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

replied, “I already am.”
    In Pasadena, all was not well. Caro had suffered from chronic high blood pressure for years. In the 1930s, high blood pressure was thought to be a natural part of aging; the heart needed to beat harder to squeeze the blood down those aging, narrowing arteries, so it went untreated. But after Julia returned home, the normally spirited Caro started complaining of headaches. One day Pop rushed her to the hospital with a raging fever. The doctors brought down her fever and declared her well, but something wasn’t right. She suffered from dizzy spells and nausea, and her skin had taken on a yellow pallor. Caro’s entire family, both parents and five siblings, had all succumbed to the ravages of high blood pressure, and on July 21, 1937, only a few weeks before Julia turned twenty-five, Caro did, too. Julia was beside her when she died.
    Julia was lost. It was as if at the age of twenty-five she retired. Her youth, which had yielded nothing much in the way of discovery about who she was and what she should be doing, seemed to be behind her. In the fall, after Caro was laid to rest, Dort returned to college at Bennington and John returned to college at Princeton and Julia was left, as the oldest daughter, to “take care” of Pop. As the McWilliamses live-in domestic staff had grown to include a housekeeper, cook, butler, and several gardeners, there was nothing for Julia to do, really, but keep her increasingly difficult father company. I’m being gentle; the man was grief-stricken. The truth is, by all reports, Pop was a nasty-tempered bigot, who grew only more so after Caro and her humanizing influence departed. Conservative doesn’t begin to describe his hatred for anything that resembled change. He despised anyone fromthe East Coast, Europe and Europeans, Democrats and moderate Republicans, intellectuals, and the brand-new Pasadena Freeway that connected his personal utopia to the corrupt metropolis of Los Angeles. Julia loved her father, and she had grown up tolerating his tirades, but her time living and working alone in New York had changed her in ways that she could not yet quite understand. All she knew was that there was a big world out there.
    Pop gave Julia an allowance, and from her mother’s estate she inherited at least $100,000 * and a nice wad of IBM stock. Julia was rich, unencumbered, and could do whatever she wanted. This sounds like a recipe for happiness, and yet Julia was not happy.
    Every morning the sun rose from behind the San Gabriel Mountains, eased across the southern sky, and then set over the Pacific. Every morning Julia played a few rounds of golf at the exclusive Annandale Country Club with Pop, joined friends for lunch, and played another round of golf or perhaps some tennis. Then she showered, dressed, and repaired to the even more exclusive Midwick Club—whose ultra-right, ultra-rich members included Walt Disney and Will Rogers—where, in the afternoon, she would drink martinis with people she claimed to find entertaining. “All I want is to play golf, piano and simmer, and see people, and summer and live right here,” she wrote in her diary. Later, she would remember these long months as being the only time in her life she felt completely lost and confused.
    She spent the next five years this way. Now there was no question that Julia was being left behind. Her friends from Smith who, before, were merely married, now were having children. Mary Case, her college roommate, had a daughter and named her Julia.
    I feel so enervated by the reality of this part of Julia Child’s life that I’m having a hard time finishing this section. She roused herself after a few years of golf, martinis, and nightly dinners in which she submitted to Pop’s rants against Democrats and every other child of Satan * and snagged a job writing a fashion column for a short-lived magazine called
Coast.
Then, she briefly held a job at the West Coast branch of W & J Sloane, from which