by Bob Spitz
Unfortunately, the suits in the New York office noticed in a big way. And once the flames subsided in their eyes, the first thing they did was to deal with Julia McWilliams.
“Fired,” she wrote in an explanation, “and I don’t wonder.” There was no gentle rebuke or second chance. Julia hadn’t slipped up, this wasn’t oversight. She defied her superiors, plain and simple. That was enough to warrant her immediate dismissal.
Having recently found belief in herself, Julia hit rock bottom again. She was back where she started, back at her father’s house, without much in the way of prospects. All the wasted time, the false starts, began to pile up on her. These years had been counterproductive, she decided; they tended to “dissolve nobility of spirit.” A few weeks before her twenty-eighth birthday, Julia’s frustration and disillusionment grew more pronounced. A wall of self-doubt began to brick up around her. “When I was in school and later, I felt I had particular and unique spiritual gifts,” she wrote in a burst of self-reproach. “That I was meant for something, and was like no one else. It hadn’t come out yet, but it was there warm and latent. Today, it has gone out and I am sadly an ordinary person.”
Less than two years after returning to Pasadena, Julia began to repeat the pattern of uncertainty and discontent that she had left New York to break. Her waking hours passed as an uneventful blur. She found a bit of daylight volunteering with the Junior League, whose do-good projects included a cookbook, of all things, filled with the kind of gloppy condensed mushroom-soup recipes that, as Julia Child, she would strive to annihilate. (Thankfully, none of her personal dishes appeared in their pages.) Instead, she reserved her energy for the plays the League put on, dramatic interpretations of children’s classics, in which Julia often starred. Friends remember her “flying across the stage” at the Civic Auditorium—literally flying, harnessed by a series of pulleys and ropes—and “cracking up the audience with that waffley voice of hers.” To fill the long, solitary nights, she hopped back on the boisterous Pasadena party circuit, which seemed to have grown and thrived in her absence. There was more of an L.A. presence in the scene than before, thanks to the new freeway, which made the towns chummy back-door neighbors. Now, everywhere Julia turned she kept bumping into Harrison Chandler—at the country clubs, in San Malo, and at a weekend retreat they frequented in Rancho Matilija, a development near Ojai, where “some serious drinking” fueled the fun and games. Nothing had changed in her attitude toward him. He was a handsome guy, no doubt about that, and well-off, probably set for life. But he had no charm and, thus, there were no sparks, nothing that indicated traces of spunk beneath that stodgy outer shell, no pentimento. Still, his companionship satisfied Julia’s need for intimacy and, at the same time, attested to her desirability.
One dividing issue between Julia and Chandler was the inevitability of war. All signs pointed to America’s entry in the crisis that had cleaved a path through Europe and was spreading with intractable force. FDR’s speeches intimated as much, as did his maneuverings in the shadows of diplomacy. Following Germany’s invasions of Scandinavia and the Benelux countries in the spring of 1940, FDR established the first peacetime draft while overseeing the rapid buildup of the American military complex. War—its advantages and drawbacks—dominated all conversations.
As of 1940, Julia was still struggling to find her political voice. For the longest time, she had echoed her father’s boisterous rhetoric until she returned from Smith with a head full of her own views. Somewhere in Northampton, she’d made a sharp turn to the left. From her professors and their disciples, she learned about New Deal initiatives and the promotion of social justice. “She was quite outspoken, when it came to progressive reform,” recalls her friend and neighbor, Katie Nevins. In her spare time, Julia pored over Walter Lippmann’s columns and parroted their opinions. “Julia loved to talk politics. It gave her great satisfaction, a kind of wicked joy, especially in heavily Republican Pasadena, where her beliefs antagonized most people.”
One person particularly offended was Harrison Chandler, whose family’s hatred of FDR was almost religious in scope. The Times was famously ultraconservative when it came to politics and Harrison stood somewhere to the far right of the paper. “He was a total reactionary,” says Dennis McDougal. In Privileged Son, his biography of the Chandler empire, McDougal writes of Chandler: “He was a leading light of L.A.’s [Abraham] Lincoln Club” and spent “an inordinate amount of time … talking politics at the California Club or the even more exclusive and secretive Sunset Club.” In any case, he and Julia were at opposite ends of the political spectrum.
Not even politics, however, could intrude upon matters of the heart. In late August 1940, after a delightful weekend at the beach among friends and family, a visibly discomfited Harrison Chandler proposed to Julia McWilliams. It must have seemed the perfect setting for such a momentous event: a gorgeous summer evening, the gentle lapping of surf against sand, the serenade of neighbors deliberating over outdoor barbecues. Seemingly perfect—though anything but. Julia fumbled the moment with uncharacteristic awkwardness. “I found I was just as embarrassed as he was and didn’t know at all what to say,” she recalled. Perhaps she hadn’t seen it coming or, more likely, she considered it mistaken. But there was a lot of hemming and hawing, dancing around the great question. In the meantime, a few issues were raised. Was he willing to live in Pasadena? How did he feel about children? (Julia told him she wanted three or four.) Chandler may have answered to her satisfaction, but Julia did not share his feelings—or his heart.
Julia needed time—to think, to gauge her feelings, to consider all the factors and the ramifications. On the one hand, marriage would answer all her problems: about the future, stability, money, status. On the other hand, she wasn’t in love. On the one hand, he was a Chandler, L.A. royalty; her father approved. On the other hand, she wasn’t in love. On the one hand, Harrison adored her just the way she was—curious, fun-loving, outspoken, slightly wacky. On the other hand, she wasn’t in love. What to do? What to do?
In her diary, Julia wrote, “I have an idea I may succumb,” but when push came to shove, she exhibited great restraint. There wasn’t any need in rushing such a momentous decision, despite being the only unmarried woman among her inner circle. She refused to act out of desperation or be influenced by family and friends (although she was curious to know what Dort thought). Even her father got nowhere in his entreaties. “He made himself very clear,” recalls Jo McWilliams. “Father wanted Julia to marry Harrison Chandler. He encouraged it. I think he counted on it.”
By all accounts, Chandler put no undue pressure on Julia. It seemed they were both willing to continue seeing each other casually without altering the trajectory of their relationship. For the time being, at least. Besides, Julia was setting out on another kind of life-changing path.
In September 1941, bored and pensive, she joined the Pasadena chapter of the American Red Cross, volunteering in the office pool. It was mostly grunt work: typing, copying, and filing, with little opportunity to utilize her talents. She was basically a clerk. Months passed without a break to this routine. But all that changed on December 7, 1941, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Like millions of Americans everywhere, U.S. entry into the war galvanized Julia. It drew her into the spirit of a unified civilian effort that was mobilizing across the country. Week after week, as newsreels carried images of “a clear demonstration of national power and purpose … that linked [all Americans] to both those on the battlefields that ranged across the globe and to one another in common cause,” Julia deliberated how to best play her part in the endeavor. A few weeks after the New Year, she fixed upon her role.
In California, especially in communities along the coast, there was a heightened urgency about enemy attack. Shockingly, there was little or no safeguard to defend almost twelve hundred miles of exposed coastline, along which were located strategic refineries and important aircraft plants, including Douglas and Lockheed in L
.A. and Consolidated in San Diego. If an attack were directed at the United States, army commanders theorized, there was little doubt it would come from the west. A kamikaze pilot, a combat sub—America’s borders were defenseless against them. By 1942, there was an overriding public sense of dread. “Invasion fever” spread as fast as rumors of enemy sightings, prompting the formation of the Aircraft Warning Service (AWS), in which civilian volunteers acted as spotters. If and when an enemy combatant was observed, word would immediately be passed to a filter center so that the military could take appropriate action.
Sometime in early March of that year, Julia and a neighbor reported to a nondescript loft building on Flower Street, in downtown Los Angeles. There, at one of the secretive Information and Filter Centers that processed data sent from AWS observation posts, they joined a young volunteer group that kept track of all the shipping up and down the California coast. “We sat in a dark, windowless room in front of a plotting map spread across a huge, flat table,” recalls Katie Nevins, who says she was “recruited” by Julia. “It would be radioed in where there was shipping, and we had little pips that we moved around to chart the course.” From balconies overlooking the action, military personnel studied the nonstop movement, transmitting pertinent details to operatives in the field.
This wasn’t some gratuitous war game to appease the natives. Just two weeks earlier, on February 23, during one of FDR’s fireside chats, a Japanese sub had risen out of the water just north of Santa Barbara and fired three shells into tidewater refinery installments. The spotters who manned the Information and Filter Center post knew what the stakes were. They threw themselves into the work, and they took it seriously.
“Julia loved the work,” Katie recalls. “She loved the top-secret aspect of it, how it related to the national defense, even to our own families. It was wartime and this was a pretty exciting job.” Exciting and demanding, with its mixture of details and intrigue. “We worked long, eight-hour shifts, often in the middle of the night. We knew the position of every ship, boat, whale or log that was in the water off the coast. And when something unusual happened that place would jump into action.”
For Julia, the job was her first taste of intelligence work. She loved being “in the thick of things.” It combined her fascination with politics and world events and stirred up the sense of purpose she’d been burying all this time. At the age of thirty, she’d finally managed to do something meaningful, and now she longed to do it on a larger stage—in Washington, D.C., perhaps, where many of her friends had recently landed, or maybe in the service, where the real action transpired. There was nothing holding her in Pasadena anymore. The obligation to care for her father was strong and sincere, but Dort had decided to move back home for a while, freeing Julia to explore other options. And Harrison Chandler—that was an easier decision. On April 10, 1942, she made it official, issuing an emphatic no. She didn’t intend to marry him, not now, not under present circumstances. “And I hope I shall maintain this position,” she concluded in a diary entry. “It is a sin to marry without love. And marriage, while utterly desirable, from my point of view, must be [with] the right one. I know what I want, and it is ‘sympatico’ [sic]—companionship, interests, great respect and fun. Otherwise and always—no.”
WHILE CHANDLER COULD not give Julia his heart, he gave her a hearty piece of advice. If she was determined to have a greater role in the war effort, he suggested, she should quit doing volunteer work and take the Civil Service exam. With the war creating a shortage of men across all government agencies, there was an urgent demand for able-bodied women. This made good sense to Julia, who took the test in June 1942. But civilian jobs sounded too much like candy-striping. Julia was raring to do something that demanded more of her, something that involved more ingenuity, more action. Being in the navy had a special appeal, so she applied to its women’s auxiliary, Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service—the Waves—and while she was at it, she also applied to the Wac, the Women’s Army Corps.
In the meantime, several friends urged her to head to Washington, D.C. “That was where the action was,” according to Katy Gates, who was already stationed there with her husband, a navy strategist. Janie McBain, whose husband was off on military assignment in Italy, offered Julia a place to stay, with her. The war wasn’t coming to Pasadena anytime soon. Why remain there, waiting for an answer from the navy, when she could wait in Washington just as well? Besides, Julia’s father was putting pressure on her to reconsider Chandler’s marriage proposal. And Harrison was still everywhere on the scene. Between him and her father, Julia felt there was too much complicity among self-interested parties. “A change of scenery,” she concluded, “would do me a world of good.”
It wasn’t exactly clear what Julia expected to see. But the new world that greeted her was about to change her life.
The social butterfly, Pasadena, 1939 (Photo credit 4.2)
Five
Keeper of the Secrets
Washington, D.C., must have brought great relief to Julia McWilliams as she emerged from Union Station into its teeming maw. From the steps of the station, the outlines of marble monuments, rising high above the bulwark of Federalist cubes, hovered in relief, sage figures against the summer sky. The snarl of traffic below blared like noisy vendors announcing a new age for the nation’s capital. With its streets bulging from the recent influx of civil servants wedded to the war effort, Washington looked to Julia “like a scaled-down version of New York.” But just as vital—positively percolating with vitality. Everyone seemed “headed this-way-or-that-way” to an engagement of great importance. But if she felt overwhelmed or unsure, she gave no sign of it. There was an exuberant spirit in the air—of extraordinary people in extraordinary times—and she desperately wanted to be a part of it.
After a weekend as a guest of her friend Janie McBain, Julia moved to a shabby residence hotel on California Street, just a bare cell of a room with mismatched furniture, whose cracked, paint-stained window looked out across a service alley onto the back of an adjacent brick building. Only temporary, she hoped, just long enough for her to hear from the Waves, after which she would most likely be deployed to a post on one of the navy bases. Friends who had enlisted had already shipped out to places as exotic as Banana River, Florida, and Olathe, Kansas, and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. And while they would never set foot on an actual ship, other than perhaps to swab its deck in port, there were plenty of meaningful jobs—tending to carrier pigeons, rigging parachutes, manning control towers, washing planes.
None of them, it turned out, suitable for Julia McWilliams. Her application came back with an “automatic disqualification” on physical grounds. There were parameters that all candidates were expected to meet. Julia had examined them and presumed she met all criteria, certainly where it came to health and size. She had been under the impression that only very short women—those under five feet—were restricted from serving, but in the space where she had entered her height, six one, some anonymous hand had circled it. “I was too long,” she told a previous biographer—too long at six one and even longer at six three.
Despite her rejection, Julia was in Washington to stay. She had gone there determined to do her part for the war effort, determined “to see action,” and do it she would, even if it meant taking a less exciting job until something more action-packed came her way. Government offices all over the capital were frantically staffing up—the War Research Service, Office of Civilian Defense, Board of Economic Warfare, National Defense Research Committee, Alien Enemy Control Unit, Center for Regulatory Effectiveness, on and on it went, infinite titles of official mumbo jumbo that only a bureaucrat could decipher. Most she had never even heard of, nor did she know what they did or the people who ran them. Often those in supervisory positions were equally in the dark; they had only recently been funded and directed to hire, hire, hire. And still, competition was fierce. There were thousands of young, educated, ambitious, shorter job-seekers on the prowl, though few
were more resourceful than thirty-year-old Julia McWilliams.
She hit the street running, scrabbling in and out of strange buildings, up and down strange corridors, in and out of strange doors, waiting in lines, dropping off résumés, filling out forms, pleading her case. Finally, on August 24, 1942, Julia got an offer: a position as senior typist for the Research Unit of the Office of War Information (OWI) at the Department of State. The OWI had only been in existence since June, but already it was churning out an avalanche of propaganda—flooding Europe with posters, warning citizens about foreign spies, producing radio broadcasts (including This Is Our Enemy and Uncle Sam), and promoting patriotism abroad through a new effort called the Voice of America. The Research Unit was its in-house database, a mash‑up of the former Office of Facts and Figures and the Office of Government Reports. Julia could not persuade its flaky director to see her, but his assistant was none other than Noble Cathcart, the editor who had assigned her the ill-fated book piece at Saturday Review and just happened to be married to her cousin Harriet. This assignment was more to her ability; in fact, it was considered idiot-proof: Julia’s job was to page through reams of newspapers and official documents noting any mention of a government official, then typing his or her name and rank on a three-by-five card. Idiot-proof—and then some. But after two months and ten thousand cards—an amazing output, by all estimates—she’d had enough.
Depleted but not daunted, Julia looked for another job that would neither drain her physically nor regard her as a machine. Ideally, she wanted to work in intelligence, which required more insight and attracted a brainier crowd. Its objectives fascinated her: espionage, propaganda, subversion, forgery, sabotage, even murder were all facets of the novels she consumed. There were several agencies that addressed these ideals, all couched within the overstuffed Department of State. Julia had familiarized herself with most of them. She did her due diligence. There were a lot of possible matches, there was a lot of overlap. But one branch kept standing out: the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).