Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  The warm tropical climate and palm trees reminded her of home, until she discovered scorpions in the drawers. There were also tarantulas, tiny noiseless mosquitoes, leeches, ravenous termites, and four-inch cockroaches. The vegetation was tropical and the rain arrived about four each afternoon. “Penicillin” grew on folded clothes. Yet Julia awakened each morning thrilled with the adventure, if not with the routine of her office. She was eager to be a part of the civilian intellectual world of Cora DuBois, Gregory Bateson, and Dillon Ripley, opening her mind to stimulating ideas and sophistication.

  One afternoon when Julia and Gregory Bateson were having drinks on the hotel porch, she again met Betty MacDonald, who thought that Julia had, when she knew her in Washington, “a highly developed security sixth sense.” Betty was a journalist with Scripps-Howard when she was recruited by the OSS because she had lived with a Japanese family in Hawaii and had learned the language in order to go to Japan. “Pearl Harbor ended this goal,” she wrote. Her husband, a lieutenant commander and journalist who would later found the Bangkok Times, was stationed in Kandy, and Betty was on temporary duty (from New Delhi) in Ceylon with MO (Morale Operations, otherwise known as black propaganda). Betty was tanned from tennis, was outgoing, and loved puns. She liked Julia immediately, she says, especially the fact that “bureaucracy did not faze her at all. She was always making fun of the bureaucrats.” Betty would later become the historian for the women of the OSS (Sisterhood of Spies, 1997).

  Colonel Richard P. (Dick) Heppner (on leave from Donovan’s law firm) arrived to be their CO. He was a handsome graduate of Princeton and Columbia Law School. Ellie worked for him in one room off a large basha hut housing the War Room, maintained by Paul Child and Jack Moore. The third room of the basha hut was occupied by Heppner’s deputy (Lieutenant Colonel Paul Helliwell) and secretary. The Registry occupied its own basha hut. The MO lived on what they called “Fleet Street,” with field photography laboratories (John Ford’s branch) on “Hollywood Boulevard.”

  The civilians, including Julia McWilliams, socialized with the officers. The youngest officer, Byron Martin (“He was pert, bright, and lots of fun,” writes MacDonald), was a decade younger than Julia and also a former Pasadenan who was impressed with both officers and civilians of the 404th Division. “They were sophisticates, and I often thought Julia was the most sophisticated of all. She was witty, fun, extremely well-informed, and always the most personable. I adored her and generally regarded her as my peer, despite the actual age difference, thanks to her warm personality.”

  While Ivy League men and women of the OSS China Command were privileged and educated, they were in search of more worldly knowledge. Years later, Julia, gazing heavenward with her hand on her chest, would say, “I was a playgirl looking for the light.” The OSS was called “Oh So Secret” or “Oh So Social,” or even “Oh Such Snobs” (probably the military view). They may have suffered from GI food and dysentery, but the distance from familial boundaries, the threat of danger, the excitement of service and adventure, and the anesthetic of gin created a compelling camaraderie, leading to many affairs, several marriages, and, ultimately, quite a few divorces.

  PAUL CUSHING CHILD

  By May 1 (when she first mentions his name in her diary), Julia McWilliams met Paul Child on the tea planter’s veranda that was now the main headquarter’s building. Paul was an older man, a friend of Bateson’s who was an urbane and multilingual OSS officer and artist working with Generals Donovan, Wedemeyer, and Chennault to create the maps and graphs for the War Room of the OSS China Command, first in New Delhi (fondly called “Per Diem Hill”) and then in Kandy. By the end of the month she placed a long description of him in her diary:

  I have a nice time with the office men—not Whee, but pleasant. There is Paul Child, an artist who, when I first saw him, I thought as not at all nice looking. He is about 40 [he was forty-two, she almost thirty-two], has light hair which is not on top, an unbecoming blond mustache and a long unbecoming nose. But he is very composed. I find him both pleasant, comfortable and very mentally get-at-able. We have dinner frequently and go to the movies.

  Initially, their meeting was tainted by her love of practical jokes. One day at lunch, according to Louis Hector (a great piano player from Miami, Florida), she announced she was “really terribly tired because she had spent so much time the evening before censoring all the outgoing mail.” Paul, sitting at the same table, blanched, “grew very agitated, got up from the table, [and] ran to the commanding officer … to demand why he had not known that his letters were being censored and particularly who was censoring them.” Heppner calmed him down, recognized Julia’s sense of humor, and suggested that her jokes thereafter not disturb “the morale of the operations.”

  Paul’s first mention of Julia McWilliams by name in his letter-diary to his twin brother, Charlie, was on July 9, 1944, when he wrote she “has a somewhat ragged, but pleasantly crazy sense of humor.” On July 19 he sent a photograph (as he did of other friends) to his brother, referring to “the 6’2” bien-jambée [leggy] from Pasadena.” The picture, in which she is seductively bending one leg for the camera, showed her lying on an Army cot. Paul sent the picture of her and the interior of his hut, to show his brother their living quarters: “a typical 10/11 feet [hut] with coir matting, woven cadjan walls, wooden shutters and army bed with folded-up mosquito net above.” Paul’s letters, which he considered an art form, drew vivid verbal pictures of the country, people, and women.

  Though Paul and Julia (and Jack Moore) would take trips together to mountain communities, Paul was writing to his brother about all the women on the post, eager to find a lover to replace the great love of his life, Edith Kennedy, who had died just months before he joined the OSS. He was still half in love with Nancy Toyne, wife of a British officer and part-time mistress of Tommy Davis, the husband of his longtime Boston friend Nancy Davis. (Paul had earlier spent time with Tommy in New Delhi, but his letters to his brother Charlie call Nancy “Zorina—a sexy dame.”) Though Nancy and Tommy would eventually divorce, Paul changed her name to “Ellen” when he typed his diary letters.

  Julia was as inexperienced with sexual skills as she was at kitchen skills, both essential talents admired by Paul. He had dated several women in the Command and thought Julia a bit “hysterical.” She seemed “slightly afraid of sex,” he wrote his brother, “but extremely likable and pleasant to be around.” He had always chosen women who were unafraid of their own sexuality, and he appeared to have little in common with this gangly girl from California. He was a ladies’ man, worldly, a decade older than she and several inches shorter. To Julia, he seemed inaccessible. One could gather from the letters Paul was writing to his twin brother in Washington that he had settled on the seduction of Jeanne Taylor, who was coming to assist him and Jack Moore in the War Room. Jeanne, according to Jack Moore, was very genteel and intellectual, a good painter and art school graduate, good-looking but with bad skin. She was Julia’s age, but more sophisticated (later, Jeanne and Cora DuBois became lovers when they returned to Washington).

  Moore, whom Julia met in Washington, was a GI (draftee) and the former art student assigned to Paul Child the year before. He lived on the compound and would watch the civilians leaving for the town every afternoon. The OSS, he said, comparing it with the later CIA, was about “heroics” and idealism. They were “tremendously educated and interesting people” who did “wild and dangerous things.” The new technology allowed them to make a bicycle that folded into a parachute and a camera that looked like a matchbook. Not surprisingly, William Colby (later head of the CIA) would call the OSS “an exercise in improvisation.”

  One day Mountbatten came in to find Child and Moore crawling around on the floor with a three-dimensional map for the British/American invasion of Burma (their two-dimensional maps had already been sent to Churchill). “It’s a waste!” the Supremo declared. Of course, the men had already discovered that the topography of the central Irrawaddy Valley was virtu
ally flat: there was no terrain.

  Moore, who knew Julia first but Paul best, described Paul’s perfectionism, his intellectual rigor and precise, almost effete, speech of an aesthete. Paul, he added, was a masculine black belt in jujitsu and had fine taste in women. There was “nothing ever ambiguous about his interest in women.”

  Mountbatten was the “one hero in my life,” said Paul Child in 1979 when an IRA terrorist bomb blew up Mountbatten’s yacht. “He was charming, witty, handsome, intelligent. We need such noble, splendid people in this world! To think that anyone would kill him!” He told another journalist at that time that he “wanted to go into a corner and bawl.”

  Though there were numerous cocktail parties and dances off the base, Julia complained in her diary about the few dates she had in what one man claimed was a paradise for unmarried women. “There aren’t any attractive Americans at all—I did meet 3 English I liked—and have a date Tuesday—that is all.” She threw herself into golf, which several of the men played, and devoted diary space to men, particularly Paul Child and Dillon Ripley. She mentions Guy Martin, “a cute fellow and a live wire,” who was Byron’s brother and a fellow Pasadenan. Julia liked the younger man enormously, but not in a romantic way.

  Guy Martin was a Navy officer (his brother was Air Force) on leave from Donovan’s law firm, who was stationed in Kandy for nearly a year, though he worked also at the Navy base in Trincomalee. He compared the climate in Kandy to that of Lake Arrowhead. He remembers long talks with Paul and his interest in seeking out good places to eat when they had to travel: “He was an intellectual, curious, observant, with a lively mind about everything.” If Paul was “tense” and “not an easy man,” Guy found Julia to be a “wonderfully normal human being without hang-ups.” One time they were fooling around the pool and she picked Guy up and threw him in the water. She was “exuberant and extraordinarily outgoing socially—if you put her with a hundred people, by the end of the afternoon she would know fifty by name.”

  By July 1, Julia was assuring herself that she enjoyed the emotion of anguish. She was bored dancing with drunken correspondents. But she cheered up herself and the office with an official-looking order for the Fourth of July: “It has been reliably reported that OSS/SEAC is planning some kind of a blow-out in celebration of the American 4th of July (date commemorates a British-American controversy in the late 18th century).” The recipients recognized the McWilliams humor.

  A study of OSS documents she sent back to Washington reveals an occasional refreshing break with the numbers and espionage codes: at the bottom of an official document stamped “Confidential” is her typed message: “If you don’t send this Registry some kind of a report or something, I shall fill the pouches with itching powder and virulent bacteriological diseases, and change all the numbers, as well as translate all the material into Singhalese, and destroy the English version” (May 25, 1944). On another occasion she asked, “Would it be possible for you to send us by Air Pouch one of those books you have giving people numbers and funny names, like ‘fruitcake’ #385. Frequently we find references to them here and no one knows who on earth is being referred to…. This document will be kept very securely in a fire-proof Mosler safe, and will be available to no one except Col. Heppner.”

  Following a concert of Beethoven (“The master was murdered,” she declared), which she attended with Gregory Bateson and two other men, Julia had a “lovely Sunday” taking photographs of an elephant with Paul Child, Jack Moore, and a couple of others. “Sunday, I decided I thought Paul was really very attractive. Now, I think I am rather jealous because he suddenly thinks Peachy is wonderful, and I thought he liked me.” She rightly concludes that “he likes a more worldly Bohemian type than me…. Wish I were in love, and that what I considered really attractive was in love with me.” While she was considering a guy named Gunner (Lieutenant Commander, OSS, Michelson), who seemed to like her, neither Dillon Ripley (“quite attractive in a scholarly rather aesthetic carefully cultured, nice way,” she told her diary) nor Fisher Howe (“attractive in a warm big gay way”) seemed interested in her. Howe, who would later serve in Oslo with Paul, knew Julia briefly in Washington and came to Ceylon to inspect camps with Ripley (he eventually headed the maritime unit in Trincomalee). He says Julia had a “highly sensitive” role at the “nerve center” of the region.

  THE BRAIN BANK

  Julia would later disparage her work as “file clerk” and wish that she could have been more “academic (I could be studying things),” yet all the sensitive documents of spying (which is gathering information) came through her hands and she organized the system for numbering and cross-referencing them. She described her work as “leading a mythical piece of poisoned fruitcake dropped in a manila envelope project through an imaginary system and every time I got it started somebody has something else.” Yet Byron Martin, formerly a bomber navigator and in Air Force Intelligence before being assigned to the OSS, where he worked in the basha next to Julia, asserts that her work, “in which she was privy to virtually every top secret,” was vital: “It required a person of unquestioned loyalty, of rock-solid integrity, of unblemished life style, of keen intelligence. It required a person of deep-set seriousness far removed from the outgoing, gay, warm Julie we always hear of at first.” She had “a truly awesome responsibility.” Betty MacDonald wrote, “Morale in her section could not have been higher.”

  According to Louis J. Hector, head of the Secretariat, Julia insisted that all security documents had to be located in one place. When she was in China the following year, senior officers, especially Colonel Paul Helliwell, resisted, complaining that they had to have each paper taken down a flight of stairs and across a courtyard. She “held her ground” with the “support of the commanding officer … and the Registry in Washington,” says Hector. Julia broke the tug-of-war with Helliwell by moving the SI files to the office beneath the colonel, cutting a hole in the floor, and installing a dumbwaiter right beside his desk, demonstrating her stubbornness and creative imagination.

  Initially, Julia did not have much time to date because, until help arrived, she worked late nights and four hours on Sunday that summer. There was no time to “scintillate” (one of her favorite words). She had become boring socially, and bored with being a “file clerk”—even though Betty MacDonald called the Registry the “OSS brain bank.” By mid-September, her assistant, Patty Norbury, arrived, just as Julia “reached the saturation point.” The reports and letters in OSS files reveal the volume and complexity, cross-indexing, and endless code numbers clogging her office. Patty, a soft-spoken Ohio woman, asked for the transfer because she was looking for her husband, who had been shot down and captured by the Japanese. He would indeed be recovered.

  Since the Allies had begun overwhelming the German airpower and retaken Western Europe, military attention focused on beating back the Japanese in eastern Asia. Most of the espionage work centered on the Burmese peninsula, which the Japanese held. Their two Japanese-Americans could not speak or write Japanese well, but the missionaries’ children, such as Howard Palmer, whose parents were missionaries in Thailand, were fluent in their respective languages. Headquarters worried about the three M’s: morale, monsoons, and malaria. They were cutting Japanese supply lines and depots and engaging in underwater sabotage, while the British and Americans were pushing through the Burma Road to China. Julia learned to keep confidences from several branches of government (there was talk of mutual spying between the British and the Americans). Good training for her work in the food world fifty years later.

  The ever-curious Bateson, according to Julia, “went out on an exploring trip from Ceylon with several military fellows because he was interested in studying the people, especially their nose-picking habits and other anthropological things.” Guy Martin remembers him wearing a tennis outfit to travel the countryside with a guide. Because he knew the Burmese superstition about the color yellow, he suggested that they drop yellow dye into the Irrawaddy River and have the
MO branch spread rumors that when the Irrawaddy runs yellow, Japan will be kicked out. He won permission, according to Betty MacDonald, but the dye, which turns yellow in ocean salt water, just sank in the fresh water. Southeast Asia seemed an anthropologists’ or linguists’ workshop for American academics hired by the OSS, just as all the European towns counted only as art for the Oxford scholars recruited by British intelligence.

  Ceylon was an Elysium far removed from reality [Jane Foster wrote to Betty MacDonald] where everyone had an academic interest in the war but found life far too pleasant to do anything too drastic about it. To the red-blooded Americans … Ceylon [was either] another form of British tyranny—frustration without representation [or] … a palm-fringed haven of the bureaucrat, the isle of panel discussions and deferred decisions.

  Jane Foster was one of the most important persons that Julia Child met in Ceylon, important because of the devastating effect she would have on the lives of Julia McWilliams, Paul Child, and others in the years to come. Born in San Francisco the same year as Julia, Foster joined the Communist Party in California in 1938, though she later dropped her membership—more a “Cadillac communist” than a serious one, writes MacDonald. Foster applied to work in counterintelligence because she was antifascist and had lived in Java (her California master’s thesis was on the Batu Islands). She was short with blond hair and freckles and “the jolliest party girl on land or sea; the only communist who had a sense of humor,” according to Guy Martin. Everyone enjoyed Jane’s sense of humor, including Paul Child. She and Julia, who she thought had a “phenomenal memory,” enjoyed laughing together.

  Humor continued to be Julia’s way of dealing with the tedium of her paperwork—for she would have preferred to be out in the field with Bateson, trudging through jungles and talking to native people. One day she addressed a memorandum to Louis Hector and Dick Heppner saying that henceforth all documents would be classified by the color of the ink, using a super-sensitive, color-determining apparatus. She explained this new panchromatic classification so convincingly, says Hector, that “the commanding officer took the bait, stormed out of his office [and] into the Registry” to berate Julia. She broke into laughter. “He joined [in] and announced that Julie was one of the things that made life tolerable in the far reaches” of the world.