Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  As a sophomore, Julia began the fifth of her six years of studying French grammar and literature. For her and her parents’ generation, reared to be Anglophile, the study of Western and Northern Europe was the civilized pursuit. They studied European languages, museums, and cathedrals—but not the sensuous elements of daily French life. Cold climate, hard currency, Northern respectability, and hearty food—these were the keys to virtue. At the time, Julia did not question these values, nor was she as yet aware of her hedonistic nature. Several of Julia’s acquaintances were planning to spend their junior year in France, including Charlotte Snyder of Boston and Catherine Atwater, who later in life would be closer to Julia when she married John Kenneth Galbraith and the Childs became their neighbors. Julia did not have the proficiency or interest to consider a junior year abroad. She took one more year of French after completing two years of Italian (Smith required two languages), never knowing how valuable the learning would become.

  If Julia picked up bad eating habits in college, she did so in a positive way, associating her dining experience with the fellowship of friends. Hubbard Hall had a kitchen and a cook and the girls had to show up promptly for their meals, over which Gilley presided. The fare was all-American, which meant “real New England food, meat and potatoes and traditional food,” said Charlotte Snyder. It also meant, in the trend of the day, shelves of products from General Foods, a company that already owned Jell-O, Postum, Baker’s Chocolate, Minute Tapioca, Post cereals, Log Cabin syrup, and Maxwell House Coffee (and soon Birds Eye frozen foods). The disastrous effects of the Depression on small retailers and farmers had only encouraged these national companies and the large supermarkets.

  Charlotte Snyder was the only classmate of Julia’s who remembered the food, beyond a general comment about its fat and sauce content. Charlotte’s father owned Batchelder and Snyder, a large meat distributor/wholesale food business in Boston (much later bought by Birds Eye), and when he visited the college he was mightily impressed when he was served sweetbreads. Though Charlotte would eventually go on to the Cordon Bleu (before Julia did) and make a career in the food world as an editor of the Larousse Gastronomique (1961), she claimed that “none of us was into food then.”

  While Julia and Charlotte were eating tasty junk food, Americans were being sold foodstuff for its purity, uniformity and “scientific” goodness. Crisco advertised its product as “used wherever a housewife takes pride in a clean, sweet kitchen.” Baker’s cocoa was “scientifically blended” and “corrects the action of the digestive organs.” Nothing in the official advertising about freshness, taste, aroma, or pleasure. Little wonder these students did not care about food preparation or careful dining. They had a kitchenette on the second floor of Hubbard Hall, but no one remembers any cooking: they stored ice cream in the refrigerator; Julia had a reputation for never doing the dishes.

  Nevertheless, during Julia’s freshman year, an event occurred in St. Louis that would eventually make a major impression on her life. Irma Rombauer, a German-American widow, and her friends put together a collection of recipes that they self-published: The Joy of Cooking. Five years later, after many rejections, it was printed by Bobbs-Merrill, and its sales, thanks to its accessibility and practical approach, increased steadily to more than a million a decade later. It would become Julia’s first cookbook after she herself discovered the joy of cooking.

  Rombauer’s book, emphasizing the pleasure of cooking and eating, went against a trend dominating American cooking for two generations: domestic science, which tried to marry science and cooking. It was a trend stoked by the food-processing companies and factory farms, which emphasized sanitation, uniformity, and “health.” Perhaps the Depression Dust Bowl helped undermine an agrarian society and fresh produce, but it was greed and the hair-netted “scientists” in the lab (no cooks need apply) that destroyed American eating habits. Their crowning achievement, suggests Laura Shapiro in Perfection Salad, was the invention of Crisco, advertised as an “Absolutely New Product” of scientific cookery. Crisco ads pointed out its “pure cream white” appearance and the fact that it never spoils (but not that it never leaves the arteries). This “model food of the twentieth century” is probably what Julia’s jelly donuts were cooked in.

  Ironically, it was the work of the grandfather of her classmate Catherine Atwater that laid the foundation of the domestic science movement. Catherine Galbraith would discover decades later that Wilbur Olin Atwater, who had studied in Germany and was professor of chemistry at Wesleyan before he became the head of the Office of Experiment Stations in Washington, DC, was the pioneer of nutrition, the popularizer of the word “calorie,” and the developer of food composition tables. His numerous books, published between 1887 and 1898, made him the first to investigate food and digestion; he became the “mentor of scientific cooks.” (Atwater’s father was a Methodist preacher who founded a temperance newspaper near Burlington, Vermont.)

  TRADITIONS

  When the chapel bell rang, as it did unannounced every October, Julia jumped for joy. It was Mountain Day, and by tradition everyone left the campus to go out into the New England foliage. Julia’s gang grabbed their sandwiches and went to the Mount Tom recreational area to hike. Smith’s traditions were much older than those at KBS, and even more effective. Rally Day was a day of skits, mostly ridiculous, put on by each class, along with singing on the steps of Hubbard Hall. Julia was always in the skits and was by nature a ham, said one of her classmates.

  Although she had “retired” from the basketball team, Julia remained physically active. The gymnasium was across Green Street, and the playing fields with tennis courts and riding stables were up Green Street and across the bridge. She engaged in hockey, tennis, archery, and baseball as well as swimming and riding. “I did not do as much in [organized] sports at Smith. I played hockey, which I had never played before; lacrosse I did not like because there were no boundaries and you ran your legs off.” She did play in a junior/senior game her last year and told her mother, “They were awfully mad at me for being so big.”

  The spring of her sophomore year the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped and the girls rallied around Connie Morrow, the baby’s aunt. Constance was a Smith freshman and friend of Anita Hinckley when they both attended Milton Academy. When the baby’s body was discovered about eleven days later, the campus was devastated. Reality had intruded into the idyllic world of Smith.

  The Olympic Games were held in Los Angeles in the summer of 1932 and Julia’s friends were caught up in the excitement. When a group of them gathered in San Malo, they staged their own Olympics and played to the point of exhaustion day after day. To her brother, who was dating lovely Southern California girls, Julia’s physical play and short hair and girl’s school manner indicated that she did not want to be a girl. She was interested in boys, he thought, but her associations were more like being “one of the boys.”

  Before returning to school, Babe Hall came over to lunch with Julia and her mother. “Julia seemed much older than I, much more sophisticated,” said Babe, who was attending Occidental College. But Mrs. McWilliams had not changed a bit. She was just as lenient and whimsical as ever: When Julia told her mother and Babe about staying out all night with a group that included boys, her mother’s only comment was: “Did you have any breakfast? Don’t do that again, dear, until you have gained ten pounds.” Babe was amazed that Mrs. McWilliams was not warning her daughter against sneaking in, but against failing to eat out.

  While protecting the intelligence and virtue of America’s finest young flowers, Smith nurtured their leadership abilities and experience. Eleven years before, the Board of Trustees established a student government association that gave the women some power in establishing the rules and regulations of their social life: Student Council, the Judicial Board, the House of Representatives, and the House Councils. In her junior year, Julia was elected Junior Class Representative to the Student Council. Madeleine Evans, a prominent campus debater, served as president;
Connie Thayer was vice president, and Mary Case was treasurer of their class. Julia was again appointed to the Grass Cops along with Marjorie Spiegel, Dorothy Fosdick, and Mary Case, and was refreshments chair for the prom committee, headed by Marjorie Spiegel. During this year she became friendly with a senior named Elizabeth (Betsy) Scofield Bushnell from New Haven, who more than a decade later would become her best friend when Julia married into the Bushnell-Bissell-Kubler-Child-Prudhomme tribe of friends.

  JUNIOR YEAR

  “I certainly hated to leave our Sunkist paradise,” she wrote her mother from the train headed back to Northampton, “But I do think it is much better for you not to have all of us around to worry about.” She was traveling with Gay Bradley, her childhood friend who after flunking out of Smith her freshman year was attending (and would graduate from) Radcliffe. They played bridge most of the way. During this junior year the Gang of Five was joined by Happy Gaillard, who, like Hester Adams, with whom she roomed, was from New York City. Happy had gone to Vassar, hated it, and transferred into Hubbard House and Smith. As a transfer student, Happy would not match the campus leadership roles of the other girls, but she would enjoy the fun. Charlotte Snyder, who lived in Ellen Emerson Hall on the other side of Paradise Pond, said, “That group had a great sense of humor. I was in awe of them. I was terribly serious [and pious] at the time.”

  Another change in the gang was the distraction of young men who came to call. Connie remembers that Hester, a freckled girl with an old-fashioned face and wide smile, would come home at the last minute and just as the bell was ringing and her friends were looking out the window, Henry, her future husband, would kiss her good night. That summer Connie also met her future husband, a senior at Yale, and drifted away from the weekend activities of the gang.

  One of the most important events of the junior year was the declaration of a major. Though Julia took more classes in music (a passion she shared with Mary), she chose history: “It had more options.” Yet a majority of her friends—Peggy, Connie, and Mary—chose the same major. Perhaps they used the same reasoning, though Julia remembered, “In those days there were not many options: secretary or teacher or nurse seemed the only [ones],” but marriage was the priority. Maybe they were influenced by politically liberal teachers, one of whom took his students to a walkout at the textile mill in Northampton (much to the dismay of Anita Hinckley’s father, who believed she was becoming a “flaming communist”). The history teachers were popular, as was Roosevelt, who won in a landslide in November 1932. Julia, who still thought like her father, wanted Hoover to defeat FDR and was still largely unaware of union leader Harry Bridges and the crippling strikes on the West Coast.

  Julia took Dr. Leona Gabel’s Renaissance and Reformation course (History 351) and earned B+ both semesters. She thought that Gabel was “a real brain.” Gabel wrote in Julia’s academic record that she admired Julia’s “qualities of leadership,” her “droll, humorous, likable personality,” and her ability to take “criticism not only kindly but responsively.” Julia’s paper on one of the promiscuous Renaissance popes caused quite a sensation in the class, remembers Mary Ford (Cairns), one of two sisters from Pasadena who were ahead of Julia at Smith.

  Because of the popularity of English professor Mary Ellen Chase, a famous “lady novelist” or “authoress” as they called her in those days, many students thought about writing careers. Chase gave a very good course on the novel to crowded classrooms. Though she did not take Chase’s course, Julia decided to become a “woman novelist”: “My plan was to be a woman novelist … there were some famous women novelists in those days.” During an interview decades later for the oral history of Smith, Julia could only explain her failing to take a course with Chase as pure romanticism, thinking “I had to live first and then I’d write. I was … an utter adolescent. The idea was to get everything else so that you can get the writing later. I was a very adolescent person all the time up till I was about thirty.”

  Later she partially justified ignoring the novel-writing class by saying that when she went to hear Chase give a lecture in Washington, DC, in the 1950s, she was disappointed, calling her a “semi-charlatan” and a “show-off … it was like watching a piece of theater. You were there to see her, not to learn anything.” Julia told an interviewer in 1980 that she was “inspired” to be a writer by reading the stories of Somerset Maugham. Instead she became something of a Maugham character, meeting her husband-to-be in a Ceylonese teahouse and following him all over the world.

  She was particularly impressed with Marjorie Hope Nicolson, then the Dean, who later became the first woman full professor in graduate studies at Columbia University. Her admiration began when Nicolson took over a chapel talk in which the students expected to hear their beloved President Neilson. “I am Banquo’s ghost,” she said at the beginning of a witty talk that would make her career with the students. She was a Renaissance scholar, and Julia took a course in Milton with her. Julia remembered little about her classes, except breeding drosophila fruit flies in her biology class.

  Julia had originally asked Alex McWilliams (their grandfathers were brothers) to the junior prom, but he was busy pole-vaulting for Princeton, and she settled on another young man with a connection to her family. Julia was a junior usher for the 1933 commencement, an honor accorded to those contributing the most to college life. Hester Adams, another member of the gang, was head of the junior ushers. The experience of participating in the final ceremonies was the best motivation for a successful senior year ahead.

  SENIOR REWARDS

  A second motivation was a car. Seniors with high enough grades could have a car on campus, and that was inspiration enough for Julia to improve her grades and for her mother to buy her an open 1929 Ford, which she named Eulalie, the first model with gear shifts. It was black with two seats and the top folded back. “I am reveling in my automobile and haven’t walked a step since I got it here,” she wrote her mother on April 25, 1934.

  During the campaign for the repeal of prohibition, the Smith girls, particularly the Gang of Five (which included Happy but not innocent Connie), partied more than ever. Julia had certainly drunk alcohol before, but never in these amounts: “I remember it well. During prohibition a group of us drove in the Ford to a speakeasy in Holyoke that was on the top of a warehouse; we all had one of everything. Luckily we had an open car, because we were all quite sick. That was very terribly exciting.”

  On December 5, 1933, at 5:32 P.M., the repeal of prohibition was ratified. Now they could openly and legally drink at the Hotel Northampton. But one happy night they created such a commotion that Gilley asked Mary to come down and demanded that as house president she had to restore order. Mary went back upstairs and discovered Julia on her hands and knees in the hall.

  Drinking had always gone on during Christmas vacation, especially on the train to and from Pasadena. One of the Pasadena girls who was a year ahead of Julia at Smith remembers that during her senior year she traveled home on the Twentieth Century to Chicago and the Santa Fe to Pasadena. Julia also remembers that trip: “We had some rather wild times on the train…. Everyone came back for Christmas and there was a lot of drinking going on. Those were the days!” Gay Bradley adds, “Those were wonderful trips in which nearly fifty of us would party for four or five days.”

  With all the celebrating and student activities, it is not surprising that Julia let her English and music grades slide a bit in her final semester. She chaired the Community Chest, which put her on the Activities Board, was a Grass Cop and assistant editor of the Tatler, the school paper, which was headed by Margaret Hamilton. Hester Adams, one of the Gang of Five, was the editor of the yearbook and Catherine Atwater her associate editor. Julia learned a Latin carioca dance for the Rally Day show, and acted in the musical variety show jointly presented by Smith and Amherst.

  Julia took three memorable courses her senior year and did well in all of them. From Merle Eugene Curti, professor of American history, she took modern
American history (after 1870) and earned B’s. He was the professor who had assigned the study of propaganda and its effect on the strikers in Northampton. When asked for the “most interesting and profitable class” of her college career, Julia named the one taught by Curti, who earned a national reputation for his textbooks after he left Smith to teach at the University of Wisconsin. He won the 1944 Pulitzer in history for The Growth of American Thought.

  She took a course in writing one-act plays from Samuel Atkins Eliot, Jr., which tapped into the fun she had had writing plays for the McHall acting troupe in her mother’s attic and would lead to her writing several short plays for the Junior League. Eliot had a severe stutter, but he inspired her to write about the traumatic event of her first year at KBS, the Stevens triple murder-suicide. She told an interviewer from Smith years later that her play was “terribly dramatic” and had “wonderful potentialities”: “About a friend of my family’s who found he had heart trouble. And unfortunately he had two boys, one of whom was a moron from birth and the other one who developed dementia praecox and he was horrified about dying and leaving his wife with these two idiot boys.” Julia followed the murder and suicide as closely as one can tell from the newspaper accounts, but included a scene in which her own mother, Caro, went to the tennis court with the mother of the murdered boy and offered to drive the car home. That is when they found the second murdered son. “So it made a wonderful play, you can imagine. It was never performed, of course.”