Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  It was Julia who then took the initiative in love. She first wrote “I love you” and spoke of her “warm love lust.” And she was the first to suggest a concrete plan of action: “Why don’t you fly out about in August and drive across the continent with me? We could say we were meeting some friends in Needles.” Paul responded immediately: “I want to see you, touch you, kiss you, talk with you, eat with you … eat you, maybe. I have a Julie-need. Come on back and sit in my lap and let me bite off your earrings again. I have never tasted such delicious pearls!—let other gourmets eat their oysters. I will take pearls (on your earlobes) and be more tantalizingly and magnificently fed than they. So to bed, pearl-hungry.” The food references were the key metaphor of longing in part because Julia was regaling him with her cooking feats. “Why don’t you come to Washington and be my cook—we can eat each other,” he again suggested. “If I buy a Buckminster Fuller house will you come and cook for me and play the pianola?”

  Julia told her father that she intended to look for another job “because life in Pasadena is comfortable and lovely but not for me.” Her sister Dorothy, who ran the McWilliams household and worked in an Army hospital all during the war, wanted to go to New York City to work in the theater (she would later do stage-managing for Gian Carlo Menotti’s operas). She believed Julia should stay with their father. Paul warned Julia about the delayed adolescence resulting from living with parents. John McWilliams, Sr., settled the question when, after two years of keeping company with Phila O’Melveny, he decided to marry the fifty-year-old widow, much to Julia’s relief.

  Philadelphia Miller O’Melveny was from the families of Gail Borden and Roger Williams; she was named not for the city but for the daughter of Williams, founder of Rhode Island. A friend of several in Julia’s Pasadena group, “she became part of my father’s generation when she married him.” Julia adored her. Phila was the widow of Donald O’Melveny, youngest son of the founder of Los Angeles’s oldest law firm, O’Melveny and Meyers. Fifteen years younger than John McWilliams, who had been widowed for nine years, she was a Roman Catholic with several children of her own. Soon she became (in John McWilliams, Jr.’s words) “mother to all three of us and all our children just as though we were hers.” Dorothy went to school with Phila’s children, echoed her brother’s praise, and would name her only daughter after her stepmother (younger Phila would inherit the older woman’s wedding ring at her death). “Phila’s father was a fierce Republican,” said Julia, which so reinforced John McWilliams’s views that “we ended up not being able to agree on the weather.”

  Julia’s father continued to be active in California politics, particularly in financially supporting a “fine, upstanding young Navy lieutenant” (in his words) from nearby Whittier named Richard Nixon, who in 1946 ran against and easily defeated Democrat Jerry Voorhis, a five-term incumbent in the House of Representatives. Nixon smeared him as a communist sympathizer, and the easy win encouraged him to run against “that woman” (as McWilliams, who did not approve of women in politics, called Helen Gahagan Douglas). Interestingly, it was Julia’s noisy communal cooking orgies, as well as her disagreement over politics, which drove her father more frequently to dinners at the home of widow O’Melveny.

  For the May 8 wedding of her father and Phila, Julia’s brother John came from Massachusetts with his wife, Josephine. He had been in the war earlier than Julia and was severely wounded in the field artillery when he was blown off a bridge in France. Since 1940 he and Jo lived in Pittsfield, where he worked in the family business, the Weston Paper Company. He shared his father’s good looks and his politics.

  Julia’s loyalties were already with the Democratic Party and her artistic, liberal Paul. After he suffered a recurrence of dysentery and a sense that he was “deeply tired way down inside,” she suggested he come West for a month and live with her. They would eat well, relax, and turn slowly in the sun “like chickens on a spit.” Yet he made no immediate plans to visit California because he was still working at the State Department, looking for a career for himself, and keenly aware that he had little savings, no house, and no car. He was also waiting for the government to sort out how much leave time he had accumulated.

  In the six months of their correspondence, Julia and Paul became increasingly intimate with each other as they shared their deepest secrets. In the sharing, Julia’s insights into herself matured:

  Until I was about 25, I was usually so self-conscious that I actually hurt if I thought people were looking at me, then I somehow realized that so many people were so busy with themselves that they were not looking at me at all. And I am continually trying to keep “ME” out of as much of my relations with people as possible, and transfer a full interest to you/them, which automatically, and actually, makes me a more lovable person to them….

  Julia and Paul were also building a base of mutual friends and acquaintances. Paul spoke in detail about his discussions with old Paris and Washington friends such as Paul Nitze (later an arms-control adviser to Presidents), Jo Davidson (“Like you, [Julia,]” Paul wrote, Davidson is “interested in life as a whole instead of in parts”), Dick and Annie Bissell (he moved from the OSS to the CIA), Richard and Alice Lee Myers, Professor George Kubler, Archibald MacLeish, and Julian Huxley. (Paul knew Davidson well in Paris; Huxley he met at the home of Edith Kennedy in Cambridge.)

  Paul kept Julia abreast of the movements of their OSS friends, including Guy Martin (who went back to Donovan’s law firm), Marjorie Severyns, General Wedemeyer, and Mary Livingston Eddy. Paul and Charlie invited Jack Moore and later General Wedemeyer for dinner at the Child household. Tommy and Nancy Davis left for San Francisco in March. Ellie was to marry Basil Summers in November, and Gregory Bateson would divorce Margaret Mead. Numerous OSS personnel (Arthur Schlesinger, Stewart Alsop, Allen Dulles, David Bruce, Arthur Goldberg, Richard Holmes, William Colby, C. Douglas Dillon, Clark McGregor) were now part of the new CIA. Teddy White published a book about China, predicting that Chiang would “inevitably” collapse. Henry Luce fired him.

  SEEING DOUBLE

  Most important, Julia learned more about Freddie and Charlie, with whom Paul was living. She learned about their warm supportive family life in their home (called Coppernose) in Lumberville, Pennsylvania, where the family spent weekends cultivating and planting the gardens.

  Through his letters, Julia learned more about Paul as well, when he described the differences between himself and his brother: Paul was precise and formal in his speech and writing, Charlie a rapid and emotional talker; Paul was right-handed, Charlie left-handed; Paul liked the “architectonic boys like Mozart and Stravinsky,” Charlie responded to Wagner and Sibelius; Paul’s painting was controlled and designed, Charlie’s suggestive and dynamic. Strangely, it was Paul who lived the wilder and more adventurous life: “broke my hip, 7 ribs, a shoulder, 3 fingers, a wrist, a collar bone, etc. I got the needle in the eye [it was Charlie’s doing]. I joined the Canadian Army at 16, I worked on schooners and tankers and arms and at stained glass while Charlie was being a Harvard man. I went to Europe first, and made fake furniture while he followed, married and settled down. I had a mistress….” Paul was, in Child language, a “finnie”—that is, a “finished product,” one who had “an innate sense of form.” He thought that his young niece Erica had his artistic sense and spent hours teaching her about form and color in art and music. She and her brother and sister would always look upon Paul as their second father.

  Paul was a natural teacher, a quality that Julia would later discover in herself. And his organized approach to life would draw out the McWilliams Presbyterian order in her. His discipline, which would have a profound effect on her later career, had a source in family but more specifically in his own will. As he told his brother in 1968, their chaotic and unstable childhood led him into “a major struggle … toward clarity and toward formality, simply to hold down the cover of my personal Pandora’s box.” While Charlie seemed to “opt for chaos” and “hug blinding Mystery and Ch
aos to [his] bosom,” Paul, “always [aware] of earthquake, nightmare, discord and vertigo trying to sweep me into their world,” chose “the realm of discipline” as the only means of action, creation, or usefulness. Not surprisingly, fifty years later, his favorite niece, Erica, would suggest that Julia embodied the extremes of the Child twins: “Julia is very emotional and sentimental (you cannot go to a movie without Julia crying)…. But she is one of the most disciplined people I know.”

  Paul’s discipline was reinforced by his study of semantics and jujitsu practice. When young boys, the twins had seen a photograph of two Japanese men “all tied in knots” in the office of Edward Filene’s Boston store. When “Uncle Ed,” their mother’s paramour, explained jujitsu to them, they tried it on the floor, went home to practice on a mattress on the floor, and after taking formal classes in later years Paul became a black belt. He maintained his physical conditioning, despite blindness in one eye, car accidents, exotic diseases caught in foreign lands, and occasional severe headaches and double vision.

  Paul’s insistence on physical toughness began, Julia later learned, when the twins, dressed in their Little Lord Fauntleroy suits for a musical performance with their mother, were taunted by other boys in Boston Common. Paul’s violin and Charlie’s cello did not survive the melee.

  “I would rather have my head resting on your breasts than throbbing up here on my shoulders,” Paul wrote on May 22, 1946, during one of the four-day headaches he had suffered with since a severe concussion several years earlier. In their correspondence now, they were “aching” for each other. Julia took a two-week holiday to the San Francisco area to visit her friends Gay (Bradley) and Jack Wright and Paul’s friends Tommy and Nancy Davis, who were expecting a baby. Paul accidentally ran into Phoebe Brown, just returned by air from Shanghai with the news that Julia and Paul were seen romancing in Washington. Meanwhile, Paul was struggling with the bureaucracy to get a five-week leave to come West for Julia.

  “I can’t think of anything nicer than a month with you, all over the country,” wrote Julia in May. She was “ready to roll” out of Pasadena anytime after July 4. The plan was to have him visit her family, then they would drive up to see the Davises, and cross the country to Lopaus Point, Maine, where they would holiday in a cabin built by the Child family.

  Paul left Washington July 4 on a new coast-to-coast train, arriving in Los Angeles July 7. Between introducing Paul to her friends and visiting his acquaintances in the area, she prepared special meals for him: she and Katy made brains in red wine sauce and naively stirred them as they cooked, leaving a mushy mess of white lumps. Julia was dismayed: “It was awful. Paul said he married me in spite of my cooking,” she would later say on many occasions. This disaster caused her to wipe the Hillcliff School of Cooking from her résumé memory. In a Cooking Club Chat on America On-Line in 1996, she said, “I had really never done any cooking until France.”

  According to her friend Gay Bradley Wright, who came down from San Francisco for the event, Julia’s father gave a party to introduce Paul to her friends. “When I met him we talked all evening; I just adored Paul.” When he was comfortable with someone, “Paul was a raconteur who could mesmerize associates with his stories,” said later friend William Truslow. “He was an artist and could put in detail, creating an atmosphere. Though inner-looking, he cared what others thought of him. Julia, by contrast, always wanted to know what you thought.” Julia’s stepmother, Phila, also liked Paul immediately, as she would all of the spouses of her husband’s children. Julia believed that her mother, Caro, would also “have loved them all.”

  Father John was a different matter, not just because Julia was his first daughter but because Paul was an artist with a European aesthetic and appearance. He wore scarves in his open-necked dress shirts and cultivated the sensual. “My father was very difficult,” explained Julia in 1988. “He was a very conservative Republican, and he thought all artists [and intellectuals] were communistic. Paul was an artist and a Democrat.” A traditional father, he wanted his daughter to marry a man like himself.

  Having lost his own father when he was a baby, Paul was probably anticipating a fatherly relationship with Julia’s parent—at least this was Julia’s wish. But the differences between the two men were immediately evident and never bridged. Paul talked with precision and daily tested “operational truth” with a detached rationality. John was settled comfortably in his political and religious beliefs, not accustomed to evaluating these beliefs or himself. It became clear to Julia that there would be no harmony and the choice of loyalty must be made.

  LEAVING POP

  When Julia and Paul drove out of Pasadena in her Buick, she made her final move away from home. She would visit briefly in the years to come, but this trip signified the break she had to make, not just physically but psychologically. Her choice separated her from the life in which she was born and reared, a life insulated by privilege and intellectual provincialism. She would move into a life perhaps just as insular, but a life of art, sensuality, and intellectual discipline.

  After a weekend in Ojai with Julia’s friends, they drove north to San Francisco to see the Davises and their new daughter, then to Crescent City, and, in a large northern sweep from Bend, Oregon, to Spokane, Washington, and Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, to Billings, Montana, and Flint, Michigan, then into Canada and down through Rochester, New York, to Maine by the first of August. They took turns driving every hour and tried to cover at least three hundred miles a day. Their guides were the AAA and Duncan Hines.

  Paul had seen some of this country before, both during the time he worked in California in 1924 (painting sets in Hollywood) and during a trip across the country seven years before with Edith Kennedy, Charlie, and his wife, Freddie. In Paul’s current letters to his brother, he made occasional comparisons with these earlier trips. In the Ojai Valley, where they spent their first weekend with Julia’s old friends, including the Gateses (Freeman’s cousin owned the 3,500-acre ranch), Paul discovered he could ride well after his eleven years of polo riding while teaching at Avon Old Farms School in Connecticut, a very English school founded by Theodora Riddle. Paul dreamed of having a house there someday. (Thirty-five years later, he and Julia would buy a home nearby on the coast at Santa Barbara.)

  If Paul made his own comparisons with earlier trips, it was Julia’s trail that was the more historically interesting. Her journey eastward made a revealing if not ironic reversal of the journey her grandfather McWilliams took westward to California in 1849. Indeed, she crossed his path in the Sacramento River valley, at the Columbia River, and on the Lewis and Clark trail, where he “had to decline [Chief Alikit’s] liberal offer” to marry his daughter. While her seventeen-year-old grandfather and his wagon train companions were refreshed and thrilled by the mighty Columbia River gorge, Julia and Paul, nearly one hundred years later, found the rugged, 115-degree journey from Briggs to Spokane hellish. Where McWilliams found dense forests and Indians, Julia and Paul saw endless “dry tortured canyons” and the “naked horror” of a mighty river. In contrast to her grandfather, who carried the Bible and Plutarch’s Lives in his wagon, Julia brought along in her Buick eight bottles of good whiskey, one of gin, and a bottle of mixed martinis. Julia’s reversal of her grandfather’s pioneering voyage was modern and illicit. She and Paul spent each night together in a $2.50 to $5.00 trailer park or motel. Yet, as was her grandfather, Julia was a pioneer in leaving her family and blazing a trail, not westward, but eastward, and eventually back toward Europe.

  As much as they delighted in the enormous redwoods wrapped in fog, the dramatic Crater Lake, and the snowcapped mountains of Idaho and Montana, they delighted most in the discovery of each other. They talked and read to each other from newspapers or Time and Life. Paul’s physical prowess and ingenuity were tested by a tire blowout in the sage-and-lava-strewn wilderness of Oregon. Her strength and sportsmanship were demonstrated daily. “She is a splendid traveling companion,” wrote Paul from Crescent City, Cal
ifornia, on July 19, “loves to look at everything, likes small places with local color flavor better than big ones, for both eating and sleeping—is jolly, objective and considerate.” Five days later, in Billings, Montana, he wrote:

  Julie is a splendid companion, uncomplaining and flexible—really tough-fibered, a quality which I first saw in her in Ceylon and later in China. She has great charm and ease with all levels of people without in any way talking down to anybody. She’s got a much tougher stomach than I have, and in the 3 years I’ve known her in War and Peace, in tropics and in USA, has never been sick from anything. She also washes my shirts! Quite a dame.

  She used that “great charm” on the border guard when they crossed into Canada for a day (he allowed them to take in more than one bottle of liquor). In a rugged little town in Montana, she got out of the car in her bare feet with red-painted toenails and, without concern, walked into a lumbermen’s restaurant with Paul, sat down, and drank a beer. It was July 22, 1946. Everyone was “goggle-eyed” reported Paul, “but no cracks.”

  A CABIN IN MAINE

  After leaving Highway 102 and passing through the tiny town of Bernard, Maine, Paul drove to the end of the peninsula, Lopaus Point, crossing what he now called “Burma Road,” a gnarled and dippy lane he warned Charlie not to cement over. Here on the rugged coast of New England, southeast of Bangor on Mount Desert Island, Julia and Paul spent an exhilarating ten days, during which Julia became a member of the Child family. She was the first woman since Edith whom Paul brought “home.” They were rechristened JuPaulski. Paul holidayed here in the years before the war and used a Lopaus stone as a paperweight on his desk in India. This family and this land were his stone.