by Bob Spitz
Like with most insular families, however, in which competition simmered, feuds erupted, and jealousies raged, there were those in the food world who found Julia’s straight talk all too threatening. Her outspokenness never failed to provoke new controversies, new challenges, often rooted in the fragile terrain on which her reputation rested: that she was an interloper, neither French nor a chef—at least not with the traditional provenance of a serious cook. She would eventually convince these skeptics, just as she convinced cooking novices everywhere, to take her seriously; to embrace her casual approach to a vital and substantive discipline; not just to laugh at her, but to respect her, to respect her research and techniques, and ultimately her cooking.
SOMETIME THAT SPRING, in April 1962, Russ Morash appeared on the doorstep of 103 Irving Street in Cambridge, one of the more unprepossessing houses on a street lined with splendid residences described in realtors’ listings as estates. John Kenneth Galbraith lived a stone’s throw down the block, as did Arthur Schlesinger, interspersed among other homes belonging to Harvard’s leading minds. As he knocked at the half-open door, Morash must have marveled, as other outsiders had, at the naked privilege on display in the perfectly manicured neighborhood and the strange circumstances that brought him to this place. Clearly, he was out of his element. Raised in “a very modest family,” Morash was blue-collar Boston—in his own words “a plain, driven guy”—armed with a strong work ethic that lacked any false sense of entitlement. Cambridge, to Morash, was uptown, Brahmin. One came here to see how the other half lived.
Ostensibly, Russ was here against his better wishes. His boss, Bob Larsen, had corralled him at the studio and mentioned that WGBH was considering doing something with Julia Child. “What do you think, Russ?” he asked. It was a loaded question. If Larsen was involved, then Morash knew something was already in the pipeline. There would have been others, influential friends, who’d already weighed in with enthusiastic opinions. “What do you think, Russ?” wasn’t a question, it was a caress that needed a hug. In other circumstances, Morash might have given it a quick thumbs-down. A cooking show was absolutely of no interest to him. Food, as he knew it, was a necessity, nothing more: Sunday roasts cooked beyond well-done into gray shades, glutinous gravy, rubbery vegetables, and Italian Swiss Colony wine. And French cooking?—ooh-la-la! One of the more “ridiculous assignments” Russ had at WGBH was directing En Français, a program that attempted to teach French to elementary school children. Russ didn’t have to remind Larson that “there was no student with less potential for learning classical French than” he. Put it all together, Russ Morash was the wrong guy for this job. He could have convinced Larsen of his inadequacy. Instead, he hemmed and hawed.
“We have no studio at the moment, so we’ll have to do it in the field somewhere,” Russ grumbled. “Plus, I need to know what kind of support we’re going to have, what kind of resources you’ll give me. And this person—Julia Child—I need to meet her and see what sort of a character she is.”
Larsen arranged their introduction at 103 Irving, and over the next few months, Morash would return there again and again, drawn to the formidable character he encountered, a fearless, ambitious, supremely self-
confident woman, a force of nature, “with this ebullient spirit, and her voice and her manner and her enthusiasm and her wit and her charm.”
When push came to shove, her appeal was the one surefire way Julia Child could convert the skeptics who resisted French cooking. In the warm glow of personality, she could transfer her passion for good food to men and women everywhere, in kitchens in the loneliest corners of the country to galley nooks in teeming metropolitan sprawls, from farmhouses and suburban developments to Park Avenue and Beverly Hills—and everywhere in between. Ultimately, cooking was the way to unite these extremes, to nourish their spirit, and to make them feel loved.
Communicating was Julia’s essence. Her brilliance rested in her capacity to articulate her experiences with food and relate them to anyone, no matter how little or great their desire to cook or eat. Less than twenty years after Russ Morash stepped into Julia Child’s kitchen, his wife, Marian, the same woman whose franks-and-beans casseroles blighted the family menu, gained recognition as a masterful cook in her own right, with a television series and go-to cookbooks of her own, and a restaurant in Nantucket that showcased her innovative food. No woman had demonstrated less talent for cooking until Julia Child swept into her life. Countless others had a similar story—without the cookbooks, TV series, and restaurant, of course—discovering and realizing their own talents, with Julia as their personal mentor, instructing, cheerleading, encouraging, being blunt, genuine, and unaffected, as only she could be.
Americans were inspired and changed forever by Julia Child—even if they never saw it coming.
* * *
1 Quotes framed in the present tense (e.g., he says, she recalls) are taken from the author’s interviews. All other quotations, with a few exceptions, are from print sources cited in the notes.
2 “In this sign you will conquer.”
The McWilliams family, Pasadena, 1922 (Photo credit prl.2)
One
Paradise
There were days in Ceylon, Kunming, Cambridge, Paris, Oslo, really any outpost in her globe-trotting exploits, when Julia Child would close her eyes, inhale, and let the exquisiteness of home wash over her. With the instincts of a sorcerer, she would summon up ribbons of pastel light unspooled across powder-blue sky, peaks that seemed drawn with a finely sharpened pencil, Craftsman-style bungalows set among orchard lanes quaintly named for trees, blackbirds in evergreen oaks singing their unsteady melody, and roses, a riot of roses, stretched like a crimson carpet from yard to yard, street to street, across canyons and dry river bottoms that, for all their gentility, bore “a touch of wilderness.” “It was paradise—just about the best place you could think of to grow up,” she recalled, during a flashback while in Sicily, halfway around the world and sixty years later. The landscape, with its lush, radiant magnetism, energized the city, as though by accident it had been waiting for a chance to stake its claim on a paradise as versatile and as unspoiled as this valley, the pure dry air, its ancient hills, a gift of nature. Pasadena wasn’t a typical California settlement established for fortune hunters and sun-worshippers, but a sumptuous cluster of missions and ranchos at the foot of the coastal range of the Sierras, whose ideal climate attracted the health-conscious wanting “to get where life was easy.” The generosity of the land, with its cornucopia of natural resources—orchards, towering oak groves, alluvial streams, succulent vegetation, and cowboy vistas—offset a terraced, urban beehive of dusty adobe and verdant parkland that showcased Pasadena as an oasis in the desert.
Julia often said that Pasadena was “California through and through,” but that description couldn’t be further off the mark. Unlike neighboring California cities, Pasadena did not develop from a gold mine, a train stop, or a dune overlooking the beach. It was settled by a co-op of disgruntled Midwesterners, from Indianapolis of all places, who hoped to abandon the snow-ridden Plains in favor of mild climes. Their scheme to go west, as far west as possible, drew tremendous interest from friends; over a hundred families joined this so-called Indiana Colony, which sent an advance team to California in 1873, searching for fifty thousand acres of arable land. The mission, at first, sounded like a boondoggle to the frozen Hoosiers left holding down the fort. Anyone familiar with the California land rush knew that the territory was “theirs for the picking.” The West was big, as big as their dreams. But after a month pushing from valley to valley, the scouts grew discouraged. Santa Anita was too expensive, San Diego too overrated, Anaheim too sandy, San Fernando too arid, San Bernardino too hot, and Los Angeles too too. And their dreams began to fade.
Julia’s grandfather, John McWilliams, had suffered the same sensory letdown in 1846, when he went west in search of gold and a mother lode of dreams. Landing in California, fresh from the Illinois prairie, he became �
�pretty well down at the mouth” when the reality of the countryside set in. The canyons, nettles, mosquitoes, and dry gulch were enough to try a man’s soul. And the heat! Good Lord, one of the pale Indianans groused, “Your face and nose get scalped with the sunshine and you need a new hide about twice a week.”
Fortunately, those in the Indiana contingent were thick-skinned. These men, who had endured brutal snowbound winters on tundra cratered by frost and then had slogged up and down the sunbaked California range of hills—“120 miles of villainous stage riding” and endless hikes that stretched their backs to the breaking point—would not let their dreams be denied. Trudging further north and then east, they crossed into the San Gabriel Valley and entered one of the most picturesque settings in Southern California, a place that, to their eyes, resembled the Garden of Eden. They were, in fact, on a portion of the sprawling San Pasqual Valley Ranch, in the northwest corner of the old Mission lands. It was a sight for sore eyes, that oasis in the desert, with rolling mountain vistas, purple mesas, leafy shade trees and flora. The air was drier, warmer, and more healthful than in Los Angeles, the sky clearer and deeper blue. There was no lack of wood—about five hundred acres of tall oak lined a canyon suitable for grazing. And plentiful water—“water delicious and cool leaping out of the rocks.” And more water: a vast underground reservoir would provide well water galore. And still more: silver mountain streams that sluiced through whispery wooded slopes and escarpments had eroded centuries-old bedrock and carved out a great gorge, the Arroyo Seco, destined to irrigate the valley.
And where there was water, these Indianans knew, there was fertile soil. These men and the families of the co-op would be dependent on the land for their means of survival—and that was why the condition of the pastureland, the fabulously rich loam, was what captured their attention. They gazed out on a horizon that foretold ideal growing conditions and more. Each acre was an eye-opener, one could easily envision their yield—so much so, in fact, that only two years later, following the settlement of Pasadena, the collective would successfully have planted more than ten thousand orange and lemon trees, several thousand deciduous fruit trees, countless olive trees, and 150,000 grapevines. And nuts—nuts seemed to be exploding out of the soil: almonds, filberts, chestnuts, butternuts, pecans, walnuts, hickories, and beechnuts.
This was more than even they had envisioned. The goal had been to find a more comfortable place to live, a place where simple, humble farmers could plow their land and provide. Several churches, perhaps, and a school would serve to round out the settlement.
What they got instead was a filthy-rich paradise.
Pasadena grew faster than the national debt. Less than five years after its incorporation, in 1886, the city was transformed from a sleepy-eyed agricultural village into an action-packed resort. Tourists and speculators from across the country poured into a frontier town that was bulging at the seams. Houses sprung up—and not just California-style bungalows, but mansions the size of palaces, packed shoulder-to-shoulder along adjacent streets. Hotels opened for business—and not just inns or roadhouses, but showplaces, as grand and elegant as San Simeon or Xanadu. Railroads marked the spot—and not just as a whistle-stop on an otherwise meandering route, but a major destination of the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe lines. Property values soared—and not just gradual increases that reflected real estate prices across America, but in wild leaps on the order of an impressionist auction at Sotheby’s. Land sold to members of the original Indiana Colony for $6 an acre reached a whopping $1,000 an acre in 1876; according to town records, a tiny parcel sliced from a ten-acre lot sold for $36,000 that same year. Banks opened for business on practically every corner, an opera house thrived, trolley lines multiplied, a commercial district emerged, and not one newspaper, but three dailies, reported on the sweeping developments straining the city limits. That made it official: Pasadena was a boomtown.
And the boom brought boomers, America’s wealthiest snowbirds who came to bask in the sunshine and build winter residences along Orange Grove Avenue. From St. Louis came beer mogul Adolphus Busch; from Minnesota, Hulett Merritt, the founder of U.S. Steel; from Chicago, publisher Andrew McNally of the Rand-McNally empire, followed by George Pullman, whose sleeping cars were world-renowned, and chewing-gum magnate William Wrigley, soon to found the Chicago Cubs; from New York, the piano Steinways, Lamon Vandenburg Harkness of Standard Oil, and John S. Cravens, whose wife oversaw the Liggett-Myers tobacco fortune. Before they’d even unpacked, Marshall Field arrived from Chicago, as well as the Rockefellers, both John D. and John D. Jr. And more: financiers and industrialists from all points of the country came west in successive waves to this former Indiana Colony, staying for three or four months, seldom longer, each year. By 1913, a reporter tallied the adjoining “boom mansions” of fifty-two plutocrats on Orange Grove Avenue, a few posh blocks known as Millionaire’s Row. Overnight, little Pasadena, settled by a group of tubercular pioneers, had become a different sort of paradise: “the richest city in America.”
When the McWilliams family arrived there in 1908, everything that glittered had turned to gold. The millionaires plowed their fortunes into civic projects that refaced the natural beauty of Pasadena with a sumptuous high-toned veneer. Thanks to the largesse of Andrew Carnegie and other philanthropists, in 1903 a solar observatory was established atop Mount Wilson, overlooking the city. By 1906, Busch Gardens—a grand arboreal fantasyland assembled on thirty sylvan acres—became a magnet for tourists to wander and gape. The City Beautiful concept whitewashed public buildings with elaborate Beaux Arts façades. Parks, pools, and open plazas flourished. Even an annual parade, the Tournament of Roses, took place to flaunt the city’s fine bounty. The spirit of pioneering and comfort that had created Pasadena was being supplanted by the spirit of enterprise. Town guardians fixated on the credo of architect Willis Polk: “To make a city attractive is to make it prosperous.” Indeed! High finance was already churning from a business district at Colorado and Pearl Streets. A Board of Trade was established to promote the city’s economy. And a streetcar line, the big Red Car express, snaked along Lake Avenue to transport Pasadena’s tycoons directly to the financial district in Los Angeles.
Pasadena’s boom economy was catnip to a man like John McWilliams. Like the city’s Indiana forefathers, he had been lured west, from Griggsville, Illinois, as early as 1849, lured by gold, of course, and the prospect of instant riches. Every sixteen-year-old, trapped on an isolated farm and laboring long hours in the fields, got the “going fever” that year. You couldn’t help it, reading the daily newspaper accounts of each fresh gold strike. For young John McWilliams, there was no other recourse. He was either “going to California … or die,” he told his father, James, a stern, determined lumberyardman reluctant to give his consent. Nevertheless, on April 9, 1849, John left town with two friends from school and his cousin, Abner. They packed a wagon with supplies—bacon, coffee, quinine, gold pans, guns with ammunition, and a butcher knife—and joined the greatest mass migration the young country had known, some eighty thousand men, Argonauts, as they were called, pioneers, dreamers, future settlers of the West.
John’s father feared for his son—and with good reason. The boy had been left a semi-invalid thanks to a “hereditary consumption”—tuberculosis—that had killed his mother and brother. He was all skin and bones, a mere 122 pounds on a six-foot, one-inch frame, known as “legs-a-mighty” to the boys back home. Grown men twice his size died on that damned trip west. As it was, they hit “snow storms all the way to Missouri.” Stampedes were common. Long marches without water disoriented them during interminably dry days. But strange things happen to determined young dreamers. By the time they reached California in October, six months later, John had put on twenty-eight pounds thanks, in part, to a diet of “fat bacon.” He was in tip-top shape, ready to prospect, to mine his weight in gold.
What John McWilliams found in Old Shasta, where he joined a sludge-caked campsite on a ridge of the Sierra
Nevada, echoed the words of Prentice Mulford, another teenage Forty-niner from back East, on the make: “Them stories about finding gold in Californy was all true.”
That they was. Prospectors hit new veins of ore with staggering success, and young John McWilliams was no exception. A teacher from Griggsville trained him to work a rocker and a riddle, two handmade tools used for sifting the gritty dirt and, as John recalled, “on the first day we tried it we took out about a hundred dollars.” The potential sites where gold lay buried stretched as far as the eye could see, up one side of the Sierras and down the other, endless rolling vistas north and south and west. A solitary prospector like John McWilliams could work that range forever, driven by his imagination—dreams of independence and the promise of riches. But it took courage, as well. There were no amenities. The conditions were brutal, barely civilized, the elements a scourge on the human soul: a lengthy wet season battered by winds and steady, sodden downpour, followed by fetid warm months, when “clouds of mosquitoes rendered sleep utterly out of the question.” Packs of coyotes preyed on the campsites at night. Four years were all that John could take toiling on that infernal squalid slope, but he did relatively well, considering. Regular shipments of gold were sent by courier to family in Illinois, so much, in fact, that large nuggets were passed down to generations of the McWilliams clan.
But it wasn’t enough for him to be welcomed upon his return.
In late January of 1852, John showed up in Dwight, a tiny farming community near Griggsville, where his younger brother, David, now flirted with success. David owned a mercantile, McWilliams and Judd, which provided equipment for crops and happened to have the only safe in town. Thus, when local farmers got paid and needed a secure place to deposit their cash, David parlayed his little safe into the Bank of Dwight. It became clear soon enough that there was no place in it for John. He stayed just long enough to marry his sweetheart, pretty Mary Dana, then enlisted in an Illinois volunteer infantry regiment and disappeared into the mist.