Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  By September, Julia and Paul had learned a great deal about each other. She learned he had lived in Paris during the 1920s and was a gourmet. Serious and introspective, he could be loquacious with friends. He worked on freighters, traveled the world, and taught French and art at Avon Old Farms School in Connecticut in the 1930s (where Paul wrote the school song, “Men of Avon,” in 1941 and one of his students was future folksinger Pete Seeger). Though he suffered from a weak stomach since a bout with dysentery in Mexico, and from migraines since a near-fatal accident in 1941, he was a black belt who taught jujitsu. He was a great admirer of women with beauty and brains (Julia would eventually learn about Edith Kennedy, the “flirtatious, witty, naughty, dynamic and intelligent” woman, in Paul’s words, with whom he had lived for more than a decade).

  Before joining Mountbatten’s office in New Delhi, Paul worked in Washington in the Visual Presentation Division (graphics and photography department) with Budd Schulberg, Garson Kanin, Ruth Gordon, John Ford, Bob Vance, Cora DuBois, and Eero Saarinen. Before that he had done professional portrait photography while he taught at Avon. His letters to his brother revealed that one day, out of curiosity, he took apart an old movie camera made in Dresden in 1909, went to Spanish class after work, and that night dined with a couple with whom he took turns reading James Joyce’s Dubliners. Such versatility could not have been immediately evident to Julia McWilliams.

  THE CURRY BELT

  What Paul learned about Julia was somewhat misleading. “She is a gourmet and likes to cook,” he innocently informed his brother Charlie. “She is trying to be brave about being an old maid!” He added, “I believe she would marry me (but isn’t the ‘right’ woman from my standpoint!).” In this three-page description (September 7, 1944) to Charlie, Paul called her a “warm and witty girl,” devoted to music, who gasps when she talks, gets overstressed in conversations (“her slight atmosphere of hysteria gets on my nerves”), and lacks savoir faire. He concluded that she is “in love with her father, in an unconscious and pleasant way … [for he] sets the key for much of her thinking and acting.” She has a good mind but is a sloppy [unchallenged] thinker and given to “wild emotionalism,” which he blamed on the fact that she has “moved safely within the confines of her class and station and consequently had almost no challenge.” He feels sympathy for her “fear” of but “fascination” with sex because he “knows what the cure is,” but it “would be too much for Dr. Paulski to risk attempting.” The “working-out implies training and molding and informing,” which would take more time and effort than he wanted to devote. He sought a companion “who has been hammered already on life’s anvil and attained a definite shape.”

  Julia saw Paul on almost a daily basis. When he received a jar of geranium jelly from his brother, Julia, Peachy, and Jane Foster helped him eat it at one breakfast sitting. When Tommy Davis and his other friends visited Kandy, they all expressed pleasure in her company. With Cora and Tommy she had Australian gin and canned orange juice in Paul’s room before dining at a local Chinese restaurant. Paul was attentive, but beyond her reach.

  They shared an interest in food in this region associated with the Indonesian “rijsttafel” curry belt, where a curry lunch is an all-day affair:

  There are three curries [according to Louis Hector]: one meat, usually lamb; one fish, usually shrimp; and one fowl, usually chicken. One first lays down a good bed of rice all over a plate, takes generous helpings of each of the three curries, and then covers this all over with as many condiments as the human imagination can devise: chopped coconut flavored with curry powder, paprika, pepper, cardamom, crumbled bacon, crumbled fried bananas, and chutneys of every hue and flavor. The whole is washed down with much beer and the event ends with everyone taking a lovely Sunday afternoon nap. It was Julia who organized these in Kandy.

  Julia remembers that the food cooked on the base was a “sort of Singhalese-Western … mixture … that was very nice,” but it was cooked in unsanitary conditions, which led to “Delhi Belly.” She also remembers that Dillon Ripley collected “durian fruit that stunk to high heaven.” Ripley undoubtedly loved the fruit, but Julia described it as smelling like “dead babies mixed with strawberries and Camembert. They served it to us several times in our mess. Then they banned it!”

  Just after a visit by General Donovan and a great cocktail party and dinner with Chinese and American generals, Heppner was promoted to full colonel at the same time the October monsoon rains drenched the compound, occasionally dampening Julia’s papers. Weights held the pages down against the wind gusts. Several times a week the electricity went out in the hotel. Mists shrouded the peaks. A walk in the underbrush was a brush with leeches. When rats invaded one major’s office, a native exclaimed in the usual participle manner, “Burning much coconut—putting on mouse machine. Master catching much rats.” It was not unusual to see either a four-foot lizard or a saffron-dressed monk from the monastery up the hill. A welcome respite from the rains came with the appearance of Noël Coward, who stayed for a week at the request of his friend Mountbatten.

  One day in late October, after yet another “flying circus”—much coming and going of Generals Stilwell, Wedemeyer, Merrill, Stratemeyer, Donovan, Mountbatten, and others—Julia heard the news: Stilwell was removed from China and the brass was moving. Her boss, Dick Heppner, took over in Kunming, and Wedemeyer took over China from Stilwell. Paul Child wrote to his brother in December that his “wonder woman” had not yet appeared, but he received Christmas greetings from “my three Jays”: Julia, Jane, and Jeanne. Paul was soon transferred to China during the last days of 1944. It would not be too many weeks before Julia was transferred too.

  The effect of the OSS presence in Ceylon is best explained by Guy Martin, who after attending an OSS reunion with Betty MacDonald in Bangkok in 1991, returned to what is now Sri Lanka. Among the group of Siamese he helped to train in Trincomalee—men who went into Thailand on missions for the OSS—sixteen were at the reunion: they were all MIT graduates and all engineers, one a foreign secretary, one the head of the Army, another the head of a large bank, another the head of the university. After 1948, when the British granted independence to Ceylon, the OSS-trained people were leading their country.

  Julia’s experience in Ceylon was formative in teaching her survival skills, organization, and responsibility. Paul told a Smith College interviewer decades later that the pressure of wartime work brought out her “innate capacities.” This land of tea and elephants proved to be rich soil for a developing friendship with Paul Child. She still lacked much of the “worldly knowledge” he had sought in vain in his lengthy analysis of her. But he had added in the letter to his brother that “she responds to companionship and love and is extremely likable and pleasant to have around.”

  Chapter 7

  TO CHINA WITH LOVE

  (1945)

  “Julie is tough and full of character, a real friend.”

  PAUL CHILD, letter, September 3, 1945

  AFTER TEN MONTHS in Mountbatten’s headquarters in Kandy, Julia McWilliams left the lush jungle foliage of Ceylon at 7 A.M. on March 8, 1945. Her plane, rising with the sunrise, headed north from the equator toward the teeming delta city of Calcutta.

  Julia had a week in this city where American OSS personnel often experienced their first culture shock at the uglier manifestations of British imperialism. (SEAC meant Save England’s Asiatic Colonies, the cynics believed.) Julia’s reaction to the fleshpots of Calcutta was a moral one:

  I remember I was horrified and disgusted and disturbed when I was going to China and I came up to Calcutta … horrified by the group of people in headquarters; they were into dirty sex; nurses necking in the living room … it all seemed so degenerate. I talked to Colonel Heppner [later in China] about it because it looked like a brothel. You have to have someone running things….

  FLYING THE HUMP

  On March 15 she flew “the Hump” from Calcutta, India, to Kunming, China, to set up and run the OSS Reg
istry in China, now the focus of the war. This flight over the Himalayas with their 15,000-foot peaks was the most dangerous route of the war, for planes had to fly at twice their normal altitude. Some on board prayed while most of the thirty passengers made it a white-knuckled 500-mile trip. On the plane, an unpressurized and freezing rickety C-54, they wore parkas and parachutes and carried oxygen masks. The Himalayan peaks were veiled by rain clouds, and the wind currents, sometimes clocked at 250 miles per hour, could flip, toss, and suck down a plane in seconds. As many as 468 Allied aircraft ultimately went down on that route, leaving what historian Barbara Tuchman called an “aluminum trail” from India to China, from Mandalay to Kunming. Because the Japanese occupied Burma in the spring of 1942, it became a vital but costly lifeline: 1,000 persons would be lost.

  On board, Julia chatted with Louis Hector and Betty MacDonald regaled them with the story of OSS officer Lieutenant Colonel Duncan Lee (an Oxford-educated missionaries’ son) and newsman Eric Sevareid parachuting from a disabled plane only months before, with time to grab a bottle of Carew’s gin before jumping.

  After nearly three hours, Julia’s plane suddenly began to plummet, the lights went out, pieces of ice ticked against the window, and one of the men got quietly sick into his handkerchief. According to Betty MacDonald, who would give the best description of flying the Hump, “the C-54 shuddered, leveled off with a roar,” found a hole in the clouds, and eventually headed for the red clay runway just south of the city of Kunming. Julia sat confidently reading a book. Betty, who thought Julia was “so cool,” still clutched Chester, her gremlin lucky charm (a pilot at a dance in Calcutta once asked to borrow Chester to make his first Hump flight).

  The plane landed at Roger Queen Airport, just north of blue Kunming Lake, and taxied beside a long row of shark-faced Flying Tiger planes. Two minutes later another plane landed. Blue-jacketed coolies were grading the edge of the field, MacDonald remembers:

  Julia, climbing down first, looked over the low, red hills and the curling rooftop of a small temple near the field, received a cheerful “Ting hao” greeting from some red-cheeked children, and turned back to her fellow passengers. “It looks just like China,” she told us.

  Betty’s first reaction was how natural and free the people were, even after seven years of Japanese occupation of their coastal lands. She had never seen any Indian children happily romping. Yet here in China there was a greater sense of the war and imminent danger. Paul Child, who flew in earlier, said Kunming “looks like California, feels like Denver.”

  Dick Heppner and Paul Helliwell met the plane, three hours overdue, nervous about the OSS personnel on board. Their OSS jeep took them past millet fields, rice paddies, and a flock of ducks and into the walled city of Kunming. The “OSS girls” (who were outnumbered by the men twenty to one) lived in a red-tile-roofed building with circling balconies in a large garden of a new suburb. The next morning she and Betty took a truck trip to the Detachment 202 compound over muddy roads crowded with rickshaws and wagons and with fetid sewers flowing down the middle of the road. Julia met with Colonel Richard P. Heppner. Many of her OSS associates—together with OSS officers freed after various victories in Europe—were assembling in China: Ellie, Peachy, Rosie, and Paul.

  The OSS moved into China at this late date in the war under the leadership of Captain Milton “Mary” Miles of the Navy, who disliked the OSS and was an ally of General Tai Li, the head of Chiang Kai-shek’s secret service (the Gestapo, Stilwell called it). It was what one historian called a “forced [and] unhappy alliance with Miles and Tai Li.” The previous fall, Chiang Kai-shek demanded and won the ouster of Stilwell, an intellectual Yankee (Paul Child called him “the Sunday School Teacher” because of his wire-rimmed glasses) who spoke Mandarin and Cantonese and hated the warlords, especially Chiang, whom he called “a peanut” because he would not attack the Japanese. (One of Stilwell’s assistants in the Imperial Hotel was Dean Rusk, who later served as Secretary of State for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.) The OSS was now openly in China, the center of its focus after MacArthur went into the Philippines and the Marines took Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

  General Albert Wedemeyer, Mountbatten’s Chief of Staff, was appointed to take Stilwell’s place. “He was a tall, blond, blue-eyed, upper-class man with a German temperament,” says Guy Martin, who was quartered for a while at Wedemeyer’s house while he supervised demolition agents. Wedemeyer, whom Paul Child affectionately called Uncle Al (to get past the censors), brought in his good friend Heppner from Kandy to be OSS commander in SEAC. Heppner in turn asked Paul Child to join him. That January, Paul met with Donovan, Wedemeyer, Chennault, and Hurley to plan the design for Wedemeyer’s China War Room. Paul reluctantly left his well-organized and well-equipped Kandy War Room to begin again, first in Chungking, the free China capital and the location of the American Embassy. By spring the War Room was moved south to the mountain city of Kunming (headquarters for the OSS and Chennault’s Flying Tigers, now under Chiang Kai-shek). Journalist Theodore White earlier called the city a “medieval cesspool” with filthy alleyways, an opium stronghold. Kunming, once home of the refugee university fighting the Chiang dictatorship, was now a wealthy black-market center.

  Julia, always excited by new adventure, this time China, and by her proximity to the war itself, was not excited by the minutiae or the volume of the paperwork. Her office primarily served intelligence branches, opening, numbering, and directing all mail and order forms. She had to devise a simpler system for code names and keeping track of the secret papers; she and Lieutenant Colonel Helliwell used pouch labels to speed up and secure the information. Her “Confidential” letters to other agents were riddled with number and letter codes as well as detailed instructions that reveal the tediousness of her job.

  It is evident from her letters that she took care of promotions for her staff and lifted their spirits when needed. She had a staff of nearly ten assistants. Her task was daunting at this critical point in the war when the United States was planning an attack on central Japan. Years later, when she disparaged her work as “a clerk,” Paul declared: “She was privy to all messages, both incoming from the field, or Washington, etc., and outgoing to our agents and operatives all over China-Burma-India.”

  Louis Hector remembers the day she turned over “a small, heavy steel footlocker which contained a large cache of tan, tallowy bits about the size and shape of Hershey’s chocolate kisses, each wrapped in a greasy bit of paper.” She handled this secret currency with tact and secrecy. It was their “operational opium” to pay spies.

  No matter how valuable the documents she handled, Julia hated the work she did. Though she scrapped her original card-indexing system from Kandy because of lack of time, she despised the daily routine and longed for real spy work. But the daughter of John McWilliams was hired to do this job and set her jaw to tough it out, a personal characteristic of honor combined with stubbornness that would carry through her personal and professional life. The McWilliams backbone was as firm as it was tall.

  Early spring winds brought brick-colored dust that coated her teeth and eyes and covered the rice fields and the old walls in Kunming. The “dust was deep and omnipresent,” said Paul Child, who had arrived in China before Julia. His presence made the temporary assignment far more appealing, for she enjoyed his company and hoped a romance with him would begin.

  Paul was struggling with the difficulty of beginning yet another War Room, securing equipment, and waiting for a team of seven, which would include Jack Moore and (by June) Jeanne Taylor. He came to China, as he had to India, “at General Wedemeyer’s request” and immediately loved this “unquenchable and gutsy country,” its mountains, its food, and its “beautiful” people. Yet he confided to a friend that he felt like a man from Mars, out of place in the military environment: “These military humans are no soil for my roots. Warfare, with which I am intimately connected, never was my work of art, and though I help shape the clay I detest the statue.” Paul asked for
carte blanche in his work, and Heppner and Wedemeyer gave it to him. As he wrote in his diary: “Whatever happens in my life I’m going to be Stage Manager, take in the money at the Box Office, write the play, act in it and have a box seat for the performance.”

  Yet Paul was indescribably lonely, still looking for the woman of his dreams. Julia was apparently not considered for this role, but their friendship was deepening. He reported to his brother Charlie that “Julie, who is here on temporary duty, is a great solace.” She listened to his complaints about lack of office equipment and supplies and his battle with his stomach and the Yangtze Rapids (equivalent to the Kandy Kanters and Delhi Belly and also known by some as the Chiang Kai Shits).

  CHUNGKING AND KUNMING

  The plane to Chungking in April brought Julia to Chiang Kai-shek’s capital on the Yangtze River. It was a city that seemed to be built on one hundred hills and cliffs, a cosmopolitan, intense, overpopulated place that Paul Child, who had been there at the beginning of the year, called a “busted and ragged city” but “wildly stimulating.” A painting of Chungking he would create, from a photograph, hung on their dining room wall in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for years.