by Bob Spitz
It was awkward, being the biggest kid in the class. And in school, for the most part, she stood out from the pack: one could always pick out Julia in the annual student photos. She was placed in the back row, usually among the boys, most of whose heads peaked at a point just below her earlobes. It was impossible for her to go unnoticed. Yet her size was never a source of ridicule or exclusion. At the Polytechnic School, where Julia spent her grammar-school years, she attracted a devoted group of friends who were impressed by her ability to throw a softball as hard as any boy or to shoot a basketball within fingertips of the rim. When it came to sports, she was a natural. Betty Parker, a Poly classmate, described Julia as a tomboy—“more boy than girl.” But there was something deeper in Julia McWilliams’s makeup, something strong and self-confident, that allowed her to swing easily between her feminine and tomboy identities. It was not unusual to see Julia sewing costumes for a skit or singing in a choir. Like most girls, she longed to play “the beautiful princess” parts in school productions, even though they eluded her. The girly girls, those who played with dolls and studied ballet, felt as close to Julia as they did to any of their like-minded friends.
But Julia wasn’t a girly girl—not by any stretch of the imagination. Each morning before school, she’d head across the street, swinging by the Halls’ back door to scoop up Charlie, after which they’d tear off on their bikes, slicing in and out of traffic on their way to Poly. Julia was a terror, hell on wheels, swooping along those busy streets like a dervish. It was a free-for-all in those days—no traffic lights, no regulations. Danger lurked at every corner. Although she could be physically awkward on her feet, Julia handled a bike with amazing dexterity, and her nerve often pushed her into madcap situations with it. Hooking rides was one such example. When the spirit moved them, Julia and Charlie would pedal up behind a bus or truck, grab hold of the fender, and glide along at breakneck speeds until they reached their destination, then simply let go. If they were daring enough, they’d hook from one truck to another, which meant flinging themselves through intersections with reckless disregard.
Her one nod to discipline was a weekly dancing class attended—via parental decree—by all the neighborhood kids, an exercise with all the mirth of a root canal that stretched from the fourth through the ninth grades. In a waxy lamplit ballroom at the Vista del Arroyo Hotel, two dozen boys and girls suffered the imperatives of old Mrs. Travis, who drilled them in the starchy protocols of Victorian etiquette. A dress code was carefully scrutinized: boys wore suits and ties, their hair slicked back with pomade, girls donned their Sunday finest, and everyone sported white gloves and black patent-leather shoes. The emphatic proviso was manners, manners, manners.
Julia was a quick study in the manners department. “She had a very proper side to her,” says Katie Nevins. There was something innate in the way she handled herself, something almost aristocratic passed down from generations of Westons and McWilliamses. Julia curtseyed like a governess when asked to dance, kept a respectable arm’s-length distance between her and her partner, and always thanked him for the pleasure. The same young girl who hooked home behind trucks, smoked cigars, and instigated any number of naughty schemes could “turn on the charm” when the situation arose. Surprisingly for a “giantess,” Julia was also light on her feet. In no time, she’d managed a pretty mean box step, while the fox trot and the waltz took her more time to master. Julia could dance—in fact, she loved to dance—but few partners ever gave her a twirl. Most boys—those who were there against their will, to begin with—dreaded being coupled with the tallest girl in the class. They shied from catching Julia’s eye; otherwise, stiff and unsmiling, they led her solemnly around the floor, eyes level with a spot somewhere below her collarbone. “She blocked out the light,” complained a reluctant dance partner. One poor mutt even admitted to hiding out in the bathroom until it was time for him to go home.
That dance class was anathema to boys and girls alike. They lay awake nights, scheming of ways to get out of it. For the most part, however, the kids in Julia’s circle led a decidedly charmed life. Adventure abounded in a neighborhood teeming with hideaways. They explored ravines and caves in the Arroyo Seco, where every childhood fantasy came to life. From one of its escarpments, called Devil’s Gate, Julia could survey the whole San Gabriel Valley, all the way west to Los Angeles, where miles of fertile farmland were being developed like a spreading virus. Or she could watch the hard hats at a sandy outpost of the canyon work the jaws of a rapacious backhoe as it consumed tons of dirt from a basin where the Rose Bowl would eventually stand. Hot days—which nature delivers practically year-round in Pasadena—demanded a dip in one of the ubiquitous backyard swimming pools or at the Brookside Plunge, a public rec center, where “white women and girls were restricted to one day a week.” There was fishing and trips up the funicular to the Mount Lowe Observatory and, once in a great while, outings with Caro to Los Angeles, which Julia found “so exciting in the twenties.”
Excitement was L.A.’s unique allure, but for Julia, “Pasadena had it all.” She could tick off any number of virtues that captivated her about the city, with one conspicuous exception: food—it wasn’t part of her Pasadena zeitgeist. Although an enthusiast at the table when it came to meals, the food Julia ate was of little or no interest to her. “Our family had a series of hired cooks, and they’d produce heaping portions of typical American fare,” she recalled. She consumed whatever was put in front of her, usually oversauced haunches of meat cooked, as Pop insisted, to a ghastly “medium gray.”
Restaurant food was of little or no consequence. “Few Pasadena families went out to eat,” according to Jo McWilliams. In fact, the restaurant scene in America had crumbled in a precipitous collapse, owing, in large part, to Prohibition, which made high-end cooking unsustainable throughout the 1920s. But Pasadena, in particular, was a gastronomic wasteland. Aside from the posh hotels, where upscale food was a mandatory staple, its most fashionable dining rooms were coffeeshops, automats, cafeterias, and luncheonettes, which reflected the convergence of economics and domestic-science cookery. “You could get a pretty good hot dog or a ham-and-cheese sandwich,” Julia recalled, along with staples from the labs of national brands: Heinz ketchup, Coca-Cola, Campbell’s soup, Borden’s sweetened milk. The sole bastion of fine cuisine was François’s French Restaurant, a small boîte on Colorado Street that was as dubiously fine as it was dubiously French. Its owner, François Giametti, was unmistakably Italian, and his menu, featuring a mixed bag of roasts and red-sauce spaghetti, claimed “our famous French dressing” as its link to a foreign heritage.
Still, that was enough to keep John McWilliams from its doors. For anything French—or anything continental, for that matter—Julia’s father felt only contempt. But in October 1926, a few months after Julia’s fourteenth birthday, John and Caro broke protocol by taking her out to eat in a foreign locale. Prohibition had driven them to drink … in Tijuana, just south of the Mexican border from San Diego, where the streets were filled with Anglos flouting the Eighteenth Amendment. Although a notorious seat of hedonism, where pleasures of every kind were available for fifty cents or less, the town had become a magnet for a coterie of Los Angeles nightcrawlers intent on making a new scene. It was party time in Tijuana, with bars and restaurants packed to the walls and liquor flowing like the Rio Grande.
At John’s insistence, they avoided the casinos and honky-tonks and made a beeline for Caesar’s Place on the dirt-caked Avenida Revolución. Two years earlier, during an unforeseen July Fourth run on the kitchen, chef Caesar Cardini had averted disaster by concocting a dinner salad—who ever heard of a dinner salad?—from what was left in the larder. In a stroke of genius, he assembled it tableside, with all the finesse of a close‑up magician: a bouquet of tender hearts of romaine lettuce were fanned out on a plate and swaddled in a rich, creamy Parmesan dressing. A few tomato slices were added, some puréed garlic for pizzazz. And, by the way—it was meant to be eaten, leaf by leaf, with
the fingers! It was an instant sensation that captivated his clientele and drew a surge of Hollywood celebrities clamoring for—what else?—a Caesar salad.
John and Caro “were wildly excited” that they should finally lunch at Caesar’s restaurant. “My parents, of course, ordered the salad,” Julia remembered. “Caesar himself rolled the big cart up to the table [and] tossed the romaine in a great wooden bowl.” It was a sight to behold for a fourteen-year-old with a serious appetite. Fifty years later she could envision the artfully flamboyant process. “I can see him break two eggs over that romaine and roll them in, the greens going all creamy as the eggs flowed over them.” What decadence! “Two eggs in a salad? And garlic-flavored croutons, and grated Parmesan cheese?” The way he conjured that dressing was an unforgettable performance. And yet the lingering memory for Julia was of her father eating a salad. “Before then,” she said, “salads were considered rather exotic, definitely foreign, probably Bolshevist, and, anyway, food only for sissies.”
If there was anything John McWilliams loathed more than exotica, foreigners, and Bolshevists, it was sissies. Frenchmen, of course, were unpardonable sissies. And artists! Artists of any kind had a chromosome in the wrong chamber. John suspected anyone who wasn’t an upright, honest straight-shooter—someone like himself, that is—of deviant behavior. Since moving to California, he had become gradually more right-wing and irritable, a hard-ass contrarian whose positions would turn more extreme—and uglier—with each year. He erupted in red-faced tirades when anyone challenged his views, and his views were expressed with clockwork regularity. John despised Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations and lashed out at anyone expressing pro-union sentiments. “Reds,” “pinks,” and subversives threatened America’s stability. Negroes and Mexicans: a drain on decent society; Jews were contemptible, beneath his respect. A man’s man—someone like himself, that is—engaged in business, invested conservatively, drank bourbon, and voted Republican. All others—the foreigners and Bolshevists and Jews and sissies—be damned.
John’s polemics bewildered his eldest daughter. Julia idolized her father; he held a heroic presence in her life. She admired her father’s stature and success in the influential business community, his prestige, and his aristocratic bearing. Long and sinewy, with broad shoulders and ice-blue eyes, he dominated people with his tenacity as well as with his size. He was exceedingly effective at imposing his will. As an entrepreneur, John was shrewd and meticulous, given to calculated moves that disarmed his detractors. Everyone agrees that his charm was considerable. In the house, however, John was a despot: he demanded unqualified respect—attention to his utterings, silence when he was working. Obedience was sacred. And he was stern, hard on his children, especially when it came to Julia. She found it blindingly difficult to please him. “My father was too hard on Julia because she was the oldest,” recalled Dort. “He could be very intimidating.” Especially toward a daughter from whom he expected great modesty. During dinner table conversation, when Julia might be bubbling and fidgety, he could cut her off with a raised eyebrow in her direction. Or a dismissive cough. Or lethal silence. In those instances, Julia would have to shut down, to subvert her personality in order to please her father, and she learned to do so with crushing disappointment. It was a process that promised endless collisions.
Inevitably, Julia took her disappointment out on Dort. As the baby of the family, Dort enjoyed privileges that grated on Julia, building resentment that was manifest by cruelty and retribution. Dort “was an easy target,” says her daughter, Phila. She had hair that stood on end—and had a personality that stood on end, too. “Even as a child, it was very easy to provoke her, which Julia would take advantage of whenever possible. Often, after [Dort] was done playing outside and tried to enter the house, Julia would lock the front door. And when she finally let [Dort] in, Julia would pretend she didn’t know her.” Looming over her younger sister, Julia would demand: “Who are you? What do you want here?” As Dort, flummoxed, grew ever more upset, Julia would announce: “I’m calling the police.” Eventually, Dort learned how to neutralize this prank, but Julia refined and expanded her strategy. One of her favorite ploys was to cast doubt on Dort’s origin. “Julia told my mom that she was adopted,” Phila says. It was an elaborate hoax that stretched over months. Of course, Julia thought it was hysterically funny, but Dort “would go nuts.”
Of all Julia’s mischief, nothing tormented Dort as much as their competition on the tennis court in the backyard. The girls would take turns drawing the chalk lines in the red clay dust, but no matter where Dort hit the ball, Julia called it out. A well-placed shot in the server’s box—“Out!” A return dropped neatly inside the baseline—“Out!” Dort would kick and scream in her own defense, point like a detective at the evidence in the dirt, to which Julia would imperviously shrug. “Out!”
Caro wisely refused to take sides. Her practice was to let the girls work out their own differences. Raising three kids was a handful. Lord knows, she had enough trouble keeping their bodies in proper balance. There were so many aspects she had to watch over. Their noses, for one thing. Caro was convinced that rubbing a child’s nose kept it supple and small. So every afternoon at a prescribed hour Julia, John, and Dort had their noses massaged. And their stomachs, for another—each child got a dreaded tablespoon of cod liver oil every day, “for regularity.” Julia remembers taking it as one would “a shot of poison.” She “held [her] breath, shuddered and tried not to gag.”
And their lungs—fresh air was the elixir of life; the good citizens of Pasadena, in particular, were addicted to it. The papers were full of articles preaching what would come to be known as New Age advice, and those eager to hear the message strained for every word. Quacks as well as “a generous sprinkling of … fortunetellers, swamis, and purveyors of ‘electronic vibrations’ … were plentiful and popular in Pasadena,” all of whom contributed to the general health craze. “Medical experts of the time advocated living, or at least sleeping, out-of-doors, for everyone, not just respiratory sufferers,” wrote a local historian. So almost every house had a wraparound sleeping porch to accommodate a grouping of beds, and the McWilliamses were no exception. John insisted the children sleep outside, “rain or shine, 365 days a year.”
Julia always claimed she never got enough rest. Perhaps the arrangement on the porch intruded on her peace and quiet—or inflamed allergies, any number of which she and her sister fought throughout their childhoods. They fought among themselves, too. At night, with the porch flaps rolled up and a view of the brilliant nightscape overhead, the girls would start in on each other, needling, needling, until one of them, usually Dort, was reduced to tears. It was a classic sibling rivalry. Julia, older and brimming with self-confidence, bullied her younger sister any chance she got, pushing Dort’s buttons—though not to any extreme, not in a way that did permanent damage. “There was plenty of love between them,” insists Dort’s daughter, Phila. But, as she said, her mother was an easy target—and Julia was expert when it came to hitting the bull’s-eye.
TARGET PRACTICE ENDED abruptly when, in 1927, Julia’s parents decided to send her to boarding school. This was in no way intended as punishment for her behavior toward Dort, nor did it reflect her evident uninterest at Poly, whose curriculum ended anyway with the ninth grade. As far as Caro and John could tell, Julia was as happy and focused as any girl her age. A little more restless perhaps, but nothing that required an extra measure of discipline. Rather, it followed a Weston family tradition. Caro and her sisters, Nellie and Louise, attended Miss Capen’s School in Northampton, Massachusetts. Boarding school, the family believed, gave a daughter’s education a larger perspective, including the vital elements of finishing and charm.
It seems illogical, therefore, that they chose the Katharine Branson School. Located in Ross, California (fifteen miles north of San Francisco), a town not unlike Pasadena—bucolic, wealthy, and devoutly conservative—there was every expectation that Julia would adapt. But had
they done their due diligence, Julia’s parents would have discovered that KBS viewed finishing and charm as scornfully as they might partying. The school, founded in 1920 and rooted in a grind of classical studies, “believed [in] a college education for all young people who were endowed with sufficient gray matter.” It wasn’t a marriage mill, like so many of the private boarding schools of the era. Students were groomed to attend a prestigious university and assumed that KBS stood for “knowledge before sex.” But college preparation was not its sole purpose, according to the school’s eponymous headmistress. “We wanted the girls to learn not only to think independently,” she wrote, “but to exercise self-discipline, to cherish self-respect, to value things of the spirit as well as things of the mind … and [to have] a high expectation of one’s self and one’s school.”
In 1927, the year that Julia arrived, KBS wasn’t yet much of a school. The Residence Hall—a creamy stucco Mission structure with dark wood interiors and big living rooms—could accommodate only eight boarders, and had been built on the steep rise of an old dairy farm so that anyone standing on its veranda overlooked a patchwork of woods and fields that seemed to isolate the campus from the outside world. But “the Res,” as it was known, doubled as the dining hall and the library, with two other cottages—“Oaks” and “Stairways”—converted into cramped classrooms. A gym and pool were in various stages of construction; otherwise, there was little else in the way of functional buildings.