Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child

by Bob Spitz

  With Paul, she’d be linking her future to someone who could teach her how, but also to a man who was relatively lost—at the very time she was finding herself.

  By the time they hit Maine, however, Julia knew her fate was cast. The trip east had been everything she’d hoped it would be—and more, much more. After nine months apart, she and Paul fell into each other’s arms, and that’s where they remained throughout most of the month-long journey. They were together all day, every day, under insufferable conditions: long, hot days in the cramped car, lackluster meals at roadside diners, stuffy nights spent in cheap, dingy motels—all perfect, just perfect. They talked about everything under the sun, they took in a glorious assortment of sights, and they made love, often and splendidly, with none of the “measly Mrs. Grundyisms concerning sex” that Paul had expected of Julia. “She loves life and all its phenomena,” he informed Charlie. Plus, he was in love again. With Julia. Everything was perfect, just perfect.

  Their friends along the way had given them enthusiastic thumbs-ups, everyone, that is, except for Julia’s father, who saw in Paul everything he despised—but that was an endorsement in its own, twisted way. In earnest, Julia had been moving away from her father, physically as well as philosophically, but now she faced an additional dilemma. Dort had been staying with Pop since 1941, running the household and looking after his general welfare. As a consequence, Julia felt her sister had become “quite stale and stultified.” Everyone agreed with Julia’s opinion that “she needs to cut loose,” and the logic finally resonated. Dort announced that she was leaving for New York to pursue a career in the theater. In her absence, she felt “someone should live with father”—that someone, of course, being Julia.

  John McWilliams, now sixty-five, hadn’t softened with age. He was still, according to Julia, “a vigorous and attractive fellow,” but if anything, he’d grown more opinionated, intolerant, stridently cantankerous, and autocratic. His right-wing politics especially disturbed Julia, particularly his latest protégé, an ambitious young lawyer named Richard Nixon, who’d just won a seat in Congress by smearing his opponent, Helen Gahagan Douglas, as a Communist sympathizer. And John had become a member of the so-called Bohemian Club, in Monte Rio, California, a secret, cult-like retreat for the conservative Old Guard power elite, whose members wore hooded robes and participated in pagan rituals. Pop was hard-core when it came to his “Republican attitudes,” a posture that leaned heavily on his daughter. “Julia and her father just disagreed about everything,” says Jo McWilliams, who had married Julia’s brother, John, and saw them often during this time. “They fought like cats and dogs. No matter what subject came up, a war of words broke out.” They weren’t strong-minded so much as uncompromising, obstinate. Neither one of them gave an inch, Julia recalled, to the point that “we ended up not being able to agree on the weather.”

  One can only imagine the fallout if she were stuck in Pasadena, taking care of Pop. There would be bloodshed in that house, that much was certain. Paul warned her against such an unwise move, for her own well-being—and for his. He had heard the chilling stories of John McWilliams’s behavior, the diatribes and rages, his refusal to respect any opinion of Julia’s or anyone else’s, for that matter. Their relationship wouldn’t stand a chance with the old man breathing down their necks. Paul wouldn’t stand for it. Besides, living at home, with a parent, was counterproductive, he argued—it was an extension of one’s adolescence and offensive to him.

  Suddenly, Julia found herself in an uncompromising position. If she abandoned her father, she might possibly lose his love—and if she didn’t, she might lose Paul.

  Kismet intervened in the person of Philadelphia O’Melveny. “She was a lovely woman who lived across town, whose children had gone to school with all of us,” says Jo McWilliams. Phila (pronounced fi-luh) was elegant, outgoing, and, at fifty, a young, attractive, well-to-do widow who had caught Julia’s father’s eye. In fact, they had been “going steady” on the QT for two years and decided, quite impulsively, to get married. The match couldn’t be more perfect, Julia reported. “I think they get along with each other wonderfully, have the same friends, like the same things. It’s a great load off my mind, because I hated to think of leaving him all alone.”

  Even better, they were married by the time Paul arrived in Pasadena. He and Julia left town with no strings attached. She felt more at peace in her relationship with Pop—now that there were three thousand miles between them.

  THE HIKE FROM the town road to Freddie and Charlie’s cabin was exceedingly strenuous. If Julia and Paul hadn’t been in such tip-top shape, the rocky path might have presented a greater challenge, but they swung along the trail, dragging shopping bags and luggage, with the flush of rapturous children on their way to summer camp. The sylvan Maine setting that surrounded them was almost as bucolic. The air had a crisp, briny freshness. Lacy shadows shifted playfully with the breeze. Through the tunnel of tall pines that framed the trail, Julia could glimpse snatches of steely-blue water that stretched out below like a living map. It was impossible to gauge the heroic sweep of the Atlantic, but one could hear its emphatic pitch, the force of its tides.

  It was the perfect soundtrack to accompany Julia’s visit. For almost two years, she’d heard nothing but Charlie, Charlie, Charlie. Paul talked about him incessantly, wrote him daily epic letters, insisted everyone in the OSS unit visit his brother when they were Stateside (and many of them did, with Paul synchronizing stopovers from eight thousand miles away). Charlie’s name came up in almost every conversation Paul had; there was something almost disturbing and obsessive about the frequency he was mentioned. But, in any case, Julia was intrigued. No, intrigued was too feeble to describe how she felt. She was flat-out burning with curiosity about this Doppelgänger of Paul’s.

  The spirit in the cabin was almost as feverish. The whole Child family—Charlie, Freddie, their daughters Erica and Rachel, and son Jon—had been waiting all morning for the couple’s grand arrival. Everyone had seen Paul’s letters about this “quite a dame!” he was bringing to meet them. His last missive was unpredictably up-front. It was a glowing roundup of Julia’s best qualities, the kind of testimonial one’s mother might write, or a eulogy delivered at a wake. “She’s direct and simple … she is unusually strong physically and marvelously healthy … she has a firm and tried character … she has a cheerful gay humor with considerable gusto … she has a frank and warm liking for men … ” The man was out of control, he was besotted. “She has a deep-seated charm and human warmth … she would be poised and at ease anywhere … she tells the truth … and I find her interesting and fun to talk to at any time. And I love her dearly.”

  I love her dearly.

  That last phrase caught them squarely on the chin. “We had heard about Julia in the letters,” recalled Erica, who was fourteen at the time, “but there were a lot of other women in the letters, as well. Paul was always apprising: ‘this one has wonderful breasts, that one has wonderful legs, this one is a gossip, that one is beautiful.’ He had been auditioning for a partner for years. But … love! We just assumed he’d always be a bachelor. The fact that he was actually bringing a woman home to meet our family was a very big deal.”

  Rachel, who was twelve, saw them coming through the woods. “They looked so happy,” she recalls, “and I hadn’t seen Paul looking happy for a long while. He seemed proud, with his chest puffed out, as if he were bringing home a prize trophy he’d won.”

  They’d been warned in advance that Julia was tall, but no one realized how tall that meant. Rachel, who was struggling with height issues, towered over her father at that point. “But Julia was—tall! She was extraordinary, the tallest woman I’d ever seen. And her feet were huge. She moved in an awkward, completely unself-conscious way. And I remember thinking to myself: ‘It’s going to be okay to be tall.’ ”

  Charlie and his family stormed outside to meet them. They still weren’t quite sure what to expect from this dame. “We had he
ard she’d been conventionally brought up, a lady in a large Republican family,” says Rachel. “And we were bohemians, fiercely progressive, living in a cabin in the woods, with logs being cured out back and mud everywhere.” Everyone was on his or her best behavior—for about a minute. That was all it took for Julia to win over this crowd. “I liked her from the moment I laid eyes on her,” recalled Jon Child, then six. “She had this amazing personality, her joie de vivre. She was fun—and funny. She became part of our family the instant she arrived, just like that.”

  Julia spent the next ten days suspended between the Child family’s unadulterated affection, which was heartfelt, and this misfit house of theirs growing up around them. From the start, she was determined to endear herself to the family. It was essential to love what Paul loved, and, in this case, he couldn’t have given her an easier assignment. Julia and Freddie hit it off immediately. “Mother needed someone to relieve the blustery despotism of my father,” says Rachel, “and Julie was exuberant, she was a positivist, with none of the New England doom-and-gloom.” A lithe, strikingly attractive woman, with hazel eyes, dramatic scarlet hair, and freckles, Freddie’s reserved manner belied the rigors of keeping her family on an even keel. The personalities in that house were combustible; the teenage girls were especially sensitive, but Charlie, as advertised, was a force to be reckoned with. “He was very gregarious,” recalls Erica, “very smart and cultured, but very childlike. The whole world had to revolve around him.” Friends pegged Charlie as “self-centered and cocky,” but fascinating nonetheless, forgiven for his arrogance and vanity because of the way he allowed himself to be scoffed at, in good fun. In Charlie, Julia found a man who “was an exact copy of Paul, who looked and spoke with the same intonation, had the same body language—but was a completely different person.” There was a steadiness in Paul that Charlie lacked. Charlie had never suffered; he was indulged. Paul painted with great restraint; Charlie painted expressively. Julia liked Charlie’s red-hot spirit, but she was wary of his volatile emotions, which tended to surge and gather force.

  Charlie strode through the cabin with unmistakable pride, pride in all the ingenuity and elbow grease that had gone into it. The house was a “terribly rudimentary” one-room log structure with a back porch that doubled as a sleeping loft. An unsurpassable view in the front came with the property: a horseshoe swath of virgin seashore and the Atlantic Ocean, in all its grandeur. Charlie, who “had a Thoreau complex,” had stumbled upon the site in 1939, a ledgy rise ten feet above the water, on a gorgeous promontory called Lopaus Point. The next summer he moved the family there, ensconcing them in tents, while he and Paul cleared the land, dug the foundation, and put down the basic framework. “We all worked on it,” recalls Erica. “We cut down the trees, peeled the bark off, and then sawed them into lengths. Meals were sandwiches on a big board that we took to the beach.”

  By August 1946, when Julia arrived, the house was slightly further along. The log walls remained unfinished except for oakum, which was used to caulk the holes. There was a big coal stove in a designated kitchen area at the front and a beast of a fireplace in the living area made from stones that Erica and Rachel had hauled. Otherwise, there was no electricity, no refrigerator, no bathroom facilities. Milk and eggs sat on a little shelf that had the benefit of a natural breeze. Water was brought in from a nearby spring. “There was a system,” recalls Jon Child. “Everybody had two buckets, water was heated on the stove. If you needed the bathroom, you’d go to the beach with a roll of toilet paper.”

  Julia loved the house from the get-go, even without plumbing and electricity. The whole notion of living in the woods, practically on top of each other—roughing it—spoke to her romantic side. She loved how welcoming the house felt, how everyone slept in the same room and shared meals at a communal table that Charlie had made, and read by the light of a kerosene Aladdin’s lamp that cast a beautiful soft glow. She loved the energy in that house and the way Paul was in it. “She loved the house because she loved adventure,” Rachel says. “The way we lived in Lopaus was just more of the same.”

  Freddie recruited Julia to help prepare meals, but it was clear the new guest was a pitiful sous chef. Freddie had to walk her through the most basic tasks: chopping vegetables and cutting up a chicken. “Word around our house was Paul’s girlfriend couldn’t cook,” says Jon. “The joke was: she could burn water if she boiled it.”

  In the Lopaus kitchen, Julia was all thumbs—she had no ability—but she knew more about cooking than she let on. During her stay in Pasadena, Julia had enrolled at the Hillcliff School of Cookery in Beverly Hills, run by two dithering British women, Mary Hill and Irene Radcliffe. It was a classic Intro to Cooking course, combining commonsense skills with hands-on preparations. To its credit, the school rejected the numbing unoriginality of home-ec cooking, which staked its claim on convenience foods and kitchen shortcuts. There were no canned-soup casseroles or gelatin salads on its syllabus. It was, in the words of a brochure from the mid-1940s, “in service to old-fashioned culinary techniques using the freshest ingredients.”

  Julia was determined to cook—and cook well. Paul loved good food, and her desire to please him was great, which meant that she needed to develop the skills to meet his exacting standards. It wasn’t a chore. “I do love to cook,” she acknowledged earlier that summer. But Julia wasn’t a natural when it came to the kitchen. She didn’t have the instincts that some women were born with, the ability to throw something together and make it jump off the plate. Cooking, for her, necessitated a logical set of instructions: measure the ingredients, boil the water, mix well, cook until done. But, as Julia soon discovered, it took more than simply following a recipe to create a delicious dish.

  Her first few experiments were unmitigated disasters. A soufflé she made had the weight and density of a brisket. A dish of brains turned to mush when she stirred it to death. Another time, friends brought her several ducks, which blew up in the oven when she forgot to prick the skin. Nor did she fare better as a saucier. Béarnaise, according to Julia, was “awfully easy when the tricks are known,” but if they weren’t known—that is, if one happened to improvise, substituting lard for butter, as Julia did at a dinner party in March—chances are the sauce will become a solid block of grease. With all that energy and fumbling in the kitchen, there was always a soupçon of hysterical nonchalance.

  And no beginning cook was more nonchalant than Julia McWilliams.

  Almost two decades before she diced, chopped, and minced her way into America’s living rooms, Julia’s inimitable kitchen etiquette was already talking hold. She and Freddie Child developed an easy rapport over meal preparations that became a hallmark of Julia’s ebullient style. They laughed and drank wine while they cooked. They told each other marvelous stories. If one of the ingredients happened to hit the floor, Freddie instructed Julia to brush it off and toss it into the pot. They made recipes that Freddie had learned while living in France. “My mother taught Julia how to cook coq au vin,” recalls Erica, “and she taught her how to relax and have fun.”

  Freddie took the hysteria out of the hysterical nonchalance and gave Julia the keys to the kitchen.

  THROUGH THE REST of the Lopaus visit and into the late-summer chill that came early to Maine—every day for two weeks, the temperatures dropped by two or three degrees—Julia and Paul integrated themselves into this warm, inviting family. They pitched in with the daily building chores, organized picnics at the beach, told endless war stories about “the clack-clack pandemonium of China” that got an animated retelling among the kids at bedtime. Julia quickly became the girls’ favorite aunt—Aunt JuJu—winning their affection with her irresistible enthusiasm. “She was fascinating to us,” says Erica, “and game to do funny things.” Whatever the caper, she was the perennial good sport. Rachel and Julia began making funny hats for each other out of seashore detritus, such as seaweed and lobster claws. In an oft-repeated Chaplinesque pantomime, Julia would pretend to lose her footing and
slip off a mossy rock, plunging comically into the surf. Such lavish attention wasn’t skimped on young Jon, who got a haircut courtesy of patient Aunt JuJu, while he blew a toy bugle into her ear. “She possessed more than a touch of the unexpected,” Charlie wrote in a memoir, and it is fair to say that he understated her impact.

  The ten days Julia spent at the cabin on Lopaus Point provided the Childs with a view of Paul unlike any they had experienced. He was a different man with a different outlook. Instead of brooding conversations and cloudy discontent, there were plans laced with promise and hope. The kids noticed there were fewer flare-ups between the brothers, none of the tension that marred earlier visits. Everything he did took on a lighter, brighter twist. “It was nice to see Paul happy again,” says Erica. “We loved it when he and Julia kissed each other and hugged. They were very open about it. He had never been that way with Edith so, of course, we credited Julia.”