Who inherited julia childs fortune

It was PBS and the late 70’s, on my grandmother’s portable black and white tv in the kitchen, when I was first introduced to Julia Child. There was this tall lady, speaking with a very distinct voice, talking about her love for the dish that she was making.

I was six years old and my attention span was short. I would eat a bunch of goldfish, listen to Julia Child for a couple of minutes, and then run over to my grandmother to see what she was cooking.

Then I would ask, “ Grandma are you making what Julia Child is making on tv?”.

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Photograph by Paul Child / © The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University

Julia in the kitchen, London, 1952.

Paul Child and Julia McWilliams met in 1944, in Kandy, where they were both stationed in the Office of Strategic Services. (Julia had joined the O.S.S. at the onset of the war and was first stationed in Washington; under the regulations of the time, her height had prohibited her from joining the Women’s Army Corps. She was six foot two.) Paul, who was forty-two, was assigned to the “Visual Presentation Division”—his work included the design for a secret war room for Mountbatten. (Other members of his office team included the architect Eero Saarinen and the journalist Theodore White.) Child, a man with a small mustache and wire-rimmed glasses, who looked like Garth Williams’s drawings for “Stuart Little,” was born in Montclair, New Jersey, in 1902. His father died when he and Charles were six months old, and the family moved to Boston, to be near his mother’s family. He attended the Boston Latin School, and spent two years at Columbia, before dropping out because of financial constraints. He found reading and world travel to be suitable educators. His escapades, as he recounted them—climbing a mast in a lightning storm, shipping out on an oil tanker—read as the dogged efforts of a fearful man who has set out to prove himself. He could draw and paint, and tried living in Paris, but eventually took a job at a boarding school in the Dordogne. Back in New England, he taught first at the Shady Hill School, in Cambridge, and then at Avon Old Farms School, in Connecticut. Along the way, he fell in love with the mother of one of his students, twenty years his senior, with whom he lived for ten years. Her death devastated him. From Kandy, he wrote to Charles, “When am I going to meet a grown-up dame with beauty, character, sophistication, and sensibility?”

Julia McWilliams had a desk in the next office. A clerk-typist, she was also sometimes assigned to secret projects—among these was her first recorded recipe, for a shark repellant. Writing to his brother, Paul criticized her “sloppy thinking,” but admired her “crazy sense of humor.” They became friends, visiting local food markets, and taking a ride on an elephant. In later years, he recalled, “It wasn’t like lightning striking the barn on fire. I just began to think, my God, this is a hell of a nice woman.” She described herself as “a rather loud and unformed social butterfly.” Julia, born in Pasadena in 1912, was ten years younger than Paul. Her mother, Carolyn, an heir to the New England Weston Paper fortune, had died in 1937. Her father, John, a wealthy California landowner, disapproved of the marriage to an Eastern aesthete with few prospects. It was Julia’s own money, inherited from her mother, that cushioned Paul Child’s civil-service salary—and all that eating out.

I first met Julia Child in 2001, but she had loomed large as a feature of my life. My mother’s boeuf bourguignon, coq au vin, onion soup, and chocolate mousse were painstakingly produced by paying careful attention to the creased pages of her copy of “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” which had been published in 1961. In my early twenties, I lived in a ramshackle apartment a few blocks from the Childs’ big house, on Francis Avenue in Cambridge. There was an opening in the clapboard fence. One spring, I peered through and saw a lawn covered in bluebells. In 2001, when an editor asked me if I’d like to interview Julia Child on the fortieth anniversary of “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” I jumped at the chance, but, once I was on the train to Boston, I panicked. What more could Julia Child possibly have to say? Plenty, it turned out. We spent the afternoon in her kitchen. She made lunch—an omelette aux fine herbes and a salade verte. Paul Child had died in 1994, after a long decline. She had just reread “Père Goriot,” and she was thinking about old age. “ ‘All happiness depends on courage and work.’ That’s Balzac for you,” she said, taking a bite of her omelette. Like Paul Child, and like Balzac, Julia liked method and order. She told me, “Some people like to build boats in the basement, I like to do things to food.” Watching, rapt, as she made mayonnaise for our salad, I mentioned that mayonnaise had always evaded me. She wrapped an apron around my waist, put a bowl in front of me, and said, “Let’s see what’s the trouble.”

Turning these pages, and reading the meandering text (leafing through the book is a little like looking at a scrapbook while someone tells stories; you ask, now and then, “Wait, was that before or after the war?”), I found myself thinking of another group of photographs: Alfred Stieglitz’s pictures of Georgia O’Keeffe, which I first saw at the Met, in 1978. I was home from college for Thanksgiving break, on the verge of a broken heart. What would it be like, I thought, to be a woman who accomplished things but was also beloved? It was something to do with seeing and being seen, I thought, but I didn’t know what, yet. Decades later, when story after story tells us what we already know—that too often being seen equals being hurt—it’s extraordinary to see a collection of photographs in which a fiercely talented and accomplished woman is presented with humor, admiration, and love.

As Prud’homme notes in the book, Julia Child arrived in France as Eliza Doolittle to her husband’s Henry Higgins; it was Paul, on that first afternoon in Rouen, who introduced her to that most intimate of languages, gastronomy. For Paul, she was both artist and muse. From an Eliza exclaiming over beurre blanc (she called it “wonder-sauce”), Julia became Paul’s Margalo, the beautiful bird whom Stuart Little loves and protects, and whom he follows to places unknown. Julia called Paul “the man who is always there—porter, dishwasher, official photographer, mushroom dicer and onion chopper, editor, fish illustrator, manager, taster, idea man, resident poet, and husband.” He took pictures at every turn, leaving a record of the streets of Paris and Marseille, of his wife, and of his own ghostly, beloved presence, reflecting the light that she cast.

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