Appetite For Life_ The Biography Of Julia Child Part 2

IVY W WALLS AND J JELLY D DONUTS.

(1930 1934) "The day I was born I was enrolled at Smith College ... If I hadn't gone, it would have broken her heart."

JULIA CHILD.

CAROLYN WESTON and Helen Janney were graduates of the cla.s.s of "naughty-aught" (1900) and determined that their daughters should also go to Smith College and become friends and roommates. "Our mothers arranged our 'marriage,'" said daughter Mary. It was September 1930 when the mothers proudly made the match in a very old house in Northampton. and Helen Janney were graduates of the cla.s.s of "naughty-aught" (1900) and determined that their daughters should also go to Smith College and become friends and roommates. "Our mothers arranged our 'marriage,'" said daughter Mary. It was September 1930 when the mothers proudly made the match in a very old house in Northampton.

In the door came Julia, this tall, very slender, very happy person smiling at me, saying, "I'm Julia McWilliams." I have never had a roommate who was so utterly fun to be with; she was almost too much fun.... She was very tall and I was about five feet five inches, and she was very thin, and I was very plump-about 160 pounds, for I had eaten too many hot fudge sundaes.

Despite their differences in academic aspirations and physical appearance, Mary and Julia became fast friends. Mary Case, a serious and idealistic Student who would make Phi Beta Kappa, was soon christened "Fatty." Julia, who would minor in academics and major in socializing, was called "Skinny."

Julia made two immediate discoveries: the cot she tried to sleep on the first night was several inches too short and, horror of horrors, her clothes did not conform to the grooming habits of the Northeastern female of Ivy League lineage. The first problem was solved by a telephone call from her mother, says Connie Thayer, one of the other freshman girls on her floor. The new longer bed that the college immediately provided would be hers for the next four years. The second problem took longer to resolve: I was a Western girl at Smith and dressed in the Western way; when I got to Smith everything everything was wrong; in those days you had Brooks Brothers crew neck sweaters; pale, pastel tweed skirts from Best & Co. and a camel's hair polo coat fastened up to the neck; brown and white Spaulding saddle shoes; and a strand of five-and-dime pearls. I was miserable until Mother came at Thanksgiving and we went to New York City and bought all these things. Then I fit in. I was in. was wrong; in those days you had Brooks Brothers crew neck sweaters; pale, pastel tweed skirts from Best & Co. and a camel's hair polo coat fastened up to the neck; brown and white Spaulding saddle shoes; and a strand of five-and-dime pearls. I was miserable until Mother came at Thanksgiving and we went to New York City and bought all these things. Then I fit in. I was in.

What impressed Julia, as it did the other girls who came from small preparatory schools, was the size and freedom of Smith. Founded in 1871 by Sophia Smith to offer to young women a higher education equal to that offered to young men, this Seven Sisters college was opened in Northampton in the Connecticut River valley of western Ma.s.sachusetts in 1875. Though it was within a twelve-mile radius of Amherst and Mount Holyoke colleges and the future University of Ma.s.sachusetts, and although it was only eighty miles to Yale, ninety-three miles to Harvard, and 156 miles to Princeton and Columbia-all crucial to the dating practices of the daughters of Smith-it was three thousand miles from Pasadena. And in terms of the life of an eighteen-year-old girl, it might as well have been a million miles from home.

What eased Julia's way into this alien climate was her mother's experience and members.h.i.+p in the club. Julia immediately belonged to the "Granddaughters Club," those whose mothers had attended Smith, and was initiated into her mother's secret society, the Orangemen; Mary was initiated into her her mother's secret society, the AOH (Ancient Order of Hibernians). mother's secret society, the AOH (Ancient Order of Hibernians).

THE CAMPUS.

Julia and her mother had approached the campus from the little town center of Northampton. Driving up the hill, with the ornate campus gate and college administration building ahead of them, they forked left into West Street and immediately entered Green Street, turning right into the campus. Hubbard Hall, built in 1878, was on the left, a three-and-a-half-story brick house with ivy climbing up the side and two chimneys rising high above the attic dormer windows. The house was named after Sophia Smith's lawyer, the college's first treasurer and trustee, but more important to Julia was that Hubbard House was strategically located close to the downtown shopping and the hundred-year-old Rahar House (then a speakeasy) on South Street. Directly across the street from Hubbard was a drugstore and soda fountain, where Mary bought her hot fudge sundaes from Mr. Curly. There, Julia quickly found the best jelly donuts in town.

Hubbard Hall would be Julia's home for four years. In the tradition of Smith, there were no sororities and girls lived and ate in their respective houses, which contained students from each cla.s.s level. Not surprisingly, the five freshmen in Hubbard soon formed an alliance that they would call the Gang of Five: Mary Case, Julia McWilliams, Hester Adams, Peggy Clark, and Connie Thayer. Three of the five were at Smith because their mothers had attended, though Peggy's mother attended only two years (this generation would all graduate). Peggy was a slender and shapely girl who had had polio and thus needed a.s.sistance to walk. She wore a heavy brace on her left leg, and during the winter months Julia would put Peggy, whom she adored, on a sled for the forays down the hill into town.

What united them in part was their "Mother Hubbard," Mrs. Holly Phillips Gilchrist. Gilley, as they called her, was the housemother who held the social fabric together, or tried to. Every afternoon she had tea, to which any girl was welcome. Motherly advice was dispensed when asked for, but many of the girls found her too old-fas.h.i.+oned and simpleminded for words. Julia called her "nice, but not too bright." Connie Thayer said they also called her "Pouter Pigeon" because she was stout, shaped like a pigeon, somber, and lacking a sense of humor. "Girls, girls, you're using just too much toilet paper!" was a lament of hers they would remember for sixty years. Gifted at imitating, Julia would mimic the lament to peals of laughter.

Julia and Mary (also often called Casey) lived at the top of the first flight of carved wooden stairs in a s.p.a.cious corner room with two windows. Unfortunately, Dr. Abbie Mabel O'Keefe, the faculty resident and the college's Director of Medical Services, lived immediately below them. Dr. O'Keefe had flaming red cheeks, white hair, and a quick temper, "very Irish," the girls thought. One afternoon when she was having a tea for other doctors and professors, Julia and Mary played a typical freshman prank: "Why don't we lower our rug down over Dr. O'Keefe's window and block out the light during the tea." They were roaring with laughter, according to Mary, when the doctor burst in and "exploded." Swiftly, they received their demerits from the Judicial Board. Forty years later, the roommates offered their "official" version to the alumni organization: they hung the rug out on the fire rope and, to their horror, "it slipped" down to cover the window below.

On another occasion, Mary locked Julia in their room with a girl whom Julia disliked ("She's like a wet dog!"). Mary slid the key out when she saw the girl in their room, and eventually Julia crawled out through the transom with some difficulty, looking like a wreck. "How could you do that to me, Fatty? Lock me in with the 'wet dog'?"

"When I came to college I was an adolescent nut," Julia Child told the official college oral history project years later: "Someone like me should not have been accepted at a serious inst.i.tution. I spent my time growing up and doing enough work to get by." The confidential file of Mrs. Gilchrist revealed that though Julia may have grown up, she never lost her rebellious and independent nature: "A grand person generally but she does go berserk every once in a while and is down down on all 'Suggestions and Regulations.'" And "inclined to let her opinions overrule her good judgment; this spells youth mostly. I believe she will outgrow her impulsiveness somewhat-but I believe there will always be things she will balk at." If Gilley did not think Julia was always "emotionally stable," she at least noted that she was "charming," "cooperative," and "an excellent organizer and manager." on all 'Suggestions and Regulations.'" And "inclined to let her opinions overrule her good judgment; this spells youth mostly. I believe she will outgrow her impulsiveness somewhat-but I believe there will always be things she will balk at." If Gilley did not think Julia was always "emotionally stable," she at least noted that she was "charming," "cooperative," and "an excellent organizer and manager."

Though her college environment resembled a sorority of largely privileged girls, Smith in 1930 was more diverse than KBS. There were a few African-Americans and a scattering of Jewish students. Of the 654 freshman students, Julia McWilliams was the tallest. "For this reason she was known by nearly everyone!" said Connie Thayer, one of her freshman dorm mates. Another cla.s.smate, Anita Hinckley, who came from Rhode Island, said, "I came from the smallest state of the Union. When I saw Julia, a great big California girl, I thought that everyone in California must be that tall." The pictures of Julia in the 1933 and 1934 yearbooks show her standing in the back row, serious, as was the custom in photographs of the day, though both her clothes and her stance were casual. While Gilley noted in her final evaluation that Julia "managed her height well" and was "well dressed," one of Julia's cla.s.smates declared, "She was never very stylish," and a professor's evaluation offered the irrelevant opinion that she "needs to give more attention to personal appearance." But the same friend who remarked that her skirts were not stylish and that she seemed to be all arms and legs, added that "later she became beautiful and graceful." Julia, when asked sixty years later about experiencing any conflict between being pretty and being successful in college, said that this conflict was lessened in a college without boys: "Being very, very tall, I had difficulties from that point of view [attracting boys]. So I did not go through some of those things that a short, pretty girl does. I was always struggling to be a pretty person, but it was difficult because you could not get the proper shoes or clothes." She confided in her diary that she felt "big and unsophisticated."

Because her mother was a Smith basketball star at five feet seven inches, Julia was expected to continue her mother's starring role as "jumping center" in three-sectioned girls' basketball. But Smith changed the rules of the game and did away with the jump ball in favor of throwing the ball into the court. Julia retired: "I was not good at the rest of the game."

Once again Julia found herself in a purportedly Christian environment, with most mornings beginning with chapel. Smith called itself a Christian college, though "entirely nonsectarian in religion." It expected all students "to affiliate themselves with the churches of their own denomination in the city." Julia, it appears, did not. (By her senior year she wrote "not a church member" on the religious preference questionnaire.) No more walking to the same church in two rows as they had done at KBS. Although attendance was not taken, chapel was indeed required and "we did what we were supposed to do," explained Charlotte (Chuss) Snyder, another of her cla.s.smates. "We certainly lived by the rules." The convocation was held in John M. Greene Hall and consisted of a hymn, a prayer, and an address. Named for the pastor who had advised Sophia Smith on the founding of the college, Greene Hall is a magnificent brick building with mighty Greek columns.

Usually President William Allan Neilson, who also taught Shakespeare, spoke to the women about current events or issues on campus that pleased or displeased him. He was forthright, witty, and personable. The women were united in their love for this Scotsman who never forgot a student's name, even years later. Julia's cla.s.smate Charlotte Snyder Turgeon still has his photograph hanging in her study. According to Julia, Neilson was a little man (she would point to her waist) who smoked a "twisted kind of stogie," and he was "adorable": He had a pink face, twinkling eyes, a white goatee, and a white mustache ... he was so cute! [In 1972 she recalled him as] a charming, charming man: [President] Neilson was just so cute you wanted to hug him, you had tremendous respect for him and he was wonderfully witty. I can't keep from crying thinking of him because he was such a charming man. Everybody felt the same way.

One day in chapel he addressed the issue of smoking on campus: "Now I have to talk to you girls about smoking. This is a custom which is unhealthy, which is not ladylike. But it is a custom that I adore."

Julia and her cla.s.smates were exposed to several major cultural figures during their Smith days. Julia remembered that Paderewski played the piano and Amelia Earhart spoke to them. When a woman from the Metropolitan Opera gave a concert, Julia went backstage. "She was a big fat soprano with a bosom so big and protruding that I went backstage to get my program autographed to see for myself." Julia also attended two days of eleven Beethoven quartets played by the London String Quartet on campus ("It was quite a trial, but I went to all of them," she wrote her mother), and she attended Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts Four Saints in Three Acts in Hartford, Connecticut, not only because it was avant-garde and a cla.s.s project; she adored the theater. in Hartford, Connecticut, not only because it was avant-garde and a cla.s.s project; she adored the theater.

Julia took her courses seriously enough, but only as a necessary part of her college experience and to be pa.s.sed successfully. "We were a big cla.s.s and by the midterm about half of us were on probation," said Connie Thayer, who thought both Mary and Julia were "brilliant." (Mary studied and earned A's; Julia studied little and was a B or B-student, except her soph.o.m.ore year, when she earned C's.) "I never was afraid of getting a low grade," remembers Julia, "though I was not a very good student."

Connie, who was considered the naive and innocent member of the Gang of Five ("I thought that storks brought babies"), was from Worcester. On a couple of vacation periods, Julia went home with Connie to visit her parents, and she went to Providence some weekends with her friend Anita Hinckley and to Was.h.i.+ngton, DC, one spring with Roxane Ruhl, her Oregon friend from KBS, who had gone to Va.s.sar.

HOLIDAYS AND FAMILIES.

The major destination for family holidays, however, was west of Northampton in Dalton, her mother Caro's hometown. Westonholme, built by her grandparents, echoed of the richness of her mother's New England heritage. In the Queen Anne style, built with one round tower and two octagonal towers and a lookout on the rooftop, Westonholme was an adventure to visit. Uncle Philip and Aunt Theodora presided over what Julia called "this monstrosity" full of cozy corners and towers. Christmas was crowded with cousins. These warm family memories would be spoiled years later in a bitter quarrel over the Weston Paper Company.

In fact, the family waters had already been muddied by Aunt Theodora, who, upon the death of the eldest Weston (Frank, who ran the paper mill), put their Uncle Philip, her husband, "in a primogeniture position" to run the family business. Julia and her sister Dort thought this "grande dame d.u.c.h.ess" a manipulating and subtly denigrating "monster." "I was always careful to tell Aunt Theodora when I felt she was boasting about her ill.u.s.trious antecedents that John Alden and Priscilla were indentured servants!" servants!" Though Julia spent many holidays in Dalton, the memory of this aunt never dimmed. As late as 1986, after visiting the Napa Valley, she wrote to M. F. K. Fisher about the "Mafia Mothers" of the winemakers, comparing them in detail to her Aunt Theodora. Though Julia spent many holidays in Dalton, the memory of this aunt never dimmed. As late as 1986, after visiting the Napa Valley, she wrote to M. F. K. Fisher about the "Mafia Mothers" of the winemakers, comparing them in detail to her Aunt Theodora.

When Julia did not visit Dalton and nearby Pittsfield during the holidays, she took the train home to Pasadena. When the train stopped in Chicago she always visited her Aunt Nell-Ellen (Nelly) Weston, who was married to Hale Holden and lived in Winnetka, Illinois. Aunt Nell had a lovely older daughter Julia's height, who became her stylish role model. "Eleanor was tall and beautiful, a wonderful character, a wonderful dresser who wore Empress Eugenie hats and great clothes. That is why I stopped in Chicago so frequently." According to her letters to her mother (usually addressed to "Dear Coco," "Mamy Dear," "Dear Cocacola," or "Dear Mother Caro"), she visited the Art Inst.i.tute in Chicago and attended concerts with her cousins. She would sign off her letters: "be good ... sweetie apple" and "love to big J."

In the summers Julia returned to her California paradise, made more idyllic with the addition of a summer home for the McWilliams family in San Malo, California, near Oceanside, more than an hour's drive down the coast from Los Angeles. Mrs. McWilliams built the house with a walled patio to keep out the ever-present white sand. Friends of Julia remember the tall doors and handles, built especially for this tall family. Julia had all her friends down for parties, and was sweet (one friend says) on a boy named Charley Crane one summer. Relatives occasionally visited, including her cousin Dana, who had attended KBS with her one year and was now enrolled, along with her sister Alice, at Scripps College for Women in Claremont, California.

Julia knew little about what had happened in her hometown during the years she had been away. Like most college students, she did not read the newspapers. Los Angeles was going through a decade-long building boom (the county population more than doubled, to two million). Yet the Depression was now exposing corruption, and many of the men who built Los Angeles-both businessmen and public officials-were going to San Quentin. The news was full of scandals and receivers.h.i.+ps (three hundred businesses, "representing more than half a billion dollars in a.s.sets," according to one historian, would be placed in receivers.h.i.+p during the early 1930s).

Though John McWilliams was disgruntled about the scandals and the political climate-Roosevelt's Democrats swept the country in the fall of 1932-no scandal touched him or the company he worked for, the J. G. Boswell Company. And he continued to support Julia's Ivy League education. Her brother Johnny graduated from Poly and was going on to Lake Forest Academy, a hope eventually undermined, according to his sisters, by his dyslexia.

When Julia returned for her soph.o.m.ore year, she arrived with a drum she bought when the train stopped in Albuquerque. When others were trying to study, she pretended to be a Navajo chief and beat out her rhythm on the tom-tom. Mary Case had already suggested that they live separately this year so that she could study better ("I couldn't play all night and laugh with Julia and stay in college.... Julia did not really worry much about anything"). The previous year, when Mary had hung a green rug on the fire rope between their two beds to protect her study time, Julia tossed a jelly donut over to her roommate. She also fed her ravenous hunger on brownies with chocolate sauce, toasted cheese sandwiches, and chocolate ice cream sodas from across the street.

ACADEMICS AND DORMITORY FOOD.

Julia's grades dropped during her soph.o.m.ore year in part because she no longer shared a room with the studious Mary and in part because she became very active in campus activities. She served on the elite Gra.s.s Cops (they blew whistles when someone walked on the lawns) with her former roommate Mary Case, with Marj Spiegel, the pretty daughter of the Chicago retail merchant, and with d.i.c.kie Fosd.i.c.k, the daughter of Harry Emerson Fosd.i.c.k, New York City's famous minister and member of Smith's Board of Trustees. Fosd.i.c.k "was our cla.s.s star," said Mary, "cla.s.s valedictorian who lived on a complete schedule and could do all sports." Julia also was chosen to be on the Soph.o.m.ore Push Committee, another great honor, with Charlotte Snyder, Madeleine Evans, and Dorothy Fosd.i.c.k-all three campus leaders. The Push Committee helped people get through commencement, even if it meant picking all the thorns off the roses. As one cla.s.s member pointed out, among the aggressive girls there were those who partied with their dates at the Dartmouth carnival and those who were the campus leaders.

Julia was a leader but a casual student and had not even taken her college boards or apt.i.tude tests seriously. Though she ranked in the high eighties percentile in intelligence in her cla.s.s, her apt.i.tude tests were only above average (highest in plane geometry, 82; in physics, 78). She a.s.sumed that as the daughter of a graduate she would be safe if she just pa.s.sed her courses. Years later, in an interview with the Smith College Sophian Sophian, she offered the following suggestion: "My father was a conservative antediluvian Republican who thought that Phi Beta Kappas were up to no good." In the college's oral history she expressed it in stronger words: "For my father, intellectuality and communism went hand in hand. So you were better off not being intellectual. And if you were Phi Beta Kappa you were certainly a pinko." What he valued was friends.h.i.+p and good citizens.h.i.+p, and she excelled in each. Moreover, girls her age were not ambitious and few graduated from college. Even in 1940, only "five percent of the female population" had a college education. It is remarkable that she persisted to graduation, for of those who did go to college, only a third graduated. The statistics were considerably better at Smith, where only one-third of her Smith cla.s.s of 654 dropped out before graduating (perhaps in part because of the Depression). "I never thought of leaving Smith; it would have killed my mother," said Julia. In her self-deprecating way, she added, "I was always one of the crowd. I had a good time and, in spite of myself, I learned something."

As a soph.o.m.ore, Julia began the fifth of her six years of studying French grammar and literature. For her and her parents' generation, reared to be Anglophile, the study of Western and Northern Europe was the civilized pursuit. They studied European languages, museums, and cathedrals-but not the sensuous elements of daily French life. Cold climate, hard currency, Northern respectability, and hearty food-these were the keys to virtue. At the time, Julia did not question these values, nor was she as yet aware of her hedonistic nature. Several of Julia's acquaintances were planning to spend their junior year in France, including Charlotte Snyder of Boston and Catherine At.w.a.ter, who later in life would be closer to Julia when she married John Kenneth Galbraith and the Childs became their neighbors. Julia did not have the proficiency or interest to consider a junior year abroad. She took one more year of French after completing two years of Italian (Smith required two languages), never knowing how valuable the learning would become.

If Julia picked up bad eating habits in college, she did so in a positive way, a.s.sociating her dining experience with the fellows.h.i.+p of friends. Hubbard Hall had a kitchen and a cook and the girls had to show up promptly for their meals, over which Gilley presided. The fare was all-American, which meant "real New England food, meat and potatoes and traditional food," said Charlotte Snyder. It also meant, in the trend of the day, shelves of products from General Foods, a company that already owned Jell-O, Postum, Baker's Chocolate, Minute Tapioca, Post cereals, Log Cabin syrup, and Maxwell House Coffee (and soon Birds Eye frozen foods). The disastrous effects of the Depression on small retailers and farmers had only encouraged these national companies and the large supermarkets.

Charlotte Snyder was the only cla.s.smate of Julia's who remembered the food, beyond a general comment about its fat and sauce content. Charlotte's father owned Batchelder and Snyder, a large meat distributor/wholesale food business in Boston (much later bought by Birds Eye), and when he visited the college he was mightily impressed when he was served sweetbreads. Though Charlotte would eventually go on to the Cordon Bleu (before Julia did) and make a career in the food world as an editor of the Larousse Gastronomique Larousse Gastronomique (1961), she claimed that "none of us was into food then." (1961), she claimed that "none of us was into food then."

While Julia and Charlotte were eating tasty junk food, Americans were being sold foodstuff for its purity, uniformity and "scientific" goodness. Crisco advertised its product as "used wherever a housewife takes pride in a clean, sweet kitchen." Baker's cocoa was "scientifically blended" and "corrects the action of the digestive organs." Nothing in the official advertising about freshness, taste, aroma, or pleasure. Little wonder these students did not care about food preparation or careful dining. They had a kitchenette on the second floor of Hubbard Hall, but no one remembers any cooking: they stored ice cream in the refrigerator; Julia had a reputation for never doing the dishes.

Nevertheless, during Julia's freshman year, an event occurred in St. Louis that would eventually make a major impression on her life. Irma Rombauer, a German-American widow, and her friends put together a collection of recipes that they self-published: The Joy of Cooking The Joy of Cooking. Five years later, after many rejections, it was printed by Bobbs-Merrill, and its sales, thanks to its accessibility and practical approach, increased steadily to more than a million a decade later. It would become Julia's first cookbook after she herself discovered the joy of cooking.

Rombauer's book, emphasizing the pleasure of cooking and eating, went against a trend dominating American cooking for two generations: domestic science, which tried to marry science and cooking. It was a trend stoked by the food-processing companies and factory farms, which emphasized sanitation, uniformity, and "health." Perhaps the Depression Dust Bowl helped undermine an agrarian society and fresh produce, but it was greed and the hair-netted "scientists" in the lab (no cooks need apply) that destroyed American eating habits. Their crowning achievement, suggests Laura Shapiro in Perfection Salad Perfection Salad, was the invention of Crisco, advertised as an "Absolutely New Product" of scientific cookery. Crisco ads pointed out its "pure cream white" appearance and the fact that it never spoils (but not that it never leaves the arteries). This "model food of the twentieth century" is probably what Julia's jelly donuts were cooked in.

Ironically, it was the work of the grandfather of her cla.s.smate Catherine At.w.a.ter that laid the foundation of the domestic science movement. Catherine Galbraith would discover decades later that Wilbur Olin At.w.a.ter, who had studied in Germany and was professor of chemistry at Wesleyan before he became the head of the Office of Experiment Stations in Was.h.i.+ngton, DC, was the pioneer of nutrition, the popularizer of the word "calorie," and the developer of food composition tables. His numerous books, published between 1887 and 1898, made him the first to investigate food and digestion; he became the "mentor of scientific cooks." (At.w.a.ter's father was a Methodist preacher who founded a temperance newspaper near Burlington, Vermont.) TRADITIONS.

When the chapel bell rang, as it did unannounced every October, Julia jumped for joy. It was Mountain Day, and by tradition everyone left the campus to go out into the New England foliage. Julia's gang grabbed their sandwiches and went to the Mount Tom recreational area to hike. Smith's traditions were much older than those at KBS, and even more effective. Rally Day was a day of skits, mostly ridiculous, put on by each cla.s.s, along with singing on the steps of Hubbard Hall. Julia was always in the skits and was by nature a ham, said one of her cla.s.smates.

Although she had "retired" from the basketball team, Julia remained physically active. The gymnasium was across Green Street, and the playing fields with tennis courts and riding stables were up Green Street and across the bridge. She engaged in hockey, tennis, archery, and baseball as well as swimming and riding. "I did not do as much in [organized] sports at Smith. I played hockey, which I had never played before; lacrosse I did not like because there were no boundaries and you ran your legs off." She did play in a junior/senior game her last year and told her mother, "They were awfully mad at me for being so big."

The spring of her soph.o.m.ore year the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped and the girls rallied around Connie Morrow, the baby's aunt. Constance was a Smith freshman and friend of Anita Hinckley when they both attended Milton Academy. When the baby's body was discovered about eleven days later, the campus was devastated. Reality had intruded into the idyllic world of Smith.

The Olympic Games were held in Los Angeles in the summer of 1932 and Julia's friends were caught up in the excitement. When a group of them gathered in San Malo, they staged their own Olympics and played to the point of exhaustion day after day. To her brother, who was dating lovely Southern California girls, Julia's physical play and short hair and girl's school manner indicated that she did not want to be a girl. She was interested in boys, he thought, but her a.s.sociations were more like being "one of the boys."

Before returning to school, Babe Hall came over to lunch with Julia and her mother. "Julia seemed much older than I, much more sophisticated," said Babe, who was attending Occidental College. But Mrs. McWilliams had not changed a bit. She was just as lenient and whimsical as ever: When Julia told her mother and Babe about staying out all night with a group that included boys, her mother's only comment was: "Did you have any breakfast? Don't do that again, dear, until you have gained ten pounds." Babe was amazed that Mrs. McWilliams was not warning her daughter against sneaking in, but against failing to eat out.

While protecting the intelligence and virtue of America's finest young flowers, Smith nurtured their leaders.h.i.+p abilities and experience. Eleven years before, the Board of Trustees established a student government a.s.sociation that gave the women some power in establis.h.i.+ng the rules and regulations of their social life: Student Council, the Judicial Board, the House of Representatives, and the House Councils. In her junior year, Julia was elected Junior Cla.s.s Representative to the Student Council. Madeleine Evans, a prominent campus debater, served as president; Connie Thayer was vice president, and Mary Case was treasurer of their cla.s.s. Julia was again appointed to the Gra.s.s Cops along with Marjorie Spiegel, Dorothy Fosd.i.c.k, and Mary Case, and was refreshments chair for the prom committee, headed by Marjorie Spiegel. During this year she became friendly with a senior named Elizabeth (Betsy) Scofield Bushnell from New Haven, who more than a decade later would become her best friend when Julia married into the Bushnell-Bissell-Kubler-Child-Prudhomme tribe of friends.

JUNIOR YEAR.

"I certainly hated to leave our Sunkist paradise," she wrote her mother from the train headed back to Northampton, "But I do think it is much better for you not to have all of us around to worry about." She was traveling with Gay Bradley, her childhood friend who after flunking out of Smith her freshman year was attending (and would graduate from) Radcliffe. They played bridge most of the way. During this junior year the Gang of Five was joined by Happy Gaillard, who, like Hester Adams, with whom she roomed, was from New York City. Happy had gone to Va.s.sar, hated it, and transferred into Hubbard House and Smith. As a transfer student, Happy would not match the campus leaders.h.i.+p roles of the other girls, but she would enjoy the fun. Charlotte Snyder, who lived in Ellen Emerson Hall on the other side of Paradise Pond, said, "That group had a great sense of humor. I was in awe of them. I was terribly serious [and pious] at the time."

Another change in the gang was the distraction of young men who came to call. Connie remembers that Hester, a freckled girl with an old-fas.h.i.+oned face and wide smile, would come home at the last minute and just as the bell was ringing and her friends were looking out the window, Henry, her future husband, would kiss her good night. That summer Connie also met her future husband, a senior at Yale, and drifted away from the weekend activities of the gang.

One of the most important events of the junior year was the declaration of a major. Though Julia took more cla.s.ses in music (a pa.s.sion she shared with Mary), she chose history: "It had more options." Yet a majority of her friends-Peggy, Connie, and Mary-chose the same major. Perhaps they used the same reasoning, though Julia remembered, "In those days there were not many options: secretary or teacher or nurse seemed the only [ones]," but marriage was the priority. Maybe they were influenced by politically liberal teachers, one of whom took his students to a walkout at the textile mill in Northampton (much to the dismay of Anita Hinckley's father, who believed she was becoming a "flaming communist"). The history teachers were popular, as was Roosevelt, who won in a landslide in November 1932. Julia, who still thought like her father, wanted Hoover to defeat FDR and was still largely unaware of union leader Harry Bridges and the crippling strikes on the West Coast.

Julia took Dr. Leona Gabel's Renaissance and Reformation course (History 351) and earned B+ both semesters. She thought that Gabel was "a real brain." Gabel wrote in Julia's academic record that she admired Julia's "qualities of leaders.h.i.+p," her "droll, humorous, likable personality," and her ability to take "criticism not only kindly but responsively." Julia's paper on one of the promiscuous Renaissance popes caused quite a sensation in the cla.s.s, remembers Mary Ford (Cairns), one of two sisters from Pasadena who were ahead of Julia at Smith.

Because of the popularity of English professor Mary Ellen Chase, a famous "lady novelist" or "auth.o.r.ess" as they called her in those days, many students thought about writing careers. Chase gave a very good course on the novel to crowded cla.s.srooms. Though she did not take Chase's course, Julia decided to become a "woman novelist": "My plan was to be a woman novelist ... there were some famous women novelists in those days." During an interview decades later for the oral history of Smith, Julia could only explain her failing to take a course with Chase as pure romanticism, thinking "I had to live first and then I'd write. I was ... an utter adolescent. The idea was to get everything else so that you can get the writing later. I was a very adolescent person all the time up till I was about thirty."

Later she partially justified ignoring the novel-writing cla.s.s by saying that when she went to hear Chase give a lecture in Was.h.i.+ngton, DC, in the 1950s, she was disappointed, calling her a "semi-charlatan" and a "show-off ... it was like watching a piece of theater. You were there to see her, not to learn anything." Julia told an interviewer in 1980 that she was "inspired" to be a writer by reading the stories of Somerset Maugham. Instead she became something of a Maugham character, meeting her husband-to-be in a Ceylonese teahouse and following him all over the world.

She was particularly impressed with Marjorie Hope Nicolson, then the Dean, who later became the first woman full professor in graduate studies at Columbia University. Her admiration began when Nicolson took over a chapel talk in which the students expected to hear their beloved President Neilson. "I am Banquo's ghost," she said at the beginning of a witty talk that would make her career with the students. She was a Renaissance scholar, and Julia took a course in Milton with her. Julia remembered little about her cla.s.ses, except breeding drosophila fruit flies in her biology cla.s.s.

Julia had originally asked Alex McWilliams (their grandfathers were brothers) to the junior prom, but he was busy pole-vaulting for Princeton, and she settled on another young man with a connection to her family. Julia was a junior usher for the 1933 commencement, an honor accorded to those contributing the most to college life. Hester Adams, another member of the gang, was head of the junior ushers. The experience of partic.i.p.ating in the final ceremonies was the best motivation for a successful senior year ahead.

SENIOR REWARDS.

A second motivation was a car. Seniors with high enough grades could have a car on campus, and that was inspiration enough for Julia to improve her grades and for her mother to buy her an open 1929 Ford, which she named Eulalie, the first model with gear s.h.i.+fts. It was black with two seats and the top folded back. "I am reveling in my automobile and haven't walked a step since I got it here," she wrote her mother on April 25, 1934.

During the campaign for the repeal of prohibition, the Smith girls, particularly the Gang of Five (which included Happy but not innocent Connie), partied more than ever. Julia had certainly drunk alcohol before, but never in these amounts: "I remember it well. During prohibition a group of us drove in the Ford to a speakeasy in Holyoke that was on the top of a warehouse; we all had one of everything. Luckily we had an open car, because we were all quite sick. That was very terribly exciting."

On December 5, 1933, at 5:32 P.M P.M., the repeal of prohibition was ratified. Now they could openly and legally drink at the Hotel Northampton. But one happy night they created such a commotion that Gilley asked Mary to come down and demanded that as house president she had to restore order. Mary went back upstairs and discovered Julia on her hands and knees in the hall.

Drinking had always gone on during Christmas vacation, especially on the train to and from Pasadena. One of the Pasadena girls who was a year ahead of Julia at Smith remembers that during her senior year she traveled home on the Twentieth Century to Chicago and the Santa Fe to Pasadena. Julia also remembers that trip: "We had some rather wild times on the train.... Everyone came back for Christmas and there was a lot of drinking going on. Those were the days!" Gay Bradley adds, "Those were wonderful trips in which nearly fifty of us would party for four or five days."

With all the celebrating and student activities, it is not surprising that Julia let her English and music grades slide a bit in her final semester. She chaired the Community Chest, which put her on the Activities Board, was a Gra.s.s Cop and a.s.sistant editor of the Tatler Tatler, the school paper, which was headed by Margaret Hamilton. Hester Adams, one of the Gang of Five, was the editor of the yearbook and Catherine At.w.a.ter her a.s.sociate editor. Julia learned a Latin carioca dance for the Rally Day show, and acted in the musical variety show jointly presented by Smith and Amherst.

Julia took three memorable courses her senior year and did well in all of them. From Merle Eugene Curti, professor of American history, she took modern American history (after 1870) and earned B's. He was the professor who had a.s.signed the study of propaganda and its effect on the strikers in Northampton. When asked for the "most interesting and profitable cla.s.s" of her college career, Julia named the one taught by Curti, who earned a national reputation for his textbooks after he left Smith to teach at the University of Wisconsin. He won the 1944 Pulitzer in history for The Growth of American Thought The Growth of American Thought.

She took a course in writing one-act plays from Samuel Atkins Eliot, Jr., which tapped into the fun she had had writing plays for the McHall acting troupe in her mother's attic and would lead to her writing several short plays for the Junior League. Eliot had a severe stutter, but he inspired her to write about the traumatic event of her first year at KBS, the Stevens triple murder-suicide. She told an interviewer from Smith years later that her play was "terribly dramatic" and had "wonderful potentialities": "About a friend of my family's who found he had heart trouble. And unfortunately he had two boys, one of whom was a moron from birth and the other one who developed dementia praec.o.x and he was horrified about dying and leaving his wife with these two idiot boys." Julia followed the murder and suicide as closely as one can tell from the newspaper accounts, but included a scene in which her own mother, Caro, went to the tennis court with the mother of the murdered boy and offered to drive the car home. That is when they found the second murdered son. "So it made a wonderful play, you can imagine. It was never performed, of course."

She also took international relations (Government 39) from Dr. Alice M. Holder, who gave Julia her only two A's. Miss Holder, who believed that Julia had "the reputation of being very humorous," commended her "good intelligence and keen interest in what she does" as well as her "general enthusiasm ... considerable personal attractions and plenty of savoir faire." savoir faire."

Her final semester was, as all commencement speakers point out, a looking backward and a beginning. In January her mother arrived for the funeral in Dalton of Julia's uncle Philip Weston. Julia bought a copy of James Joyce's Ulysses Ulysses because n.o.ble Cathcart, married to her cousin, had published an essay on the novel in his because n.o.ble Cathcart, married to her cousin, had published an essay on the novel in his Sat.u.r.day Review of Literature Sat.u.r.day Review of Literature. She did not have time to brush up on her Homer, as she told her mother, and read only part of the novel. But she was stimulated by the courses she was taking from Professor Curti and a.s.sociate Professor Holder. And she was distracted by a boy named Luther, on whom she was sweet. Since February she and her cla.s.smates had been wearing their graduation gowns to chapel, sometimes over their pajamas. But behind the daily distractions and plans for commencement was the ever-lingering question of vocation.

When Julia enrolled at Smith, she listed her vocational choices as "No occupation decided; Marriage preferable." She was typical of her cla.s.s. When Mrs. Gilchrist wrote her reference evaluation of Julia she said that her family was "wealthy" and thus she "will not need 'a job' I do not believe. She would do well in some organized charity or social service work." Such were the expectations to be lived up to. Five years later President Neilson told them that they were "not the brightest cla.s.s that ever graduated from Smith, but you were the marryingest cla.s.s." However, Charlotte Snyder Turgeon claims that 80 percent of her Smith house went into the foreign service. The lack of a sense of direction was something Julia shared with most of the women of her cla.s.s. Because Julia could not antic.i.p.ate the marriage track, she abandoned her "lady novelist" fantasy and was looking at journalism. "I only wish to G.o.d I were gifted in one line instead of having mediocre splas.h.i.+ngs in several directions," Julia wrote her mother on November 26 of her senior year.

Julia invited a boy named Fred Allen to the senior prom, but he could not get away from Harvard because of his grades. Then she tried Win Crane, who worked at the Weston paper mill and whom she had met at her relatives'. If the latter had not accepted, she was going to send the entire s.e.x to Hades, she told her mother. Accustomed to being chosen first for any team of girls, she did not have the same score with boys.

In addition to the prom was: Ivy Day, when she walked in her white dress and red sash between the two soph.o.m.ore lines carrying ivy chains, and she and Mary were joint toastmasters at their senior dinner-a gig they would repeat for reunions. She would stay close to her buddies, though they immediately moved on to marriage and children. Mary, who would name her first baby Julia, emphasized that the greatest characteristic of her roommate was "compa.s.sion ... human kindness." This opinion of Hubbard House's "head girl" was echoed by the rest of the gang.

When she graduated, Julia became an active Smith alumna for the remainder of her life, returning to cla.s.s reunions, opening her home to them, joining the "club" that would eventually include Nancy Reagan, Sylvia Plath, and Gloria Steinem. She wears this a.s.sociation proudly, defending the school against what she saw as "charges" of h.o.m.os.e.xuality when by the 1990s Northampton had become synonymous in some minds with lesbians. Smith would give her a New England a.s.sociation that never failed to surprise some people when they learned she was born and reared in Pasadena.

Her mother, sister, and brother came for the elaborate Smith College graduation ceremonies on Monday, June 18, 1934. Dean Christian Gauss of Princeton was the commencement speaker. The three siblings drove Eulalie back across the country. "Now this car is very old and we will drive no faster than between forty and forty-five miles an hour," Dorothy remembers her brother John declaring. Indeed, Eulalie had over 50,000 miles on her, and forty miles an hour was as fast as the car would go. "It took us almost two weeks to get across the country."

John Dillinger was loose that summer, and every time they saw a black limousine, they were certain they were going to encounter the famous bank robber and murderer. He was shot dead by the FBI in Chicago that July, but until that time the police search was exciting and took their minds off the grueling trip. They were driving through the Dust Bowl in heat that reached 110 in Oklahoma. Dorothy remembers: "This enormous tan cloud was coming toward us and it was dusk and it blew over us and Julia's hat blew off, and the dust blew past and then it rained and then it got to be 100 degrees again. We stayed in Tourist Courts-auto courts. When it got too hot, the water fell out. John taped the water radiator and we continued. Once when we stopped a million flies surrounded us." They arrived home dirty and exhausted and headed for the beach.

The lovely photograph of Julia in the Pasadena newspaper announced her graduation from Smith College with a major in history: "She will return here after graduation and will pa.s.s the summer with her family at the McWilliams beach home at San Malo."

Chapter 5.

CAREER S SEARCH.

(1934 1943) "I am quite content to be the way I am-and feel quite superior to many a wedded mouse."

Julia McWilliams's diary

"MIDDLE-CLa.s.s women did not have careers," explained Julia McWilliams, who spent one year at home after Smith College. "You were to marry and have children and be a nice mother. You didn't go out and do anything," she told Andy Warhol's women did not have careers," explained Julia McWilliams, who spent one year at home after Smith College. "You were to marry and have children and be a nice mother. You didn't go out and do anything," she told Andy Warhol's Interview Interview magazine in 1989. Without serious marriage prospects, she spent the summer of 1934 in San Malo and then lived at 1207 South Pasadena Avenue helping her mother, whose high blood pressure was not improving. She spent her time playing piano (as well as accordion and bugle), socializing with her friends (particularly Gay Bradley), and still occasionally dating a young man named Luther, whom she could not even recall fifty years later. She gave a "whirl of parties," according to her mother's letters to Dorothy (now a senior at Katharine Branson School): fourteen friends for a weekend at St. Malo, sixteen for a buffet lunch, a black-and-white ball for forty at their Pasadena house. When she was not giving her own parties, she attended some of Babe Hall's Sunday soirees across the street. On one occasion, according to Babe's brother, Julia put a bottle of brandy in the punch, considerably enlivening the party. magazine in 1989. Without serious marriage prospects, she spent the summer of 1934 in San Malo and then lived at 1207 South Pasadena Avenue helping her mother, whose high blood pressure was not improving. She spent her time playing piano (as well as accordion and bugle), socializing with her friends (particularly Gay Bradley), and still occasionally dating a young man named Luther, whom she could not even recall fifty years later. She gave a "whirl of parties," according to her mother's letters to Dorothy (now a senior at Katharine Branson School): fourteen friends for a weekend at St. Malo, sixteen for a buffet lunch, a black-and-white ball for forty at their Pasadena house. When she was not giving her own parties, she attended some of Babe Hall's Sunday soirees across the street. On one occasion, according to Babe's brother, Julia put a bottle of brandy in the punch, considerably enlivening the party.

She became increasingly restless living at home without purpose. The Smith alumnae news reported that "Miss McWilliams has been taking up German and music this winter and also supervising youngsters at a clinic." But she told the vocational guidance office at her alma mater that she wanted a "literary" career on a "newspaper, magazine, critical, etc." in the Los Angeles area.

The Junior League was the civic expression for all young middle-cla.s.s women her age in Pasadena. She and Gay Bradley studied for the Junior League "as if we were working for a Ph.D.," said the latter: Of course, no one ever studied, so we got 100 percent. Julia was the center of attention and activity; when we were all together she was always the focus, always the funny one, always the clown (of course, she had her serious side); when she was little she was always the first one throwing b.u.t.ter at the ceiling, the ringleader ... always the kind of person people follow because she had great magnetism.

Not long after attending Dorothy's graduation at the Katharine Branson School, where Dort followed her sister's example in winning the School Cup as outstanding student, Julia went east to Providence, Rhode Island, for more than a week. She was one of eighteen bridesmaids at her cla.s.smate Anita Hinckley's wedding to Charley Hovey. Julia helped write thank-you notes as the gifts arrived at the Hinckley house. She was the life of the party, said the bride, who claimed, "All the ushers were absolutely crazy about Julia, especially Stacey Holmes and Eugene Record. Whether at the clambake at their Narragansett summer home or the dinner parties and wedding reception, Julia was adored in every way but romantically. After all the reception toasts had droned on, Julia arose with dramatic flair, lifted her gla.s.s, and said only "Hinckley, Hovey, Lovey Dovey." Anita would never forget Julia's toast. The effect of this grand society wedding was to pull Julia back to her East Coast friends and emphasize her need for a purpose in life. Anita was the example of traditional "success," both in her choice of marriage and in her husband-Harvard varsity crew and law school graduate.

NEW YORK CITY CAREER GIRL.

Julia, Dort, and their mother, Caro, drove East in September 1935 to take Dort to Bennington College, where she would study drama, and Julia to western Ma.s.sachusetts, where she would stay with her Aunt Theodora and study secretarial skills at the Packard Commercial School. Aunt Theodora was a woman who could take everyone's measure and everyone came up short. Julia quit the stenography program in a month or two when, after applying and persisting, a job appeared (which did not need shorthand). She was hired in October by the prestigious home-furnis.h.i.+ng firm of W. & J. Sloane in New York City.

New York drew Julia and a number of other 1934 graduates of Smith, certainly those who did not marry. She rented an apartment at 400 East Fifty-ninth Street with Julie Chapman and Lib Payson. "Julie [Chapman] has been promoted to the position of personal shopper at Best & Company, and Libby seems to be doing very well at Lord & Taylor. The Maguires are still at Bonwit Teller, and Libby has also been promoted to personal shopper. Georgia Williams has just come into Sloane's," she proudly informed Smith's vocational office. "The salaries of all are comparatively small, but we are all happy." Later she would say, "I loved it. I started out at eighteen dollars a week.... I remember lunch across the street from Sloane's was fifty cents." Living was cheap because of deflated Depression prices, the subway (five cents) was clean and safe, and with her long legs she could stride down the streets at any hour, her head thrown back confidently. She lived frugally, though her parents sent her (as they would for years) a $100-a-month allowance. Advertising, she reasoned, would be an avenue into the publis.h.i.+ng world.

In a large brownstone building at the corner of Fifty-ninth Street and First Avenue, the women shared a small apartment costing $80 a month, and Julia could park her Ford (her second car) across the street and under the Queensboro Bridge, which loomed above them. On stormy days they could hear the waves breaking against the rocks on the riverbank. In the middle of the East River was Welfare Island (now Roosevelt Island), a cigar-shaped piece of land housing welfare inst.i.tutions, a hospital, home for old people, and the New York Cancer Inst.i.tute. The bridge to Queens, built in 1909, pa.s.sed high over Roosevelt Island, necessitating an elevator so that people, ambulances, and fire trucks could service the island.

Julia ate chiefly at the apartment, which meant she did not eat well. But food prices were low and Birds Eye frozen foods were booming (250 million pounds of frozen fruit, vegetables, and meat by 1938). There was Delmonico's and the Cafe des Artistes, but Julia was not interested. Indeed, she ate only to defeat her hunger. However, she said, "I used to go to Grand Central Station Oyster Bar and watch them make the oyster stew." She patronized the chains: Schrafft's had thirty-eight outlets in Manhattan, Childs had forty-four, and Huyler's had eleven, all with soda fountains.

The city burst upon her with its million electric lights and mountains of steel buildings. The fast-paced life (1.5 million people on 22.2 square miles) and its mixed colors of the fas.h.i.+on world set against the impoverished street life stimulated her. This ratatouille of races, still struggling to come out of the Depression, challenged her McWilliams social a.s.sumptions about success and forced her to look at stark poverty. She would later claim that this civic lesson eventually led her to become a Roosevelt Democrat.

Sloane's was located at 575 Fifth Avenue, only a fifty-cent cab ride or a brisk six-and-a-half-block walk west on Fifty-ninth and south for twelve blocks on Fifth Avenue. Sloane's sold furniture and all the beautiful lamps, tables, antiques, and accessories for the home. They specialized in displaying artwork from other countries and filling special orders for well-to-do clients. Julia proudly s.h.i.+pped an elegant coffee table to her roommate Mary Case when she wed Leon Warner in Minnesota.

Her boss was A. W. Forester, advertising manager for W. & J. Sloane, who admired her writing and her ability to get along with people. She was tactful and conscientious, he would later record. She worked for him from October 1935 to May 1937, performing secretarial ch.o.r.es, contacting the press for publicity, arranging photography, and writing press releases. She loved the variety of her experiences and the challenge of learning. "I am learning quite a bit about store management and interior decoration. In fact, I couldn't be more pleased," she informed her alumni vocational office.

In addition to her roommates, Julia saw several of her Smith cla.s.smates who lived in the city, including Peggy Clark, with whom she went to Wagner's opera Die Meistersinger Die Meistersinger. She also attended plays, seeing Reflected Glory Reflected Glory, starring Tallulah Bankhead, whose similarly unmistakable voice was as low and steady as Julia's was high and swinging. Briefly Gay Bradley, transferred to New York by the J. Walter Thompson agency, roomed with Julia and her two roommates until she married Gabriel Wright in 1937 and moved to San Francisco.

Julia was dating a young man named Tom Johnston, her first serious boyfriend. "I am delighted she is seeing more men and finding out how to manage the sweet creatures," her mother wrote Dorothy. Tom was a literature major ("full of Melville," she told her diary) but was trying to get a job in New York. She had met him at Smith, but now she thought she was madly in love ("I had never been profoundly in love before"). By midsummer of 1936 she sensed that the freshness had gone out of their relations.h.i.+p, that he was under financial stress, and that she was both tired and s.e.xually frustrated ("in heat," as she put it picturesquely). Self-control is civilized, she believed, but she had a strange feeling that being in love with someone and not able to consummate was destructive of the relations.h.i.+p, for love is both physical and psychological.

She also had a strong attraction to her cousin's husband. "They were my family when I lived in New York," she said of her cousin Harriet Patterson (Aunt Bessie's daughter, who had taught her to do her nails in Santa Barbara) and Harriet's husband, n.o.ble Cathcart. They lived almost around the corner, on Fifty-seventh Street. Cathcart was editor of the Sat.u.r.day Review of Literature Sat.u.r.day Review of Literature, and he gave her, as well as his daughters, a lot of attention. Julia playfully claimed later to have been "madly in love with n.o.ble, though curbed my pa.s.sion because I was so fond of my cousin Harriet." In her continuing desire to write for a living, Julia secured one a.s.signment for the Sat.u.r.day Review of Literature Sat.u.r.day Review of Literature, to write a short blurb about Sherwood Anderson, whose latest book (Puzzled America (Puzzled America, 1935) was being published. It was a small a.s.signment, but she failed to complete it-blaming overwork and laziness. But she continued to send in short human-interest pieces to The New Yorker The New Yorker, to no avail. "I intended to be a great woman novelist, but for some reason The New Yorker The New Yorker didn't ask me to be on its staff, and I ended up in the advertis.e.m.e.nt department of W. & J. Sloane (just to gain experience)," Julia told me many years later. didn't ask me to be on its staff, and I ended up in the advertis.e.m.e.nt department of W. & J. Sloane (just to gain experience)," Julia told me many years later.

Her most successful work was writing advance copy for Sloane's. The unpublished writing she was doing during this period of her life reveals maturity, an admirable vocabulary, but mixed results. Her least successful writing attempts were book reviews, which she obviously wished to have published in The New Yorker The New Yorker. Three survive and they reveal fairly shallow a.n.a.lysis and lack of polish. Two short humorous pieces submitted to The New Yorker The New Yorker show a more natural style and wit: a piece about Sloane's flying the national flag with the Boy Scout flag on November 11 reveals playful puns ("flaggish sensitivity" and "Boys had been scouting"). The essays she wrote about Sloane's art exhibits (textile design, painted French screens, British antiques), which had to be rewritten for release to the major New York newspapers, are her most polished and sophisticated work. Her boss believed that she had a "flair for writing." But try as she might, she would never become a "lady novelist." show a more natural style and wit: a piece about Sloane's flying the national flag with the Boy Scout flag on November 11 reveals playful puns ("flaggish sensitivity" and "Boys had been scouting"). The essays she wrote about Sloane's art exhibits (textile design, painted French screens, British antiques), which had to be rewritten for release to the major New York newspapers, are her most polished and sophisticated work. Her boss believed that she had a "flair for writing." But try as she might, she would never become a "lady novelist."

THE JILTING OF JULIA.