswell Company, one of California's major landowners and developers. His personal and professional mission was to keep California booming, and he put a great deal of time into Pasadena community life. Julia was raised to admire his discipline and public spirit, which she did, but he also nurtured a set of rabidly right-wing convictions that she would come to abhor. The two of them split sharply during the 1950s, when John McWilliams became an enthusiastic supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom Julia found despicable. Her father was also vocal about his contempt for Jews, artists, intellectuals, and foreigners; and for most of her adult life Julia viewed him with enormous dismay, though she managed to keep loving him.

Her mother was a very different creature, lively and full of humor, and Julia adored her. Julia Carolyn Weston, known as Caro, grew up in a wealthy household of seven children in Dalton, Massachusetts—her father founded the Weston Paper Company and made a fortune—and Caro developed a streak of cheerful independence she never lost. She went to Smith College in nearby Northampton, where she was a star of track and basketball, and so loved the place that she and a classmate vowed they would send their daughters there. The early death of her mother was a sorrow that Caro felt for the rest of her life, and she blamed her father for the nonstop childbearing she believed had badly weakened her mother. Julia would be childless herself, to her regret, but she made Planned Parenthood her favorite charity.

For all their pride in Pasadena, Julia's parents sent her out of town for high school so she could attend the best school they knew—the Katharine Branson School in Marin County, where Julia became a boarder. Small, expensive, and very highly regarded, the Branson School offered West Coast girls a traditional New England education, the sort that would prepare them for Seven Sisters colleges. It was largely wasted on Julia. Her work was good enough to get her by without trouble, but what she really liked about the school was everything else, including beach parties, hiking expeditions, innumerable athletic events, and playing the title role in
Michael, the Sword Eater.
She won an armful of awards at graduation in honor of her accomplishments and school spirit, and was named Branson's First Citizen. There was no question about what would follow Branson: her mother had been waiting eighteen years to help Julia pack for Smith. Many years later, Julia remarked that if she had known about such things as coed colleges, she would have raced to one. But at the time, luckily for family harmony, she had no such ambitions; in fact, she had few ambitions of any sort. Filling out an enrollment form that asked her to list vocational plans, she wrote, “No occupation decided; Marriage preferable.” The next four years passed in a romp, interspersed with only enough studying to keep her from getting bored. She majored in history, though looking back, even she couldn't say why. Her prom dates tended to be family friends, since she towered over most of the eligible men at nearby Amherst College; and by the time she graduated, she was no closer to marriage, much less an “occupation,” than she had been when she enrolled.

Back in Pasadena she spent a year doing exactly what her friends were doing—parties, golf, Junior League, and going to weddings. Then she took herself in hand and decided it was time to become a novelist or maybe find a job in publishing. She took a stenography course and moved to New York with two of her Smith friends, settling into an apartment on East 59th Street in the fall of 1935. To her consternation, she couldn't get an interview at
The New Yorker,
and she flunked the entry-level typing test at
Newsweek,
so she was proud and relieved to be hired in the advertising department at W. & J. Sloane, a Fifth Avenue furniture store.

For the next year and a half, she supplied New York newspapers with press releases on Sloane's new products. Julia was no furniture expert, but she was a quick study, and she did like to write. “When you have put your all into a party, and struggled over making sandwiches that are chic and dashing as well as tastey [
sic
], it is terribly deflating to have their pretty figures ruined by guests who must peak [
sic
] inside each 'wich to see what it's made of,” ran the draft of one effort. The Sloane solution was “sandwich indicators”—“wooden picks which you stick in the sandwich plate, nicely shaped and painted. There is ‘Humpty-Dumpty' for egg, a rat in a cage for cheese, a dog, boat, and pig for meat, fish, and ham. And it seems like a very sound idea.” That last sentence has the ring of desperation: even Julia couldn't come up with more to say about the charm of identifying a cheese sandwich with a rat.

She was writing and getting paid for it—$20 a week, eventually raised to $35—but the appeal of Sloane's and New York didn't last very long. By the end of her first year in the city, she had fallen in love, which was thrilling, and been jilted, which was shattering. She stuck it out until May 1937 and then went back to Pasadena.

Shortly after she returned home, her mother died at sixty of complications stemming from high blood pressure. Her father wanted Julia to stay near him, so she obediently narrowed her focus to a life at home. When the Smith vocational office alerted her to job possibilities in New York and Paris, she ignored them. Instead, she took a stab at fashion writing, becoming a columnist for a new and painfully obscure California magazine called
Coast.
She got the job through family connections and worked hard at it, reporting on the latest styles and suggesting what to wear with what; but the fact was, the woman who would become famous wearing a skirt, a blouse, an apron, and a dish towel really did not care what people wore with what. “Loathesome business,” she called her fashion career years later; and she was relieved when the magazine went bankrupt. The Beverly Hills branch of W. & J. Sloane then made her its advertising manager, a new position at the store and one with considerable responsibility—she set up the office, managed a $100,000 annual budget, and planned and carried out all the advertising for the store—but she was fired after a few months. “I don't wonder,” she wrote candidly on her résumé. “One needs a much more detailed knowledge of business…than I had.”

Her social and volunteer activities were far more successful: she gave lots of parties and poured tremendous energy into the Junior League, writing children's plays and sometimes acting in them, and contributing to the league's magazine. She was even courted by an eligible suitor—Harrison Chandler, a member of the family who owned the
Times-Mirror.
Julia was tempted, but decided she just didn't love him. The prerequisites for marriage, in her view, were “companionship, interests, great respect, and fun,” and the relationship with Chandler didn't measure up. By this time, she was nearing thirty and starting to see that she might not marry at all. With the equanimity that would guide her all her life through crises large and small, she absorbed that possibility and kept right on going.

But she changed direction. As she started to envision life as a single woman, she realized she had no wish to spend the rest of her years as a Pasadena socialite. In the fall of 1941, caught up in the news of impending war, she began volunteering at the local office of the Red Cross. After Pearl Harbor, she joined the Aircraft Warning Service and then took the civil service exam. She was becoming increasingly impatient with life at home. A crisis was sweeping the globe, and for the past five years she had been doing little more than enjoying herself. Now the nation needed everyone—for once, even women were being called to serve. Here was a rare opening in the sky-high wall of convention and family responsibility that normally barred women from the world at large. Like millions of others, Julia leaped to take advantage. She filled out applications to join the Waves and the Wacs and set out eagerly for Washington, D.C. There she learned to her disappointment that at six feet two inches she was too tall for the military. So she took the only war-effort job she could get—typing index cards at the U.S. Information Center in the Office of Wartime Intelligence. It was unbearably tedious. She quit after three months with no idea about what would come next, but never for a minute did she contemplate returning home. Her departure from the past was permanent. The war offered her a future, and she grabbed it.

“I got an awfully late start,” Julia reflected once. She wasn't talking about marrying at thirty-four, or beginning her life's work at thirty-seven, or launching a television career at fifty. The start she had in mind was the moment when her childhood finally ended and she could feel herself coming into focus as the person she wanted to be. It happened during the war, in the heat and stress of a military office rigged up on a Ceylon tea plantation. Later, when she looked back at this turning point, she could hardly believe she had spent so long in a foreign country—and she didn't mean Ceylon, she meant Pasadena.

What she really wanted to do in Washington was join the newly formed Office of Strategic Services (OSS), headed by General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, who was organizing what would become a far-flung network of espionage and intelligence operations in Europe and the Far East. It's not clear whether Julia hoped to become a spy—she wasn't exactly someone who could fade imperceptibly into a crowd—but by this time she was a master at typing and filing, and her background made her just the sort of woman Donovan was trying to hire. An OSS recruiter once said that Donovan's concept of the ideal office worker was “a cross between a Smith College graduate, a Powers model, and a Katie Gibbs secretary.” Julia fit the template nicely. She started as a file clerk at OSS headquarters, but as soon as word went out that Donovan was establishing bases overseas and was looking for volunteers, she put her name forward. Although she knew some French and a bit of Italian, she didn't ask for a posting in Europe. When the war was over, she would surely get there on her own and maybe even live abroad for a time. In hopes of just such a possibility, she was already taking French lessons three times a week. But here was a chance to travel someplace completely improbable, someplace way, way off the map of her life to date. She requested India and sailed on a troop ship from California in March 1944.

Once they all arrived—a flock of men and a handful of women—their orders changed. The new OSS base was to be in Ceylon, where Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten was directing the South East Asia Command from Kandy, up in the hills. “Our office is a series of palm-thatched huts connected by cement walks, surrounded by native workmen and barbed wire,” Julia wrote to her family from the tea plantation that became OSS headquarters. Though she had an emergency signaling mirror and felt quite ready for attack or capture, her job turned out to be chiefly paperwork. Julia's assignment was to set up and operate the Registry, a massive chore that she did single-handedly until an assistant showed up months later. The Registry handled all the highly classified documents pertaining to intelligence in the China-Burma-India theater, and Julia created the system that would keep track of every scrap of information and make it quickly accessible.

There were insects the likes of which she had never seen before, elephants and tropical rains, golf games and a huge workload—Julia thrived on all of it. Primitive living conditions didn't bother her, and she was calm about dealing with the vital wartime secrets that flowed in and out of her office. When the OSS shifted operations to China ten months later, Julia was transferred to Kunming to set up the Registry there. By now she was getting tired of a daily life devoted to paperwork, but she liked the idea of seeing another new country, and not even the famously treacherous flight over the Himalayas upset the genial self-possession that was a hallmark of her personality. One of her OSS colleagues remembered sitting on the plane from Calcutta to Kunming as it rattled through ice and wind—hundreds of flights on this route ended disastrously—while the people around her shook with fear. Not Julia; she was absorbed in a book. When they reached the airport, she looked around with pleasure and remarked, “It looks
just
like China.”