by Bob Spitz
Her politics, thankfully, were still a long way off. In any case, there was too much for Julia to discover beyond the front yard. She loved to roam the neighborhood, from the top of their street to the orchards on Orange Grove Avenue, where she picked up fallen fruit and gorged herself on their sticky-sweet juice. As soon as she was physically able, she pedaled a tricycle around the block, although the streets were fairly dangerous, shared by horse-drawn carriages, trolleys, and cars. It was easy to spot the young Julia McWilliams, who was unusually tall for her age. From her fourth birthday, she started shooting up into a gangly stalk of a girl, with extremely long arms and an untamable mess of hair. Julia was noticeably larger than the other kids her age—and her behavior around them became more striking.
In an era when young girls were expected to be demure and behave as princesses, Julia indulged in rambunctious behavior. She was “always the instigator,” according to an entry in her mother’s diary—the first one to suggest an adventure or a prank and the first one to lead the charge. Even more striking, considering Julia played mostly with older kids, girls and boys alike, all of whom bowed to her enthusiasms. It was easy to persuade them to go along with her schemes. Always the instigator. Yet more than that—more a case of speaking up. If a playground group put on a skit, Julia usually wangled the lead. If there was a dare on the table, Julia no doubt made it—and took it.
A few weeks later, Julia began going to school, and from that day on her independent spirit began to emerge. The proper age for enrollment was five years old, but her parents decided against a public school anyway; the choices available weren’t up to their particular standards. The Garfield School, a few blocks away on California Street, catered to a diverse mix of students—children who grew up on Millionaire’s Row as well as those whose parents were Mexican laborers—and the focus there was more disciplinary than instructive; the Arroyo Seco School, opened that year to serve strictly Anglo families, was still largely untested. Instead, Julia was sent to a nearby Montessori school that emphasized hands-on activities—seeing and feeling and doing—as opposed to the imaginative play of most kindergartens. Jukie, as she’d been nicknamed, mastered the school’s physical drills intended to develop a youngster’s hand–eye coordination: hammering round pegs into round holes, squares into squares; organizing containers so that they fit inside one another; rearranging alphabet blocks in their proper order. “I started doing handwork when I was three,” Julia recalled. “We rang bells, learned the scale, put buttons on button frames.” There were exercises that stressed graceful movement and good posture, handwriting prompts that sharpened sensory-motor skills. Precision and control, practice and dexterity: all prerequisites for chopping, dicing, and slicing. Although Julia marched to the beat of her own drum, she learned to follow the rules, to listen to instructions: all prerequisites for completing a recipe.
Of course, none of this was on Julia’s mind at the time. By 1917, all of her attention had turned to the family, growing again with the coming of spring. Caro was pregnant—“For the last time!” she swore—and Julia devoted herself to praying for a sister. Her brother, John, was tolerable, as brothers went, but definitely on a different wavelength. He was an unusually dozy boy, adrift, almost withdrawn, which his parents made light of to mask their dismay, but privately they were saying that John was “slow.” He had trouble concentrating on the simplest concepts; life, in general, seemed to confound him. He was a lovely boy, with an easy, exuberant smile, but “somewhere in the machinery a wire was crossed.” Phrases often came out backward. He was clumsy, easily distracted. As a child, Julia just thought he acted goofy. It wasn’t until much later, well into his adulthood, that John learned he was “severely dyslexic.” “The boys in the family were all dyslexic,” says his niece, Phila. “It was genetic—two chromosomes right next to each other.” Caro should have recognized the symptoms. Her brother, Donald, was much the same way. But the less fuss made over John the better, she decided, especially with another baby on the way.
In any case, Julia got her wish. Caro gave birth to a girl on April 17, 1917, and there was no doubt whatsoever about her name. Two months earlier, Caro’s twenty-three-year-old sister, Dorothy, collapsed in her husband’s arms and died instantly, the demon tuberculosis finally catching up with her. It came as no surprise when the baby was named in her honor—Dorothy Deane McWilliams. The family never called her Dorothy, however. From that day on, she would always be Dort.
Despite the age difference, Julia seemed to take a special pride in her younger sister. Dort was the baby, and for that reason, it seems Julia went overboard feeling responsible for her, taking care of her so that she didn’t get into trouble. She dragged Dort along on all of her escapades, up Fair Oaks Avenue, through the groves, even into the arroyo, where Julia was forbidden to play. Julia gave Dort the attention she craved. But the four-year difference between them would eventually take its toll.
A sibling rivalry developed almost as soon as the McWilliams family moved into a new, much larger house, at 1207 South Pasadena Avenue. The sprawling two-story structure occupied the best location on the street, a lush two-acre lot with a rolling lawn, fine gardens, a copse of orange and avocado trees, and a clay tennis court, where almost every morning, before the noonday sun made play unbearable, Caro would face off against her friends after their husbands left for work. Julia always “loved this house,” describing it in detail, years later, as “a happy, warm, enfolding” place. With its attractive shingled façade, wide eaves, wraparound porches, and a bay window overlooking the grounds, it was a house that represented the family’s upward spiral in the community. In a relatively short time, John McWilliams Jr. had made his mark in a city of fabulously rich men. A series of lucrative investments and land deals placed him on the fringe of their golden circle, with enough respect and influence to function in their orbit. The house added to John’s already prominent image. It was a place where he and Caro could entertain in style, although John’s tightwad tendencies put a damper on those affairs.
The move, for Julia, was a dream come true. She had her own corner suite of rooms on the second floor, which was flooded by sunlight, and enough built-in shelves for a menagerie of stuffed animals. More important, she made instant friends with the Hall kids who lived across the street. Charlie Hall was in the same class as Julia, but his sister, Babe, who was one year younger, had a sparkle that appealed. Babe Hall was a wiry little firecracker, one of those girls for whom the rules were made to be broken. There was a persuasiveness about her even then, an irresistible rascally streak that lapsed into mischief, with her intriguing proposals for unsupervised play. They could smoke or play pranks, even “take things” that didn’t exactly belong to them but were nevertheless up for grabs, like fruit left unattended at the posh Raymond Hotel or plunder from one of the many construction sites nearby. In no time, Julia and Babe were inseparable. They formed the McHall gang, which featured a revolving-door cast, but usually included Charlie and John when the girls were feeling benevolent, and various playmates from up the street who adhered to their whims.
From 1918 until the summer of 1921, Julia and Babe Hall ran roughshod through their neighborhood, flouting authority and raising as much hell as two girls could get away with. It was not unusual to see them tooling around on bicycles, their baskets overflowing with doo-dads to set some shenanigan in motion: spools of wire, safety matches, shears, nails—whatever they could get their hands on. Anyone who ran into them knew they were up to no good. Julia, especially, was developing quite a reputation. “She was always the leader, the center of things, the instigator,” according to her friend, Gay Bradley. “All activities centered around Julia, who was a lively prankster.”
Mostly, the pranks were acts of mischief. For instance, one afternoon, she and Babe climbed on the roof of a neighbor’s garage and flung mud pies at cars as they sped along Fremont Avenue. They were wildly off-target; the road was littered with muddy clumps. Occasionally, however, they managed to lan
d a few bull’s-eyes. There’d be a loud splat, followed by the awful screech of tires, at which point the girls sprawled face-flat to avoid detection, while struggling to stifle their laughter. Julia thought it was a howl, just great fun—until one enraged driver doubled back and crept up behind them. Babe jumped off the roof and scrambled over a fence with Julia hot on her trail, but the driver got his hand around her ankle and threatened to call the police. Julia’s tears must have served to distract her captor, because at some point she managed to shake free and escape.
Sometimes, the pranks were destructive. Like the time Julia and Babe dismantled a chandelier in a neighbor’s abandoned house and buried the glass finials where the owner wouldn’t find them. Or dropped rocks on cars of the Sante Fe trains as they sped beneath the Columbia Street overpass.
But too often her pranks courted danger. One time, while casing a vacant house, she and Babe decided to explore the rooms inside. The doors were padlocked, but that wasn’t going to stop them. Earlier, they had spied an open window on the second floor and, rather painstakingly, shimmied along a metal gutter under the roof until they were close enough to swing their legs through to safety. All seemed to go according to plan, until Julia snagged her finger on a piece of sharp wire. She dangled there for some time, trying desperately to free herself, before jumping and ripping away the skin, from fingernail to knuckle. Another time, while prowling around a construction site, Julia wedged herself in the chimney of a new house, requiring a little spontaneous demolition in order to rescue her.
Her curiosity was insatiable—and fed her desire to break the rules. Wherever she wasn’t supposed to be, whatever she wasn’t supposed to do, were temptations too great for Julia McWilliams to ignore. No one is sure whose idea it was to buy a mail-order cartridge gun in the name of Charlie Hall, but Julia’s fingerprints were all over that scheme. The same went for smoking, a favorite pastime of the girls. “I don’t believe there was anything they didn’t try to smoke,” Babe’s brother, Charlie, recalled. At first they used a pipe, which Julia kept in a cigar box hidden in the backyard. Later, they stole cigars from Babe’s father. Julia’s father also had cigars, which the girls smoked from their lookout high in an oak tree, but they much preferred the cigarettes from a music box in his study, slipping a piece of paper between the lid and a clasp to disable its sound.
Even on family vacations, Julia couldn’t resist doing things her own way. The McWilliamses’ annual getaway to the beach always stirred up some brouhaha or another. One particular squabble was over their dog, a high-strung Airedale by the name of Eric the Red, an ungovernable beast with a penchant for wreaking havoc. Her father forbid, absolutely forbid, Julia from taking the dog along on trips. No matter how she tried to change his mind, he wouldn’t budge. The dog, he argued, was an unnecessary bother—which didn’t stop Julia: she simply stashed Eric in a laundry basket in the backseat of the car and waited until they were twenty miles out of Los Angeles, at which point she produced the dog.
The beach came as something of a release for Julia. It was the place where she could channel her wild energy into more harmless diversions. As far as she was concerned, there was nothing as “magical” as a trip to the coast, where she could swim, climb the dunes, and walk barefoot along the sandy lanes. “I think Santa Barbara is the most beautiful place in the world,” she said often of her childhood summers, after decades spent circling the globe. Each June, she and her family, along with the maid and Dort’s nurse, joined a caravan of Pasadena families who made the annual pilgrimage north, bumping along sections of coastal highway that were nothing more than patchy dirt and logs. They steered their cars through what locals called the back country, miles of farmland that cut through Whittier and on out to the coast, over rocky ridges, climbing high into the hills, then dipping precariously toward wetlands on either side. The trip seemed endless, a hairy, dramatic journey just to get to Santa Barbara. Yet, to Julia, it ended at another locus of paradise.
It appeared like Oz, emerging from the rustic terrain, a sight to behold. The water in that horseshoe cove was such a brilliant blue, a blue the shade of the stalky irises that overran her mother’s garden. Abutting that cove the drama of jagged rocks breaking the surface, barnacled and slippery, and the distant range of mountains whose peaks filtered through the sifting haze. The smell, that salty seaside musk that soothed the senses and seeped into every pore like an invigorating balm. And the beach, the incomparable beach with its velvety pink-tinged sand, a vast, inexhaustible playground where young imaginations ran wild. These were the impressions that stayed with Julia all her life.
For several summers, the McWilliamses stayed in lovely Montecito Park—“Little Pasadena”—a community of modest gray-shingled cottages surrounded by marshy bamboo thickets, where a splash of familiar faces from back home enlivened the scene. Most of Julia’s friends from school showed up at one time or another. The weekends were especially exhilarating. There were family-oriented social gatherings on the beach, with daily picnics, spilling back into homes after nightfall. Meals were strictly informal. A smoky cloud from the cookouts, weenie roasts, hung over the enclave. “When we went out to eat there on Sunday noon, we ate at the Miramar Hotel, in a big circular dining room,” Julia recalled. “I was fascinated by the fact they served sherbet in the middle of the meal.” Formalities like that were few, however. The weeks were, for the most part, a confection of sun, surf, and sand. Caro took the kids swimming every day, dressed in mummy-mode, to ensure maximum protection from the sun. “Mother wore a black swimming costume and black stockings,” Julia remembered. Otherwise, they spent afternoons at the big city pool, with a “Tot Lot” attached, where a young instructor led children in games and craft projects.
It was magical, all right, the perfect retreat—while it lasted. Julia adored the lazy, idyllic months, even when her parents packed her off, with a cousin, to nearby Rancho Asoleado for a few weeks each July. The camp was a more structured place than she was used to, where “the girls wore knee socks and elastic-bottomed pants above the knee.” Julia, predictably, recalled only the food. “The camp,” she said, “was owned by two women who were very good cooks. Every Sunday there was a pancake race to see how many we could eat.” Smart money bet on the unusually tall girl from Pasadena. But in 1927, when plans were announced to raze Montecito Park to make way for the Biltmore Hotel, John and Caro decided to move farther along the coast.
Remarkably, they landed in an even more magical place. San Malo, a narrow slip of beach at the mouth of the Buena Vista Lagoon, was founded in 1928 by Pasadena architect Kenyon Keith as an ultraexclusive sanctuary. To an almost comic extent, it was modeled after an island fishing village off the Brittany coast, with identical oceanfront cottages built in a Disneyfied French-Norman motif, with slanted roofs and wood shingles, matching redbrick chimneys, and animal-shaped weathervanes. Keith sold off the cottages to a group of select friends, all prominent captains of industry, all “old money” from L.A. and Pasadena, who eagerly signed covenants assuring a strict code of silence—what went on in San Malo stayed in San Malo—which exists to this day. Thus, barons like the Chandlers, the Doheneys, and the Sepulvedas could maintain an iron-fisted privacy in the midst of twenty-eight acres of pristine seaside and lush gardens; in its vast gingerbread clubhouse in which members played cards at linen-covered tables; on its cobbled terraces, the scene of endless cocktail parties stocked with unlabeled bottles of Prohibition-era hooch; passing through its well-guarded gatehouse each Friday evening, in a cavalcade of chauffeur-driven vehicles that deposited the weary husbands who’d been in L.A. all week tending their empires.
Julia’s family lived just outside the gates, although they were considered adjunct members, welcome anywhere inside San Malo. “In those days, everybody knew everybody else,” recalls Julia’s girlfriend, Katie Nevins, a frequent visitor to the retreat. “The kids were on the beach all day long or sailed sailboats on the Slew,” a basin filled with brackish water, which flowed inland to the
sea. “We could wander anywhere, with one exception, the railroad tracks on the eastern end of the community, which went right by us toward Santa Barbara.” It should come as no surprise—“Julia played on the tracks whenever she got the chance.”
She also disappeared regularly into the Slew, hidden by the tall reeds, where she’d break off stems of bamboo and fashion them into makeshift pipes, in which she would stuff a pinch of tobacco or corn silk. “Many San Malo kids learned how to smoke courtesy of Julia McWilliams,” Katie Nevins says.
What they couldn’t learn from Julia, ironically, was how to cook. Several times each summer, Julia, Katie, and another friend aptly named Berry Baldwin would hijack the McWilliams kitchen, where they attempted to make jam from local strawberries. “Nobody had a damn idea how to do it,” Katie remembers, “especially Julia, who was the ringleader of the bunch. It was always a real gooey mess. Nor did she know how to cook, though, God knows, she tried.”
All types of experiments-gone-wrong emanated from that kitchen—casseroles with the density and destructive capability of a SCUD missile, sandwiches containing more sand than wich. Julia McWilliams was “a terror at the stove,” lacking flair or any kind of technical know-how.
To her credit, however, she was a prodigious eater. Julia loved food—loved food. “She could pack it away,” says a friend from the neighborhood, who recalls watching with awe and admiration as Julia wolfed down copious helpings at family meals. She ate with gusto, albeit with an indifference to the fare on her plate. Food—and more food—was essential to this ever-expanding girl’s growth. By the age of nine, Julia was “already a head taller than her playmates,” and edging into her teens she towered over everyone else. “I grew out of my clothing almost overnight,” she recalled of those gawky years, when nothing off the rack seemed to fit her leggy frame. “I was always one size bigger than you could ever buy.”