Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  She also took international relations (Government 39) from Dr. Alice M. Holder, who gave Julia her only two A’s. Miss Holder, who believed that Julia had “the reputation of being very humorous,” commended her “good intelligence and keen interest in what she does” as well as her “general enthusiasm … considerable personal attractions and plenty of savoir faire.”

  Her final semester was, as all commencement speakers point out, a looking backward and a beginning. In January her mother arrived for the funeral in Dalton of Julia’s uncle Philip Weston. Julia bought a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses because Noble Cathcart, married to her cousin, had published an essay on the novel in his Saturday Review of Literature. She did not have time to brush up on her Homer, as she told her mother, and read only part of the novel. But she was stimulated by the courses she was taking from Professor Curti and Associate Professor Holder. And she was distracted by a boy named Luther, on whom she was sweet. Since February she and her classmates had been wearing their graduation gowns to chapel, sometimes over their pajamas. But behind the daily distractions and plans for commencement was the ever-lingering question of vocation.

  When Julia enrolled at Smith, she listed her vocational choices as “No occupation decided; Marriage preferable.” She was typical of her class. When Mrs. Gilchrist wrote her reference evaluation of Julia she said that her family was “wealthy” and thus she “will not need ‘a job’ I do not believe. She would do well in some organized charity or social service work.” Such were the expectations to be lived up to. Five years later President Neilson told them that they were “not the brightest class that ever graduated from Smith, but you were the marryingest class.” However, Charlotte Snyder Turgeon claims that 80 percent of her Smith house went into the foreign service. The lack of a sense of direction was something Julia shared with most of the women of her class. Because Julia could not anticipate the marriage track, she abandoned her “lady novelist” fantasy and was looking at journalism. “I only wish to god I were gifted in one line instead of having mediocre splashings in several directions,” Julia wrote her mother on November 26 of her senior year.

  Julia invited a boy named Fred Allen to the senior prom, but he could not get away from Harvard because of his grades. Then she tried Win Crane, who worked at the Weston paper mill and whom she had met at her relatives’. If the latter had not accepted, she was going to send the entire sex to Hades, she told her mother. Accustomed to being chosen first for any team of girls, she did not have the same score with boys.

  In addition to the prom was: Ivy Day, when she walked in her white dress and red sash between the two sophomore lines carrying ivy chains, and she and Mary were joint toastmasters at their senior dinner—a gig they would repeat for reunions. She would stay close to her buddies, though they immediately moved on to marriage and children. Mary, who would name her first baby Julia, emphasized that the greatest characteristic of her roommate was “compassion … human kindness.” This opinion of Hubbard House’s “head girl” was echoed by the rest of the gang.

  When she graduated, Julia became an active Smith alumna for the remainder of her life, returning to class reunions, opening her home to them, joining the “club” that would eventually include Nancy Reagan, Sylvia Plath, and Gloria Steinem. She wears this association proudly, defending the school against what she saw as “charges” of homosexuality when by the 1990s Northampton had become synonymous in some minds with lesbians. Smith would give her a New England association that never failed to surprise some people when they learned she was born and reared in Pasadena.

  Her mother, sister, and brother came for the elaborate Smith College graduation ceremonies on Monday, June 18, 1934. Dean Christian Gauss of Princeton was the commencement speaker. The three siblings drove Eulalie back across the country. “Now this car is very old and we will drive no faster than between forty and forty-five miles an hour,” Dorothy remembers her brother John declaring. Indeed, Eulalie had over 50,000 miles on her, and forty miles an hour was as fast as the car would go. “It took us almost two weeks to get across the country.”

  John Dillinger was loose that summer, and every time they saw a black limousine, they were certain they were going to encounter the famous bank robber and murderer. He was shot dead by the FBI in Chicago that July, but until that time the police search was exciting and took their minds off the grueling trip. They were driving through the Dust Bowl in heat that reached 110 in Oklahoma. Dorothy remembers: “This enormous tan cloud was coming toward us and it was dusk and it blew over us and Julia’s hat blew off, and the dust blew past and then it rained and then it got to be 100 degrees again. We stayed in Tourist Courts—auto courts. When it got too hot, the water fell out. John taped the water radiator and we continued. Once when we stopped a million flies surrounded us.” They arrived home dirty and exhausted and headed for the beach.

  The lovely photograph of Julia in the Pasadena newspaper announced her graduation from Smith College with a major in history: “She will return here after graduation and will pass the summer with her family at the McWilliams beach home at San Malo.”

  Chapter 5

  CAREER SEARCH

  (1934 – 1943)

  “I am quite content to be the way I am—and feel quite superior to many a wedded mouse.”

  Julia McWilliams’s diary

  “MIDDLE-CLASS women did not have careers,” explained Julia McWilliams, who spent one year at home after Smith College. “You were to marry and have children and be a nice mother. You didn’t go out and do anything,” she told Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine in 1989. Without serious marriage prospects, she spent the summer of 1934 in San Malo and then lived at 1207 South Pasadena Avenue helping her mother, whose high blood pressure was not improving. She spent her time playing piano (as well as accordion and bugle), socializing with her friends (particularly Gay Bradley), and still occasionally dating a young man named Luther, whom she could not even recall fifty years later. She gave a “whirl of parties,” according to her mother’s letters to Dorothy (now a senior at Katharine Branson School): fourteen friends for a weekend at St. Malo, sixteen for a buffet lunch, a black-and-white ball for forty at their Pasadena house. When she was not giving her own parties, she attended some of Babe Hall’s Sunday soirees across the street. On one occasion, according to Babe’s brother, Julia put a bottle of brandy in the punch, considerably enlivening the party.

  She became increasingly restless living at home without purpose. The Smith alumnae news reported that “Miss McWilliams has been taking up German and music this winter and also supervising youngsters at a clinic.” But she told the vocational guidance office at her alma mater that she wanted a “literary” career on a “newspaper, magazine, critical, etc.” in the Los Angeles area.

  The Junior League was the civic expression for all young middle-class women her age in Pasadena. She and Gay Bradley studied for the Junior League “as if we were working for a Ph.D.,” said the latter:

  Of course, no one ever studied, so we got 100 percent. Julia was the center of attention and activity; when we were all together she was always the focus, always the funny one, always the clown (of course, she had her serious side); when she was little she was always the first one throwing butter at the ceiling, the ringleader … always the kind of person people follow because she had great magnetism.

  Not long after attending Dorothy’s graduation at the Katharine Branson School, where Dort followed her sister’s example in winning the School Cup as outstanding student, Julia went east to Providence, Rhode Island, for more than a week. She was one of eighteen bridesmaids at her classmate Anita Hinckley’s wedding to Charley Hovey. Julia helped write thank-you notes as the gifts arrived at the Hinckley house. She was the life of the party, said the bride, who claimed, “All the ushers were absolutely crazy about Julia, especially Stacey Holmes and Eugene Record. Whether at the clambake at their Narragansett summer home or the dinner parties and wedding reception, Julia was adored in every way but romantica
lly. After all the reception toasts had droned on, Julia arose with dramatic flair, lifted her glass, and said only “Hinckley, Hovey, Lovey Dovey.” Anita would never forget Julia’s toast. The effect of this grand society wedding was to pull Julia back to her East Coast friends and emphasize her need for a purpose in life. Anita was the example of traditional “success,” both in her choice of marriage and in her husband—Harvard varsity crew and law school graduate.

  NEW YORK CITY CAREER GIRL

  Julia, Dort, and their mother, Caro, drove East in September 1935 to take Dort to Bennington College, where she would study drama, and Julia to western Massachusetts, where she would stay with her Aunt Theodora and study secretarial skills at the Packard Commercial School. Aunt Theodora was a woman who could take everyone’s measure and everyone came up short. Julia quit the stenography program in a month or two when, after applying and persisting, a job appeared (which did not need shorthand). She was hired in October by the prestigious home-furnishing firm of W. & J. Sloane in New York City.

  New York drew Julia and a number of other 1934 graduates of Smith, certainly those who did not marry. She rented an apartment at 400 East Fifty-ninth Street with Julie Chapman and Lib Payson. “Julie [Chapman] has been promoted to the position of personal shopper at Best & Company, and Libby seems to be doing very well at Lord & Taylor. The Maguires are still at Bonwit Teller, and Libby has also been promoted to personal shopper. Georgia Williams has just come into Sloane’s,” she proudly informed Smith’s vocational office. “The salaries of all are comparatively small, but we are all happy.” Later she would say, “I loved it. I started out at eighteen dollars a week…. I remember lunch across the street from Sloane’s was fifty cents.” Living was cheap because of deflated Depression prices, the subway (five cents) was clean and safe, and with her long legs she could stride down the streets at any hour, her head thrown back confidently. She lived frugally, though her parents sent her (as they would for years) a $100-a-month allowance. Advertising, she reasoned, would be an avenue into the publishing world.

  In a large brownstone building at the corner of Fifty-ninth Street and First Avenue, the women shared a small apartment costing $80 a month, and Julia could park her Ford (her second car) across the street and under the Queensboro Bridge, which loomed above them. On stormy days they could hear the waves breaking against the rocks on the riverbank. In the middle of the East River was Welfare Island (now Roosevelt Island), a cigar-shaped piece of land housing welfare institutions, a hospital, home for old people, and the New York Cancer Institute. The bridge to Queens, built in 1909, passed high over Roosevelt Island, necessitating an elevator so that people, ambulances, and fire trucks could service the island.

  Julia ate chiefly at the apartment, which meant she did not eat well. But food prices were low and Birds Eye frozen foods were booming (250 million pounds of frozen fruit, vegetables, and meat by 1938). There was Delmonico’s and the Café des Artistes, but Julia was not interested. Indeed, she ate only to defeat her hunger. However, she said, “I used to go to Grand Central Station Oyster Bar and watch them make the oyster stew.” She patronized the chains: Schrafft’s had thirty-eight outlets in Manhattan, Childs had forty-four, and Huyler’s had eleven, all with soda fountains.

  The city burst upon her with its million electric lights and mountains of steel buildings. The fast-paced life (1.5 million people on 22.2 square miles) and its mixed colors of the fashion world set against the impoverished street life stimulated her. This ratatouille of races, still struggling to come out of the Depression, challenged her McWilliams social assumptions about success and forced her to look at stark poverty. She would later claim that this civic lesson eventually led her to become a Roosevelt Democrat.

  Sloane’s was located at 575 Fifth Avenue, only a fifty-cent cab ride or a brisk six-and-a-half-block walk west on Fifty-ninth and south for twelve blocks on Fifth Avenue. Sloane’s sold furniture and all the beautiful lamps, tables, antiques, and accessories for the home. They specialized in displaying artwork from other countries and filling special orders for well-to-do clients. Julia proudly shipped an elegant coffee table to her roommate Mary Case when she wed Leon Warner in Minnesota.

  Her boss was A. W. Forester, advertising manager for W. & J. Sloane, who admired her writing and her ability to get along with people. She was tactful and conscientious, he would later record. She worked for him from October 1935 to May 1937, performing secretarial chores, contacting the press for publicity, arranging photography, and writing press releases. She loved the variety of her experiences and the challenge of learning. “I am learning quite a bit about store management and interior decoration. In fact, I couldn’t be more pleased,” she informed her alumni vocational office.

  In addition to her roommates, Julia saw several of her Smith classmates who lived in the city, including Peggy Clark, with whom she went to Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger. She also attended plays, seeing Reflected Glory, starring Tallulah Bankhead, whose similarly unmistakable voice was as low and steady as Julia’s was high and swinging. Briefly Gay Bradley, transferred to New York by the J. Walter Thompson agency, roomed with Julia and her two roommates until she married Gabriel Wright in 1937 and moved to San Francisco.

  Julia was dating a young man named Tom Johnston, her first serious boyfriend. “I am delighted she is seeing more men and finding out how to manage the sweet creatures,” her mother wrote Dorothy. Tom was a literature major (“full of Melville,” she told her diary) but was trying to get a job in New York. She had met him at Smith, but now she thought she was madly in love (“I had never been profoundly in love before”). By midsummer of 1936 she sensed that the freshness had gone out of their relationship, that he was under financial stress, and that she was both tired and sexually frustrated (“in heat,” as she put it picturesquely). Self-control is civilized, she believed, but she had a strange feeling that being in love with someone and not able to consummate was destructive of the relationship, for love is both physical and psychological.

  She also had a strong attraction to her cousin’s husband. “They were my family when I lived in New York,” she said of her cousin Harriet Patterson (Aunt Bessie’s daughter, who had taught her to do her nails in Santa Barbara) and Harriet’s husband, Noble Cathcart. They lived almost around the corner, on Fifty-seventh Street. Cathcart was editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, and he gave her, as well as his daughters, a lot of attention. Julia playfully claimed later to have been “madly in love with Noble, though curbed my passion because I was so fond of my cousin Harriet.” In her continuing desire to write for a living, Julia secured one assignment for the Saturday Review of Literature, to write a short blurb about Sherwood Anderson, whose latest book (Puzzled America, 1935) was being published. It was a small assignment, but she failed to complete it—blaming overwork and laziness. But she continued to send in short human-interest pieces to The New Yorker, to no avail. “I intended to be a great woman novelist, but for some reason The New Yorker didn’t ask me to be on its staff, and I ended up in the advertisement department of W. & J. Sloane (just to gain experience),” Julia told me many years later.

  Her most successful work was writing advance copy for Sloane’s. The unpublished writing she was doing during this period of her life reveals maturity, an admirable vocabulary, but mixed results. Her least successful writing attempts were book reviews, which she obviously wished to have published in The New Yorker. Three survive and they reveal fairly shallow analysis and lack of polish. Two short humorous pieces submitted to The New Yorker show a more natural style and wit: a piece about Sloane’s flying the national flag with the Boy Scout flag on November 11 reveals playful puns (“flaggish sensitivity” and “Boys had been scouting”). The essays she wrote about Sloane’s art exhibits (textile design, painted French screens, British antiques), which had to be rewritten for release to the major New York newspapers, are her most polished and sophisticated work. Her boss believed that she had a “flair for writing.” But try
as she might, she would never become a “lady novelist.”

  THE JILTING OF JULIA

  On September 6, 1936, Tom wrote a “Dear Julia” letter, in which he said he did not love her, and immediately left town. Two weeks later she bought a gold-leafed, lockable ledger to confide her heartbreak. She called it jilting—she sobbed when he told her before fleeing to Detroit—and she called it “excruciating.” It hurt her stomach. When a friend told her this was not unusual, she concluded it was merely a biological fact.

  She lost him to a Smith College acquaintance a few years ahead of her: Isabel (Izzy) Holmes McMullen (Smith ’32), and she felt betrayed when she found out he had been seeing her all along. But she gave her emotional “blight” one year. Her roommates comforted her, as did Dort during a visit to the city, and Gay Bradley, who was living there at the time. One called him “a jerk … he did not tell her he was going with another girl, typical male behavior if they can get away with it.” Julia also found comfort in poetry, copying Elinor Wylie’s “My heart’s delight, I must for love forget you” into her diary (the next December she wrote “pooh!” beside the poem).