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the newly built bridges, where they would stop only to drop mud pies on cars passing below. *
    They routinely stole material from construction sites and broke into vacant houses in the neighborhood. Mrs. Greble, the neighborhood “witch” (she yelled at Julia for hiding out in her oak tree, smoking Pop’s purloined cigars), was the target of Julia’s pranks. Once they broke in and stole a chandelier and buried the crystal prisms.
    Sometimes Julia would get caught, and then she would get dutifully spanked by Pop, but did it make her feel bad for what she’d done? Did it make her refrain from stealing Pop’s cigarettes, cutting the braids off the head of the pastor’s daughter, or hanging out with the hobos down at the train yard? Not at all. For Jukes getting spanked was simply the price of doing what amused her.
    By the time she was a preteen, Julia had developed a habit of stealing Pop’s cigarettes, and also the cigarettes that belonged to the parents of her friends. Pop, who by this time had recognized the futility of traditional discipline, instead gathered his kids for a powwow. He promised that if they stayed away from cigarettes until they were twenty-one, they would each receive a thousand-dollar bond. † Julia, recognizing a great deal, abstained until the stroke of 12:01 a.m. the day after her twenty-first birthday, thensmoked a pack a day well into middle age. She gave it up briefly on July 26, 1954, and took it up again on July 27, 1954, failing to see any reason then why she should deny herself the pleasure.
    Play the emperor.
    When she wasn’t breaking and entering, or seeing what happens when you melt a piece of pavement tar on the stove, Jukes wrote and performed her own plays. She was entranced by the local community theater and would go with her mother by streetcar into Los Angeles to catch the latest Charlie Chaplin “photo-play,” as movies were then called. From grammar school on up she acted in any play that would cast her, and it was here she learned an intractable lesson, one that couldn’t be mitigated by freedom, affluence, or the love of Caro and Pop.
    Julia was simply too tall to play the female roles.
    Too tall to play the damsel-in-distress, too tall to play the lady-in-waiting, too tall to play the ingénue or the princess. If she wanted to participate—and when did Julia ever not want to participate?—she would be forced to accept the roles usually reserved for boys. Thus, she was cast as a lion or other large, fierce beast, or as the emperor. At Katharine Branson, the college preparatory school she attended before going to Caro’s alma mater, Smith, she played Michael the Sword Eater in a production of
The Piper.
    Even as a girl Julia was tremendously adaptable, and once she realized she would never play a princess, she found shepreferred playing the emperor, with his great strides across the stage, his roaring proclamations. As the emperor, she was free to indulge her inner ham, something she would never be able to do otherwise. She was free to be herself.
    Julia’s height informed her life, in the way being a McWilliams of sunny Pasadena ultimately didn’t. At age four she was the tallest girl in her Montessori school. She would be, for the rest of her life, among the tallest, if not the tallest, person in any crowd. In her beloved France, she would be a foot or more taller than everyone she met.
    A woman as tall as Julia could never be transformed by a new dress or tube of lipstick. No makeover would ever make over the part of her that failed to comply with traditional standards of feminine beauty.
    To what degree did it bother her? To what degree did she try to slouch or smoke in order to stunt her growth—actually, she may have smoked in part for that reason—or wished upon a falling star that one day she would wake up to find herself a foot shorter? Probably not at all. Julia was never one to indulge in “what if.” She never pined for the impossible; if there was