by Bob Spitz
She discussed quitting Le Cordon Bleu with Max Bugnard, who convinced her to take a leave of absence instead. For as little as a dollar, Julia could still attend the afternoon demonstrations and take brush‑up pâtisserie lessons when the situation arose. Chef Bugnard even agreed to make occasional after-hours visits to Julia’s kitchen for some private instruction, in exchange for a good meal. In the meantime, she promised to practice, practice, practice, boning up at home in order to prepare for the cooking school’s final exam.
Julia had also grown disenchanted with her role as an embassy wife. Having gleaned satisfaction, if not pride, from the effects of her cooking, she resisted any return to her butterfly status. There was nothing wrong with the part of her that enjoyed playing housewife, hurrying home to fix her husband dinner. A strong woman could pull that off without suffering any loss of respect. But helpless or superficial Julia was not, and she bristled at situations that required her—or any woman—to function as window dressing.
At first, the embassy receptions were fun. On most occasions, usually at the ambassador’s residence, the wives of bureaucrats were enlisted as ushers in the receiving line. “Husbands met guests at the door and introduced them to Ambassador Bruce,” Julia recalled. “Wives then took them off the other end and introduced them around, got them a drink, and then came out and stirred things up.” The bigwigs who attended were entertaining, larger than life, and the novelty of it provided a charge. But after a year marked by weekly receptions the thrill, for the Childs, had run its course. The profusion of special events, galas, benefits, and parties began to blur and fatigue. After a while, Julia considered them a wretched nuisance and chafed at the spectacle once inside the door: “Government wives freshly manicured, waved and perfumed, twitching and shaking in their off-shoulder dresses, pulling up front to cover titties, flushed with excitement; men all like crows in black and white.” Everyone was limited to one dance with their spouse, then a few mandatory turns with a guest. It was nothing you couldn’t square with several bourbon-and-ginger ales, but who needed all that fuss?
They went because they had to; all agency personnel were obliged to attend. Paul’s attendance was inescapable, if not compulsory, but would not go toward improving his situation at work. Despite his wonderful facility with all things artistic, Paul’s career as a bureaucrat was an unfolding disaster. Strong-willed, opinionated, prickly, and aloof, he was a lone wolf in an agency that valued team players above all. He ate at his desk instead of lunching with co-workers, didn’t gossip or socialize “with the right people,” after work. He had a highbrow—some thought pretentious—way of expressing himself. And, worse, he struggled with authority, a lifelong headache.
As of early 1950, Paul began reporting to a man named George Picard, who was given effective oversight of the Public Affairs (PA) division. Most PA personnel considered Picard a benign functionary with no personal agenda, either toward art or office politics. Yet, it rankled Paul that such an uncultured man was given sway over a talented creative team, and he was unable to hide the contempt on his face. From the beginning, their encounters were awkward, undermined by a “certain roughness” in Paul’s manner. “I’ve been having a series of minor run-ins with Picard since he became my boss,” Paul confided to his brother, worried how it would reflect on his advancement up the ranks. Paul had good reason to be concerned; no one had more influence on his position, especially when it came to salary. For months, Paul had been waiting to hear about a raise that was tied to his annual efficiency rating. The final decision awaited Picard’s evaluation. “He is not competent to judge anyone’s skill in art,” Paul complained. “If [he] had a personal grudge against someone under him he could affect his whole career by a few nicely chosen phrases.”
As far as can be determined, Picard held no grudge. His report, filed in mid-December, was an exercise in fairness—although peppered with a few nicely chosen phrases. In it, he praised Paul, giving him a desirable Very Good rating, adding that he was extremely competent in the field of art, but conditions were raised: “Of course, it would be unfair to expect as much of this employee in the field of Administration,” Picard wrote. “I feel certain that in time he will become more competent, therefore I do not feel that a salary increase would be indicated at this time.”
Paul was stung and dispirited by the tone of his review. “He doesn’t know about my 17 years as a teacher,” he fumed, “or my war years with the OSS.” Criticism would have been easier to accept. To stem the bitterness and reinforce his sense of duty, Paul buried himself in several traveling exhibitions that the USIS was underwriting in the upcoming spring months. He was particularly proud of a retrospective he curated of Edward Weston’s photographs, followed by a series of poster and photo contests that received good press. One knockout show in particular, “U.S. Artists Living in France,” kept him exhaustively engaged, selecting juried work from over five hundred candidates. Hanging the show in Paris was a delicate undertaking, with so many egos in the balance. Plus, it was a logistical nightmare coordinating the arrangements to launch the exhibit on a six-city circuit. For that reason, among others, he was forced to bow out of a social function with Julia that promised to be almost as forbidding as his work.
In April 1950, John and Phila McWilliams were coming for a monthlong visit.
Despite Julia’s deep-rooted love for her father, they had not seen each other since her wedding two years earlier. During that time, they’d exchanged regular letters, but nothing substantive, nothing more than warmed-over pleasantries. Anything stronger might have sparked a nuclear incident. Pop’s “emotions and prejudices” bred incendiary responses. It went without saying that Julia found his right-wing diatribes unconscionable. He’d been a bully ever since she could remember, intolerant and dismissive of anyone whose views ran east or west of his own. Julia knew better than to argue with him. For a while she’d become expert at dodging his recriminations, but since her marriage to Paul she’d had difficulty holding her tongue, especially in light of the recent McCarthy hearings in Washington. Several of the Childs’ State Department pals had come under the scrutiny of the man they were calling “that bastard from Wisconsin.” It was open season on artists and intellectuals. Already there was a suspicion in the air that the House Committee’s wrath might corrode Paul’s agency. In all likelihood Julia said as much in her letters to Pop because, for a while, he stopped answering her altogether. But tensions had thawed in the intervening months, and his visit portended a truce of sorts.
In Pasadena, John McWilliams, now seventy, hadn’t mellowed so much as he’d ripened with age. Subversives were everywhere, as far as Pop was concerned, even smack in his own backyard. He had no doubt that his intellectual son-in-law, Paul, “was a communist-type.” And who knew about his impressionable daughter? But years of bursitis had left John physically weak, “stiff in the joints … unable to do much walking,” as age caught up to his once-imposing frame. He’d also softened somewhat as a result of his second marriage, with a winning wife for whom family came first. It had been Phila’s idea to visit Paris. To John, Paris represented just about everything he detested, art and culture, to say nothing of those infernal French fops. He much preferred to remain in Pasadena. “I’ve got my nice house and my friends, and I can talk the language,” he told Julia. But Phila put her foot down. It wouldn’t do for John to be estranged from his daughter—either of his daughters, for that matter.
Dort’s crime, in her father’s eyes, had been to fall in with the theater crowd, “a high-strung and emotional lot” of “artistic ne’er-do-wells.” She’d worked in New York and London with ragtag troupes, producing pitifully little income and even less fulfillment. There were no prospects on the horizon for any kind of fruitful career. Almost thirty-two, Dort had run out of options when Julia invited her to visit in Paris. Julia regretted the physical distance between the sisters. “To be honest, when she arrived I felt as if I knew Hélène Baltrusaitis better than my own flesh and blood.”
Once she hit Paris, however, Dort’s presence was greatly felt. Julia’s little sister had grown in the interim, maxing out at nearly six-foot-six. In fact, she was outsize in every way—animated, garrulous, bohemian, and irrepressible, tending an untamed exuberance that rose and fell in waves. “She was very, very mercurial,” says her only daughter, “full of life, but with a wicked temper that would go off like that!” With her animal energy, Dort threw herself into resolving things with Julia. In late 1949, with only a suitcase under her arm, she moved into the spare bedroom at Roo de Loo, ready to embrace her sister’s new world.
Dort fell willingly under the transformative spell of Paris. Within months, she was a fixture on the young ex-pat scene, bounding from party to bistro to nightclub to café, curled behind the wheel of an armadillo-shaped Citroën. She had real magnetism, a great liveliness that made her the life of every party. Although Dort spoke hardly a word of French, the language barrier was no problem for her. She simply twisted the language into her own inscrutable dialect. French never had a chance in her mouth. Shampoo became champignon (mushroom), a fender-bender became craché dans ma derrière (spat in my butt). And somehow she got away with it—atrocities for which most Americans would be summarily disemboweled. Dort’s abandon had a way of disarming the most thin-skinned of Gauls. Even Julia and Paul were amused by her.
By 1950, Dort was working for the American Club Theater, a Parisian outfit whose plays put the avant in avant-garde. Samuel Beckett might have found their productions impenetrable. It was a thankless job—long tension-filled hours and little pay—but Dort loved every minute of it. Even when the company manager directed skeins of abuse at her, Dort never protested. She loved the theater and forgave it its indiscretions. But, like Julia, Dort couldn’t resist the vise grip of her father, and when news surfaced of his imminent visit to France, she traded the theater for the family crucible.
The prospect of entertaining Pop terrified the McWilliams sisters. John and Phila intended to spend a week with them in Paris, then travel through the south of France into Italy, spanning Portofino to Capri, for most of a month. As the momentous day approached, they were “prepared for the worst.” Julia, especially, had gone to great lengths to accommodate her visitors, but nothing seemed to measure up to Pop’s finicky standards. “I think it is all going to be somewhat of a trial,” she fretted, “as we have grown so far apart in our ways of life.” She sought to “show him something of the life and the people that [she] found so heart-warming and satisfying,” but knew how dicey a prospect that could be. One false move—a stray eye-roll or errant opinion—could light the fuse on a war of words—or worse. Julia had no illusions about reforming her father. The best she could hope for was maintaining the peace. She was determined to do her “damndest to be very, very nice indeed, and dumb, and amenable, and having no thoughts or ideas about anything.”
At least Paul was off the hook. He agreed to entertain his in-laws while they were in Paris, but anything more would be asking for trouble. Paul was no one’s fool; he knew the score. John McWilliams had nothing but disdain for him. Paul could live with their obvious differences—he could tune out Pop’s rants about commies and progressives, lefties and liberals, intellectuals and elitists—but the subtext of his enmity was too much to ignore. “He felt his daughter was supporting Paul,” said a granddaughter, and to some extent, that may have been true. Julia’s inheritance gave the Childs freedom to enjoy a certain Parisian lifestyle, but Paul thought “it was none of John’s damn business.”
The old man was just too damn condescending. Behind his fatherly, mackerel smile, John McWilliams had other fish to fry. His daughter, Julia, was in need of long-term security, and that meant making a respectable man out of Paul. Pop made no secret of his disappointment that the marriage would effectively end Julia’s chances of a place in society. But perhaps he could rescue her from the depths of failure. Paul needed to step up in some way. Fearing that he didn’t have what it took to do it on his own, John offered to buy Paul’s successfulness. In a letter to Julia, he wrote “that if Paul needed money to launch himself in the big time, he wanted very much to help out in any way financially possible.” Julia turned him down without another thought, but Paul never forgave John for his royal arrogance. He was almost fifty, for god’s sake, convincingly his own man. As far as Paul cared, going to Italy was out, Julia wrote, “because he don’t want to waist [sic] no vacation time”—and she “didn’t blame him.”
Remarkably, the McWilliams-Child reunion in Paris came off without a hitch. Everyone was on their best behavior, including Pop, who’d kept his mouth shut, though, from where Paul sat “it was hard to tell whether he’s just determinedly trying to be nice for this visit, or whether it’s a deep-seated change.” Julia also noticed restraint in her father’s demeanor. As she and Dort set out on their group trip south, she observed: “I suddenly realize[d] he is an old man, which he never used to be—and he seems to realize it himself.”
At age seventy, John McWilliams was no longer the bogeyman of old. Had he lost the propensity to intimidate and terrorize, the need to stage “wild and bitter scenes,” to mete out constant put-downs and beratings that made his tall daughters shrink in his presence? Julia obviously thought so as they meandered south, on a route that paralleled the Rhône. She was struck by her father’s “niceness and complete naturalness,” his attempts to charm the French with a chirpy “Bahn Joor” wherever he went before launching into long exchanges in English “as though it were inconceivable they wouldn’t understand.” Even that she found charming, in a roundabout way. At least Julia no longer felt humiliated around Pop. Or perhaps she no longer took his blather to heart. All in all, she managed to endure his “standard prejudices about ‘the harps,’ ‘the chosen people,’ ‘foreigners,’ etc. etc. etc.” Some things about him would never change, but Julia let them roll right off her back. Whatever she’d felt about her father in the past, whatever scars his bullying had left on her, it came to her, watching him putter aimlessly through France and Italy, that the world he’d created for himself, his “rich, upper-class conservative Republican” world, was small and sad. It was evident in the way he viewed the riches of Europe. Pop had little or no regard for the ancient cities they visited, no interest in their architecture and art, “those dank cold churches or museums,” no enthusiasm at all for the food and wine, all the forces of culture that made Julia swoon. “We have just about nothing in common anymore,” she wrote to her family, after the trip, “no reactions, likes, life, anything.”
JULIA GAINED A kind of freedom from her past as a result of the trip with Pop. She freed herself from the lifeline that had always tethered her, from the stultifying place where children were always children, obedient, passive, seen but not heard. She spent the rest of the summer mostly in splendid isolation, “experimenting at home,” combing through her collection of classic recipes and cooking them repeatedly to perfection, until she was satisfied they worked. Increasingly, all that mattered to her were the wonders of French cuisine—the technique, the science, the care, the magic—“the enjoyment of producing something wonderful to eat.” More than merely fine-tuning the recipes, Julia’s goal was to make them her own, to develop versions whose details and procedures were absolutely clear. She still wasn’t sure where all of this was headed, whether she would eventually cook alongside one of her mentor-chefs or open that fantasy restaurant with her sister-in-law Freddie, under a sign that read MRS. CHILD AND MRS. CHILD: FORMERLY OF THE CORDON BLEU, PARIS, FRANCE. For the time being, she was content just to practice her craft. “My immediate plan was to develop enough foolproof recipes so that I could begin to teach classes of my own,” she recalled.
At the same time, Julia sank further into her exuberant Paris life, overseeing the new housekeeper she’d hired to manage Roo de Loo and “a great campaign of refurbishment of the tottery furniture” they’d inherited. Like the recipes that occupied her attention, she aspired to make the place her own. “She wan
ted to brighten up the apartment, to modernize it,” recalls her niece Rachel. Down came the heavy brocade drapes and the rococo sconces. Cracks in the ceiling were replastered. The water-stained walls were repainted—beige in the salon, white and sage in the kitchen. She made butter-colored slipcovers for the lumpy old sofa, whose arms were as frayed as a homeless man’s coat.
The ongoing life there with Paul filled a hole in Julia’s development. Marrying him and moving to Paris had been an act of rebellion, but it helped her enormously to establish an identity all her own. Paul never tried to domineer, to possess her. He never acted like his career was more important than her cooking. With everything going on in their respective circles, they had learned not to crowd each other. Apart from their “two official lives—cooking and government”—Paul and Julia remained committed to a carefully balanced marriage; it was something they pursued with respect and great gusto. Their social calendar—a dizzying cycle of non-stop receptions and dinner parties—was as active as any jet-setter’s, yet they always found the time to follow their own intimate routine. Alternate Thursdays were reserved for a Ciné Club they had joined. A long-awaited subscription to the Comédie-Française finally came through. Paul continued to paint street scenes; Julia sewed. They even maintained their Sunday-morning tradition, exploring a section of Paris they’d never visited before.
For all the family visits, entertaining, and other distractions, the kitchen at Roo de Loo remained a hotbed of experimentation throughout the summer and fall of 1950. “I’ve been making so many meals,” Julia observed, “it feels like I’ve filled half the stomachs in Paris.” For Julia, whose cooking closely followed her personal development, the output was a badge of increasing satisfaction: all the efforts of the previous year had begun to find their way onto plates. Finally, in the spring of 1951, feeling the thrust of Paul’s encouragement, Max Bugnard’s approval, and friends’ praise, she decided to take her talents to the next level.