RULE No. 2:
PLAY THE EMPEROR
I’m all for hunger among the well-to-do. For comfortable people, hunger is a very nice quality.
IN 1992 JULIA WENT TO LONDON TO ATTEND THE OXFORD Symposium on Food. She traveled with Nancy Verde Barr, who served as the executive chef for Julia’s Good Morning America segments and helped her produce her feature articles for Parade magazine. Anyone who worked with Julia for any length of time inevitably became a good friend, and Barr had been with her for a dozen years by then.
Julia almost never said no to an invitation. Even in her dotage, the only thing that prevented her from saying yes to every invitation that came down the pike was the scant twenty-four hours in every day. Just as the two friends were preparing to leave for England, the London branch of Cordon Bleu invited them to another event, and Julia, a traveling pro with everything she needed packed into a small black suitcase, insisted they add it to their itinerary. But where would they stay? As luck would have it, Julia’s friends—the Sullivans—were traveling in the States at the time, and their very nice flat remained empty.
What could be more perfect? Especially since this would allow Julia and Nancy to throw a cocktail party for their London friends in the cooking world, of which Julia had many.* One night, at the end of their stay, Julia thought it would be nice to thank their generous hosts by photographing themselves enjoying the flat, and enclose the pictures in the thank-you note. Then she spied a rare porcelain vase sitting on the mantel—but one of the Sullivans’ large, priceless collection—and hatched a better, much more entertaining plan.
Inside their proper thank-you note the Sullivans also received a handful of photos of Julia and Nancy … in their bathrobes pretending to hurl their museum-quality porcelain to the floor. Ha!
Julia was eighty when she carried out this caper, and it was far from her last.
There are many stories like this about Julia, by those who knew her well and those who knew her in passing. What they all attest to is one of the great mysteries surrounding the person of Julia Child: She grew up without losing those tremendous kid-type qualities that make everyday life fun.
NOTHING PREVENTED JULIA FROM BEING HERSELF
Until the day she died, Julia was never out of touch with what my friend Gabby calls her “girl spirit.” For most women that curious, rambunctious, prank-playing, singing-at-the-top-of-our-lungs-while-riding-our-bikes-down-the-middle-of-the-street joie de vivre begins to dwindle around the time we start reading Seventeen, and is usually extinct by the time we’re in the throes of calorie-counting, expensive eye cream–wearing, eligible man–pursuing adulthood. We can hardly be blamed. I can’t think of an era in which Julia’s exuberant tomboy style of behavior was ever in vogue for grown women. Being yourself in the way Julia was herself has been frowned upon as being unladylike, un-Joni Mitchell-like, or un-smokin’ hot babe-like, depending upon the era. This wouldn’t matter in and of itself, except the implication of being a woman who inhabits and expresses the full range of her personality, as inevitably put forth by the pundits-du-jour, is that refusing to get in line with accepted notions of femininity means you’re bound to wind up unloved and alone.
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.
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.
Even as a girl Julia was tremendously adaptable, and once she realized she would never play a princess, she found she preferred playing the emperor, with his great strides across the stage, his roaring proclamations. As the emperor, she was free to indulge her inner ham, something she would never be able to do otherwise. She was free to be herself.
Julia’s height informed her life, in the way being a McWilliams of sunny Pasadena ultimately didn’t. At age four she was the tallest girl in her Montessori school. She would be, for the rest of her life, among the tallest, if not the tallest, person in any crowd. In her beloved France, she would be a foot or more taller than everyone she met.
A woman as tall as Julia could never be transformed by a new dress or tube of lipstick. No makeover would ever make over the part of her that failed to comply with traditional standards of feminine beauty.
To what degree did it bother her? To what degree did she try to slouch or smoke in order to stunt her growth—actually, she may have smoked in part for that reason—or wished upon a falling star that one day she would wake up to find herself a foot shorter? Probably not at all. Julia was never one to indulge in “what if.” She never pined for the impossible; if there was one thing that nothing could be done about, it was her height, and fairly early on she made peace with it.
Her practical nature asserted itself, and she realized she had a choice. “Why languish as a giantess when it is so much fun to be a myth?” she wrote in her diary. She may have been whistling in the dark, or practicing a sassy attitude, but she seemed to have understood, even then, that a girl could choose to behave in a way that would distinguish her. Perhaps that was her only choice, given the alternative was to “languish.” Still, given how sociable she was, how free-spirited and energetic, she knew this was something she could pull off. By sheer force of her personality, she could escape her fate.
Years later, she could joke about it. When she and Paul moved into their apartment at 81 rue de l’Université, their bed was so short, Paul built an extension, about which Julia said, “At last, I could fit my size-twelve feet comfortably under the covers, rather than have them sticking out like a pair of gargoyles.”
Once in a great while, she was distressed by the way she looked. As she was rounding the bend to forty she would write to Avis DeVoto that whenever she read Vogue she “felt like a frump … but I suppose that is the purpose of all of it, to shame people out of their frumpery so they will go out and buy 48 pairs of red shoes, have a facial, pat themselves with deodorizers, buy a freezer, and put up the new crispy window curtains with a draped valance.”
Julia was able to deconstruct the disingenuous motives that drive women’s magazines with the ease she normally reserved for deboning a duck, seeing quite clearly that while ostensibly offering inspiration and useful advice, the stories and articles quietly pummel the reader’s sense of self, the better to drive her into the arms of the advertisers.
What is most instructional about this little anecdote, however, is that even by average woman standards, Julia’s sense of style was pretty basic, mostly because how could it be otherwise, given that it was next to impossible to find any skirts, trousers, blouses, or jackets in her size. Even with the help of a series of good tailors, the pickings in the shops and department stores were slim. Only when she read Vogue did she feel a little frumpy, even though, in actuality, she was a lot frumpy. But her ability to accept, work with, and even celebrate her own idiosyncrasies made the truth of the matter irrelevant.
Change nothing.
One of the trends that caught fire in the wake of the most recent global recession is the Buy Nothing movement. It goes by a variety of names—The Compact, the Minimalists*—and there are various cells and offshoots, but the point is to reduce debt and clutter, to recycle, reuse, and simplify, and also to help defuse our panic over having no disposable income, or perhaps any income at all.
There are the inevitable blogs about living a year without buying anything, and websites where people post about their experiments in growing and canning their own tomatoes and using the recycled newspaper from Starbucks as toilet paper, and also, confess when they “slip.” A whole argument can be made about how the health of the global economy relies on consumers breaking down and buying a pair of shoes once in a while rather than foraging for them in the Dumpsters behind the dorms the day after the students have gone home for the summer, but that’s another polemic for another time.
Inspired by the Buy Nothing people, let’s resolve to Change Nothing about ourselves. By now, most first-world women don’t even need to go online, pick up a magazine, look at a billboard, or turn on the TV; we’ve completely internalized the message that everything about us can be improved, and that if we’re not actively working on the endless remodeling project that is Us, then we lack self-esteem. That every last one of us can and should be thinner, firmer, smoother, more radiant, more supple, more plump in the parts that are supposed to be plump and less plump in the parts that aren’t, with lots of swingy shiny hair up there and no hair down there, barely warrants mention, so old-school is that brainwashing.
In recent years the wheel has turned a little. Women’s magazines have heard the criticism that every woman on the planet who reads them for any length of time winds up despising herself so thoroughly that her options have been narrowed to throwing either the magazine or herself off a bridge, and so now their focus is “spiritual.”
Now, while effortlessly rocking our skinny jeans, we must also be working to live a life of abundance, and to recognize said abundance, and to learn how to feel properly grateful, and to become the hero of our own journey. Wait, your inner critic is somehow as resilient as a post-apocalyptic cockroach and keeps chiding you for failing to be the hero in your own journey? Not to worry; here are eighty-seven foolproof ways to silence that inner critic.
On and on it goes. Julia wasn’t having any of it, and neither should you.
Here’s an experiment: For one day, walk the earth in your fat pants and raggedy cuticles. Do whatever you do in the morning to get yourself together, beauty-wise,* then, forget about it. If you’re not feeling grateful, then don’t be grateful. Quit practicing whatever inner thing you’re practicing. Don’t take the stairs instead of the elevator. Don’t choose the banana instead of the bag of chips. Every time that chiding little voice inside says you should be working on changing yourself, silence it. Instead, play the emperor. The emperor doesn’t live on an endless self-improvement regime, and the emperor doesn’t apologize for who she is. And as for the inner critic, our bête noire du jour: If there’s nothing to criticize, she’s out of a job. Do this, for one day, and see what happens. Sometimes, simply accepting our imperfections serves to lay the groundwork for confidence. Who knew?
I’m not saying you’re fine the way you are. Julia, certainly, for her time, was not “fine” the way she was. Instead, by embracing all that she was, she redefined fine.