Julia Child Rules by Karen Karbo Read Free Book Online Page A

alma mater and was a devoted alumna until the day she died, but while she was an undergraduate there, she may as well have been at the University of Southern California, my alma mater and the local party school of choice for many Pasadeneans. There was no reason for Julia to be at Smith, other than that her mother went to Smith. Like so many four-year colleges, Smith was merely a four-year holding tank for Julia, while she matured not at all.
    And that was okay.
    My intent is not to put anyone out of a job who has made a lucrative career consulting with high school seniors and their energetic parents about how to find the perfect college; how to prepare to take the SATs and ACTs; * how to compose a brilliant, provocative essay; † how to create a standout application; ‡ and how to present a top-notch case for admission using every tool in your family’s personal arsenal of awesomeness, but if the life of Julia Child tells us anything, it’s that where you go to college doesn’t matter.
    I’m not trying to console you because your kid didn’t get into HYPS * or her first choice, or your beloved alma mater. Nor am I saying it to make you feel better because, gentle reader, you’d dreamed all your life of going to NYU and you wound up at a state college, and now you worry that you’ll never achieve anything. Steven Spielberg attended no famous film school but the California State University Long Beach. Conversely, a friend’s brother-in-law graduated from Harvard and now is a checker at Trader Joe’s. †
    What matters is what’s going on with the student, and if you’re young, naive, and “unserious,” as Julia would describe herself years later, and without any real interests, where you wind up is irrelevant. “I only wish to god I were gifted in one line instead of having mediocre splashings in several directions,” wrote Julia in a letter home to Caro near the end of her college career.
    “Passing tests doesn’t begin to compare with searching and inquiring and pursuing topics that engage us and excite us,” said the esteemed philosopher and cognitive scientist Noam Chomsky. Julia passed the tests, but all the searching, inquiring, and pursuing was decades down the road.
    In June, after commencement, she drove Eulalie home to California, accompanied by her mother, sister, and brother, who’d taken the train across the country to meet her. It was the summer John Dillinger was on the loose. Eulalie’s top speed was fortymiles an hour. At home, in balmy Pasadena, Julia played tennis and golf and threw huge parties where she secretly spiked the punch. She enjoyed herself. Still, she was too much the daughter of practical, tough-minded, hardworking John McWilliams. In 1935 she went back East, where she enrolled in the Packard Commercial School to learn “secretarial skills”; after a month the tedium drove her bonkers and she quit. She eventually found herself in New York City, working in the advertising department of W & J Sloane, a home furnishings store. She was good at her job, organized and able to get along with just about anyone. In her small apartment she subsisted on Birds Eye Frozen Food. *
    Despite her success at W & J Sloane, Julia struggled in New York. She felt “big and unsophisticated.” She fell in love for the first time with a “literature major” named Tom, who was in New York looking for work. She was smitten; he was only kind of smitten. She was a bull in the china shop of love, falling over herself to assure him of her love and devotion; probably he was her first lover. Eventually, he wound up betraying her by up and marrying a fellow classmate from Smith.
    Even the boisterous, seemingly indestructible Julia McWilliams was knocked sideways by love. She wanted to go home. When she gave her notice at work, telling her boss she was moving back to California where she belonged, he sputtered, “But Julia, I can make you the biggest advertising woman in New York!” To which she