Despite their differences in academic aspirations and physical appearance, Mary and Julia became fast friends. Mary Case, a serious and idealistic Student who would make Phi Beta Kappa, was soon christened “Fatty.” Julia, who would minor in academics and major in socializing, was called “Skinny.”
Julia made two immediate discoveries: the cot she tried to sleep on the first night was several inches too short and, horror of horrors, her clothes did not conform to the grooming habits of the Northeastern female of Ivy League lineage. The first problem was solved by a telephone call from her mother, says Connie Thayer, one of the other freshman girls on her floor. The new longer bed that the college immediately provided would be hers for the next four years. The second problem took longer to resolve:
I was a Western girl at Smith and dressed in the Western way; when I got to Smith everything was wrong; in those days you had Brooks Brothers crew neck sweaters; pale, pastel tweed skirts from Best & Co. and a camel’s hair polo coat fastened up to the neck; brown and white Spaulding saddle shoes; and a strand of five-and-dime pearls. I was miserable until Mother came at Thanksgiving and we went to New York City and bought all these things. Then I fit in. I was in.
What impressed Julia, as it did the other girls who came from small preparatory schools, was the size and freedom of Smith. Founded in 1871 by Sophia Smith to offer to young women a higher education equal to that offered to young men, this Seven Sisters college was opened in Northampton in the Connecticut River valley of western Massachusetts in 1875. Though it was within a twelve-mile radius of Amherst and Mount Holyoke colleges and the future University of Massachusetts, and although it was only eighty miles to Yale, ninety-three miles to Harvard, and 156 miles to Princeton and Columbia—all crucial to the dating practices of the daughters of Smith—it was three thousand miles from Pasadena. And in terms of the life of an eighteen-year-old girl, it might as well have been a million miles from home.
What eased Julia’s way into this alien climate was her mother’s experience and membership in the club. Julia immediately belonged to the “Granddaughters Club,” those whose mothers had attended Smith, and was initiated into her mother’s secret society, the Orangemen; Mary was initiated into her mother’s secret society, the AOH (Ancient Order of Hibernians).
THE CAMPUS
Julia and her mother had approached the campus from the little town center of Northampton. Driving up the hill, with the ornate campus gate and college administration building ahead of them, they forked left into West Street and immediately entered Green Street, turning right into the campus. Hubbard Hall, built in 1878, was on the left, a three-and-a-half-story brick house with ivy climbing up the side and two chimneys rising high above the attic dormer windows. The house was named after Sophia Smith’s lawyer, the college’s first treasurer and trustee, but more important to Julia was that Hubbard House was strategically located close to the downtown shopping and the hundred-year-old Rahar House (then a speakeasy) on South Street. Directly across the street from Hubbard was a drugstore and soda fountain, where Mary bought her hot fudge sundaes from Mr. Curly. There, Julia quickly found the best jelly donuts in town.
Hubbard Hall would be Julia’s home for four years. In the tradition of Smith, there were no sororities and girls lived and ate in their respective houses, which contained students from each class level. Not surprisingly, the five freshmen in Hubbard soon formed an alliance that they would call the Gang of Five: Mary Case, Julia McWilliams, Hester Adams, Peggy Clark, and Connie Thayer. Three of the five were at Smith because their mothers had attended, though Peggy’s mother attended only two years (this generation would all graduate). Peggy was a slender and shapely girl who had had polio and thus needed assistance to walk. She wore a heavy brace on her left leg, and during the winter months Julia would put Peggy, whom she adored, on a sled for the forays down the hill into town.
What united them in part was their “Mother Hubbard,” Mrs. Holly Phillips Gilchrist. Gilley, as they called her, was the housemother who held the social fabric together, or tried to. Every afternoon she had tea, to which any girl was welcome. Motherly advice was dispensed when asked for, but many of the girls found her too old-fashioned and simpleminded for words. Julia called her “nice, but not too bright.” Connie Thayer said they also called her “Pouter Pigeon” because she was stout, shaped like a pigeon, somber, and lacking a sense of humor. “Girls, girls, you’re using just too much toilet paper!” was a lament of hers they would remember for sixty years. Gifted at imitating, Julia would mimic the lament to peals of laughter.
Julia and Mary (also often called Casey) lived at the top of the first flight of carved wooden stairs in a spacious corner room with two windows. Unfortunately, Dr. Abbie Mabel O’Keefe, the faculty resident and the college’s Director of Medical Services, lived immediately below them. Dr. O’Keefe had flaming red cheeks, white hair, and a quick temper, “very Irish,” the girls thought. One afternoon when she was having a tea for other doctors and professors, Julia and Mary played a typical freshman prank: “Why don’t we lower our rug down over Dr. O’Keefe’s window and block out the light during the tea.” They were roaring with laughter, according to Mary, when the doctor burst in and “exploded.” Swiftly, they received their demerits from the Judicial Board. Forty years later, the roommates offered their “official” version to the alumni organization: they hung the rug out on the fire rope and, to their horror, “it slipped” down to cover the window below.
On another occasion, Mary locked Julia in their room with a girl whom Julia disliked (“She’s like a wet dog!”). Mary slid the key out when she saw the girl in their room, and eventually Julia crawled out through the transom with some difficulty, looking like a wreck. “How could you do that to me, Fatty? Lock me in with the ‘wet dog’?”
“When I came to college I was an adolescent nut,” Julia Child told the official college oral history project years later: “Someone like me should not have been accepted at a serious institution. I spent my time growing up and doing enough work to get by.” The confidential file of Mrs. Gilchrist revealed that though Julia may have grown up, she never lost her rebellious and independent nature: “A grand person generally but she does go berserk every once in a while and is down on all ‘Suggestions and Regulations.’” And “inclined to let her opinions overrule her good judgment; this spells youth mostly. I believe she will outgrow her impulsiveness somewhat—but I believe there will always be things she will balk at.” If Gilley did not think Julia was always “emotionally stable,” she at least noted that she was “charming,” “cooperative,” and “an excellent organizer and manager.”
Though her college environment resembled a sorority of largely privileged girls, Smith in 1930 was more diverse than KBS. There were a few African-Americans and a scattering of Jewish students. Of the 654 freshman students, Julia McWilliams was the tallest. “For this reason she was known by nearly everyone!” said Connie Thayer, one of her freshman dorm mates. Another classmate, Anita Hinckley, who came from Rhode Island, said, “I came from the smallest state of the Union. When I saw Julia, a great big California girl, I thought that everyone in California must be that tall.” The pictures of Julia in the 1933 and 1934 yearbooks show her standing in the back row, serious, as was the custom in photographs of the day, though both her clothes and her stance were casual. While Gilley noted in her final evaluation that Julia “managed her height well” and was “well dressed,” one of Julia’s classmates declared, “She was never very stylish,” and a professor’s evaluation offered the irrelevant opinion that she “needs to give more attention to personal appearance.” But the same friend who remarked that her skirts were not stylish and that she seemed to be all arms and legs, added that “later she became beautiful and graceful.” Julia, when asked sixty years later about experiencing any conflict between being pretty and being successful in college, said that this conflict was lessened in a college without boys: “Being very, very tall, I had difficulties from that point of
view [attracting boys]. So I did not go through some of those things that a short, pretty girl does. I was always struggling to be a pretty person, but it was difficult because you could not get the proper shoes or clothes.” She confided in her diary that she felt “big and unsophisticated.”
Because her mother was a Smith basketball star at five feet seven inches, Julia was expected to continue her mother’s starring role as “jumping center” in three-sectioned girls’ basketball. But Smith changed the rules of the game and did away with the jump ball in favor of throwing the ball into the court. Julia retired: “I was not good at the rest of the game.”
Once again Julia found herself in a purportedly Christian environment, with most mornings beginning with chapel. Smith called itself a Christian college, though “entirely nonsectarian in religion.” It expected all students “to affiliate themselves with the churches of their own denomination in the city.” Julia, it appears, did not. (By her senior year she wrote “not a church member” on the religious preference questionnaire.) No more walking to the same church in two rows as they had done at KBS. Although attendance was not taken, chapel was indeed required and “we did what we were supposed to do,” explained Charlotte (Chuss) Snyder, another of her classmates. “We certainly lived by the rules.” The convocation was held in John M. Greene Hall and consisted of a hymn, a prayer, and an address. Named for the pastor who had advised Sophia Smith on the founding of the college, Greene Hall is a magnificent brick building with mighty Greek columns.
Usually President William Allan Neilson, who also taught Shakespeare, spoke to the women about current events or issues on campus that pleased or displeased him. He was forthright, witty, and personable. The women were united in their love for this Scotsman who never forgot a student’s name, even years later. Julia’s classmate Charlotte Snyder Turgeon still has his photograph hanging in her study. According to Julia, Neilson was a little man (she would point to her waist) who smoked a “twisted kind of stogie,” and he was “adorable”:
He had a pink face, twinkling eyes, a white goatee, and a white mustache … he was so cute! [In 1972 she recalled him as] a charming, charming man: [President] Neilson was just so cute you wanted to hug him, you had tremendous respect for him and he was wonderfully witty. I can’t keep from crying thinking of him because he was such a charming man. Everybody felt the same way.
One day in chapel he addressed the issue of smoking on campus: “Now I have to talk to you girls about smoking. This is a custom which is unhealthy, which is not ladylike. But it is a custom that I adore.”
Julia and her classmates were exposed to several major cultural figures during their Smith days. Julia remembered that Paderewski played the piano and Amelia Earhart spoke to them. When a woman from the Metropolitan Opera gave a concert, Julia went backstage. “She was a big fat soprano with a bosom so big and protruding that I went backstage to get my program autographed to see for myself.” Julia also attended two days of eleven Beethoven quartets played by the London String Quartet on campus (“It was quite a trial, but I went to all of them,” she wrote her mother), and she attended Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts in Hartford, Connecticut, not only because it was avant-garde and a class project; she adored the theater.
Julia took her courses seriously enough, but only as a necessary part of her college experience and to be passed successfully. “We were a big class and by the midterm about half of us were on probation,” said Connie Thayer, who thought both Mary and Julia were “brilliant.” (Mary studied and earned A’s; Julia studied little and was a B or B—student, except her sophomore year, when she earned C’s.) “I never was afraid of getting a low grade,” remembers Julia, “though I was not a very good student.”
Connie, who was considered the naive and innocent member of the Gang of Five (“I thought that storks brought babies”), was from Worcester. On a couple of vacation periods, Julia went home with Connie to visit her parents, and she went to Providence some weekends with her friend Anita Hinckley and to Washington, DC, one spring with Roxane Ruhl, her Oregon friend from KBS, who had gone to Vassar.
HOLIDAYS AND FAMILIES
The major destination for family holidays, however, was west of Northampton in Dalton, her mother Caro’s hometown. Westonholme, built by her grandparents, echoed of the richness of her mother’s New England heritage. In the Queen Anne style, built with one round tower and two octagonal towers and a lookout on the rooftop, Westonholme was an adventure to visit. Uncle Philip and Aunt Theodora presided over what Julia called “this monstrosity” full of cozy corners and towers. Christmas was crowded with cousins. These warm family memories would be spoiled years later in a bitter quarrel over the Weston Paper Company.
In fact, the family waters had already been muddied by Aunt Theodora, who, upon the death of the eldest Weston (Frank, who ran the paper mill), put their Uncle Philip, her husband, “in a primogeniture position” to run the family business. Julia and her sister Dort thought this “grande dame duchess” a manipulating and subtly denigrating “monster.” “I was always careful to tell Aunt Theodora when I felt she was boasting about her illustrious antecedents that John Alden and Priscilla were indentured servants!” Though Julia spent many holidays in Dalton, the memory of this aunt never dimmed. As late as 1986, after visiting the Napa Valley, she wrote to M. F. K. Fisher about the “Mafia Mothers” of the winemakers, comparing them in detail to her Aunt Theodora.
When Julia did not visit Dalton and nearby Pittsfield during the holidays, she took the train home to Pasadena. When the train stopped in Chicago she always visited her Aunt Nell—Ellen (Nelly) Weston, who was married to Hale Holden and lived in Winnetka, Illinois. Aunt Nell had a lovely older daughter Julia’s height, who became her stylish role model. “Eleanor was tall and beautiful, a wonderful character, a wonderful dresser who wore Empress Eugénie hats and great clothes. That is why I stopped in Chicago so frequently.” According to her letters to her mother (usually addressed to “Dear Coco,” “Mamy Dear,” “Dear Cocacola,” or “Dear Mother Caro”), she visited the Art Institute in Chicago and attended concerts with her cousins. She would sign off her letters: “be good … sweetie apple” and “love to big J.”
In the summers Julia returned to her California paradise, made more idyllic with the addition of a summer home for the McWilliams family in San Malo, California, near Oceanside, more than an hour’s drive down the coast from Los Angeles. Mrs. McWilliams built the house with a walled patio to keep out the ever-present white sand. Friends of Julia remember the tall doors and handles, built especially for this tall family. Julia had all her friends down for parties, and was sweet (one friend says) on a boy named Charley Crane one summer. Relatives occasionally visited, including her cousin Dana, who had attended KBS with her one year and was now enrolled, along with her sister Alice, at Scripps College for Women in Claremont, California.
Julia knew little about what had happened in her hometown during the years she had been away. Like most college students, she did not read the newspapers. Los Angeles was going through a decade-long building boom (the county population more than doubled, to two million). Yet the Depression was now exposing corruption, and many of the men who built Los Angeles—both businessmen and public officials—were going to San Quentin. The news was full of scandals and receiverships (three hundred businesses, “representing more than half a billion dollars in assets,” according to one historian, would be placed in receivership during the early 1930s).
Though John McWilliams was disgruntled about the scandals and the political climate—Roosevelt’s Democrats swept the country in the fall of 1932—no scandal touched him or the company he worked for, the J. G. Boswell Company. And he continued to support Julia’s Ivy League education. Her brother Johnny graduated from Poly and was going on to Lake Forest Academy, a hope eventually undermined, according to his sisters, by his dyslexia.
When Julia returned for her sophomore year, she arrived with a drum she bought when the train sto
pped in Albuquerque. When others were trying to study, she pretended to be a Navajo chief and beat out her rhythm on the tom-tom. Mary Case had already suggested that they live separately this year so that she could study better (“I couldn’t play all night and laugh with Julia and stay in college…. Julia did not really worry much about anything”). The previous year, when Mary had hung a green rug on the fire rope between their two beds to protect her study time, Julia tossed a jelly donut over to her roommate. She also fed her ravenous hunger on brownies with chocolate sauce, toasted cheese sandwiches, and chocolate ice cream sodas from across the street.
ACADEMICS AND DORMITORY FOOD
Julia’s grades dropped during her sophomore year in part because she no longer shared a room with the studious Mary and in part because she became very active in campus activities. She served on the elite Grass Cops (they blew whistles when someone walked on the lawns) with her former roommate Mary Case, with Marj Spiegel, the pretty daughter of the Chicago retail merchant, and with Dickie Fosdick, the daughter of Harry Emerson Fosdick, New York City’s famous minister and member of Smith’s Board of Trustees. Fosdick “was our class star,” said Mary, “class valedictorian who lived on a complete schedule and could do all sports.” Julia also was chosen to be on the Sophomore Push Committee, another great honor, with Charlotte Snyder, Madeleine Evans, and Dorothy Fosdick—all three campus leaders. The Push Committee helped people get through commencement, even if it meant picking all the thorns off the roses. As one class member pointed out, among the aggressive girls there were those who partied with their dates at the Dartmouth carnival and those who were the campus leaders.
Julia was a leader but a casual student and had not even taken her college boards or aptitude tests seriously. Though she ranked in the high eighties percentile in intelligence in her class, her aptitude tests were only above average (highest in plane geometry, 82; in physics, 78). She assumed that as the daughter of a graduate she would be safe if she just passed her courses. Years later, in an interview with the Smith College Sophian, she offered the following suggestion: “My father was a conservative antediluvian Republican who thought that Phi Beta Kappas were up to no good.” In the college’s oral history she expressed it in stronger words: “For my father, intellectuality and communism went hand in hand. So you were better off not being intellectual. And if you were Phi Beta Kappa you were certainly a pinko.” What he valued was friendship and good citizenship, and she excelled in each. Moreover, girls her age were not ambitious and few graduated from college. Even in 1940, only “five percent of the female population” had a college education. It is remarkable that she persisted to graduation, for of those who did go to college, only a third graduated. The statistics were considerably better at Smith, where only one-third of her Smith class of 654 dropped out before graduating (perhaps in part because of the Depression). “I never thought of leaving Smith; it would have killed my mother,” said Julia. In her self-deprecating way, she added, “I was always one of the crowd. I had a good time and, in spite of myself, I learned something.”
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