by Bob Spitz
The old prospector—John McWilliams Sr.—didn’t attend the wedding, but he sent a gift that was more precious than anything they’d anticipated. It was an honorable discharge of sorts—his blessing for John to leave Odell at long last and for the newlyweds to relocate to Pasadena, where he lived. But while Caro would, in later years, retell this story with a smile, the gift from “Father,” as she called him, turned out to be a mixed blessing at best. The elder McWilliams insisted that the couple live with him, that John work alongside him, that they consult him on any decision pertaining to future plans, all of which dealt Caro’s independence a serious blow. Caro could manage John’s traditional nature, but his father was a tougher customer. The old man’s stare, it was said, could turn your soul into salt. When he was around, Caro took pains to mind her p’s and q’s.
In the relationship with her father-in-law, Caro was respectful to a fault, but she always felt a binding tension between them. It seemed like a competition—they were competing for his son’s/her husband’s attention. Even in small, unimportant matters like meals and attire a raised eyebrow from McWilliams Sr. could hijack John’s loyalty. Once, in fact, Father ordered his son to change his shirt before leaving the house, even though Caro had picked it out for John moments before. Other times he dictated the details of dinners down to the amount of salt used in a particular dish. There was little latitude for a new bride’s touch. Father and son huddled over land deals all day long, while Caro tended house in a perfunctory fashion. In the evenings their dinners were stiff, plodding affairs. She worked hard in order to fit into this routine, although, God knows, it placed a strain on the couple’s new marriage.
But John encouraged her, kept her chin up, promised better days ahead. He was “a good egg,” according to Julia, who heard stories about how her father held that marriage together, stories that later would prove despairing to her. John was a different man in those early days in Pasadena, when “growing up with the country” seemed like an ever-evolving godsend. The city was custom-tailored to his deliberate Midwestern style, a style whose Victorian passions and rigid philosophies stood in contrast to the heathen Los Angeles, which was ten miles from Pasadena “as the Rolls-Royces fly.” The city had its practical side, too, none of the boisterous indulgence of L.A., none of the flash or the clangor. Fenced off from those decadent forces, John and Caro found their kind of people in Pasadena, a discriminating country-club set whose high-toned high jinks and ritualistic pastimes created a well-defined division between the Elite and the Otherwise. “It was quite a social place,” recalls Julia’s sister-in-law, Jo McWilliams, a Pasadena native. John and Caro took advantage of all the scene had to offer. They tapped into a circle of young, wealthy snowbirds from the East, and joined the exclusive Valley Hunt Club, whose Sunday-night suppers and annual theme balls, such as the Sheik’s Frolic, gave them a place to ride, trapshoot, play tennis, and swim.
The Valley Hunt, as it was called, also gave them entry to an in-crowd that would advance their rising status as members-elect to what one knowledgeable observer called “the crème de la crème of California.” These weren’t your run-of-the-mill plutocrats. It was said that “rich people who move to southern California do not go to Pasadena to live unless they have had money for at least two decades.” And rich Pasadenans didn’t join the Valley Hunt unless they had money to burn. John had exactly what the guidelines called for—the right pedigree, an abiding moralism, a bulging portfolio, and a wife from patrician stock—and Caro already held sway with this crowd. There were plenty of familiar faces from back East, debs from Smith and Wellesley and New York’s Social Register who had married well and prospered. The couples entertained each other with frequent well-staffed dinners and compared family notes, although John and Caro were childless.
That changed in August 1912, just as the McWilliams family, père et fils, were planning a move further west, to a recently built, much grander home on South Euclid Avenue, with gardens and palms and a huge view of the mountains. Caro thought she and John should live by themselves, perhaps closer to town, anywhere that gave her some privacy from her in-laws. The gregarious, fun-loving woman needed her space, space to run her own home, to express her opinions freely, to make her own mistakes, space to relax and to breathe, without the old prospector, Father, looking over her shoulder. Though Caro had raised all reasonable objections, John convinced her that the move would benefit his future—their future. It would be temporary, just until he was more established in the community.
So that was the plan: they would all move to South Euclid together, where John and Caro would enjoy their own en suite wing of the house, with a veranda off their bedroom, overlooking the camellias. It was a substantial three-story affair, but unlike any of the many popular Mission style or Swiss chalet style or French manor style or Gothic stone homes that neighbored the grounds. No, Father had commissioned his own faux-style mini-mansion to resemble the kind of solid Midwestern farmhouse of his childhood: a warren of bright, high-ceilinged rooms, a back staircase, the kind of wraparound porch that invited the family to pull up a rocking chair and sip iced tea on warm afternoons. At the last minute, he had added servants’ quarters whose level differed by two steps from the main residence. It was a stunner as far as new houses went, and even Caro had to admit that the place suited their needs.
But the best-laid plans went awry when Caro discovered she was pregnant. It was a well-known fact that Father was allergic to children. “Seen but not heard” was a McWilliams family credo. A screaming baby just wouldn’t do. Of course, Father never said as much, but he suggested that it might be to everyone’s benefit if John and Caro kept the State Street house, at least for a while, until “everybody” got settled.
So that became the new plan: Father would move into the South Euclid house ahead of Caro’s delivery, his son and daughter-in-law would remain behind on their own, and the entire clan would assemble on Sundays, precisely at six, for family dinner—a plan that secretly pleased everyone involved. The details necessary to revise that plan were never fully spelled out.
But one thing was certain: life in the John McWilliams Jr. household would never be settled again.
Two
“On Her Way”
It seems only right somehow that, a few days before Julia Child’s birth, when all of Southern California was captivated by events surrounding the Los Angeles bribery trial of Clarence Darrow, a new column began running in the Pasadena Evening Post. With the title “Practical Meals for Pasadena Housewives,” the city’s young homemakers were encouraged to prepare three square meals a day, selecting from a menu that included such standard cupboard fare as farina, baked potatoes and eggs, broiled chops, and sliced tomato salad, along with a special recipe of the day. The premiere piece, written with the kind of instructive detail only a home ec teacher could love, might have been called “Mastering the Art of Cooking with Canned Goods.”
“Open a can of salmon early in the morning, turn it out and flake the fish, discarding skin and bones,” it began. Later the same day, after what one can only imagine has been hours during which the salmon festered in the Pasadena heat, various fillers are added, including “two teaspoons of baking powder and sufficient sifted flour to make a thick batter.” This whole concoction is then dropped “into a kettle half-filled with smoking-hot fat … and cook[ed] like thick pancakes.”
As Julia might have later deadpanned: “Indeed!”
Clearly America was waiting for someone to introduce better food. Julia Carolyn McWilliams arrived in the nick of time, following an ungodly stretch of labor at Pasadena Hospital. Her size at birth was nothing out of the ordinary—seven pounds, eight ounces—no indication of her subsequent prodigious height. Nor was there any disagreement over what to name the baby. For a while, Caro toyed with naming her Dorothy Deane, after her ailing sister; however, she hewed to the original plan: after herself if it was a girl, otherwise there’d be another installment in the long line of John McWilliamses.
Julia’s student years at the Katharine Branson School, 1928 (Photo credit 2.1)
Her parents were thrilled with the baby. “She’s the spitting image of her mother,” John exclaimed, while handing out cigars on whose wrapper was stamped It’s a Girl! to everyone he encountered. In fact, Julia’s hair was light brown at first, not red like Caro’s, nor did she have the supple Weston mouth. She had her mother’s heart-shaped face and sensitive eyes, but her father’s patrician features and stately chin. It would be several more years before her most identifiable attribute emerged: the voice, a high-pitched warble that descended directly from the Weston side. The family called it “hooting,” the result of unusually long vocal cords, which gave the voice a kind of comical slide-whistle effect. Caro had the voice, and so did her siblings. With Julia, however, it would eventually be launched into an inimitable cultural brand, like the NBC chime or Bob Dylan’s husky growl.
Only a few weeks after Julia’s birth, a mammoth collection of new recipes was published that underscored “the progress of the last few years” taking place in the American kitchen. A New Book of Cookery would be Fannie Farmer’s final contribution to her extraordinary cookbook canon, but it signaled a huge sea change away from the domestic science movement popular at the turn of the century—a trend that gave us processed cheese, sliced white bread, and instant mashed potatoes—and a return to the more traditional methods of food preparation. Miss Farmer’s 860 new recipes relied on cooking instead of chemistry. Her approach was that the process be analytical and precise—both qualities related to science—but ultimately “delicious.” Successful beyond her dreams and devoutly reform-minded, Farmer was inured to criticism that her sauces for this collection were too rich, too decadent, and already pushing beyond the typical bland fare to focus on recipes more creative and international in scope: Spanish Lamb Chops, Chicken Maroc, Eggs à la Russe, Bavarian Veal.
Eventually, Fannie Farmer’s outlook would have a huge impact on Julia’s life. At the time, however, and until she left for college, Julia’s worldview was restricted by the insularity of Southern California. For a young girl, it was the paradise that she’d later extol—a spacious home set in a posh residential neighborhood, the natural playground of the Arroyo Seco, her family’s seaside retreat in nearby San Malo, and all points in between—a paradise as delicious and satisfying as any culinary feast.
And no one’s childhood was more satisfying than Julia’s. There was a house full of love, a community full of promise, and for two years Caro and John doted on their infant daughter with the kind of dizzy devotion that a newborn gleans. Caro’s attachment was especially moving. In a formal picture taken when Julia was six weeks old, Caro’s gaze conveys a soft, affecting tenderness, while Julia, resting upon a lacy crocheted pillow, stares intently toward the camera, her tiny hands clasped across a white lace smock with pleated front and puff sleeves. On the other side of the picture, in a loopy scrawl, someone had written: “The Little Goddess.” While Julia was still very young, her mother spent long lazy afternoons reading her stories. There was a small, wooden bookcase in the corner of Julia’s bedroom crammed with well-thumbed volumes of children’s favorites, among them: Freckles by E. Boyd Smith, Mother Carey’s Chickens by Kate Douglas Wiggin, the Beatrix Potter classics, Tales of Peter Rabbit and The Tale of Mr. Tod, Alice Caldwell’s Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, and, of course, the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen. Julia would curl up on the living room couch, listening raptly, while Caro delivered the narrative in a variety of stagy voices until, at some point each afternoon, the child would drift off to sleep.
It was idyllic in a formative sense, but Julia was an unusually high-spirited child. Her mother was constantly running through the house, frantically calling out for her daughter after Julia had inched off, exploring some new cluttered corner or wedging herself under a low-slung table. Because the wide French doors were left open most days, Caro was particularly fearful that Julia would wander off outside, making her way off the porch, through the garden, and into the deeply rutted street. “One of these days we’ll have to put up a fence,” she’d lament in exasperation, until eventually she did exactly that, cordoning off rooms with little accordion fences.
That may have contained Julia, but not enough to keep her out of trouble. “I locked myself in the bathroom and they got the fire department to get me out,” Julia recalled. And as she became more ambulatory, her antics grew peskier.
Neighbors who lived several blocks away would come upon a tiny figure sitting on the curb outside their homes, attempting to throw stones at horse-drawn carriages. Or lob a ball into an open-hatched car. John’s hard-assed father, hearing of his granddaughter’s shenanigans, exhorted Caro to get on the girl’s case, but Caro would throw up her hands and say, “She’s a child, for goodness’ sake,” refusing to scold Julia with anything more than a sigh.
Life became eminently more complicated when the family expanded in size. A son, John III, was born in August 1914, during a family holiday in Santa Barbara. Like many Pasadena families, the McWilliamses summered on nearby beaches in order to escape the inland heat. They were staying with John’s sister, Bessie, when Caro went into labor, and rather than scramble home over the hilly coastal roads, the delivery became a rather spontaneous affair.
With two children to raise, Caro and John moved into a larger house a few streets away, on Magnolia Avenue. Finally, a place of their own! Not that they were entirely free from John’s despotic father. Conveniently—or not—he lived just around the block. In fact, Julia would often cut through backyards to visit, even though, as she later said, “He scared the living daylights out of me.” Alas, it was not her grandfather’s crusty manner that drew Julia to his door, but an ever-present plate of doughnuts that sat on the windowsill in the kitchen. They were like catnip to a girl who complained she was “always hungry”—dense circles of cake batter that had been deep-fried in oil and dusted in powdered sugar with the faintest whiff of nutmeg. They were delicious, one of her grandmother’s Midwestern recipes that never failed to please. Julia would pick up a doughnut and hold it up to her nose, inhaling its sweet, exotic aroma before taking a first bite. God, they were things of beauty. And she was always hungry.
Even at such a young age, food was always on Julia’s mind.
But—where to find it? Not on Magnolia Avenue, that was for sure. Caro hardly ever made dinner once they moved, and when she did it was Alka-Seltzer time. “All she knew how to cook was baking-powder biscuits and Welsh rarebit,” Julia recalled. There was some genial nonsense about codfish balls, as well, deep-fried specimens as hard and deadly as one of Grandfather’s mini-balls and drowned in a gluey white sauce that would clot on impact. They may have been “delicious” to some castaway stranded on a New England whaler, but were hardly enough to satisfy an interminably hungry child. Fortunately, Caro employed a cook to make most of the family dinners, a black woman from the valley who prepared acceptable meals—mostly standard meat-and-potatoes fare from The Boston Cooking School Cookbook.
But when push came to shove, Julia headed to her grandparents’ house. Lo and behold, Grandmother McWilliams, whom Julia described as “a modest and retiring little woman with gray hair in a bun at the back of her neck,” was, in her granddaughter’s estimation, “a great cook.” Growing up on the Plains, where the finest provisions lay right outside the front door, she learned cooking as a second language—farm-fresh omelets, succulent roasts, rustic stews, home-baked pies, hand-churned ice cream, all part and parcel of her seasonal repertoire. And chicken—the word alone made Julia’s mouth water—“some of the best broiled chicken I ever ate,” she declared, long after eating in the finest French bistros. Of course, Grandmother McWilliams had an ace up her sleeve: she was schooled at the elbow of her family’s French cook. Imagine that: a French cook in the Midwest in the late 1800s, where dreaming of France was quite a feat. But having a French cook at your service—oh-la-la!
Still, one didn’t acknowledge on
e’s Frenchness around Julia’s father. Somewhere along the way, John decided the French posed a threat. What kind of threat he never quite said, but he had a bill of particulars. The French were intellectuals, he said, making it sound about as unsavory as escargot. They were snooty and artsy. When you came right down to it, they were … well, French. That alone was enough to make his case. No, John didn’t trust the French one damn bit (pardon his French). The only thing John hated more than snooty, artsy intellectuals were snooty, artsy French intellectuals. It was a favorite rant of his that often dominated the table talk.
Since moving west, John McWilliams Jr. had become a very opinionated man. He distrusted government, or at least any statesman with a progressive point of view. And anything foreign. And intellectuals. And Jews. Just for starters. “My grandfather was fairly outspoken when it came to his prejudices,” Phila Cousins recalls. “He would make all these right-wing pronouncements that horrified Grandma Caro, but everyone knew better than to disagree with him.”
Fortunately, his sympathies never rubbed off on young Julia. As a child, she was “completely disinterested” in her father’s partisan views. Besides, when it came to politics, John never attempted to engage his children. Their role was to remain silent and listen—listen and learn. It was only much later, when Julia had formed her own opinions, that she distanced herself from his bias and intolerance. “The way I lived my life never sat well with Pop,” Julia observed. “It was bad enough when I became The French Chef.”