Julia Child_ A Life - Laura Shapiro [6]
For all their pride in Pasadena, Julia’s parents sent her out of town for high school so she could attend the best school they knew—the Katharine Branson School in Marin County, where Julia became a boarder. Small, expensive, and very highly regarded, the Branson School offered West Coast girls a traditional New England education, the sort that would prepare them for Seven Sisters colleges. It was largely wasted on Julia. Her work was good enough to get her by without trouble, but what she really liked about the school was everything else, including beach parties, hiking expeditions, innumerable athletic events, and playing the title role in Michael, the Sword Eater. She won an armful of awards at graduation in honor of her accomplishments and school spirit, and was named Branson’s First Citizen. There was no question about what would follow Branson: her mother had been waiting eighteen years to help Julia pack for Smith. Many years later, Julia remarked that if she had known about such things as coed colleges, she would have raced to one. But at the time, luckily for family harmony, she had no such ambitions; in fact, she had few ambitions of any sort. Filling out an enrollment form that asked her to list vocational plans, she wrote, “No occupation decided; Marriage preferable.” The next four years passed in a romp, interspersed with only enough studying to keep her from getting bored. She majored in history, though looking back, even she couldn’t say why. Her prom dates tended to be family friends, since she towered over most of the eligible men at nearby Amherst College; and by the time she graduated, she was no closer to marriage, much less an “occupation,” than she had been when she enrolled.
Back in Pasadena she spent a year doing exactly what her friends were doing—parties, golf, Junior League, and going to weddings. Then she took herself in hand and decided it was time to become a novelist or maybe find a job in publishing. She took a stenography course and moved to New York with two of her Smith friends, settling into an apartment on East 59th Street in the fall of 1935. To her consternation, she couldn’t get an interview at The New Yorker, and she flunked the entry-level typing test at Newsweek, so she was proud and relieved to be hired in the advertising department at W. & J. Sloane, a Fifth Avenue furniture store.
For the next year and a half, she supplied New York newspapers with press releases on Sloane’s new products. Julia was no furniture expert, but she was a quick study, and she did like to write. “When you have put your all into a party, and struggled over making sandwiches that are chic and dashing as well as tastey [sic], it is terribly deflating to have their pretty figures ruined by guests who must peak [sic] inside each ’wich to see what it’s made of,” ran the draft of one effort. The Sloane solution was “sandwich indicators”—“wooden picks which you stick in the sandwich plate, nicely shaped and painted. There is ‘Humpty-Dumpty’ for egg, a rat in a cage for cheese, a dog, boat, and pig for meat, fish, and ham. And it seems like a very sound idea.” That last sentence has the ring of desperation: even Julia couldn’t come up with more to say about the charm of identifying a cheese sandwich with a rat.
She was writing and getting paid for it—$20 a week, eventually raised to $35—but the appeal of Sloane’s and New York didn’t last very long. By the end of her first year in the city, she had fallen in love, which was thrilling, and been jilted, which was shattering. She stuck it out until