Laura Shapiro Read online

  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 th
e 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 (magni
ficent 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.