Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  With the cholera epidemic dissipating, Julia and Paul decided to go on “a terrific binge of spring rolls with garlic (jaodze) [steamed dumplings], duck (yaadze), mixed green vegetables with hat on, sweet-sour big fish, pig meat, green beans [and] pudding, not to mention duck-wind-pipe hot soup.” Paul described the roasting chestnuts now in season and the orgy of eating he enjoyed with Julia.

  She was sitting on her string bed in her “moldy room,” writing in her diary, regretting her departure from China, where she had found the intellectual stimulation that would feed her natural curiosity for the remainder of her life, and wondering if she would win Paul Child (who had asked to be sent to Peking). Her “affair of friendly passion and companionship” with Paul had no clear future:

  I am not the woman for him as I am not intellectual. He is probably not the man for me as he is not constant nor essentially vigorous enough—which is hard to explain. Perhaps it is his artisticness [sic] that makes him seem to lack a male drive. But his sensitiveness and the fact that we can talk about anything and there are no conventional barriers in thought communication make him a warm and lovable friend.

  What she interprets as the lack of “male drive,” is (as is clear in lengthy letters to his brother) complete exhaustion (“I couldn’t even get an erection”) and lack of physical passion for her. Tucked inside her diary is a page on which she wrote the lyrics of a popular song beginning: “A Man without a woman / Is like a ship without a sail.”

  Julia spent her last month briefly confined to quarters during a Chinese uprising (Chiang was solidifying his power) and saying goodbye to friends. The few women who were left gave a party for about sixty people in the house, with punch that packed a punch, and a phonograph for dancing. “We tried sunning on the balcony … [but] the bullets would fly overhead,” wrote Ellie. During one encounter in Yunnan province, an arrogant young redheaded Air Force intelligence captain who could speak Chinese because he was the son of a fundamentalist Baptist missionary stupidly stood up against a group of Chinese communists and was shot. His fellow OSS intelligence colleagues considered John Birch’s act stupid, an overreaction at a roadblock. For the political far right, his death would become a martyrdom, the first of the Cold War, the seed of the John Birch Society.

  Bradley F. Smith argues that the OSS played a “marginal part” in China, but historian R. Harris Smith thinks otherwise. Although historians do not agree on the importance of the impact of the OSS on the war, it is clear that America’s first attempt at international espionage was to give birth to the CIA in the months to come. The latter organization would not be characterized by the “free-wheeling, intellectually stimulating, and politically liberal” environment of the OSS (indeed, Ralph Bunche would be amazed at the rigidity, conservatism, and prejudiced environment of the organization that took the place of the OSS). One of the best historians of the OSS, Harris Smith, charges that the initial hamstringing of the OSS in China led the United States to overestimate Chiang and Russia, which in turn led FDR to make his deal with Russia at Yalta. Theodore White agrees that the United States forced Mao to throw in with Russia. Both assert that the OSS should have backed Mao and kept the Russian influence out of China. The OSS performed one clear service, argues Stanley Lovell: Donovan’s OSS “amassed an incredible amount of information about practically every nation in the world,” data that would be used for years to come in every branch of the military. In this process, Julia McWilliams played a key role.

  Just before Paul flew to Peking and Julia to Calcutta, they had their last meal together in their favorite restaurant in town, Ho-Teh-Foo, which specialized in Peking cuisine. Paul described the meal to his brother:

  We had spring rolls (a mixture of vegetables, meat and garlic rolled into a sort of lady-finger and fried in boiling sesame oil); long leaf cabbage and Yunnan ham; winter mushrooms with beet tops; Peking duck (broiled and de-boned into little half-dollar-size pieces). The bones were mixed with transparent noodles and spinach and an egg, and made into soup. The duck-pieces were brought sizzling-hot with a stack of thin, freshly-cooked, limp, unleavened wheat cakes, into which [they] rolled the duck and leeks, brown fermented-applesaucy soybeans, and any odds and ends left from other dishes. [We] finish[ed] off the meal with the soup. [October 8, 1945.]

  At one of their final parties the few women remaining were dancing every dance, but Julia’s thoughts were on Paul in Peking. “Beloved Julie,” he wrote October 15, where the reception for the Americans was like a hundred Mardi Gras, “at the risk of sounding trite, I wish you were here. I need you to enjoy these marvels with, and I miss your companionship something awful. Dearest Julie, why aren’t you here, holding my hand and making plans for food and fun! Love, Paulski.” She would not receive the letter until she was in Washington the following month, but she clung to his promise that they would meet each other’s families and see what each looked like in civilian clothes and surroundings. All those years of hunting through others’ recipes for an adult life had led her to Paul.

  Chapter 8

  EASTWARD HO

  (1945 – 1946)

  “Life without you is like unsalted food.”

  PAUL CHILD

  AFTER A MONTH on board the troopship General Stewart with 3,500 people, the three women were starving for a taste of America. Julia McWilliams, Ellie Thiry, and Rosamund Frame, knowing that their bags would not be found for hours, carried out the plan they agreed upon on board ship. After Thibaut swept away Rosie, his new fiancée, to Elizabeth Arden’s, Julia and Ellie found a cab near Pier 88 and asked for New York City’s famous “21” Club, the former speakeasy for “Ivy League clientele,” now turned restaurant. There they ordered their celebratory martinis and oysters, the best food and drink of home. The journey had been long and uncomfortable.

  HOMEWARD BOUND

  More than a month before the troopship’s arrival in America, Julia flew back over the Hump to Calcutta, where she was stuck for ten days living in a ten-foot-square room with five other women and a dog. All the planes had been commissioned to deploy troops from North Africa to the Pacific. She wrote of her dilemma to Paul, who was in Peking before traveling home via Hawaii. Finally she was put on a troopship for a spartan and difficult journey, nothing like the original journey to India on the SS Mariposa, a converted cruise ship.

  The General Stewart moved down the thick Hooghly River from Calcutta and into the Bay of Bengal on October 27, 1945, with the last three women of the original group. Julia, Rosie, and Ellie had been out the longest, feeling dirty and exhausted. “We did look like we had come off a cattle boat,” said Julia. “We had been in China with few clothes and no makeup.” Eighteen women from several countries shared a single stateroom. Deafening Navy loudspeakers just outside their stateroom carried reveille at 5 A.M., awakening the thousands of people on board ship, including 400 in the ship’s hospital. Taps sounded at 9 P.M.

  When they pulled into the tree-lined bay at Colombo, Ceylon, for refueling, the harbor was crowded with warships and freighters. Julia felt years older than the young woman who first sailed into this harbor. After stopping at Port Said in the Suez Canal for water, the transport sailed for New York Harbor, as Julia and Rosie and Ellie made plans for a festive arrival.

  The “21” Club was followed by shopping and a “perm” for Julia. Unlike Rosie, Julia had no fiancé, but Paul, who had left Shanghai for Pearl Harbor, then San Francisco, made plans for her to meet his family in Washington, DC. “We were not engaged then,” Julia said later. “We wanted to see our families before anything was decided.”

  For the second time Julia passed through the cavernous dome of Union Station and checked into the Brighton Hotel in Washington. The station, hotel, and Q Building carried such a feeling of normalcy that her two years in Asia seemed a dream. The bustle and urgency were gone; Q Building felt like the morgue for a dying OSS. Discharge forms were in triplicate as usual, and when Julia had her final physical examination before being discharged, she was told she had a
slightly rapid pulse, but no sign of hypertension.

  Her heart quickened further with Paul’s arrival and her brief meeting with his double, Charles. Chafred, Paul’s name for his identical twin brother and his wife, Fredericka (Freddie or Fred for short), lived at 1311 Thirty-fifth Street in Georgetown. Charlie Child was still working for the Department of State (chiefly on UNESCO), while his wife worked as a nurse’s aide at Georgetown University Hospital. Their daughters, thirteen-year-old Erica and eleven-year-old Rachel (little Jonathan was only three), do not remember meeting Julia at this time, but they would have seen her only as one of Uncle Paul’s many friends. On his return trip from China, during which he tanned his body nut brown on the deck of the ship, Paul wrote to Charlie of his continuing grief for Edith Kennedy, but his references to “Julie” were increasingly positive: “You will appreciate her warmth, and you can quickly learn, as I have, to discount the slightly hysterical overtones of her manner of talking.” Her warmth and naturalness were indeed what they first admired. Paul and Charlie were now forty-four years old and, though Charlie was to celebrate his twentieth wedding anniversary that April, Paul had never married.

  Before she left for California, Julia applied for another job in government, as Paul would also do. Her form (December 12) asserted that she was willing to locate “anywhere.” The work she preferred was “public relations;” she did “not want to do any more” office administration, “particularly anything to do with files.” Though she fudges on her height, saying she is only six feet tall, she honestly explains that she was fired from Sloane’s for “insubordination, actually for general immaturity.” Within seven months she would change her mind about wanting to work for the government again.

  Julia was increasingly aware of the changes in herself, especially when on the way home to Pasadena she visited Pittsfield, where she no longer cared about the approval of Aunt Theodora. Paul, reflecting on the past year, also thought she had changed since he met her. In his Christmas letters from Charlie’s permanent home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, then under eighteen inches of snow, Paul tells her that he finds comfort in writing to her:

  I have been warmly and deeply aware myself, since I first met you on the porch of the tea-planter’s bungalow …, how you have been emerging from the mists, indecisions and attitudes of your past into a fuller and more balanced life. I am curious to know if your family will have noticed that you are indeed a newer and better Julie, a more emotionally stable Julie, a more thoughtful Julie, a darlinger sweeter and lovelier Julie—or are these perhaps qualities which you always had and which it took my old eyes two years to see—finally? I would be unworthy of my semantic salt if I did not allow the possibility that it was I who had changed—not you—I who had become more perceptive, I who had finally been able to see the reality. But there is another possibility which we must both take into consideration. That we have changed each other for the better, because I believe that a relationship based on appreciation, understanding and love can work that sort of double-miracle—and whether we do or do not manage to live a large part of our future lives together, I have no regrets for the past, no recriminations, and no unresolved areas of conflict. It was lovely, warming, fulfilling, and solid—and one of the best things that ever happened to me.

  Affectionately, Paulski

  THE EDUCATION AND SEDUCTION OF JULIA

  For the first six months of 1946, Julia was in Pasadena, preparing herself in several ways for the arrival of Paul, who was concluding his work for the Department of State. With Jack Moore, he was preparing a map showing the locations of the State Department’s employees around the world for the Senate Appropriations Committee, and in March he was decorated with the Medal of Merit. His letters, at first signed “affectionately,” then “love,” convey the healing environment of his family, as well as his worrisome burden with the “frightening world”—both extremes he wanted to share with her. As one wag said a long time ago, the two most dependable aphrodisiacs are the presence of a desirable woman and her absence.

  By contrast, Julia was taking music and cooking lessons. It was no accident that both art forms were close to Paul’s heart. “Paul’s mother was a good cook and he had lived in France. If I was going to catch him, I would have to learn to cook.” She experimented with cooking for weeks, sharing her triumphs and failures in letters to Paul, until she finally decided she needed formal training. Her best friend, Katy Gates, remembers that “Julia was smitten with Paul and said, ‘We must go to cooking school, Katy.’ I said, ‘All right, we’ll go to cooking school.’”

  In the spring, Julia and Katy Gates drove three times a week to Beverly Hills for cooking classes at the Hillcliff School of Cookery, taught by Mary Hill and Irene Radcliffe. Julia called them “two old English ladies” who featured “waffles, pancakes, and omelets.” According to Katy, Julia wanted to learn to make soufflés. “Mrs. Hill had never seen anything quite like Julia,” whose ambition and enthusiasm matched her physical strength. Katy recalled their practice dinner parties, especially their “Béarnaise Connection” dinner, for which they substituted lard for the unavailable butter and discovered to their dismay that at the buffet table, beside the steak and vegetable, the “béarnaise” sauce had turned to solid lard. Neighbors Douglas Gregg and Ed Valentine loved to tell about the time she forgot to puncture a duck—they had all gone hunting together—and it exploded in the oven. Old KBS pal Berry Baldwin recalled being served oxtail stew, to the wonder of the guests.

  Every triumph and disaster of their cooking school experience was reported in Julia’s letters to Paul. After a pancake disaster (she had not yet learned how to cook with eggs), Paul wrote a letter assuring her she would eventually be a “wonderful cook because you are so interested in food.” He likes “sensual folk,” he added, “in the sense of those who use and enjoy their senses on all fronts.”

  Probably at the suggestion of the government doctors in Washington, DC, Julia consulted her Pasadena doctor, who discovered that Julia had a goiter wrapped firmly around her vocal cords and removed it surgically. For years she had thought she had a “fat neck.” “I noticed immediately, after I threw up my dinner the first evening it was out, that my voice had cleared. It was getting more gruff and hoarse daily. Now it is a clear, compelling bell-like coo,” she wrote Paul as if to assure him that her voice was maturing.

  Because in his letters Paul mentioned titles of his major interest, general semantics, she took S. I. Hayakawa’s Language in Action with her to the hospital. Paul called himself a Korzybskian semanticist, and for years credited this scholar’s work for disciplining his mind and writing style. To discipline her own mind, Julia subscribed to the daily Washington Post and the Sunday New York Times to become more informed and (she told Paul) to distinguish the missing and discolored stories presented by the Chandler family in the Los Angeles Times. (Paul would later call this newspaper “a Tory-angled, extreme-rightist, Republican die-hard paper.”) He suggested other book titles and wondered if she had friends with whom she could discuss world affairs. He also suggested she meet the Beaches (and makes a point to say that Beach was bisexual), whose two boys Paul tutored in Asolo, Italy, in 1925. These friends near Pasadena would be an “opening wedge for you in a different world,” he wrote her on February 11, 1946.

  The letters between Julia and Paul proved an important instrument in the growth of their love. They exchanged gifts (engraved silver cigarette box from Julia, poetry from Paul), ideas, opinions on current political events (such as Paul’s enthusiasm for the newly created UNESCO, for which he seemed “ideally shaped and created”), and words of endearment. “I adore you,” he wrote January 10; “I long and languish for you,” she wrote five days later. The next month her letters began: “Dearest one.” The following month he wrote: “You play a leading role in my fantasy life,” and later: “I have kissed no one since I kissed you.” His letters were lengthy, articulate, and artful; hers briefer and initially quite simple. Most evident in Paul’s letters we
re his continuing guidance, especially in expanding her knowledge about sex.

  He encouraged her to read Henry Miller and, when she announced her sixty-five-year-old father might remarry, made frank references to body parts in a dissertation on the penis of the elderly male. He also sent a witty detailed description of graffiti in the men’s room of the State Department auditorium. After Jane Bartleman, the astrologer upon whom Paul and Charlie depended for astrological guidance, made a detailed prediction about Julia’s future—a prediction that had Paul and Julia falling in love with other people—Julia responded that Bartleman was probably in love with Paul herself. “Then, Saturn will not be sitting on your sun sign; it will be Venus, with limbs askew, upon your Capricorn,” she wrote. In response to Paul’s detailed analysis of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, a “forest of stiff pricks through which one wanders amazed, delighted, and revolted,” Julia agreed with his assessment of Miller, liking the “surrealistic ‘stream’ sequences which seemed amazingly Daliesque.” A clever, eager-to-learn woman signed her letters: “Much loving and more so—.” Henry Miller was an earthy teacher in Paul’s absence. “You seem to be expanding on all fronts—semantics, cookery, Henry Miller. How’s your bosom?” he wrote, pleased by her frank and natural response.