by Bob Spitz
Meanwhile, Manhattan was an eye-opener to a girl from the West. “I just loved New York and everything it had to offer,” she recalled, acknowledging the kid-in-the-candy-store effect the city had on her. The razzle-dazzle of it suited Julia perfectly, the crush of people in constant motion, going, doing, hustling. It was more than mere nourishment for her hungry soul. “While I was there, I tried to take advantage of as much of it as I could.” At the outset, that meant wandering the streets, giddy with amazement, enjoying the simple luxury of blending in with the crowds. At Smith, Julia wasn’t just the tallest woman at school; she towered over her classmates, a bit of a freak. But in New York her height wasn’t anything unusual. Among the skyscrapers she “felt humbled” in contrast to their size.
The buildings helped to put things in perspective, and so did the multitudes that besieged her on the street. In a city known for its impersonal makeup, Julia had ready-made friends to draw on. “Most of my friends … went to New York for a job,” she recalled, citing those who were self-respecting enough to work. College classmates had found their way into the retailing and advertising fields, and some were determined to see their names in lights. The Smith grapevine wrapped itself around new arrivals, making the transition to Manhattan a less overwhelming experience. There were plenty of companions with whom to take in the nightlife. Theater and the opera were among Julia’s favorite pastimes, while dining, a New York specialty, failed to register on her action meter. Food, for Julia McWilliams, was more of a necessity than an indulgence. She wasn’t drawn to the gastronomic auras of, say, Delmonico’s or Lüchow’s. There were plenty of restaurants in the mid-1930s where you could have a perfectly respectable meal for around a dollar, and Julia, more preoccupied with satisfying her hunger than refining—or even defining—it, haunted many of them. She could often be found at the counter of one of the chains, a Huyler’s, a Chock Full o’Nuts, or ironically a Childs, all of which served classic, if indifferent, food. If she felt ambitious, Julia would walk the long blocks across Fifty-seventh Street to the Schrafft’s, just west of Carnegie Hall, whose air-conditioned Columbus Room had a more fashionable appeal.
Food was less important to her than landing a more intriguing job. Julia had never given up the hope of writing serious novels, and she continued to bombard The New Yorker with writing samples—chatty “Talk of the Town” pieces and book reviews—as a way into a staff position. Unfortunately, they were riddled with clichés and rejected by form letter. Her applications to Time met with no greater success, and at Newsweek, which actually granted Julia an interview, she got no further than the typing test, which she failed.
At least her writing at Sloane’s—mostly catalogue copy and press releases about new products—was free from outside critical response. Julia was no Thurber when it came to sparkly humor, but her prose, for the most part, was exuberant. “When you have put your all into a party, and struggled over making sandwiches that are chic and dashing as well as tastey [sic], it is terribly deflating to have their pretty figures ruined by guests who must peak [sic] inside each ’wich to see what it’s made of,” she wrote about a little gizmo called Sandwich Indicators—“wooden picks which you stick in the sandwich plate, nicely shaped and painted. There is ‘Humpty Dumpty’ for egg, a rat in a cage for cheese, a dog, boat, and pig for meat, fish, and ham. And it seems like a very sound idea.” It was unlikely that such efforts would attract The New Yorker, but Julia was writing for a living nonetheless, developing a voice and a style that would eventually come in handy.
She was also beginning to develop an active social life in New York. There were parties and galas almost every weekend of the year, most of them a consequence of the go-go Ivy League circuit. Julia could usually count on an invitation to one bash or another, but it was no fun always going unattached. As she approached her twenty-third birthday, Julia anguished over her inexperience with the opposite sex. “Being very, very tall, I had difficulties from that point of view,” she lamented, “so I did not go through some of those things that a short, pretty girl does.” Boyfriends and romance were uncharted territory. There had been very few dates in college, none of them serious, fewer opportunities to be choosy about men. Many of her Smith classmates were in serious relationships or already married. Although she claims to have felt no peer pressure in that regard, men and intimacy were clearly on her mind.
Sometime in the fall of 1936, Dort spent a weekend visiting her sister, and Julia took her to a gala at the Waldorf-Astoria. The party turned out to be another Ivy League mixer, a gathering of the upper crust of the post-college-age society, familiar faces she’d seen at similar events. One face, in particular, had hijacked her attention. Julia knew Tom Johnston from a number of Smith parties, where he and his Princeton classmates invariably made hay. Johnston was a notorious “party animal,” a big, strapping guy—as big and strapping as Julia—with an outsize personality, who’d played football and boxed on his college teams. Julia was attracted by his irrepressible charm and the confidence he exuded; she found him “very attractive, a free-thinker,” and, at a deeper level, a fellow maverick. Johnston hoped to forge a career in high-stakes advertising and was kicking around the New York agencies with another Princetonian, Andy Hewitt, who would eventually launch his own firm, Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson, and Mather.
At some point during the evening, after some energetic drinking, Julia and Dort coaxed Johnston onto a plank they’d found and paraded him around the ballroom like a Persian prince. It was the kind of hoopla, the kind of unembarrassed levity in which the McWilliams sisters excelled. Julia loved these happy-go-lucky scenes, and Dort, who was a theater major at Bennington, seemed to be a chip off the old block. “They were a couple of high-spirited gals,” an acquaintance recalls, and Johnston apparently appreciated their moxie.
Soon Tom and Julia began bumping around the city together, showing up at dinner parties or browsing through the bookstores along lower Fifth Avenue. The figure they cut as a couple was unconventional, even by New York standards: twin towers with lofty personalities. And literary ambitions. Tom is “full of Melville,” Julia confided in a diary entry, struck by his passion for the great books. His passion for fantasy was even greater, captivated as he was by stories of high-seas adventure and exotic locales. The intensity of their relationship isn’t as clear, but evidence suggests it was lopsided. Julia, by all accounts, had fallen “profoundly” in love. Everything about Tom Johnston delighted her no end. Whether he felt as strongly about Julia or not, she perceived in his attentions, for the first time in her life, that romance had come her way—at long last! In any event, sex seemed likely; Julia was “in heat,” she said, and eager to give it a whirl.
Before the momentous ritual could occur, however, the relationship ran out of steam. Julia mistakenly attributed it to the “financial stress” Tom seemed under all the time. “He wasn’t a rich boy, like the other Princeton guys,” says his son, Jim, “but he traveled in their fast lane and aspired to their lifestyle.” Money was always a nagging issue. That might have affected him to some degree, perhaps a smidgen, but it wasn’t the reason for his romantic malaise. In fact, unknown to Julia, Tom had been two-timing her for months, conducting a long-distance relationship with Izzy McMullen, a Smith grad a few classes ahead of Julia, now living in Detroit. Eventually, as with all deceptions, the truth wanted out. On September 6, 1936, when a “Dear Julia” letter arrived in the post, Julia was blindsided, devastated. She never saw it coming. All the symptoms of heartbreak converged on her at once: she couldn’t eat, couldn’t get her breath, her stomach was in knots. Johnston hadn’t even the decency to tell her face-to-face. He’d taken off for Detroit so that Julia couldn’t reach him.
This “jilting,” as she referred to it, dealt a serious blow to her self-esteem. Julia’s height had always served as a cornerstone of her identity, but now she described herself as “big and unsophisticated.” The impact of rejection had distorted her self-image. “I was always struggling to be a pretty person,�
�� she said, in a revisionist diary entry from that period. Nothing anyone said could relieve her wounded pride. For days, weeks, afterward, Julia lay prostrate on her couch, like Violetta in La Traviata, striking a pose of epic suffering, while being consoled by friends and family who took turns damning Tom Johnston to an unhappy fate.2
For a while at least, reading a series of books about detached existences and la vie de bohème, Julia forgot about heartbreak and Tom Johnston. Friends took her out to nightclubs, hoping to edge her back into circulation. A number of soulless dates were arranged, soullessly consummated. But Julia was unable to let go of Tom. Rashly, she dashed off a letter to him, professing her undying love. With newfound hope, she held out for some word of encouragement or a reconciliation. The hiatus provided a welcome lift for a while. Julia spent several weeks reconstructing her damaged self-image, redefining ideas about relationships, and especially marriage. Ideally, according to her diary, she sought a man who would stimulate her intellectually, someone levelheaded, who inspired confidence and contentment, but also able to provide “FUN and complete mutual understanding and respect.” Though this was supposed to be a new, revised mission statement, it was clear that Julia had Tom Johnston in mind. He was the whole package. But when word from him finally arrived, in early 1937, it was the news of his marriage on New Year’s Day.
Once again, Julia was distraught. It was almost as though he had broken her heart twice. Reeling from the news and seething with anger, she opened her diary and dashed off several drafts of a letter, accusing Tom of untold deceptions. His behavior had really touched a nerve. “Taken in,” “misled,” “strung along,” “pulled the wool over my eyes”—they all added up to the same thing: treachery. Tomfoolery! Julia had never been so mistreated before. Each draft took on a blacker cast. In the end, however, she wished the couple much success and happiness.
Her romantic life was an unqualified mess—and her professional life wasn’t in much better shape. Though Julia had received a nice raise at Sloane’s, to thirty dollars a week, and an employee evaluation that put her on a fast track for advancement, she was unhappy, deeply unhappy, in an otherwise unstimulating job. One thing was certain: she had no real passion for advertising. It didn’t excite this young woman for whom excitement was life’s nectar. There was nowhere to deploy her “great magnetism,” as one friend defined it. She had a burning ambition to do something wonderful, something that turned her on, fascinated her. Though she suffered from a blow to her self-confidence, deep down Julia believed she was “like no one else,” a young woman with “unique spiritual gifts” who was “meant for something” extraordinary. Her job at Sloane’s, while agreeable, would never offer the extraordinary. By April 1937 that had finally sunk in, and Julia gave her notice.
“I do not want to be a business woman!” she declared. Julia still dreamed of the literary life, still hoped to crack The New Yorker’s exclusive editorial staff, but the dreams and hopes seemed ever beyond her grasp. A charitable assignment from her cousin, reviewing Sherwood Anderson’s Puzzled America, for the Saturday Review, went uncompleted, which just about dashed her chances for a freelance career. No, a job in publishing wasn’t in the cards. And as for a New York makeover, she “just didn’t have the stamina.”
As early as March—two months after Tom Johnston’s marriage was formally announced and a few weeks before the job at Sloane’s ended—Julia was restless to go home to Pasadena. She’d become “bored with nightclubs,” she said, and the hustle of New York, tired of the grind, wanting something else, something more. It was too dispiriting. She couldn’t keep up, couldn’t compete. In May, she was due to be in California for a friend’s wedding. That would be the end, she thought. She wouldn’t return to New York. “Julia of the almost spring,” she noted in her diary. She was still awaiting her time to bloom.
* * *
1 Sciolta, fluent; frustrata, frustrated.
2 Tragically, his marriage did end in the worst possible way. Two years later, Tom’s wife committed suicide.
Four
Only a Butterfly
For a few weeks after her return, Julia unwound in the hot California sun, hopscotching between San Malo, where her father had built a new Tudor-style cottage on a cliff above the beach, and the family house, in Pasadena. She was thrilled to be home, relieved to be back West. “Life there seemed so much less complicated,” she said. Julia never outgrew her attachment to Pasadena. She loved the sleepy, laid-back lifestyle, the clear, dry air, and, no less, the privileges of the leisure class.
Her hometown was every bit the paradise she remembered. Sitting in her rickety jalopy, Eulalie, on one of the veiny roads that traversed Mount Wilson, Julia often stopped to enjoy a panoramic view of the growing city that stretched all the way to the Los Angeles basin. Progress, so to speak, had left its imprint on the vista. Yet for all its beauty and incredible wealth, the Pasadena Julia found when she returned in 1937 was a city she barely recognized. While she was away, the floodgates had been opened—the hotel and tourist industry had spiraled to meet greedy demand, Caltech was spreading across the landscape faster than lungwort, a freeway to Los Angeles—the first of its kind on the West Coast—was nearly finished, the Palomar telescope newly perched atop Mount Wilson staked its claim on the stars, and smog—the first faint wisps of smog, like Morse code—backed up against the mountains, spelling out a portent of the changes to come.
Eager to resume her old friendships after a four-year absence, Julia reached out to the few pals who still lived in town. But while Julia was struggling to carve out a career, they had begun to form couples, families, with their own tranquil lives and built-in interests. In the midst of deepening social imbalance, Julia’s insecurities quickly resurfaced. She felt the widening gap that separated her from the others, and her relationship to them that summer, while pleasant, was never entirely comfortable.
At the beach in San Malo, California, late 1920s (Photo credit 4.1)
The circumstances only sharpened the old conflicts inside her—the collapse of her love affair with Tom Johnston and her seeming inability to focus on the future. Both regrets continued to haunt her in Pasadena. “I really had no idea where I was headed,” she recalled, “and it frustrated me, really frustrated me for awhile.” Tom’s rejection, combined with the mounting frustration, professional as well as sexual, cast Julia into an uncharacteristic state of unease. “It was one time I can remember feeling hopelessly lost.”
Caro responded with an outpouring of encouragement to shore up Julia’s sagging spirits. For years, she had exhorted her children to make the most of their lives. “Stand up straight. Be somebody!” she’d implore, catching them in moments of slack disregard. Now, however, she soothed Julia’s setback with more sympathetic tones and turned her considerable skills as a mother toward rekindling her daughter’s spark. But Caro’s efforts, well-intentioned though they were, lacked her trademark vitality. That spring, especially during Julia’s last weeks in New York, Caro’s health had begun to fail. The ravages of stroke and high blood pressure had taken their toll, both visible and invisible. Only sixty years old and physically sturdier than her children, the strain on her vital organs crept treacherously toward cliff’s edge. “Indigestion” was how she explained her persistent maladies to Julia. “A touch of the flu” was offered to mask the grimaces and sallow complexion that had marred her features. Frequent weak spells and bouts of nausea seemed to support these diagnoses, but even Julia could tell her mother’s condition was more serious than flu.
Several times that spring the family’s anxiety level had been raised. Caro fought through increasingly severe spells of anemia, dizziness, nausea, and shortness of breath. Alarmed by a sudden increase of jaundice in her face and eyes, John sent Caro to La Jolla for emergency kidney treatment. In early July, when her temperature spiked and her blood pressure plummeted, he rushed her by ambulance to San Diego. Both times, Caro returned home with a clean bill of health, but it was clear to those closest to her th
at her condition was deteriorating. Even so, Julia painted the situation with a rosy veneer. In a letter to Dort, on July 10, she downplayed the seriousness of their mother’s illness, going so far as to declare Caro “100% better.” In fact, her doctors—and presumably both Julia and her father—knew that Caro was suffering from uremia; her kidneys were shutting down, dangerous toxins poisoning her vital organs. There was little that could be done to prevent the contamination of her bloodstream. As far as Caro had traveled from the inbred limits of Dalton, as hard as she had worked to be a doting mother and a devoted wife, as much as she had prospered, spiritually and financially, in the California oasis she adored, she could not, in the end, escape the “Weston curse.” It had claimed her parents, three sisters, and two brothers. And on July 21, 1937, around ten o’clock in the morning, Caro’s heart finally gave out.
Julia was at her mother’s bedside when she died. There were so many memories, so many things she still wanted to say to Caro. Her heart was flooded with undue guilt. “I could have been much nicer to her,” Julia thought. “I could have been with her more.” Her mother’s death summoned an outpouring of grief. For Julia, it was especially devastating, coming on the heels of her recent heartbreak. She had never stopped mourning Tom Johnston; now she’d lost someone else she dearly loved.