By the time Julia began her job at Sloane’s she had come into her mother’s inheritance and was feeling confident about herself. She was in charge of public relations and advertising and had one secretary. She confided in her diary, which she had taken up again briefly, that at sixteen she had been hurt when people looked at her with curiosity and that her earlier lovesick ramblings about Tom in her diary displayed “callow adolescence.” Every year “brings more peace of mind, adjustment, and pleasure,” she assured herself. The security of her own money and the responsibility of her job, which paid $200 a month, even lessened her worry about her unmarried state.
“And thank heaven I am getting over that fear and contempt of single maidenhood (or should I say maiden head—guess not),” she wrote in her diary. “I am quite content to be the way I am—and feel quite superior to many a wedded mouse. By god—I can do what I want! Though I do hate to have to scurry around for extra men every time I give a party—and of course—sex is nice. But it is a mighty difficult subject—and a mighty self-indulgent one too.” Julia made it very clear in later years that “I had had several affairs before meeting my husband, but we did not go all the way…. One did not in those days.”
In the back of her diary, in an undated entry, Julia copied the following verse:
Oh why do you walk though the fields in gloves,
Missing so much, so much?
Oh fat, white woman whom nobody loves,
When the grass is as soft as the breasts of doves
And shivering sweet to touch
Why do you walk through the fields in gloves—
Missing so much and so much?
From the first of March 1940 until the summer months, Julia arose early and drove down the hills to Los Angeles and Sunset Boulevard, which took her through Hollywood to Beverly Hills. There was no freeway yet, though the county was building one, much to the distress of John McWilliams, who lobbied against it. Julia loved progress and change. She detailed the basis of her confident and happy life in her diary: a grand house, plenty of money, “each with independent incomes,” good social position and heritage, the freedom to do what she wanted, and a “pleasant perfect relationship” with her father.
As inspiring and as much fun as her job was, Julia was in a position beyond her training. With a budget of $100,000 a year, she had to hire newspaper artists, typographers, and printers, plan advertising campaigns and write copy. She believed she was doing well after four months until an incident when she forgot to clear the copy for a policy statement with national headquarters before sending it to the printmaker and the newspapers (actually she forgot to call in the changes when they arrived because they seemed minor). The New York office was deeply and rightfully angered, and Julia was fired for rank insubordination. She apparently took it well, because four years later she recorded on a government job description an explanation why she left W. & J. Sloane: “Fired, and I don’t wonder. One needs a much more detailed knowledge of business, buying, markets, and more experience in advertising than I had had for so much responsibility. But I learned a great deal, and did pretty well in establishing the mechanics of the office and the business personnel.”
During one of Julia’s big cocktail parties when brother John was home for the holidays, he took one look at Josephine Smith, who had been brought by one of the Meyers twins, and it was love. Jo was fair and handsome, a classic California girl. Following their marriage in June 1940, the young John McWilliams moved to Massachusetts and the Weston Paper Company. Though he continued to manage the investments of his sisters—their inheritances had been equal—Julia would never again spend a sustained length of time with him. Indeed, especially during the war years to come, they did not even remain in correspondence for periods of time.
Dorothy, on the other hand, finally returned home to Pasadena after a year of work at the Cambridge School in Waltham, Massachusetts, and some theatrical stage-managing for Menotti’s operas The Medium and The Telephone in New York City. Her presence eventually allowed Julia to take a job in the East. Dort had probably been closer to Willy than to her sister (“I do not think I was a particularly good sister because I did not know Dorothy very well. She was young and a nuisance,” admits Julia). Now, as adults, the sisters became close friends. Indeed, as they aged, people often confused their voices and figures.
After nearly four years at home, Julia had matured emotionally. Certainly the equanimity with which she took any possible shame in her firing from Sloane’s, which she blamed on herself, illustrates this. The return to Pasadena had been a step backward when it was taken, yet by 1940–41 Julia herself began to notice, upon rereading her diary, her burgeoning maturity. Without tearing out the childish pages, she added dated notes in the margins: beside a lovesick poem, she wrote “trash;” beside her emotional reaction to her jilting, “history of delayed (or prolonged) adolescence. May 7, 1941.” She had now even forgotten the boy’s name, she claimed. Perhaps this “delayed adolescence” was a gift from her emotional mother, set down in Julia’s loving diary at her mother’s death: “She was really run by emotions … child-like … fresh and spontaneous…. she would give of herself and her energies actively and aggressively, with her whole heart and interest. I should like to be like Mother in all that.”
At the same time, Julia’s diary shows her growing skepticism about religion, politics, and herself. “I think it is particularly interesting how the years dissolve nobility of spirit. When I was in school and later, I felt I had particular and unique spiritual gifts. 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…. It still lingered in N.Y., and here at B.H. Today, it has gone out and I am sadly an ordinary person … with talents which I do not use.” In another passage in which she declares, “Lord, how I hate the good,” she deplores such self-conscious goodness in favor of “an unconscious wicked devilish goodness.” Using her only reference to food, she writes: “I like [the] ‘good’ but it must be with salt and pepper, a small onion and a bay leaf. August 3, 1940.”
She thought through her religious beliefs and values during the painful recovery from knee surgery in March 1941. The highest value, she concluded as the rain fell outside her hospital window, was in relations with others; introversion and self-analysis were fine for creative geniuses, but for a “happy full life,” human relationships are paramount. Her religious beliefs were moving far away from those of her Presbyterian ancestors: the human spirit, a part of God that returns to God (the “God Stream”), is trying to make “his kingdom come on earth.” Rejecting resurrection and miracles, she writes that while Jesus was the perfect living example for human behavior, all earthly events could be explained by natural causes.
POLITICS AND A PROPOSAL
When Julia decided to leave home to enter government service and the international arena in 1942, it was not a sudden move. With Japan’s invasion of China in the fall of 1937 she began her first political commentary in her diary. When Hitler demanded the right of self-determination for Germans in Austria and Czechoslovakia the following February, she began reading political articles. Still, in the autumn of 1939 she felt the war was “remote” and not “our war.” By June 1941, even while she was continuing those weekend parties for twelve in San Malo (followed by pages of limericks in her diary—probably written under the martini influence: “Residue of W[illiam] C[ullen] Bryant, arise!”), she wrote not of dating Harrison Chandler but of the crisis in world affairs. For her, Roosevelt’s speeches signaled approaching war.
As her father’s daughter, Julia was always involved in civic concerns. She had discussed the building of Union Station in Los Angeles, argued with her father over the building of the Pasadena Freeway (opened on New Year’s Day 1941) and the merits of FDR’s social programs, and had done local precinct work during elections, as well as raise scholarship funds for Smith College. She had two favorite columnists—Walter Lippmann and Dorothy Thompson—and used their arguments in her
conversation, clipping the best articles for her diary. When she decided to do precinct work and vote for Wendell Willkie instead of FDR (“I voted for Roosie in 36”), it was less her father’s influence than her own belief that FDR’s reform had gone far enough. She wanted more individual freedom and responsibility, for she had just read Huxley’s Brave New World and Dorothy Thompson’s article about the WPA, which argued that Roosevelt’s WPA, by paying according to a man’s needs, was conditioning him to “increase his needs and decrease his abilities.” Julia pasted the article into her diary. She admired Thompson’s style and was provoked by her ideas. Pages of analysis in the diary reveal Julia’s lively intelligence and a well-read mind. This keen interest in politics and world affairs would never leave her.
Her first proposal of marriage capped the summer of 1941. Harrison Chandler, who had been part of their San Malo and Ojai ranch crowd for years, asked her to marry him. She always thought that when this flattering moment arrived she would “handle that situation with enormous elegance and Saturday Evening Post finesse—but I found I was just as embarrassed as he was and didn’t know at all what to say.” Harrison was a good friend, handsome, well dressed, and good company. Gay thought he was not exciting enough for her. Actually, he was shy and would not marry until he was fifty-five years old (to a fifty-one-year-old divorcée in 1958). Harrison Gray Otis Chandler, one of six children and the middle son of Harry Chandler and Marian Otis Chandler, became, when the dynasty was inherited, the head of the Times Mirror printing operations. How different life would have been for Julia and the cooking world had she taken the easy choice and married into this Los Angeles establishment.
Julia did not know if she liked Harrison enough to marry him. She asked him that late August day if he wanted to live in Pasadena and have three or four children (there is no record of what he said). “I have an idea I may succumb,” she told her diary, waiting to see what Dort thought of him. Julia was flattered and continued to date him, testing her feelings toward him. “I took him seriously for about a month,” she admitted in 1996. “He was very nice in a somewhat stiff way. I don’t remember what happened to him.”
While Julia was making up her mind (and dating him for seven more months), she began volunteer work with the American Red Cross of Pasadena in September 1941, serving as head of the Department of Stenographic Services, typing and mimeographing. Following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, she was caught up in the need to have her country join the war: “I am definitely anti-isolationist. What kind of world would it be if we were alone surrounded by enemies.” Her reasoning was not ideological, but based on her recently articulated philosophy of the primacy of human relationships.
Because of the world war, the Tournament of Roses was canceled New Year’s Day 1942. The next month, as Japan took Singapore, Rangoon, and Burma, Julia added the Aircraft Warning Service to her Red Cross work. A short undated clipping from the local newspaper reveals how well she worked with this group: “Everybody called everybody either ‘Mr.’ or ‘Mrs.’ at the Fourth Interceptor Command with the exception of Julia McWilliams whom everybody addresses as Julia.”
The only relationship she could not seem to find charming was the one with Harrison Chandler. In the second week of April she declined his marriage proposal. “4/10/42—NO. A cooling from both parties. And—I hope I shall maintain this position—it is a SIN to marry without LOVE. And marriage while utterly desirable, from my point of view, must be the right one. I know what I want, and it is ‘sympatico’—companionship, interests, great respect, and fun. Otherwise and always—NO.”
Continuing her double volunteer work, she added the occasional line of poetry at the back of her diary, such as Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Now that love has perished” stanza that begins by addressing her “erstwhile dear” who is “no longer cherished” and has a line about love having “come and gone.” But the times called for action, not poetry. Her friends, including Bob Hastings and Tule Gates, were joining the Navy. Janie McBain, a San Francisco friend whose husband was stationed in Italy, urged Julia to come and stay with her in Washington.
Pragmatism—an efficacious activism—ran through Julia’s body like a current. She was a doer. After asking herself several times in her diary what she should do about her strong political beliefs, she took the Civil Service exam, stopped keeping a diary, essentially ceased her writing practice, resigned her Red Cross and aircraft warning work, and applied to the WAVES and WACS. She wanted to be in the Navy and knew that Dorothy would stay home with their father. In midsummer she packed her bags and typewriter and boarded the train for what would prove to be her most life-changing journey. Katy Gates, who was already in Washington with her Navy husband, said, “Washington was where the action was. New York was passé. Julia always wanted to be where something was going on. She wanted to keep up with the times.” Julia added: “The war was the change in my life.”
MISS MCWILLIAMS
GOES TO WASHINGTON
As Julia left the magnificent Union Station with her suitcases, Washington, DC’s white monuments seemed to intensify the summer heat. The spirit of action in the city was contagious, young civil servants caught up in the midst of world events. The arena fit her size. The sight of the Capitol brought tears to her patriotic eyes. Volunteering for the Aircraft Warning Service and the Red Cross in Pasadena had not been enough.
After a brief stay with Janie McBain, whose father was an influential San Francisco lawyer who knew many leading figures in the political world, Julia settled in the Brighton Hotel on California Street and waited for news about her application to the WAVES. The Naval Reserve returned her letter with an “automatic disqualification.” The form was checked as a “physical” disqualification, though the category listed only “under five feet,” with no mention of the other extreme. But someone had circled the phrase in her letter mentioning she was six feet one inch, an understatement at that. “I was too long,” she would explain later. Thereafter, she would list her height as six feet—a shaving-off of two inches.
With adventure on the high seas beyond her reach, Julia took a job the end of August 1942 as Senior Typist for the Research Unit of the Office of War Information, Department of State. In short, “Mellot’s Madhouse,” after the Director and the frenetic environment. The Assistant Director was Noble Cathcart, husband of her cousin Harriet. She worked in a building opposite the Willard Hotel, madly typing white file cards for every government official mentioned in the newspapers and official documents, listing full title and agency. In two months she had typed herself through 10,000 cards and to the door of madness. She applied for a job with the Office of Strategic Services, where she had friends. “I worked so hard they replaced me with two people,” she said of her stint at Mellot’s Madhouse.
Still a social animal, Julia, when she was not typing and enlivening the office madness, partied with her growing number of friends in Washington from Pasadena and Northampton. The dinner parties and martinis of Smith College and San Malo beach continued in Washington, but the nights were not as late.
In December, wearing a new leopard fur coat to the work, Julia began her career in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) as Junior Research Assistant in the office of the Director, William Donovan, on E Street. She was now in the Secret Intelligence (SI) branch of government. Her immediate supervisor was Marian O’Connell, an old friend of the Director and in charge of the Registry, which processed all records and correspondence. Edwin J. (Ned) Putzell, Jr., the Executive Officer and Assistant Director of the OSS, remembers Julia as “the life of the group. Julia was energetic, light of spirit, always of good humor—and willing to jump into any assignment.” Aline Griffith, who later became a countess and authored The Spy Wore Red (1987), also worked with Julia before going to work in Spain. The Spy captured the cloak-and-dagger atmosphere quite dramatically.
Occasionally they were visited by the Director himself, who flew in from world hot spots. William (Wild Bill) Donovan w
as a corpulent, rather dumpy-looking man who was anything but wild. He had intense personal magnetism, but spoke with a restrained voice when he was in the office or in the field. Unemotional, but a risk taker. Julia’s personal memory of him was that she only said “yes, sir” and “no, sir” to him: “He was rather small and rumpled [with] piercing blue eyes; and it was said that he could read a document just by turning the pages, he was so fast at it, and he was … somehow fascinating [to people]. He gave you his complete attention and you were just fascinated by him.”
Donovan had been a Wall Street lawyer and Republican when Franklin Delano Roosevelt and he planned what would be called the OSS, America’s first espionage unit. FDR was impressed with Donovan’s prophecy that Britain would withstand the Nazi blitz and wanted an intelligence organization equal to that of the “Brits.” Nothing like it had existed in any previous American war.
Donovan reported only to FDR, a status that, together with his loose administrative style (he was in fact a terrible organizer), provoked much jealousy and criticism from other government people, particularly in the military. Donovan (a lawyer) was not of the military establishment, nor were his Ivy League employees. Just as the British Secret Intelligence Service seemed to be staffed from Burke’s Peerage, so the Office of Strategic Services was composed of blue bloods or, as some called them, “a bunch of college professors” or “Donovan’s amateur playboys.” Like Julia, they came from wealthy families and did not need the money; hence Donovan reasoned they were not bribable.
Political views were irrelevant to the Director—indeed a number of communists were recruited. He valued creative intelligence, a love of adventure, and a willingness to fight the enemy. And he left them alone to plan their capers. At the time this was positively un-American—shrouded in secrecy and outside any military or governmental system. And it was exhilarating—not only for Julia and the file keepers in Washington—but for those abroad. Thus Donovan gathered around him the best and the brightest, from James B. Conant to Moe Berg of Red Sox fame; from filmmaker John Ford to David Bruce, Allen Dulles, and Junius S. Morgan. One cynic said that Donovan staffed the OSS with “potential postwar clients.”
Appetite for Life Page 11