by Karen Karbo
Once, when I was in my mid-twenties, the age at which it becomes clear that you really are an adult, and not the faux-adult to which people give lip service the day you turn eighteen, I had a rare, candid conversation with my dad.
The operative word here is candid. My dad and I talked quite a bit for a father and daughter of that time. In many ways, we were comrades-in-arms, united in our mystification at my mother’s compulsion to make complicated French food and her kooky extroversion.* He taught me how to drive a nail, win at checkers, draw a correctly proportioned human head, ride a horse up and down a steep hill, and shift gears in my Volkswagen without engaging the transmission. Our many conversations were topical: the Civil War, rattlesnakes, gold mines, football vs. basketball, movies, the origin of words, and the nature of infinity. My point is he wasn’t one of those coldhearted, disinterested dads (like Julia’s, as it turned out) who had no relationship with his child. We talked a lot, just not about anything personal.
But one night while I was sitting with him, “enjoying” an after-dinner drink—he was fond of the horrid licorice-flavored, urine sample–colored Galliano—I felt compelled to unburden myself of a complaint I had vis-à-vis the way he and my mother had parented me. Since we were both adults now, I figured it was time he was enlightened.
I said that my mother, now conveniently dead and not there to defend herself, had ruined my confidence by telling me, around age twelve, that I could no longer do all the stuff I really liked to do, like, for example, laugh so hard I was forced to throw myself on the floor, rolling around holding my belly; or do headstands in the living room while we had guests; or get into fistfights with the boys with whom I disagreed; or beat everyone in the entire school at tetherball. Her fear was that if I didn’t rein it all in a bit I would deprive myself of a successful and happy teenhood, which translated to never having a boyfriend, which further meant I’d be scarred for life.* I told my dad that there was nothing worse than allowing me complete freedom to express my personality and then once I hit eighth grade suddenly insisting that everything everyone thought was so cool about me—my impersonation of a goat, for example†—was inappropriate behavior for a young lady. I confessed that I had been tortured by this for years. I said it was an inner conflict so pernicious it was threatening to send me to a psychiatrist.
“At twelve, suddenly, I was supposed to become someone else!” I’d raised my voice. I’d sounded strident. Another big no-no.
“You’re right,” said my dad. “We should have sat on you much earlier.”
Sat on me?
Only many years later, after I had become the parent of a child who took umbrage with some of my own parenting, did it occur to me that my dad was probably joking.
But regardless, Julia never had to deal with anything remotely like this. No one ever tried to sit on her, even in jest. She marched straight into womanhood with the best parts of her character intact. There was no Reviving Ophelia phase, where her self-regard plunged as she reached adolescence, no transition from high school to college, then from college out into the real world, that was rocky enough to transform her from the brightest, brattiest, most ebullient girl in town, into a shy woodland creature who worried that everything she felt, thought, and did was somehow not right.
The result: She was a woman never divided against herself.
I’m sure there are men who feel divided. But I’d wager it’s usually because of choices they’ve made, not because up until puberty they were perfectly acceptable human beings, at which point they had to completely rewire themselves to become attractive to the opposite sex. Do you know one forty-year-old guy who, deep in his heart, feels he’s too old for Star Wars? And does a love of Star Wars prevent him from getting laid (maybe, but not if he’s discreet) or walking down the aisle? On the other hand, a woman of the same age who holds the same attachment for the things of her childhood might just have a mental disorder.
Look at pictures of Julia. Never will you see on her face an expression that conveys anything approaching self-doubt. Never in her eyes will you catch that vague look of self-consciousness so many of us possess, even beneath our extra-whitened HD smiles, that telegraphs our basic discomfort with the person we’re projecting. By all reports, the feeling expressed on Julia’s face at any given moment mirrored the feeling in her heart.
Pretty much everyone who knew Julia said the same thing: that what you saw was what you got. She had no buried girl self on which her proper woman self had been constructed, and, perhaps not incidentally, she had no regrets, except one: When she was a nonagenarian, long after Paul had died, and her health was forcing her to slow down to three times the speed of a normal healthy fifty-year-old, she did remark to her old colleague and cowriter Simone Beck that at this stage of her life it would have been nice to have a grandchild or two around. Otherwise, until the end of her life, she was as gregarious, energetic, pragmatic, curious, and adventuresome as she’d been as a child.
How did she turn out this way? And more important, is there any way we can reverse engineer our own lives in order to see whether we might extract any Juliaesque essence that will help us live as fully and gaily as she did?
Be rich.
My inclination is to lay Julia’s stupendous self-acceptance and joie de vivre at the feet of her equally stupendous privilege. Julia always maintained that her family was of the Buick not the Cadillac class, but she grew up with an upstairs maid, a gardener, and a cook. They also had a tennis court, which suggests the McWilliamses were neither of the Buick class nor the Cadillac class, but the class of people who are so well off they don’t know that having a private tennis court means you’re really well off.
Julia’s dazzling mother, Julia Carolyn “Caro” Weston, was from Massachusetts and an heiress to the Weston Paper Company. Her father, John “Big John” McWilliams Jr., was a Princeton man who moved to Pasadena from Illinois, to take over his father’s land management business. Managing land in Southern California in the early part of the twentieth century could apparently make one quite wealthy.* Pasadena was a small town in 1912, the year Julia was born. By Southern California standards, it’s loaded with history. The first football game that became the Rose Bowl matchup was played in 1902. Around the same time, enormous resort hotels sprang up along the board boulevards—the Raymond, the Hunting-ton, and Hotel Green—and a raft of gargantuan churches of all denominations sat on their corners, surrounded by queen palms.
John and Caro, with their three children, Julia, John III, and Dorothy (known as Dort), lived in several grand houses, including a huge five-bedroom, five-bath colonial, designed by architect Reginald Johnson, famous locally for also designing the Los Angeles Opera House, Santa Barbara’s Biltmore hotel, and several Episcopal churches. When the McWilliamses weren’t relaxing at home, you could find them at one of three country clubs they belonged to: one for swimming and riding (Valley Hunt Club), one for golf (Annandale Country Club), and one for polo (Midwick Country Club).
Pop, as Julia called her dad, was a brusque Presbyterian Republican. He was civic-minded, believed in public service, and did many good things like run the Pasadena branch of the Red Cross and sit on the chamber of commerce, but he was so conservative that anyone who didn’t grow up the way he did, think the same way he did, and hold all of the same values he did was a traitor to the nation.
Julia adored Pop in the standard manner of worshipful daughters everywhere, but lucky for her she was temperamentally like her mother, having inherited “the Weston twinkle” from Caro, whose disposition was as sunny as her husband’s was stern. A sassy redhead, at Smith College (class of 1901) Caro was the captain of the basketball team and had a reputation as an independent thinker. She didn’t marry until the advanced age of thirty-three, believing it was important to see the world before settling down. Even after she became the mother of three, she spent a good part of every day playing tennis. Endorphins weren’t discovered until 1974, but clearly Caro McWilliams enjoyed the benefits.
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br /> Caro loved to cook in the manner of people who aren’t required to do it every day. Dinner generally consisted of some kind of overcooked meat and boiled potatoes. Because Caro always instructed Cook to include a vegetable grown in their garden, and perhaps some sliced avocado from one of their trees, her reputation among Julia’s friends was as a health food nut. By the time Julia was in her teens, Cook would also have been able to purchase Heinz Ketchup, Van Camp’s Pork and Beans, Del Monte canned fruits and vegetables, Grape-Nuts, Wheaties, Welch’s Grape Jelly, and Wonder Bread. Because Julia never went into the kitchen if she could help it, and as an adult had almost no memory of the food she ate as a child, we don’t know whether she ever tore off the crusts of a slice of Wonder Bread and rolled the white part into a ball.
Caro had a few noteworthy recipes: baking powder biscuits, Welsh rarebit, and a Yankee specialty, codfish balls, made from poached dried cod whipped with egg and mashed potatoes. She would cook these at least once a month, usually on Thursday, Cook’s night off. When Caro was too tired from her daily tennis, or simply not in the mood, the McWilliamses would repair to one of their “dining clubs.” But Caro’s “love” of cooking notwithstanding, she never pressured her daughters to learn to cook, unlike my own mother who, a week before any school vacation, would promise she was going to teach me to cook a few things when I was on break. Nothing sounded more punishing. Do you know who cooked? Boring mothers, that’s who. The first day of vacation I would leap on my bike right after breakfast and disappear until it started getting dark, and I knew she would start calling around to my friends’ houses to tell their mothers to send me home for dinner. Once she worried that no one would want to marry me if I didn’t know how to cook, to which I sneered, “Good.”
Whether Julia and Dort McWilliams could or couldn’t cook was immaterial; as adults they would have enough money to attract a suitable mate, or live high on the hog as eccentric spinsters. In any case, they would have their own Cooks.
When I was an undergrad at the University of Southern California, there was a special, appalling football cheer trotted out in the fourth quarter, when it looked as if the Trojans were going to lose. “Whether we win! Whether we lose! We’re rich, we’re rich, we’ll buy you!” I doubt Julia’s parents harbored such crass notions, but the sense of entitlement was there in the heartbeat of the house, in the complete freedom that Caro accorded her children, especially her daughters, girls who were average-looking and born to be taller than almost everyone else in the room. Because they were wealthy in love, attachment, and money, they didn’t need to be pretty, petite, and docile, predictable bait for a future husband that would improve the family’s fortunes.
Disclaimer
Once I sat on a panel at a book festival, where the topic was how to fashion a productive writing life. My copanelists were celebrated first novelists who, it was said, came from money and were married to money and did not suffer in the way that so many writers do, holding soul-sucking day jobs, or cobbling together freelance gigs that pay on a regular basis (and without fail pay ten or more months after the job is complete). They were lovely, intelligent women with shiny hair, well-turned ankles, and solid habits, and just enough specific requirements (a special type of bendy straw for their Diet Coke, an ergonomic chair) to show how seriously they took their creative temperaments. I, who prefer to cultivate the foreign war correspondent mode of creation, training myself to write anywhere at any time with anything at hand, was in equal parts impressed by their awareness of what “worked” for them and appalled by their fussiness.
A woman at the back of the room raised her hand. She was the mother of very young children. Even from that distance you could see her exhaustion in the slump of her shoulders. It didn’t help matters that she was wearing an earflap hat and fingerless gloves. As it turned out, my lovely copanelists were also the mothers of very young children, and the question asker wondered if they had any advice about how she, the mother of toddler-age twins, might also fashion a productive writing life.
One of them suggested hiring a nanny for the morning hours, and the other said, “You must get yourself an office out of the house. With the recession, I’m telling you the rents are cheap.”
Disbelief registered on the woman’s face. An invisible thought bubble floated above the heads of pretty much everyone in the place: It may be cheap for you.
After having written about the McWilliamses money and the McWilliamses’ five-bedroom yellow colonial and the zany, loving mom and reserved but mega-bread-winning dad,* and the love and freedom Julia experienced every day of her life, I wonder if I sound like the lovely debut novelist—well-meaning and completely out of touch. Obviously most of you have not enjoyed anything close to Julia’s fabulous upbringing. Yes, there’s some misery to come, but by and large it was as good as it gets. Until they invent the way-back machine, we’re all stuck with who and where we came from.
Still, Julia’s life wasn’t perfect.
Live in a temperate climate.
Money makes our childhoods so much easier, except when it screws us up; were it not so, the phrase “poor little rich girl” would never have entered the vernacular, nor would the hearts of the nation go out to Suri Cruise, with her tiny designer heels and peculiar father.
But no one can argue with the salubrious effects of nice weather, in this case in Pasadena, California, pre–internal combustion engine. Here, then as now, there are no brutal seasons to interrupt the fun, no frigid winters paralyzed by blizzards, nor humid, daze-producing summers. Those old adages that worriers from other, harsher climes live by have no meaning in Southern California. “Make hay while the sun shines” and “Save your money for a rainy day” is advice for someone else, someone whose world is not their oyster.
If you have a good childhood, it’s a very good one in that climate, where the weather cooperates to the extent that the world seems benign and supportive of all human endeavor, where you can play outside all yearlong and no one ever yells “Don’t forget your mittens.” In Pasadena, twelve months a year, excluding three rainy weeks in February during an exceptionally wet season, you spend your entire life outdoors, bombing around on your bike. The world, with its golden light and dry air, does nothing to impede your desire to play. The message is that nothing in the natural world, aside from perhaps an earthquake—which is short, to the point, and cannot be predicted—will ever get in your way.
The fine weather colluded with Caro to support Julia’s junior-anarchist style. She was a freewheeling tomboy who loved to hike, swim, play tennis, and golf. Julia was the girl in the neighborhood who could pitch a softball overhand.
“Jukes” was full of ideas for adventures that were rarely evaluated for their merit. The point of her young life seemed to be to make something, anything happen, regardless of the outcome. I should stop here and say there’s a flip side to living in such an agreeable climate. Living in a world unmarred by the threat of impending weather, cloudy on occasion but with no chance of snow, ice, or sleet, does make a kid feel that if anything exciting is going to happen, she’s going to have to be the one to make it so.
Above all, Julia loved not knowing what was going to happen next. From the time she was a girl, her eyes popped open in the morning and one of her first thoughts was How can I have fun and make some trouble today?
She was the ringleader of the neighborhood group of kids who, completely unsupervised, rode around the oak and pepper tree–lined streets, up into the scrubby hills, down into the dusty arroyos, and over the newly built bridges, where they would stop only to drop mud pies on cars passing below.*
They routinely stole material from construction sites and broke into vacant houses in the neighborhood. Mrs. Greble, the neighborhood “witch” (she yelled at Julia for hiding out in her oak tree, smoking Pop’s purloined cigars), was the target of Julia’s pranks. Once they broke in and stole a chandelier and buried the crystal prisms.
Sometimes Julia would get caught, and then she would get
dutifully spanked by Pop, but did it make her feel bad for what she’d done? Did it make her refrain from stealing Pop’s cigarettes, cutting the braids off the head of the pastor’s daughter, or hanging out with the hobos down at the train yard? Not at all. For Jukes getting spanked was simply the price of doing what amused her.
By the time she was a preteen, Julia had developed a habit of stealing Pop’s cigarettes, and also the cigarettes that belonged to the parents of her friends. Pop, who by this time had recognized the futility of traditional discipline, instead gathered his kids for a powwow. He promised that if they stayed away from cigarettes until they were twenty-one, they would each receive a thousand-dollar bond.† Julia, recognizing a great deal, abstained until the stroke of 12:01 a.m. the day after her twenty-first birthday, then smoked a pack a day well into middle age. She gave it up briefly on July 26, 1954, and took it up again on July 27, 1954, failing to see any reason then why she should deny herself the pleasure.
Play the emperor.
When she wasn’t breaking and entering, or seeing what happens when you melt a piece of pavement tar on the stove, Jukes wrote and performed her own plays. She was entranced by the local community theater and would go with her mother by streetcar into Los Angeles to catch the latest Charlie Chaplin “photo-play,” as movies were then called. From grammar school on up she acted in any play that would cast her, and it was here she learned an intractable lesson, one that couldn’t be mitigated by freedom, affluence, or the love of Caro and Pop.
Julia was simply too tall to play the female roles.
Too tall to play the damsel-in-distress, too tall to play the lady-in-waiting, too tall to play the ingénue or the princess. If she wanted to participate—and when did Julia ever not want to participate?—she would be forced to accept the roles usually reserved for boys. Thus, she was cast as a lion or other large, fierce beast, or as the emperor. At Katharine Branson, the college preparatory school she attended before going to Caro’s alma mater, Smith, she played Michael the Sword Eater in a production of The Piper.
