Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child

by Bob Spitz

  Throughout April and May 1945, as the strains of war reached a final crescendo, Paul and Julia shared myriad meals together, taking great pleasure in the Chinese cooking—and in each other. They spent hours, nights, weeks hunched over food-laden tables, exchanging the most intimate details of their personal sagas. Everything came pouring out: the intransigencies of Julia’s father, the twins’ difficult rivalry, Tom Johnston’s breach, Edith’s death, their similar dilemmas at midlife—without a peacetime vocation, without a partner, in personal purgatories of sorts. “I feel lost,” Paul admitted; no doubt Julia echoed that sentiment. They debated what Paul considered “one of the clichés of human life: how to have one’s cake and eat it too?” Was there a plausible way “to spend half one’s time making money, and half in cultivating the intellect and the arts?” Julia turned this same question over in her mind, as well. Now that she’d acquired a taste for something more stimulating from life, was there a way for her to improve herself when she returned home, after the war? In time, they discovered themselves to be soulmates, not only understanding each other’s respective circumstances, but also appreciating the way the other felt.

  This rapport continued to develop as both Paul and Julia were transferred to Chongqing: another war room, another Registry, another stop along the war itinerary. Chongqing was “a wildly stimulating spot,” the provisional capital of free China, built on what seemed like hundreds of extruding hills, with the Yangtze flowing through the center of town. From 1939 onward, the city had been beaten to a pulp by the Japanese, leaving the skeletons of bomb-shattered houses amid creeping filth and pollution. Still, the remains of natural beauty shone through the misery. By the time Paul and Julia arrived the plum trees were in blossom, the warm, thick air made eminently thicker by the gusts of spicy mimosa. “This busted and ragged city … is tenfold over-populated,” Paul wrote to friends. There was “an almost frenetic overtone of energy” in the air, with a marked duality that mystified him. One could walk down any street and sense a cosmopolitan spirit, yet see a “moss-covered thousand-year-old pagoda standing alone in the mist.” Somewhere between those extremes lay the character of China.

  Without ceremony, Julia reestablished the Registry. If anything, the eleven months of managing those blasted files gave her even more perspective on the trajectory her life was taking. There was real know-how in the way that she handled her job, know-how mixed with instinct and practice. In the past, she had always wrestled with initiative: Was she willing to take on responsibility, and if so, would she take it—or herself—seriously? But the OSS had changed that for good. No longer a “social butterfly,” she had a whole new sense of her potential. The fact that she’d formed a friendship with such a smart man was evidence enough that she was headed someplace important.

  Certainly, Paul had begun to take her seriously. In Chongqing their friendship continued apace. The social life hummed at a fairly high level, so they saw each other with clockwork regularity. There was the usual surfeit of dances and cocktail parties on the base, plus weekend getaways to the countryside at a favorite hot springs resort, visits to temples, walks through the rice paddies and along the mist-shrouded hills. But—always with a group, always perfectly platonic. Yes, Paul took Julia seriously, but it was all on the surface; there was no evidence of a deeper emotional response.

  Food seemed to be their common aphrodisiac. If only they could launch another Chinese restaurant junket, perhaps spring rolls and spareribs might rekindle the spark, especially in Chongqing, where fiery Sichuan dishes ignited a provocative culinary heat. During the war, when Chongqing became the headquarters of the Kuomintang, the elite from all over China flocked there, toting their private chefs and secret family recipes. In the interim, Chongqing had become a melting pot of flavors. But to Paul and Julia’s great dismay, restaurants were strictly off limits, thanks to an outbreak of cholera in the city. Any heat would have to be self-generated.

  But heat needed combustion, some kind of chemical reaction. If there was anything simmering between them, it was hard for Julia to gauge. She sensed Paul’s resistance to anything deeper or more heartfelt. Apparently they were buddies, nothing more, despite such obvious compatibility. She summed it up perfectly in her diary, calling it an “affair of friendly passion and companionship,” which was acceptable for the here-and-now, if that were all he had to give. Whatever the extent of Paul’s affection, Julia reveled in it. Deprived of a significant male relationship for so long, she found in Paul’s sympathies the kind of attention that had always eluded her.

  Something more meaningful might develop over time. But on August 6, after the OSS unit had returned to Kunming, news arrived that would affect every timetable. An atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima; on August 9, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Japan surrendered on August 14. The reaction in Kunming was restrained, even detached. A different kind of shell shock silenced the Americans. The end of the war meant the end of the unit. What would happen to everyone now? Many would be going home to resume their routine lives, but for some, like Julia, it was almost an unthinkable step backward. The war had utterly changed her; she’d become a different person while serving her country, part of a mission, part of a community. What would she do with herself once she got home?

  Two days earlier, Julia had turned thirty-three, an age when most of her friends were already married, with children. There was no family waiting for her back in the States, no husband, no job, no place to call her own. It seemed almost cruel to celebrate this birthday. In fact, it passed without fanfare. But on August 15, Paul came forward with a sonnet he’d composed to mark the occasion. One can only imagine Julia’s reaction as she read through the ornately handwritten verse:

  How like the Autumn’s warmth is Julia’s face

  So filled with Nature’s bounty, Nature’s worth.

  And how like summer’s heat is her embrace

  Wherein at last she melts my frozen earth.

  Endowed, the awakened fields abound

  With newly green effulgence, smiling flowers.

  Then all the lovely riches of the ground

  Spring up responsive to her magic powers.

  Sweet friendship, like the harvest-cycle, moves

  From scattered seed to final ripened grain,

  Which, glowing in the warmth of Autumn, proves

  The richness of the soil, and mankind’s gain.

  I cast this heaped abundance at your feet

  An offering to Summer, and her heat.

  Paul had thrown her an unexpected curve. For someone whose ambivalence was an established facet of his persona, the poetry was filled with romantic imagery. No matter how Julia construed the beautifully crafted phrases—“warmth is Julia’s face … heat is her embrace … her magic powers … her heat”—the underlying message was unambiguous. The “sweet friendship” had somehow blossomed into “final ripened grain.” Inevitably, Paul was falling in love.

  Whether or not Julia sensed this right away, Paul was coming to terms with it. The next day, in a letter to Charlie, he devoted a paragraph to Julia’s virtues, admitting that, over time, he had “become extremely fond of her.” She might not be his ideal, his dreamgirl, he said, but she was “understanding, warm, funny, and darling.”

  In his newfound enthusiasm, Paul made the most of whatever time they had left together. He took Julia on “a terrific binge” of Yunnanese food—to “eight or ten different regional restaurants”—and spent hours reading Hemingway’s short stories aloud to her on the veranda of the old tea plantation. “One was about sex,” a friend remembered—a lesson courtesy of the old schoolteacher.

  Yet, despite all the spirited attention she received, Julia still anguished over the feasibility of their relationship. She remained unconvinced of her appeal to such a fascinating man or the alien world from which he came. “I am not the woman for him as I am not an intellectual,” she confessed during a full-scale meltdown in the pages of her diary. How could she expect anything more? T
here were too many obstacles in each of their paths. And he wasn’t the only one who had reservations. Yes, Paul enjoyed her company and they could “talk about anything”—politics, philosophy, literature, sex, emotions, nothing was off-limits—but when push came to shove he was “not essentially vigorous enough” for Julia, he “seem[ed] to lack the male drive”—in other words, he’d never made a move. That didn’t bode well for her future prospects.

  Their other colleagues seemed to be pairing up before heading back to the United States. Almost all the women Julia had deployed with had found lovers or husbands during their Asian stay. There was any number of weddings scheduled for the months following their return. Everyone’s status was in a state of flux.

  Julia and Paul may not have resolved on anything more definite than friendship, but there is every indication they discussed the future. Paul’s situation was changing—fast. “Everything is shifting and rearranging itself a dozen times a day,” he wrote his brother. On October 12, his Presentation outfit was moving to Peking in the army’s effort to reoccupy the major cities before the Communists had time to move in. With little time to spare, he was drawing maps for the “humanitarian teams” being dropped into the POW camps. Julia’s tour of Asia was over. She was headed to Calcutta on October 16, and then back to the States—exactly where, she did not know, but it seemed probable that she and Paul would both eventually wind up in Washington. They made tentative plans to have Thanksgiving together, with his brother and sister-in-law, in Pennsylvania. But after that—it was difficult to say.

  Everything is shifting and rearranging itself a dozen times a day. It was impossible, crazy, to make serious life-changing decisions in such an uncertain, unstable world. Anything could happen between one moment and the next.

  On October 7, with very little time left, Paul and Julia enjoyed a farewell dinner at their favorite Kunming restaurant, Ho-Teh-Foo. In order to satisfy their powerful Chinese food fix, they pulled out all the stops, ordering enough from the menu to feed their entire OSS unit. The tiny tabletop was covered with heaping, steaming dishes: crispy fried spring rolls, long-leaf cabbage studded with bits of salty Yunnan ham, winter mushrooms flecked with the piquant tops of beets, sizzling-hot Peking duck on a bed of glass noodles, and meaty, scented egg-drop soup—a veritable banquet, not soon to be forgotten. The atmosphere was festive, if somewhat forced; in the backs of their minds, each was aware of the possibility that this might be the last time they would ever see each other. Their tentative plans, while upbeat, were no hedge against fate. So often people in such extraordinary circumstances, in such intense situations, formed passionate connections that didn’t sustain in the everyday world. A war relationship was beyond extraordinary. “It was a strange life, dislocated,” Julia recalled. Who knew how they would feel about each other once they got home? Besides, there was no need to rush into anything. “We were, by that time, fairly grown up and mature,” Paul recalled. “So we pursued the plan we had in mind, which was to get through with the war and see what we looked like in civilian clothes.” It would be better, they decided, to meet each other’s friends and families and, after that, see if the magic remained.

  It wasn’t nearly that long before the spell took hold. Two days after landing in Peking, Paul had an epiphany that would redefine his life. He had been sitting in his new quarters, “a splendid old palace” surrounded by three large gardens and an orchard of ancient persimmons, staring out over the treetops at the rose-colored walls of the Forbidden City. Its complex of courtyards were eerily deserted. The architecture filled him with “a nostalgic sense of forlorn majesty” that conjured a similar feeling for the love he’d left behind. All those doubts that had been churning around inside him, from Kandy to Chongqing to Kunming, began to dissipate like the “blue smoke that sifted” across the “timeless” horizon. His mind came to a clearing: visibility washed over him. Picking up pen and paper, he began a letter: “Beloved Julie,” he wrote in a hurried script, “at the risk of sounding trite, I wish you were here. I need you to enjoy these marvels with, and I miss your companionship something awful. Dearest Julie, why aren’t you here, holding my hand and making plans for food and fun!” He signed it: “Love, Paulski.” He posted it at once.

  It took more than a month for the letter to reach Julia’s hands, in Washington, where she’d come to complete the formalities of her discharge. After years of searching for a vocation and a man, she was now once again out of a job—but she knew she had finally found the man.

  Eight

  Lucky to Be Alive

  The sun burned high in the sky above Mount Desert Island. Julia and Paul had been driving all day, urging her beat‑up old Buick along the homestretch of Route 102 in Maine. It was the final leg of a nearly four-thousand-mile journey that had begun a month before in Pasadena, in early July 1946. They’d set out on an expedition that might have been called the Julia and Paul Getting-to-Know-You Tour, a cross-country lollapalooza, of sorts, designed to show themselves off to their respective friends—and, more importantly, to each other.

  In the space of half a year, since their return from China, Julia and Paul’s relationship had gone from tepid to sizzling hot. Undaunted by the distance between them—Julia was at her father’s house in California, Paul in Washington, D.C.—they summoned the courage to express their hearts honestly and with abandon in a rash of long, uncensored letters that might, in some circumstances, set the postman’s hands on fire. They had begun tentatively enough, exchanging bits of personal news: gossipy observations, reviews of books, personal insights, this and that. Julia toyed with seeking work in Hollywood; Paul seemed headed for something more banal, with the State Department. They filled each other in on friends lost and found. But between the mild lines of chit-chat, things started to heat up. “What have you done to me,” Julia teased, “that I continue to long and languish for you?” Paul picked up the forward pass and ran with it: “You play a leading role in my fantasy life,” he admitted, imploring her to read Tropic of Cancer and de Sade.

  Julia and Paul’s wedding reception, September 1, 1946 (Photo credit 8.1)

  Finally, in a letter dated February 10, 1946, Julia McWilliams took off the gloves. Beginning it “Dearest one,” she launched headlong into a description of a photograph Paul had sent her, of one of his tempera paintings depicting a familiar Chinese landscape. “I love your style … I love the sturdy warmth of the tree … ” and then—whammo!—she dropped the big one: “I love you.” She just snuck it in there. In fact, she might have slipped it by him, drawing little attention to it, had she not underlined the phrase a few times. I love you. There was nothing ambiguous about it.

  Was it too much? Would it scare Paul off? One can only imagine that Julia held her breath until his next letter fell into her hands. Paul’s response, as it turned out, was as equally free-spoken as hers. “I want to see you, touch you, kiss you, talk with you, eat with you … eat you, maybe. I have a Julie-need.” Aside from the irresolute “maybe,” there was nothing ambiguous about his position, either. Things had taken a turn for the steamy.

  And—steamier. “I feel that I am only existing until I see you, and hug you, and eat you,” Julia responded. Paul suggested that she move to Washington and become his cook. “We can eat each other,” he said.

  Clearly, they were preoccupied with their hunger.

  Urgent measures were needed to satisfy their appetites. It was decided that, sometime after the July Fourth holiday, Paul would travel by train back to Pasadena. Aside from some basic touching, kissing, talking, and eating, Julia wanted him to meet her father and Dort. Afterward—that is, if there was an afterward—they’d set out across the country together, stopping to visit each other’s friends, before winding up in Maine, at Charlie and Freddie’s lake house. It would be the ultimate test to move their friendship along, hopefully into more serious territory. No doubt by the time they reached Maine, every lingering question would be answered.

  The time was right for such a pivotal
experiment. Both Julia and Paul’s lives were in limbo at the moment, each unsatisfied with his or her respective role. Neither had come home from the war with specific plans for the future. For Julia, Pasadena was a rest stop, nothing more. She found her hometown much as she’d always remembered it—“comfortable and lovely, but not for me.” Yet by the summer of 1946, she still had no idea of where to plant her flag. “There is always Washington and the government, both of which I like,” she confided in a letter to Paul. But she was tired of secretarial work, and a dead-end job like the Registry was out of the question.

  Unfortunately, Paul was in no better shape. He’d had an offer to teach in Peking, at Yenching University, but the situation in China had grown progressively too dangerous for him to remain. Instead, he headed home, to Washington, D.C., but even “home” was a concept that had no real meaning. Where was home? In a rented basement apartment—in a city that meant little to him? He had no roots there, no friends, no support system of any kind. And what was he to do? Teach school or work in a photo lab? He was forty-four years old, the world was passing him by. “I should have been making contacts for such a possibility,” he related while still in China, “but I’ve kept too much in the groove”—by which he meant “in a rut,” out of the mainstream. He had no job to speak of—and he had no family, aside from his brother. Now he faced the even more unnerving prospect of reinventing himself. Again. It exasperated Paul that, for all his sophistication and “unusual number of talents,” he’d failed to translate them into a useful and rewarding career. So far, at least, but—he was forty-four!

  These frustrations of Paul’s were glaringly apparent to Julia. “If you could find your niche, I should think you could find your life,” she said, comforting him as best she knew how. But the pep talk was a tough sell. In reality, they were at different crossroads in their lives. At thirty-four, Julia was finally “coming out of [her] cocoon,” blossoming in a huge, exciting way. The new experiences she’d undergone had turned her inside-out; she couldn’t process them fast enough. Since coming home from the war, she’d become her own personal reclamation project, devouring anything she could find that enlarged her already expanding universe. “I am starting on The Cosmological Eye, and also reading some elementary psychology, of which I know very little,” she reported soon after she got back. She’d already clawed her way through a stack of books on semantics, including S. I. Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action, which Paul had recommended when they were in China. In between tomes, she combed through three dailies—The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times—surveying the political landscape, which, for her, was rapidly moving from the right to the left. There was so much information for her to absorb. “Ah, life,” she sighed, “will one ever learn to live it?”