Laura Shapiro Read Online Free

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 May 1937 and then went back to Pasadena.
    Shortly after she returned home, her mother died at sixty of complications stemming from high blood pressure. Her father wanted Julia to stay near him, so she obediently narrowed her focus to a life at home. When the Smith vocational office alerted her to job possibilities in New York and Paris, she ignored them. Instead, she took a stab at fashion writing, becoming a columnist for a new and painfully obscure California magazine called Coast. She got the job through family connections and worked hard at it, reporting on the latest styles and suggesting what to wear with what; but the fact was, the woman who would become famous wearing a skirt, a blouse, an apron, and a dish towel really did not care what people wore with what. “Loathesome business,” she called her fashion career years later; and she was relieved when the magazine went bankrupt. The Beverly Hills branch of W. & J. Sloane then made her its advertising manager, a new position at the store and one with considerable responsibility—she set up the office, managed a $100,000 annual budget, and planned and carried out all the advertising for the store—but she was fired after a few months. “I don’t wonder,” she wrote candidly on her résumé. “One needs a much more detailed knowledge of business…than I had.”
    Her social and volunteer activities were far more successful: she gave lots of parties and poured tremendous energy into the Junior League, writing children’s plays and sometimes acting in them, and contributing to the league’s magazine. She was even courted by an eligible suitor—Harrison Chandler, a member of the family who owned the Times-Mirror. Julia was tempted, but decided she just didn’t love him. The prerequisites for marriage, in her view, were “companionship, interests, great respect, and fun,” and the relationship with Chandler didn’t measure up. By this time, she was nearing thirty and starting to see that she might not marry at all. With the equanimity that would guide her all her life through crises large and small, she absorbed that possibility and kept right on going.
    But she changed direction. As she started to envision life as a single woman, she realized she had no wish to spend the rest of her years as a Pasadena socialite. In the fall of 1941, caught up in the news of impending war, she began volunteering at the local office of the Red Cross. After Pearl Harbor, she joined the Aircraft Warning Service and then took the civil service exam. She was becoming increasingly impatient with life at home. A crisis was sweeping the globe, and for the past five years she had been doing little more than enjoying herself. Now the nation needed everyone—for once, even women were being called to serve. Here was a rare opening in the sky-high wall of convention and family responsibility that normally barred women from the world at large. Like millions of others, Julia leaped to take advantage. She filled out applications to join the Waves and the Wacs and set out eagerly for Washington, D.C. There she learned to her disappointment that at six feet two inches she was too tall for the military. So she took the only war-effort job she could get—typing index cards at the U.S. Information Center in the Office of Wartime Intelligence. It was unbearably tedious. She quit after three months with no idea about what would come next, but never for a minute did she contemplate returning home. Her departure from the past was permanent. The war