JULIA RARELY turned down a request for an interview, and one of the questions that came up frequently over the years was about the food she remembered from childhood. What did she eat growing up? What turned her into a cook, a gourmand, a tireless advocate of the kitchen as the most important room in the house? She never had much to say on the subject. “It was good, plain New England food, the kind my mother had back in Massachusetts,” she once told People magazine. The meat was invariably cooked until well done, she recalled; the vegetables were seasonal; in those days, of course, there was no wine. The family always employed a cook, and only on her night out would Julia’s mother step into the kitchen to make baking powder biscuits and Welsh rarebit. These were the memories Julia scraped from a dry well. The truth was, food hadn’t been important to her when she was growing up. She was not a natural epicure, one of those food lovers who seem to remember every childhood meal all the way back to that first, transcendent mouthful of strained peaches. And she certainly wasn’t a natural cook—her calamitous efforts to learn her way around a kitchen would go on for years. What she did have was a huge, unstoppable appetite. Tall and skinny, she plowed through the first several decades of her life with only one gastronomic thought—“To eat all she could hold at every meal,” as her husband put it. Food would not take on any greater significance than that until she was thirty-two years old, thousands of miles from home, and falling in love.
Julia’s mother used to say that she had raised eighteen feet of children, for each of her three—Julia, Dorothy, and John—eventually topped six feet. Julia was the oldest, a gawky youngster who liked riding her bike, acting in school plays, building treehouses, and trying to smoke cigars in the orchard. Pasadena, where she was born in 1912, was a handsome city known for its wealth and civic accomplishments; and her father, John McWilliams, was a living symbol of the city’s prosperity. A Princeton graduate and devout Republican, he managed the western landholdings and investments amassed by his own father, and later became vice president of the J. G. Boswell Company, one of California’s major landowners and developers. His personal and professional mission was to keep California booming, and he put a great deal of time into Pasadena community life. Julia was raised to admire his discipline and public spirit, which she did, but he also nurtured a set of rabidly right-wing convictions that she would come to abhor. The two of them split sharply during the 1950s, when John McWilliams became an enthusiastic supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom Julia found despicable. Her father was also vocal about his contempt for Jews, artists, intellectuals, and foreigners; and for most of her adult life Julia viewed him with enormous dismay, though she managed to keep loving him.
Her mother was a very different creature, lively and full of humor, and Julia adored her. Julia Carolyn Weston, known as Caro, grew up in a wealthy household of seven children in Dalton, Massachusetts—her father founded the Weston Paper Company and made a fortune—and Caro developed a streak of cheerful independence she never lost. She went to Smith College in nearby Northampton, where she was a star of track and basketball, and so loved the place that she and a classmate vowed they would send their daughters there. The early death of her mother was a sorrow that Caro felt for the rest of her life, and she blamed her father for the nonstop childbearing she believed had badly weakened her mother. Julia would be childless herself, to her regret, but she made Planned Parenthood her favorite charity.
For all their pride in Pasadena, Julia’s parents sent her out of town for high school so she could attend the best school they knew—the Katharine Branson School in Marin County, where Julia became a boarder. Small, expensive, and very highly regarded, the Branson School offered West Coast girls a traditional New England education, the sort that would prepare them for Seven Sisters colleges. It was largely wasted on Julia. Her work was good enough to get her by without trouble, but what she really liked about the school was everything else, including beach parties, hiking expeditions, innumerable athletic events, and playing the title role in Michael, the Sword Eater. She won an armful of awards at graduation in honor of her accomplishments and school spirit, and was named Branson’s First Citizen. There was no question about what would follow Branson: her mother had been waiting eighteen years to help Julia pack for Smith. Many years later, Julia remarked that if she had known about such things as coed colleges, she would have raced to one. But at the time, luckily for family harmony, she had no such ambitions; in fact, she had few ambitions of any sort. Filling out an enrollment form that asked her to list vocational plans, she wrote, “No occupation decided; Marriage preferable.” The next four years passed in a romp, interspersed with only enough studying to keep her from getting bored. She majored in history, though looking back, even she couldn’t say why. Her prom dates tended to be family friends, since she towered over most of the eligible men at nearby Amherst College; and by the time she graduated, she was no closer to marriage, much less an “occupation,” than she had been when she enrolled.
Back in Pasadena she spent a year doing exactly what her friends were doing—parties, golf, Junior League, and going to weddings. Then she took herself in hand and decided it was time to become a novelist or maybe find a job in publishing. She took a stenography course and moved to New York with two of her Smith friends, settling into an apartment on East 59th Street in the fall of 1935. To her consternation, she couldn’t get an interview at The New Yorker, and she flunked the entry-level typing test at Newsweek, so she was proud and relieved to be hired in the advertising department at W. & J. Sloane, a Fifth Avenue furniture store.
For the next year and a half, she supplied New York newspapers with press releases on Sloane’s new products. Julia was no furniture expert, but she was a quick study, and she did like to write. “When you have put your all into a party, and struggled over making sandwiches that are chic and dashing as well as tastey [sic], it is terribly deflating to have their pretty figures ruined by guests who must peak [sic] inside each ’wich to see what it’s made of,” ran the draft of one effort. The Sloane solution was “sandwich indicators”—“wooden picks which you stick in the sandwich plate, nicely shaped and painted. There is ‘Humpty-Dumpty’ for egg, a rat in a cage for cheese, a dog, boat, and pig for meat, fish, and ham. And it seems like a very sound idea.” That last sentence has the ring of desperation: even Julia couldn’t come up with more to say about the charm of identifying a cheese sandwich with a rat.
She was writing and getting paid for it—$20 a week, eventually raised to $35—but the appeal of Sloane’s and New York didn’t last very long. By the end of her first year in the city, she had fallen in love, which was thrilling, and been jilted, which was shattering. She stuck it out until May 1937 and then went back to Pasadena.
Shortly after she returned home, her mother died at sixty of complications stemming from high blood pressure. Her father wanted Julia to stay near him, so she obediently narrowed her focus to a life at home. When the Smith vocational office alerted her to job possibilities in New York and Paris, she ignored them. Instead, she took a stab at fashion writing, becoming a columnist for a new and painfully obscure California magazine called Coast. She got the job through family connections and worked hard at it, reporting on the latest styles and suggesting what to wear with what; but the fact was, the woman who would become famous wearing a skirt, a blouse, an apron, and a dish towel really did not care what people wore with what. “Loathesome business,” she called her fashion career years later; and she was relieved when the magazine went bankrupt. The Beverly Hills branch of W. & J. Sloane then made her its advertising manager, a new position at the store and one with considerable responsibility—she set up the office, managed a $100,000 annual budget, and planned and carried out all the advertising for the store—but she was fired after a few months. “I don’t wonder,” she wrote candidly on her résumé. “One needs a much more detailed knowledge of business…than I had.”
Her social and volunteer activities were far more successful: she gave lots of parties and poured tremendous energy into the Junior League, writing children’s plays and sometimes acting in them, and contributing to the league’s magazine. She was even courted by an eligible suitor—Harrison Chandler, a member of the family who owned the Times-Mirror. Julia was tempted, but decided she just didn’t love him. The prerequisites for marriage, in her view, were “companionship, interests, great respect, and fun,” and the relationship with Chandler didn’t measure up. By this time, she was nearing thirty and starting to see that she might not marry at all. With the equanimity that would guide her all her life through crises large and small, she absorbed that possibility and kept right on going.
But she changed direction. As she started to envision life as a single woman, she realized she had no wish to spend the rest of her years as a Pasadena socialite. In the fall of 1941, caught up in the news of impending war, she began volunteering at the local office of the Red Cross. After Pearl Harbor, she joined the Aircraft Warning Service and then took the civil service exam. She was becoming increasingly impatient with life at home. A crisis was sweeping the globe, and for the past five years she had been doing little more than enjoying herself. Now the nation needed everyone—for once, even women were being called to serve. Here was a rare opening in the sky-high wall of convention and family responsibility that normally barred women from the world at large. Like millions of others, Julia leaped to take advantage. She filled out applications to join the Waves and the Wacs and set out eagerly for Washington, D.C. There she learned to her disappointment that at six feet two inches she was too tall for the military. So she took the only war-effort job she could get—typing index cards at the U.S. Information Center in the Office of Wartime Intelligence. It was unbearably tedious. She quit after three months with no idea about what would come next, but never for a minute did she contemplate returning home. Her departure from the past was permanent. The war offered her a future, and she grabbed it.
“I got an awfully late start,” Julia reflected once. She wasn’t talking about marrying at thirty-four, or beginning her life’s work at thirty-seven, or launching a television career at fifty. The start she had in mind was the moment when her childhood finally ended and she could feel herself coming into focus as the person she wanted to be. It happened during the war, in the heat and stress of a military office rigged up on a Ceylon tea plantation. Later, when she looked back at this turning point, she could hardly believe she had spent so long in a foreign country—and she didn’t mean Ceylon, she meant Pasadena.
What she really wanted to do in Washington was join the newly formed Office of Strategic Services (OSS), headed by General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, who was organizing what would become a far-flung network of espionage and intelligence operations in Europe and the Far East. It’s not clear whether Julia hoped to become a spy—she wasn’t exactly someone who could fade imperceptibly into a crowd—but by this time she was a master at typing and filing, and her background made her just the sort of woman Donovan was trying to hire. An OSS recruiter once said that Donovan’s concept of the ideal office worker was “a cross between a Smith College graduate, a Powers model, and a Katie Gibbs secretary.” Julia fit the template nicely. She started as a file clerk at OSS headquarters, but as soon as word went out that Donovan was establishing bases overseas and was looking for volunteers, she put her name forward. Although she knew some French and a bit of Italian, she didn’t ask for a posting in Europe. When the war was over, she would surely get there on her own and maybe even live abroad for a time. In hopes of just such a possibility, she was already taking French lessons three times a week. But here was a chance to travel someplace completely improbable, someplace way, way off the map of her life to date. She requested India and sailed on a troop ship from California in March 1944.
Once they all arrived—a flock of men and a handful of women—their orders changed. The new OSS base was to be in Ceylon, where Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten was directing the South East Asia Command from Kandy, up in the hills. “Our office is a series of palm-thatched huts connected by cement walks, surrounded by native workmen and barbed wire,” Julia wrote to her family from the tea plantation that became OSS headquarters. Though she had an emergency signaling mirror and felt quite ready for attack or capture, her job turned out to be chiefly paperwork. Julia’s assignment was to set up and operate the Registry, a massive chore that she did single-handedly until an assistant showed up months later. The Registry handled all the highly classified documents pertaining to intelligence in the China-Burma-India theater, and Julia created the system that would keep track of every scrap of information and make it quickly accessible.
There were insects the likes of which she had never seen before, elephants and tropical rains, golf games and a huge workload—Julia thrived on all of it. Primitive living conditions didn’t bother her, and she was calm about dealing with the vital wartime secrets that flowed in and out of her office. When the OSS shifted operations to China ten months later, Julia was transferred to Kunming to set up the Registry there. By now she was getting tired of a daily life devoted to paperwork, but she liked the idea of seeing another new country, and not even the famously treacherous flight over the Himalayas upset the genial self-possession that was a hallmark of her personality. One of her OSS colleagues remembered sitting on the plane from Calcutta to Kunming as it rattled through ice and wind—hundreds of flights on this route ended disastrously—while the people around her shook with fear. Not Julia; she was absorbed in a book. When they reached the airport, she looked around with pleasure and remarked, “It looks just like China.”
Julia had what they used to call a good war. She spent it in a world she had barely known existed, and the exotic locales were the least of it. What seized her imagination most were her colleagues, the vigorous academics and professionals Donovan had made a point of recruiting. She had grown up with people who had money, leisure, and every opportunity for travel and education, yet who spent their lives absorbed in golf and parties—a class she later described as “a lot of Old Republicans with blinders on, and women who rarely develop out of the child class and create just about nothing.” Now, in the excitement and heightened intimacy of wartime, she was meeting people who saw the world very differently. Here were “missionaries, geographers, anthropologists, psychiatrists, ornithologists,” people who had chosen work they loved and pursued it with hearts and minds fully engaged. They spoke foreign languages, they were eager to taste foreign foods, they were passionate, sophisticated, and adventurous. Her mind flew open. She had found her tribe.
Back at the Branson School, in her senior year, Julia had published a witty essay in the literary magazine that began “I am like a cloud.” She was born, she wrote, with deficient tear glands, which meant that at the slightest emotional stimulus her eyes began to flood. Sitting in the theater she tended to embarrass everyone around her. Yet this did not mean she was a maudlin creature, she emphasized, far from it. She might look weepy and vulnerable, “but in my innermost inner I am as hard as a nail!”
No, she wasn’t hard as a nail, at school or later. The warmth she projected was genuine. But Julia had a firmness at the core, a constitutional strength of spirit that helped her pass smoothly through her first thirty years without the trauma or self-pity that might have attacked another woman in the same situation. She was always too tall to receive the abundant romantic attentions that someone with her charm had every right to expect; she was ruefully aware that she had wasted most of the time she spent at Smith; she had flubbed both her dream career as a writer and her actual career in business; and her single status at age thirty was like a medal of dishonor proclaiming inadequate femininity. None of this forced her psyche into neurotic twists and turns. Julia could not be toppled: there wasn’t an ounce of self-destruction in her personality, and her confidence ran so deep she hardly noticed it. But she knew that Donovan’s office had been her salvation, and that the war years put her on a road she might never have located otherwise. She always kept her OSS signaling mirror in a kitchen drawer.
The most important person she encountered in Ceylon was the man who would make her Julia Child. The two of them became friends right away, since Julia attracted friends as naturally as she laughed. Apart from her sociability and her impressive skills at the Registry, however, Paul Child found few points of contact with this big, jovial Californian. It wasn’t so much that their backgrounds were different—nobody had a background like Paul’s—but that Julia still seemed embedded in hers. Raised carefully in a manner befitting her parents’ comfortable ambitions for her, she was naive and inexperienced—a “grown-up-little-girl,” Paul thought. He, by contrast, had lived like a character in a boys’ adventure story. His father, who worked in the Astrophysical Observatory at the Smithsonian, had died in 1902, when Paul and his twin brother, Charlie, were only a few months old. Their mother, Bertha Cushing Child, moved the two boys and their sister back to Boston, where she had grown up. A trained contralto, she managed to support the family by teaching and performing, and received good reviews for her appearances with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Handel and Haydn Society. Meanwhile, the boys studied violin and cello, and their sister took piano lessons. As soon as they could all manage their instruments, Bertha booked the quartet for salon performances as “Mrs. Child and the Children.” Music was only the first of Paul’s numerous careers. After high school he worked in a stained-glass shop, learning to cut and glaze, and then he headed out west. Over the next few decades, he was a waiter in Hollywood, a tutor for an American family in Italy, a woodcarver in Paris, and a teacher at a couple of private schools in New England. Along the way he acquired a black belt in judo and became an avid photographer, painter, gardener, and poet. At the OSS he worked in the visual presentation unit, which prepared maps, charts, and graphic displays, and he was setting up the war room in Kandy when he met Julia on the veranda of the tea plantation.
Setting up war rooms was exactly the sort of thing Paul did best. In fact, he would do it many times in his life with Julia, organizing her high-performance kitchens at home and in the television studio. He was passionately analytical and took deep pleasure in trying to pin down the unwieldy universe in images, designs, and language. One of the many subjects that fascinated him was general semantics, a philosophy of language that he studied for years. Followers of general semantics, which emphasized the perpetually inexact relation between words and things, were fond of the abbreviation etc., because it implied that however much had been expressed, there was always something left unsaid. Paul tried to say it, all of it. He wrote constantly to his brother, Charlie, page after page of graceful calligraphy describing his days, his thinking, and his work with such dedication that he might have been the Homer of his own lifelong odyssey.
Paul was largely unsentimental, but his emotional life was always in full gear, and during the war years, he was deeply absorbed in the problem of women. He had lived for seventeen years, in Paris and in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a woman named Edith Kennedy, who was some twenty years older than he. Widely accomplished, brilliant, and sophisticated, Kennedy had died of cancer in 1942. Three years later, Paul was still longing hopelessly for her. “I am really spoiled for other women and I realize it over and over,” he wrote mournfully to Charlie. Before he left the United States, an astrologer in whom he put considerable faith had revealed his future to him. “Sometime after April 1945” was the predicted time frame; at that point he could expect to fall in love with a woman who would be, according to the astrologer, “intelligent, dramatic, beautiful, a combination of many facets, can keep house, yet is a modern woman.” By the spring of 1945, Paul was lonely, grieving, sexually deprived, and waiting impatiently for the prediction to come true.
There certainly were enough candidates. Was it Nancy, code-named Zorina in his letters? Zorina was the name he and Charlie gave to certain women who physically resembled the famous ballet dancer while exuding a kind of essential female quality that greatly appealed to both twins. “They possess what is lacking in this warring, man-ridden world: a sense of the continuity of life and perpetual sympathy, fellow-feeling and consolation,” Paul once said about their Zorinas. But Nancy was in love with another man, and Paul finally gave up on her. Perhaps Janie? “Une Bohémienne, of a fine sort. She adores animals and people, draws with great style and is worldly and often witty. She speaks Malay and French, both well.” But it didn’t last. “The woman could be Rosamond,” he wrote excitedly. “No Zorina she, but a wonderfully interesting and alive person, speaking French and Chinese and in spite of a woman-hockey-player’s figure, very attractive physically.” But Rosie was in her twenties and too young to be very interesting for very long. “When am I going to meet a grown-up dame with beauty, brains, character, sophistication, and sensibility?” he exclaimed in agony. Finally, she appeared—Marjorie, definitely Marjorie. “She has a first class brain and is widely informed, is wonderfully quick, subtle and humorous, but very earnest about life and its problems and possibilities. You begin to love women like that the moment you see them, almost.” But Marjorie went off with someone else.
This barrage of failure, and the possibility of spending the rest of his life alone, prompted a bleak poem.
These prison-wires strung round my bones
Bear cryptic messages from the heart.
Wasteland, wasteland—never a bush—
No gushing coolness under the rock,
Devoid of butterfly and buttercup.
Vacant as an idiot’s eye.
These pipes, pulsing in my flesh,
Water no garden, fertilize no flower.
Bitter, bitter on the sand is love.
Love lost, love never gained, love unfulfilled.
The teeming world is lonely as a mooreland,
As a bird in the middle of the sea.
Meanwhile, there was Julia, who impressed him chiefly by virtue of her good nature and great legs. Three months after they met, he sent a photo of her to Charlie, devoting more of the letter to a description of the bunk room than to the woman in it. Lying on a cot, stretched out to her full, dramatic length, Julia wore a dress and pearls, lipstick, and nail polish. She was leaning on an elbow, with one long leg angled over the other in a manner that suggests she was trying, somewhat against nature, to look coy. “The enclosed photo is of Julia, the 6'2" bien-jambée from Pasadena,” wrote Paul. “The room is a typical 10' x 18' with its coir matting, woven cadjan walls, wooden shutters and army bed with folded-up mosquito net above.” He added, “Save the photo for me please,” but it’s not clear whether it was Julia he hoped to preserve or his careful documentation of the room. Later he wrote out a detailed analysis of his new friend, making it clear why she would never qualify as the woman of his dreams. “Her mind is potentially good, but she is an extremely sloppy thinker,” he told Charlie, blaming Julia’s well-cushioned background for her inability to observe life in any depth or nuance. “She says things like this, ‘I don’t see why the Indians don’t just throw out the British,’ and ‘I can’t understand what they see in that horrid little old Gandhi.’” It’s easy even now to imagine Julia voicing these comments. Bluntness was a trait she would retain for the rest of her life; and whether or not she knew what she was talking about, her inclination was to speak out and accept the consequences. What saved her from being narrow-minded was an ingrained habit of trying out new ideas and perspectives. She was always eager to learn and rarely clung to a belief just because it was familiar. Paul’s take on her thinking was incomplete, but it was accurate for 1944; and he would be the one responsible for igniting her intellect.
For Julia, falling in love with Paul was a cinch, in part because she had already fallen in love, headlong and forever, with the whole OSS team and what it stood for in the way of civilized living. Paul was the very emblem of these new values. His sophistication dazzled her, easily outweighing the fact that he was ten years older, considerably shorter, and sported a mustache that suited him poorly. Just as important, Paul liked women a lot, and he was completely comfortable with strong, capable females—even strong, capable females who towered over him. Julia was sexually shy, but she was hardly unwilling, and she found Paul’s experience a very desirable asset. Here was a man who plainly relished all his physical appetites, and she responded as if the power had been switched on inside her. To be hungry for food was a state she knew well. To be hungry all over was a revelation. Nothing and nobody in her wondrous new environment resembled her stodgy past, Paul least of all. She had to have this.
It took a good eighteen months. Paul found Julia “extremely likeable and pleasant to have around,” but he had no intention of pursuing her romantically. She was a virgin, he reported to Charlie, and probably afraid of sex—a state that did not appeal to Paul at all. Here, he decided, was “the traditional old maid of song and story,” subconsciously obsessed with sex but unable to handle the reality. “I feel very sorry for her because while I see clearly what the cure is, I do not see clearly who will apply it,” he wrote. “I have considered the matter carefully, as obviously there would be compensations and pleasures, but I believe the lack of worldly knowledge, the sloppy thinking, the wild emotionalism, the conventional framework, would be too much for Dr. Paulski to risk attempting to cure.” What’s more, he was irritated by her most prominent speech mannerisms. “She has a slight atmosphere of hysteria which gets on my nerves, being given to overstress in conversation and to gasping when she talks excitedly,” he told Charlie—habits he would come to love as her public did. But at the time, they simply contributed to the many reasons why Julia fell short of his ideal.
So they embarked on a friendship, nothing more. Julia was out of the running. “I have never liked the idea—which is so appealing to many men—of Man the Sculptor, moulding and shaping a woman to his desire,” Paul explained to his brother, never imagining that love itself might be a sculptor pretty handy with clay. He and Julia went to movies, traveled a bit in Ceylon, and when she was transferred to China shortly after he was, they did some sightseeing there as well. They shared many meals; they talked and talked. And often they talked about food. Paul had spent years in Paris and was a knowledgeable and enthusiastic food lover. Julia liked these conversations—she certainly liked them better than the ones about general semantics—but as far as she was concerned, the most delicious thing about the meals they shared was Paul. Nonetheless, her sharp intellect rooted around happily in the talk about flavors, recipes, and culinary cultures that flowed between herself and this entrancing man. Paul was quickly persuaded that he had met a fellow epicure. “She is a gourmet and likes to cook and talk about food,” he reported admiringly, a few months after meeting her. He also knew a great deal about music, which she found less of a stretch, since she had minored in the subject at Smith. (“She is devoted to music,” Paul told Charlie approvingly.) Her shortcomings were, of course, severe in his eyes. But he came to treasure the qualities she brought to a friendship—constancy, humor, resilience, character. About six months after they met: “Julia is a nice person, a warm and witty girl.” Several months later: “A darling warm lovely girl.” A year after they met: “Julie…is a great solace.” And at last, in August 1945, a sonnet for her birthday. This was only three months after he had written the poem beginning “These prison-wires strung round my bones,” with its despairing imagery of the wasteland and the lonely sea. Now he was in full Shakespearean mode, and it was Julia’s doing.
How like the Autumn’s warmth is Julia’s face
So filled with Nature’s bounty, Nature’s worth.
And how like summer’s heat is her embrace
Wherein at last she melts my frozen earth.
Endowed, the awakened fields abound
With newly green effulgence, smiling flowers.
Then all the lovely riches of the ground
Spring up, responsive to her magic powers.
Sweet friendship, like the harvest-cycle, moves
From scattered seed to final ripened grain,
Which, glowing in the warmth of Autumn, proves
The richness of the soil, and mankind’s gain.
I cast this heaped abundance at your feet
An offering to Summer, and her heat.
Still, they weren’t quite engaged when the war ended. For all the delights of this relationship, they both worried that perhaps it was just a wartime fling. Maybe what Julia called their “friendly passion,” which was rooted in their great enjoyment of each other’s company, wasn’t powerful enough to see them through to marriage and beyond. Julia was painfully aware of how different she was from Paul’s great love, Edith Kennedy, who had been chic, intellectual, and—Paul’s favorite term of approval—“worldly.” Years later, when they were married and living in Paris, she could go to a Christian Dior fashion show and admire the “slightly ravaged ‘worldly’ look” of the models, admitting it was a look far beyond her power to achieve. (“Great big milk-fed ‘femme de menage,’ that’s me.”) But now she just had to hope it wasn’t an insurmountable problem. As they parted in China with plans to meet each other’s family and test the relationship by the light of real life, neither one knew quite what would come next. Julia went back to Pasadena, and Paul returned to Washington and the State Department. They spent the first six months of 1946 on opposite coasts, writing letters and pondering the future. And, as it turned out, missing each other terribly. If this was “friendly passion,” the emphasis was beginning to fall equally on both terms. “I am in a warm love-lust mood, wanting to have my ear-rings eaten,” she sighed, having just received two letters and a packet of photos from “Paulski.” For his part, he said he wanted to “see you, touch you, kiss you, talk with you, eat with you…eat you, maybe. I have a Julie-need.”
Julia knew she didn’t want to settle in Pasadena, no matter what happened with Paul, but she couldn’t figure out what to do with herself. By now she was sick of filing and secretarial work, yet she hadn’t come home from the war with any more specific career plans than she had when she left. What she really wanted to do was marry Paul, but she could hardly explain that to him, so she wrote to him about her plans in carefully circumspect fashion. Maybe she ought to look for a job in Hollywood? “I don’t know, as I have no contacts yet,” she mused. “I feel that it is not worth it to me to get any kind of a job like ‘Registry,’ nor a job that doesn’t pay at least $4,000 a year. I want something in which I will grow, meet many people and many situations. There is also and always Washington and the gov’t—both of which I like.”
But it was clear, at least to Julia, that the real project for her stay in Pasadena was to work on becoming Mrs. Paul Child, a project somehow distinct from the question of if and when they would marry. Marriage was inconceivable unless Paul found her to be the right person, and she knew she wasn’t, yet. She had no wish to give up her identity; what she was hoping to do was expand it to meet his, and then dissolve the borders. Paul urged her to read Henry Miller, which she did with mixed reactions (magnificent writing, she thought, but too much of a “stiff-prick forest”); she also took up semantics, psychology, and politics, which she followed in the Washington Post and the New York Times. “There is just so much that is fascinating!” she told him, and underlined the phrase eight times. When she turned to cooking, it was in the same frame of mind—here was an exhilarating intellectual adventure that would bring her closer to Paul. Cooking, love, and learning would be conjoined for the rest of her life.
And learning—conscientious, painstaking, step-by-step learning—was at the center of the enterprise from the moment she first propped a cookbook on the counter and went to work. Julia had none of the instincts that make a man or a woman “a born cook.” Much as she enjoyed food, it’s unlikely that her cooking would have acquired much depth or refinement on its own. She simply wasn’t one of those mysteriously gifted creatures who could wander into the kitchen and wander out again bearing a wonderful meal, never having glanced at a recipe or measured an ingredient. Cookbooks were supposed to help, and she studied them with the faith and zeal of a Torah scholar; but the recipes always seemed to fall horribly short. One day she made a broiled chicken according to the directions in a book, checked on it when the book said to, and found a blackened mess. If she was going to cook, and cook well enough to please Paul, she knew she needed lessons.
Two British women, Mary Hill and Irene Radcliffe, ran the Hillcliff School of Cookery in Beverly Hills; and in the spring of 1946, Julia started going three times a week. She was ambitious and diligent, but when she came home with her new knowledge and put it into practice, nothing seemed to happen as it should. A dish of brains turned into mush on the stove, a duck blew up in the oven because she forgot to prick the skin. She mastered béarnaise sauce—“Awfully easy when the tricks are known,” she told Paul airily—but tried it another time using lard instead of butter and watched the whole thing congeal into a vile mass. There were triumphs occasionally: she and a friend gave an elaborate dinner for twelve featuring three kinds of hors d’oeuvres, steak and kidney pie (“The crust was superb”), and peas cooked with lettuce, the French way. But then there was the day she got up at 6:30 in the morning to make the family a big breakfast and ended up in near-hysterics two hours later when she still hadn’t managed to put any food on the table. “The kitchen was a mess, and they came in and hovered over me, and the coffee fell on the floor and burned them, and they made rude remarks, and I threw them out and burst into tears,” she recalled years later, still grim at the memory.
Julia wrote to Paul about all of it, whether the results were delicious or disastrous. Far more than books or politics, food became a red-hot connective wire between them during these months of separation, a living metaphor for the intimacy that had seemed so elusive at the end of the war. “I feel I am only existing until I see you, and hug you, and eat you,” Julia wrote; and Paul suggested that she move to Washington and become his cook—“We can eat each other.” This was the highly charged context in which Julia threw herself into studying recipes, practicing her Hillcliff lessons, and staging dinner parties: every cup of flour and sprinkle of herbs seemed to radiate her desire for Paul. He, too, was getting hungry. In July, he showed up in Pasadena, and the two of them got into Julia’s Buick and drove back across the country together.
It was the supreme test: long, hot days on the road, nights in cheap motels. Julia had packed eight bottles of whiskey, a bottle of gin, and a bottle of premixed martinis. She was as good a driver as Paul, he noted with approval, and it turned out that they liked stopping to look at all the same things—“wineries, crab-canneries, local architecture and nature.” Julia never complained, ate and slept as comfortably as if she were traveling in luxury, painted her toenails, and washed Paul’s shirts. “Quite a dame,” he told Charlie. By the time they reached Niagara Falls, he was in love and knew it.
Julia’s determination had carried her to a glorious finish line: the raw, emotionally chaotic “old maid” that Paul once dismissed was now his lodestar. Sitting down to analyze his rush of awakened feelings in a letter to his brother, Paul tried to figure out what had happened. Did Julia change, or did he? It was Julia, he decided. And Julia had indeed changed, or rather she had opened up areas of her mind and personality that nobody before Paul had demanded to see. Yet when he went on to list what he loved most about her, he didn’t dwell on the intellectual skills that had newly flowered, but rather on the great, stalwart elements of her character that had always made people warm to her—and would have the same effect years later on millions of people she would never meet. “She never puts on an act,” he wrote, pinpointing at the top of the roster the very quality her audiences would relish most. “She frankly likes to eat and use her senses and has an unusually keen nose…. She has a cheerful, gay humor with considerable gusto…. She loves life and all its phenomena…. She has deep-seated charm and human warmth which I have been fascinated to see at work on people of all sorts, from the sophisticates of San Francisco to the mining and cattle folk of the Northwest…She tells the truth.” And he noted appreciatively that she had none at all of the “measly Mrs. Grundyisms concerning sex” that might have been expected in an inexperienced woman nearly thirty-four years old. A month later, they were married.