Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  Branson was also influenced by the Child Study Movement, which began in the late nineteenth century and emphasized the teaching power of nature. Its patriarch, Stanley Hall, believed that adolescence was its own separate world, and guardians “should strive … to keep out of nature’s way.” The beautiful garden that was KBS, says its historian Mark Baur, was “ideal” for this romantic naturalism, for it was “enclosed, sprayed, and weeded … [but] at the same time healthy and natural.”

  Beyond the classrooms were sports for every season, required athletic training (only riding, tennis, and dancing lessons were optional), an annual drama staged on the lawn, and afternoon international current events lectures (on days when there were no organized athletics). On one of their trips to San Francisco by ferry from Sausalito, the girls heard ten-year-old violinist prodigy Yehudi Menuhin play with the symphony. Art and music appreciation (non-credit) classes supplemented the recitals, concerts, and crafts. It was a verdant, nurturing world that one girl described years later as a protective ivory tower and the school’s historian called “a Garden Enclosed.” Yet, coming back from a San Francisco trip, the girls were grousing together when one of the chaperones said, “These are the happiest years of your lives!” The girls looked at her in stunned silence.

  MURDER IN PASADENA’S Stevens family brought a loss of innocence for Julia and her friends at the end of her first semester at KBS. The incident occurred in early December when one of John McWilliams’s best friends killed his two sons and then committed suicide. It rocked the community and shook the children, who were playmates and classmates of the Stevens children. Their daughter, Julia’s close friend and a senior at Westridge with Babe, survived, along with her mother.

  The murders and suicide made the front pages of the Pasadena papers because fifty-one-year-old Francis Everett Stevens was a lawyer, founder of the North American Life Insurance Company, and vice president of the First National Bank and the First Trust and Savings Bank. He left the bank one morning and picked up his thirteen-year-old son, George (whom the papers called “subnormal”), at his elementary school, shot him in the head, and placed him under a blanket on the floor of the back of his sedan; at the Los Encinas sanitarium, he locked the car, threw sand on the gas tank where blood was beginning to drip, and asked for his twenty-year-old son, Francis, who was being treated in long-term care after a head injury suffered in a car accident at the University of Michigan. The father placed a packet of papers on the desk at the sanitarium and went for a walk with his son to the tennis court, where he shot young Francis in the temple, then put the gun in his own mouth. Two hours later, after breaking the car window, the police found the body of George.

  Among the papers in the packet of stocks, bonds, and a will was a letter to John McWilliams, his close friend. The Stevenses had bought the McWilliamses’ home on State Street and the children had grown up together. Betty Stevens called Caro to come over. The McWilliamses were prostrate with grief; the entire community was stunned. The two newspapers treated the deaths, with front-page analysis, as a story of “Father Love: Tragic Fate Overtakes Three.” They portrayed “the love of a father who gave his own life to prevent his only two sons from becoming a helpless burden upon society, a curse for themselves,” or as “high moral conviction that his duty lay in saving his sons from impending insanity.” After the private funeral, one newspaper invoked Stevens’s strong will and called the murder story “pitiable, but almost sublime.”

  Dinner conversations at the McWilliams table included talk about inherited family mental illness, bank problems, heart troubles. Franker conversations went on across the street about the mental problems of both boys (George had once been in Charlie’s class), and the Halls told their children that it was a sex-linked mental deficiency in the family. Jim Bishop, who attended the Webb School with George, declared that George was expelled for homosexuality. Betty Parker believed he was just “weird and retarded.” Had the word “homosexuality” been mentioned in the home of most of the children, they would not have known what it meant. Though the McWilliams children were protected from some of the lurid details, they nevertheless struggled with the tragedy that befell their friends. Julia would later write a play about it for her college playwriting class.

  Since the death of Julia’s grandfather in 1924, her father was free to be his own businessman (when his own son came of age, he would compensate by keeping his hands off his son’s career to the point, his sisters felt, of neglect). When Julia graduated from Poly, her father joined the prestigious California Club in downtown Los Angeles, where he often lunched. For a week each summer he would romp in the woods of Northern California with the Bohemian Club. By the end of the 1930s, John McWilliams was often in downtown Los Angeles in his capacity as vice president of the J. G. Boswell Company, which owned 20,000 acres of farmland in Kings County, where it raised stock, grain, and cotton. He knew the central regions of California like the back of his hand and was a natural consultant for the giant company. He was instrumental in their developing the Buena Vista Lake property.

  Julia’s father had long been a friend of the Boswell brothers in Pasadena, especially Jim Boswell, because they both had land in Kern County. When their father began working for Jim Boswell about 1940, all the McWilliams children knew was that their father was some kind of consultant for Boswell, a shrewd businessman with a strong Southern accent. How much this work contributed to their sizable family inheritance they are uncertain. Colonel James G. Boswell was the largest cotton grower in the world. He was driven out of Georgia by the boll weevil and settled in California to become one of the most powerful farmers in the state and marry Ruth Chandler, the daughter of land baron and Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler. The Boswell empire, run from its downtown Los Angeles headquarters, extended northward and centered in the San Joaquin Valley, the state’s most fertile region, where Boswell grew cotton, wheat, and seed alfalfa. Through the end of the century, his company would supply the cotton for Jockey underwear, L. L. Bean shirts, and Fieldcrest towels.

  Los Angeles’s development was symbolized by the new LA city hall, a twenty-eight-floor building towering over downtown. Construction, which began when Julia was away at school, cost $4.8 million. Her father knew the movers and shakers of America’s fastest-growing area. During her holidays at home, Julia continued to visit downtown with her mother and to share Sunday dinner now with Aunt Annie McWilliams Gans, who moved her family from Hagerstown, Maryland, into a home on Euclid in order to care for Julia’s grandmother Clara Dana McWilliams. Cousins Alice and Dana became a steady presence in Julia’s life.

  The summer before Julia’s senior year, Caro suffered a stroke in Santa Barbara, after which one side of her face permanently sagged. She took to bed increasingly with the Weston curse: high blood pressure. Dorothy, five years younger than Julia and not yet a teenager, felt forsaken by her mother. Caro, as her own mother before her, would inevitably abandon her chicks, a painful reality for a woman who, in Julia’s words, “loved being a mother. She was a great deal of fun … [and] so devoted a mother.”

  FROM THE FIRST to the last day at KBS, Jukie was immensely popular. She was never interested in domesticity or food, except when hungry, and she was often hungry. Despite her “love of jelly donuts,” she remained as lean and tall as an adolescent boy. From today’s perspective, she looked like a fashion model.

  The school uniform was becoming on her, especially the blue-and-white-plaid winter skirt (with white blouse). She was hipless, so the skirts gave her a certain fullness. No one looked particularly fetching in the blue-and-white-checked gingham summer dresses (dresses whose length rose and fell according to the current style of each decade over fifty years). The blue crepe de chine dresses with Peter Pan collars that the boarders wore for dinner were no more appealing. French blue was Miss Branson’s (and Julia’s) favorite color. Only through scarves, belts, and socks could the girls express any individuality. Julia had an advantage: her height. Her friend Roxane giv
es the best description of Julia at this time:

  She was … gangly, a little awkward, standing tall but stooping slightly to look benignly down on the rest of us. She was serious about life, but had a unique way of seeing the humor in incidents, and expressing it in her deep, rather thick manner of speaking. She wasn’t trying to be funny. In fact she was very modest and unassuming, totally lacking in exhibitionism. She was just reacting naturally to a situation…. What she was thinking, she said, and it was usually very apt. And often very funny…. She wasn’t attention-seeking, nor aggressive, nor competitive, nor ambitious…. She is just herself…. But as I think back, I suppose her complete lack of self-consciousness, her modest natural responsiveness, feeling at home and at ease anywhere, was true of her then and is now, and is the secret to her charm and appeal.

  This lack of competitiveness and ambition that her friend observed was evident especially in her classwork. On national intelligence tests her scores were considerably above average. Yet her limited attention span, her undeveloped study skills, and her willingness to settle for merely passing grades led to an average school record. Why she was happy to settle for average grades could be explained in terms of her parents’ leniency in expecting high performance or Julia’s desire not to stand out (other than physically) in the crowd, but to be liked and accepted as one of the group. One teacher recorded that she earned “good to excellent grades;” another noted that she earned “100 points perfect in school spirit.”

  During these three high school years, Julia experienced a rigid society for the first time. She was awakened in the morning and sent off to sleep each night by the sound of a bell, and moved through the structure of each day. She rejected the religious aspects, but seemed to enjoy some of the traditions of KBS. She was assigned to the Blue Bonnet team and wore a blue cardigan sweater and beret with her uniform; half the girls were Tam o’Shanters and wore red. These two teams, chosen at registration, played against each other in every sport. When the school basketball team left campus to play in San Francisco or East Bay, they dreaded appearing in their hated “bloomers.” The KBS athletic uniform consisted of “dreadful” black satin bloomers bound in by elastic at the knee, white middy blouses, which some girls would starch until the neck bled, a black silk tie, and black cotton stockings inside high white laced sneakers. When they walked onto the court and saw the “cute little uniforms” of the opposing team, said Mary Zook, they felt humiliated. But with Julia as the “jumping center” (the court was divided into three parts), KBS beat Miss Burke’s School 58 to 12. Outdressed, but victorious. Viola Tuckerman, who lived in Circle Cottage with Julia, said that Julia, the captain of the team, was one of the most popular girls in the school, with her “great sense of humor and [so] easy going.” For Julia, the games were play, not competition (another member of the team remembers Julia never being angry when another girl made a mistake). In fact, she was not a great player, just unbeatable in the jumping circle.

  Her personal progress consisted of adapting to the KBS world. “The peculiar nature of the extrovert,” says Jung, “is to expand and propagate himself in every way … If [one] thinks, feels, acts, and actually lives in a way that is directly correlated with the objective conditions and their demands, [s]he is extroverted.” She believed in her group, and they trusted her. At KBS, as in her later life, she would find in community her work and her happiness. Had she done better in French, she would have known that the role she played was as a boute-en-train—one who promotes gaiety and joy in others, the life and soul of the party.

  The KBS “traditions” that Miss Branson carefully cultivated meant less to Julia as sentimental occurrences than as occasions of frolic. She endured the morning march into assembly for prayer, song, and announcements, but threw herself into other communal activities. She became president of the Vagabonds, a hiking group that once a year, accompanied by Miss Branson, climbed Mount Tam’s 2,600-foot peak. There were fall and spring outings to the beaches (Bolinas, Stinson, Newhall) for swimming, marshmallow roasts, and beach parties, a Halloween party, and Field Day at Seminary Field for competing on Mr. Youngman’s horses. Before Christmas each girl carried her lighted candle through the orchard and up the hill to carol under the lights of the giant central cedar tree. There was the Senior Dance (canceled her senior year because of a mumps outbreak), for which Miss Branson had to approve each gown, and Play Week, and May Revels, with strings of flowers and a maypole.

  Play Week brought all classes to a halt for a week of creative expression and hard work. The play was chosen in early spring, complete with tryouts for the roles, and lines memorized, and a professional drama coach brought in. Everyone served on at least one committee that built sets or wrote programs and invitations, acted or prompted. Because of her height, Julia always played the man or the fish, she remembered, and when as “John Sayle” she had to embrace the leading lady in Pomander Walk, everyone got the giggles, until the final performance for trustees and parents. She also starred in Michael, the Sword Eater and in The Piper. The final plays for the spring of 1930 were Dickon Goes to the Fair and The Admirable Crichton.

  During her senior year, after mumps canceled both the Senior Dance and the spring holiday, Julia took a memorable trip to San Francisco with Roxane Ruhl. When the ferry landed at Fisherman’s Wharf, they had artichokes with hollandaise sauce and cinnamon toast oozing in butter. At the City of Paris shop they bought lipstick and Prince Matchabelli perfume (“We thought we were so elegant,” she remembers). On Market Street at the army-navy store they bought white sailor pants, a daring adventure in an era when neither girls nor women wore slacks. “We wore them with great glee during vacations,” said Roxane. “I suspect the other Branson girls our age were more interested in attracting boys than being like boys.”

  At her graduation under the cedar tree, Julia garnered all the awards: captain of the Blue Bonnets, captain of the basketball team, Vagabond Chief, member of the track and swimming teams, jumping center, and president of the student council. Not surprisingly she was voted unanimously for the White Beret—the highest honor that can fall to a resident girl. When at graduation they brought out the School Cup for presentation to the “School’s First Citizen,” no one was surprised when she was called forward. Miss Branson had the last words on record: with her standard of perfection, she thought Julia’s academic work was “moderately good,” but her “genuineness” was “excellent.” Then she listed Julia’s assets: “integrity of mind and heart, joyousness of spirit, kindliness, refreshing naivete, understanding, generosity—a thoroughly lovable and perfectly delightful girl.”

  Though Babe Hall was convinced that she and Julia were sent to girls’ schools so that they would become more feminine, Julia had attended a private liberal arts school because it was a tradition in the Weston family to be sent to boarding schools. She gained self-confidence, learned leadership skills, and was not distracted by the presence of boys. A recent Mount Holyoke College study shows that girls are overlooked and undervalued in most coeducational classes, especially in math and science. Years later, as if to justify her private high school, Julia noted that “girls’ academic achievement at fourteen or fifteen drops drastically when they discover boys.”

  It was not surprising either, in the tradition of her family and the girls of KBS, therefore, that she would plan to attend Smith College, where both her mother and her father’s sister Annie were alumnae. Nearly all the KBS girls went to college, either directly or after another year of study or European travel. Julia would go to Smith, Mary Zook would go to Vassar, and Berry Baldwin to Bryn Mawr. Her educational track (two private schools) continued what her future husband would call her smooth move through life under “the protection of her money and position.” She was well educated and connected, a young woman confident and comfortable with herself. Julia seemed to know that she could do the work, she just did not value academic achievement. After all, her mother had been center on the Smith College basketball team, and she was still
Caro’s daughter.

  Chapter 4

  SMITH COLLEGE:

  IVY WALLS AND JELLY DONUTS

  (1930 – 1934)

  “The day I was born I was enrolled at Smith College … If I hadn’t gone, it would have broken her heart.”

  JULIA CHILD

  CAROLYN WESTON and Helen Janney were graduates of the class of “naughty-aught” (1900) and determined that their daughters should also go to Smith College and become friends and roommates. “Our mothers arranged our ‘marriage,’” said daughter Mary. It was September 1930 when the mothers proudly made the match in a very old house in Northampton.

  In the door came Julia, this tall, very slender, very happy person smiling at me, saying, “I’m Julia McWilliams.” I have never had a roommate who was so utterly fun to be with; she was almost too much fun…. She was very tall and I was about five feet five inches, and she was very thin, and I was very plump—about 160 pounds, for I had eaten too many hot fudge sundaes.