Julia Child

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Victoria Price

Julia Child made cooking entertainment. A well-bred, tall, ebullient woman who came to cooking in the middle of her life, Julia Child appeared on television for the first time in the early 1960s and inaugurated a new culinary age in America. Blessed with an ever-present sense of humor, a magnetic presence in front of the camera, and the ability to convey information in a thoroughly engaging manner, Julia Child spirited Americans away from their frozen foods and TV dinners and back into the kitchen, by showing them that cooking could be fun.

For someone who would become one of the most recognizable and influential women in the world, it took Julia Child a long time to find her true calling. She spent the first 40 years of her life in search of her passion--cooking--and when she found it, she was unrelenting in promoting it. But like so many privileged women of her generation, Julia Child was not brought up to have a career. Born on August 15, 1912 into the conservative affluence of Pasadena, California, Julia McWilliams was the daughter of an aristocratic, fun-loving mother and a well-off, community-minded businessman father. Raised in a close family, who provided for her every need, Julia was a tree-climbing tomboy who roamed the streets of Pasadena with her passel of friends. Her childhood was full of mischievous fun, and food formed only the most basic part of her youth. Her family enjoyed hearty, traditional fare supplemented by fresh fruits and vegetables from nearby farms.

By her early teenage years, Julia was head and shoulders taller than her friends, on her way to becoming a gigantic, rail thin 6 feet 2 inches. Lithe and limber, the athletic teenager enjoyed tennis, skiing, and other sports, and was the most active girl in her junior high school. When she graduated from ninth grade, however, her parents decided it was time for Julia to get a solid education, and so they sent her to boarding school in Northern California. At the Katherine Branson School for Girls, Julia quickly became a school leader, known, as her biographer Noël Riley Fitch has written, for "her commanding physical presence, her verbal openness, and her physical pranks and adventure." As "head girl," Julia stood out among her classmates socially, if not intellectually. She was an average student, whose interests chiefly lay in dramatics and sports and whose greatest culinary delight was jelly doughnuts. But her education was solid enough to earn her, as the daughter of an alumna, a place at prestigious Smith College in Massachusetts.

In her four years at Smith, Julia continued in much the same vein as in high school. She was noted for her leadership abilities, her sense of adventure, and, as always, her height. At 6 feet 2 inches, she was once again the tallest girl in her class. At Smith, she received a solid education. But, as Julia would later remark, "Middle-class women did not have careers. You were to marry and have children and be a nice mother. You didn't go out and do anything." And so after graduation, Julia returned home to Pasadena. After a year, however, she grew restless and returned to the East Coast, hoping to find a job in New York City. Sharing an apartment with friends from Smith and supported mostly by her parents, Julia found a job at Sloane's, a prestigious home-furnishing company. She worked for the advertising manager, learning how to write press releases, work with photographers, and handle public relations. She loved having something to do and reveled in the job. Having always been interested in writing, Julia also began submitting short pieces to magazines such as the Saturday Review of Literature. Her life now had some larger purpose.

But Julia's stay in New York would only last a few years. Unhappy over the breakup of a relationship and worried about her mother's health, Julia returned home to Pasadena, where her mother died two months later. As the oldest child, Julia decided to stay in California to take care of her father and soon found work writing for a new fashion magazine and later heading up the advertising department for the West Coast branch of Sloane's. But by the early 1940s, with America at war, Julia had grown impatient with her leisurely California life. A staunch Rooseveltian Democrat, Julia wanted to be a part of the war effort and so applied to the WAVES and the WACS. But when her height disqualified her from active service, Julia moved to Washington, D.C., where she began work in the Office of Strategic Services, the American branch of secret intelligence.

With her gift for leadership, Julia quickly rose in the ranks, working six days a week, supervising an office of 40 people. She still dreamed of active service, and when the opportunity arose to serve overseas, she jumped at the chance. In early 1944, 31-year-old Julia McWilliams sailed for India. In April, she arrived in Ceylon, where she went to work at the OSS headquarters for South East Asia. Although she considered the work drudgery, she loved being in a foreign country, as well as the urgency of the work at hand. She met many interesting people, men and women, not the least of whom was a man ten years older than she, an urbane officer named Paul Child.