by Bob Spitz
What’s more, Mary was at home in a world from which Julia felt excluded. She not only had the Smith mind-set, she had the Smith look: a Brooks Brothers crew-neck cable-knit sweater, a pastel tweed skirt and camel’s hair coat from Best & Co., a strand of five-and-dime pearls, and brown-and-white Spaulding saddle shoes. “I didn’t have anything like this,” Julia said. “I was just an absolute mess.” The façade of a Seven Sisters coed seemed unassailable, exposing Julia as a western girl who dressed like one, not chic, like the easterners, but in ginghams and lace. Julia was despondent, an outcast. More than anything, she longed to fit in. By late November, the role of outcast was killing her. “Finally Mother came east for Thanksgiving,” Julia recalled, “and I wept upon her neck, and we went to New York and I came back with my Spaulding two-tone leather shoes, my sweater, my pearls. Then, I felt in.” At last, “I was finally in.”
In—but still indifferent. Nothing in Julia’s classes managed to engage her, a standard freshman load that included English Comp., Hygiene, History, Zoology, French, and Italian. Sidetracked and distracted, she resorted to reading mysteries, carousing, doing just enough homework for a respectable grade. Meanwhile, Mary Case burned the midnight oil, splitting their corner suite at Hubbard House into two very different zones. But a virtual split proved by no means enough. Julia’s antics never failed to crack Mary up. “I have never had a roommate who was so utterly fun to be with,” she said. But with Julia around, it was becoming impossible to concentrate on her studies. The girls got “into such terrible giggle fests” that eventually they had to swipe the fire rope from the hall, stretch it across the room, and hang their bedspreads on it so they couldn’t see each other.
While Mary hit the books, Julia immersed herself in a variety of extracurricular activities, jumping center for the Smith basketball team, on which her mother had starred, and acting in skits, most of them glib, lightweight burlesques written by one or another of the English majors planning a Broadway career. Julia loved the stage, loved the delicious theatrics involved, expressing herself eloquently, if a little over-the-top. She had a gift for it, always delivering her lines in that riveting fluttery voice. Her friends would laugh appreciatively as Julia loped across the stage, swallowing her lines with guttural abandon, never dreaming how, years later, they would become her signature shtick. To anyone observing her at the time, it seemed unlikely that Julia McWilliams would command any serious spotlight. She was outgoing and frisky, which made her popular at Smith, but never targeted for success. “A grand person generally but she does go berserk every once in awhile,” the Hubbard housemother wrote in Julia’s confidential file.
Behavior of this nature spelled uncertainty for a career-minded young woman—although the housemother might have altered her opinion slightly had she any inkling that two companies, RCA and Westinghouse, were in the throes of discussing a new medium that would someday thrive on grand and occasionally berserk personalities. They weren’t yet sure what to do with it, but they were already calling it television.
JULIA HAD NO such eye on the future. She lived entirely in the present, larking across the Smith campus, doing the bare minimum of study to get by. “I was not going full steam,” she recalled. “I did not have all the burners turned on.” They were only turned to low, in fact—an output that earned a B-minus average her freshman year. The next year, her flame grew even dimmer, barely meriting Cs. Ostensibly, she was an undisciplined worker, and her work, haphazard. As far as flunking out went, she was right on the cusp, but that prospect apparently never worried her. “Julia did not really worry much about anything,” said Mary Case, who by sophomore year no longer shared a dorm room with Julia. Mary’s grades—and weight—had suffered at the hands of her erstwhile roommate. “I couldn’t play all night and laugh with Julia and [hope to] stay in college.”
Remarkably, Julia never gave serious thought to cutting her losses and dropping out of school, a fate not uncommon to young women at the time. Such a ruthless decision, as opposed to languishing at Smith, might have set her on a path of earlier accomplishment. Nevertheless, it almost surely would have landed her in the doghouse at home. Leaving college would have especially crushed her mother’s spirits.
In fact, Caro’s health was more than just an idle concern. Two years earlier, in 1929, Julia’s mother had suffered a stroke while vacationing in Santa Barbara. She was only forty-nine years old and still as vigorous as any of her children, but an emotional, high-strung disposition had finally caught up to her. The Weston birthright had inflicted its share of injury. “Extreme inbreeding in Dalton,” was one relative’s hazy conclusion. Perhaps so, perhaps the Westons’ trust in primogeniture had finally done them in. But there appeared to be mitigating factors. For generations, congenital high blood pressure had taken its toll—on Caro’s parents certainly, both of whom died young, but also on her nine siblings, many of whom were sickly, weak—or dead. Caro had seemed fortunate; she seemed to have avoided a similar fate. She was fun-loving, ostensibly hearty, always running on a full tank of exuberance. Her son, John, considered her nothing short of a “dynamo.” The last thing anyone suspected was a ticking medical time bomb. When Caro grew fatigued, as was often the way things stood, it was written off to a case of burnout—or hot flashes. This time, however, there were no such pretenses. The stroke had caused one side of her face to permanently sag. And there were other, less perceptible symptoms: occasional unsteadiness, tremulous reflexes, some minor disorientation. Those closest to Caro could tell “she’d kind of faded.”
No, dropping out of Smith was never an option for Julia. She knew better. Caro couldn’t have taken it. “It would have killed my mother,” Julia insisted.
By her own admission, Julia accepted her role stoically, “doing just enough work to get by.” In her junior year, her grades improved slightly, thanks to an undemanding major in history. But to even the most chance observer, Julia minored in partying. For most of the year, she immersed herself in a smorgasbord of campus activities that sidetracked her studies and channeled her energies elsewhere. There were weekend socials and recitals and committees that organized the socials and recitals. A column in The Tatler, Smith’s humor monthly, kept her gainfully preoccupied. Fellow students recall seeing Julia, along with Mary Case and other pals, parading around campus as “grass cops,” the so-called elite squad of whistle-blowing enforcers who shooed people off the lawn. And she continued playing basketball despite the nonstop complaints from opponents who, Julia said, “were awfully mad at me for being so big.”
“There was so much going on at the college,” Julia recalled. “And then there was, of course, Amherst and Harvard and everything [else] right near.” You could strike out in any direction and get swept up in another school’s spirit. Dartmouth’s carnival was a favorite that Julia never missed. The same went for Princeton’s foxy men, who raided the Smith henhouse as if it were a private harem. Annually, Smith and Amherst staged a joint musical sketch that collapsed into a drunken bacchanal. “And if you went down to a game in New Haven,” Julia recalled, “everybody just got terribly drunk.”
“Julia had quite a taste for the spirits,” recalls a classmate who witnessed her drunken antics during the last two years of college. “Even during Prohibition, she had the knack for coming up with a bottle of gin.” Or she knew of a place to get it. There were several bootleggers, notoriously shady characters, who supplied the student market in and around Northampton, and while they “scared the bejesus” out of most proper coeds, Julia never felt intimidated. The same went for speakeasies, which were famously wicked establishments. Once, she heard about such a joint in nearby Holyoke and organized a field trip to scout out its potential. “It was up on the top floor of a warehouse,” Julia recalled. “Everyone was very nice to us, and we all drank one of everything and drove home and most of us were heartily sick—but it was terribly exciting.” On another occasion, following a night of enthusiastic drinking, Mary Case encountered Julia, shitfaced, prowling the Hubb
ard Hall corridor on her hands and knees.
Julia McWilliams could party with the best of them. She was a big girl with a seemingly bottomless tank and the energy to push the limits of authority as far as they could go. You could always count on Julia when it came to raising a little hell. Her insatiable curiosity allowed for any kind of experience. Without self-discipline, without any real goal in life, she had nothing to lose.
Perhaps the only night of carousing in which Julia didn’t partake was November 8, 1932, when Smith students celebrated FDR’s landslide election. Progressivism had deep roots on campus, where liberal causes flourished and where Roosevelt was viewed as “the Second Coming of Christ.” Despite a general complexion of rich, privileged coeds, the Smith student body was forward-thinking, broad-minded; there was a groundswell of support for FDR’s dynamic social platform. Julia, however, was a staunch Hoover girl, an old-style Republican from a household where party loyalty—that is, Republican Party loyalty—was equated with patriotism. Julia’s father “hated Roosevelt,” according to any number of friends and relatives. “He literally said Roosevelt was a traitor to his class.” Worse, FDR was despised for being, of all things, intellectual. For John McWilliams, that was the most cunning kind of subversion. “In fact, intellectuality and communism went hand-in-hand,” said Julia. “And if you were Phi Beta Kappa, you were certainly a pinko.”
That was one epithet Julia wouldn’t have to worry about. There was no Phi Beta Kappa in her future. And no being branded pinko—at least, not at Smith, not for the time being.
All things considered, Julia’s college experience was unremarkable. She had set out, she always said, “to become a great woman novelist,” but there was little evidence that she worked toward that goal. Despite the opportunity to study with Mary Ellen Chase, whose memoirs and novels were widely admired, Julia sabotaged any opportunity to develop her skills. “I purposely didn’t take any writing classes,” she said, owing to a fatuous “romantic” belief that one had to live before she could write. The closest she came to any creative writing was a lurid play based roughly on the Stevens murders in Pasadena. Otherwise, Julia did nothing to develop her literary ambitions at Smith.
She fulfilled the school’s course requirements with as much gusto as she conformed to its rules. History intrigued Julia, but only insofar as it satisfied her need for a major. She took more courses in music, studying ear-training and harmony, as well as four years of piano lessons to broaden her character. Under guidelines that applied to all Smith students, the women were required to master two foreign languages, which would assist them later, should they ever pursue an international vocation. Many classmates contemplated careers in the foreign service, one of the few lines of work that employed smart women (in part because they would perform secretarial work as well as their more professional duties). From 1930 until 1933, Julia studied French and Italian, though she didn’t achieve any degree of proficiency in either. Her French, especially, had fallen flatter than a crêpe. She seemed to fulfill her KBS teacher’s prophecy that she had an “inability to detect shades of sound in French.” And after years of conjugating Italian verbs, she was less sciolta than she was frustrata.1
With graduation looming, most senior Smithies engaged in a mad scramble to solidify their futures. Many used contacts to schedule job interviews in New York (although a staggering number of women from Julia’s class enrolled in Katharine Gibbs secretarial classes), while several others, many others, announced plans to marry their boyfriends. In the rush to destiny, Julia remained a bystander. By the end of midterms, less than six months before commencement, she grew increasingly anxious over her lack of initiative. “I only wish to god I were gifted in one line instead of having mediocre splashings in several directions,” she lamented to her mother.
For all the promise of a Smith College education, for the intellectual atmosphere, the luminaries who taught there, and the academic freedom, Julia graduated in 1934 with little to show for it. She had failed to take advantage of the riches that Smith had to offer. “Looking back on it,” she said almost forty years later, “I say, ‘What a shame!’ There it all was.” But for one reason or another her interest was never awakened. She never felt challenged, never challenged herself. A classmate attributed it to “a stunning lack of maturity.” And even Julia herself decried an “adolescent” point of view, noting that she had no expectations of using her education; it was for building character, not a career. Especially for a girl from her side of the tracks. Julia dismissed this thinking as “something of a class thing.” Young women with her pedigree were not expected to work. “You were supposed to go back [home],” she said, “and live the social life.”
Mrs. Gilchrist, the Hubbard House adviser, shared a similar outlook for Julia. Mingled with praise for Julia’s energy and school spirit were reservations about the future. In an evaluation she filed just prior to graduation, Mrs. Gilchrist wrote, “She would do well in some organized charity or social service work.” Nothing more substantial was predicted for her. In any case, she continued, Julia’s family was “wealthy. She will not need ‘a job’ I do not believe.”
DESPITE HAVING A diploma in hand from Smith College, Julia McWilliams was slated for a life of leisure. “She will return here after graduation,” cited a column in the Pasadena Star News, “and will pass the summer with her family at the McWilliams beach home in San Malo.” Beyond the sun and fun, no mention was made of Julia’s immediate plans. She had come home to the lifestyle she was born to: that of a junior socialite. No one was ever more suited to the role or rose as high to the occasion. She threw more parties—“a whirl of parties,” to quote her mother—than her family thought possible, including a black-and-white ball for forty that nearly rent the house asunder. Afternoons, she stormed the grounds of the posh Midwick Country Club in Alhambra, where her father served as a director and where Hollywood royalty gamboled on the polo fields, often playing competitive tennis after a round or two of golf. Otherwise, she bombed around town in a decrepit old Ford, which she’d nicknamed Eulalie and whose tailpipe let out rude bursts of gas that sent passersby running for cover.
Caro McWilliams, who functioned as her daughter’s guardian angel during those dog days of summer, searched for distractions to occupy Julia’s copious stretches of down-time. Over the months, she had tried various strategies designed to keep Julia out of trouble—by sending her to the movies, especially to the Strand, on Colorado Boulevard, where an all-lady orchestra still accompanied the features; by encouraging her to join the Junior League, whose do-good projects raised her presence in the community; and by increasing her allowance to $100 a month so she could attend premieres at the Pasadena Playhouse, where a repertory company of young actors, including Henry Fonda, Eleanor Parker, Dana Andrews, and William Holden, were launching their careers. With so much time on her hands, Julia drifted around Pasadena with no real purpose. She told the Smith alumnae bulletin that she “has been taking German and music this winter and also supervising youngsters at a clinic,” but that was so much wishful thinking. Those months were strung together without a whiff of accomplishment, and by the fall of 1935, even Caro had run out of patience. In light of Julia’s increasing restlessness—she bumped around the house for hours, playing the piano or reading mysteries—a different approach was in order. A trip abroad, perhaps, or a change of scenery.
At Caro’s prompting, Julia accompanied her mother and sister on a cross-country drive, as part of a road trip intended to drop Dort off at college. A KBS graduate like Julia, she’d passed on Smith and enrolled at Bennington, in Vermont, a few hours from Dalton, where the women were headed after tucking Dort into her dorm. It had been agreed, after much protest, that Julia would remain back East, at Aunt Theodora’s house in Massachusetts, and take a basic secretarial course at the Packard Commercial School in Pittsfield. One can only imagine the resentment this stirred in Julia. Julia was a spark plug, full of unharnessed energy. The last thing she desired was something so dull
and unimaginative. The classes in the brochure sounded a leitmotif of boredom: filing, stenography, typing, clerical administration … Was this where four years of a Seven Sisters education had taken her?
Julia gave secretarial school a halfhearted shot, but a month at Packard was all she could withstand. The options it presented were too bleak to consider, the future without it—even bleaker. But in October, Julia finally caught a break. Thanks to the efforts of the Smith vocational guidance office, she landed an entry-level job at W. & J. Sloane, in New York City, as a girl Friday for the upscale home-furnishings company. In exchange for juggling a broad range of secretarial duties, writing press releases, scheduling photography shoots, and anything else they could offload on her, Julia was paid eighteen dollars a week—only a fraction of what it would cost her to live in the city. Nevertheless, she wasn’t about to let money derail such a golden opportunity. The monthly allowance from home helped her to underwrite the expense. A young woman could live quite lavishly in New York during the Depression with $100 in her pocket. Necessities like food and lodging were ridiculously cheap. Finding suitable accommodations certainly presented no problem; the city was teeming with empty apartments, with more than a million New Yorkers living on government aid. Julia tapped into her trusty Smith resources, rooming with two recent grads who also worked in retailing in an $80-a-month brownstone at the corner of East Fifty-ninth Street and First Avenue, in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge.
For Julia, whose only experience with a job of any kind had been chalking the lines on her mother’s tennis court, the work at Sloane’s was a revelation. Her boss, the company’s advertising manager, kept her busy all day, cranking out reams of copy on the decorative arts, everything from antique case clocks to a Baker bedroom ensemble. It was an enjoyable routine, not a lot of pressure, but enough to keep her engaged. In between her advertising assignments, she helped to work the floor. “I am learning quite a bit about store management and interior decoration,” she enthused in a letter to the Smith vocational office. “In fact, I couldn’t be more pleased.”