After being shown her MO cadjan, Jane was introduced to some of the more senior officers. The thirty-three-year-old Heppner, a junior partner in Donovan’s law firm, was reportedly one of the OSS’s bright young stars, a graduate of Princeton and Columbia Law School who had directed special ops in London and had participated in the North Africa invasion. In addition there were S. Dillon Ripley, a tall, attractive Harvard ornithologist who was head of the Secret Intelligence Division; Carleton “Scofie” Scofield, a psychologist from Yale who was the head of MO; Edmond Taylor, a well-known journalist and author of a book on psychological warfare called Strategy of Terror, who was in charge of coordinating Allied clandestine and propaganda activities in the theater; and John Archbold of the Standard Oil family, whose claim to fame was having explored, by plane, remote parts of Western New Guinea.
On learning that most of her female colleagues were still in the hospital, Jane decided it would be a good idea to pay a sick call. She had no fear of catching dengue fever as she believed that once having had it “one was immune.” She took a jeep up to Kandy’s hospital, housed in an old Franciscan monastery, and found them all prostrate in a row of beds in a large ward. Cora was “red from head to foot, even the whites of her eyes were red.” In the bed next to her was Virginia Webbert, a girl from the Deep South with a lilting southern accent whom Jane had nicknamed “the Magnolia Blossom,” looking as pale and wilted as a day-old corsage. Two nights later, Jane came down with “violent chills and aches all over” and almost fainted into a plate of Chinese food at dinner. Some officers helped her back to the Queen’s Hotel, but the next morning she joined her friends in the infirmary. (One’s immunity, it turned out, lasted only a matter of months.) The U.S. Army cure-all at the time was the A.P.C. tablet—a mixture of aspirin, phenacetin, and caffeine. After being “stuffed” with pills for several days, she began to recover.
Jane soon discovered that the reason all the women fell ill with dengue was that “the drains of the Queen’s hotel had been neglected for years and were a perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes.” The men, despite their deep tans, were not in much better shape. The whole of India was a bacterial breeding ground, and many of the original members of their OSS team, who had spent weeks if not months in Calcutta or Delhi before moving to Ceylon in April to set up camp, had contracted bacillary dysentery. By the time they arrived, they were all sick as dogs. Carleton Scofield and Paul Child had spent many days on their beds of pain, suffering an ailment popularly known as “Calcutta Crud” or “Delhi Belly.” (The CBI was rife with pseudonyms for dysentery: in Burma, it was known as the “Rangoon Runs”; in Thailand, the “Bangkok Blahs”; and in Ceylon, the “Kandy Canters.” The award for creativity went to the OSSers in China, who came up with the “Yangtze Rapids” and “Chiang Kai-shits.”) They all had a hard time getting cured; they still tired easily and had lost a lot of weight. Paul reported having lost close to twenty pounds since arriving in India in January.
One of the most difficult aspects of adjusting to life in Kandy was reconciling their hotel’s fancy appearance with the multitude of insects that infested their rooms. Even the intrepid Cora DuBois had developed a raging phobia of cockroaches that kept her awake at night rigid with fear. It began after she was washing up one evening and reached for a towel to dry her face, only to have a giant, glossy roach skitter off the back of the cloth and across her cheek. Late that same night, clad only in her nightgown, she was sitting on the bed writing letters when a roach dropped from an envelope onto her thigh. She let out a shriek and jumped up, slapping at the cursed bug, but as she had her fountain pen in hand she ended up burying it in her leg, breaking off the point and covering herself in ink. Now when anything brushed one of her extremities, she became momentarily unhinged, shuddering and cringing and completely unable to control her horror for a long time afterward. Another one of the girls found a live tarantula on her dressing table, and when she screamed for the room-boy to kill it he responded in what must have been the local Buddhist fashion by covering it with a towel and then carefully shaking it out the window. For her part, Jane learned the hard way not to get up in the night when she once switched on the light to find a large lizard on the wall above her head. The lizard was a good five inches long and reacted to the sudden glare by making a disturbing noise Paul later likened to a spoon scraping the bottom of an aluminum pan. After that, she stayed safely cocooned in her netting and did not stir until she heard the room-boy at her door with the early tea.
Jane fell into the habit of meeting Paul for a proper breakfast every morning in the hotel dining room, where they established their own private table. An austere-looking bachelor in his early forties, Paul was finicky and set in his ways but endowed with an engaging, slightly offbeat sense of humor. After discovering they both hated pre-coffee prattle, they settled into a routine of sharing the full English buffet in companionable silence, each happily engrossed in The Ceylon Times. Neither of them would “utter a word” until the plates were cleared and the papers thoroughly digested. They looked for all the world like an old married couple. One morning as they were breakfasting, they glimpsed “an apparition,” as Jane put it, “a buxom girl, very sexy in a tight black satin dress and black satin high-heeled shoes, with long red fingernails, plus a high Pompadour hairdo.” General George E. Stratemeyer, the Far East Air Force commander, was so transfixed by her appearance that he just sat there “drooling egg down his chin” as she sashayed past his table. Paul looked up over his glasses and broke his silence for the first time. Inclining his head slightly, he murmured, “Ah, the Black Tulip!” Jane smiled knowingly at the reference to the Alexandre Dumas novel about a fierce competition to grow Holland’s most coveted flower. From then on, they referred to the bodacious OSS assistant by that “Dumas title,” and on such a slender reed a mutual understanding was formed.
Paul had only recently written to his twin brother, Charles—who had landed a cushy job in Washington as advisor on art and music to the Department of State—complaining about the paucity of female companionship in Kandy. He was “lonely,” and he longed to meet a woman who was his equal, “an intimate, intelligent, and understanding companion.” Paul saw himself as a connoisseur of the fairer sex and lamented that his high standards only exacerbated the problem: “I am really spoiled for other women and I realize it over and over.” For seventeen years, he had been involved with a woman named Edith Kennedy, living with her first in Paris and then in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was twenty years his senior and tremendously dynamic and sophisticated. He regarded her as the great love of his life and was devastated by her death from cancer in 1942. By the time he joined the OSS, he had recovered sufficiently to date Jeanne Taylor, a young graphics designer in his department, and had reluctantly bidden her adieu before shipping out.
Very much on the prowl for a new girlfriend (confessing that he had more or less given up hope of seducing Nancy Toyne, the sometime mistress of his married friend Tommy Davis, whom he had met in Delhi), he sent his brother long, highly descriptive letters analyzing all of the available women, commenting on everything from their appearance and figures to their subtlety, individuality, and allure. While Paul technically honored the OSS injunction against keeping a diary, he wrote his brother that he considered his letters an “extension of his journal,” explaining that he jotted down notes during the day and “treasured up” anecdotes and apt phrases for the finished product, which he considered every bit as much as an art as his painting. When not discoursing on his health—he suffered from a host of ailments, from bad migraines following a serious car accident before the war to an array of allergies, an ulcerative stomach, sleeplessness, hives, and other nervous disorders—he elaborated his “dream” type of woman. She was a “Zorina,” in honor of the famous ballet dancer Vera Zorina, who possessed, besides beauty and a goddesslike body, “what is lacking in this warring, man-ridden world: a sense of the continuity of life and perpetual sympathy, fellow-feeling, and consolation.” Since
arriving in Ceylon, Paul had accompanied Julia and a flock of chattering girls on a day’s excursion to the cave temple at Dambulla, but he was not particularly taken with any of them (not a Zorina in the bunch). In the narrow margin of one letter, he scribbled an aside that Julia had a “somewhat ragged, but pleasantly crazy sense of humor.” Most of the OSS girls were “soft-headed dopes,” who, he wrote, “with their uncomprehending sex appeal and limited understandings, have almost no magnetism for me, except in a very surface fashion.”
Then, on July 27, Paul wrote Charles that he was pleased to report the arrival at last of “a new and interesting gal named Janie,” adding that they had immediately bonded. “She’s an artist, intelligent, talkative, and a comfort to me.”
After their acquaintance had stretched to several weeks, he sent his brother a long letter about his new friend, filling several pages with descriptions of her delightful, if slightly mad, character and antics. “Janie is sweet and warm,” he began, singing her praises. Though not conventionally pretty, she had a freckled, piquant face “with lively attractive blue eyes and a ready grin.” Comparing her to the much-admired wife of a friend, he wrote, “Many of her phrases and attitudes are exactly those of Margaret Gerard. The difference is great, however, as Janie is undisciplined emotionally, and though she has a better mind her feelings are always crashing around. She is sloppy physically, and given to wild hair and a messy room,” though some of this could be forgiven on the grounds that she was “a true Bohemienne.”
Their instant camaraderie was rooted in shared intellectual passion. They could talk for hours about art, books, and politics, and she could more than hold her own on any topic. She was still curious about life and had the gusto and force of character he admired in a woman. He found her an immensely attractive, talented, and stimulating person, despite her various eccentricities. Shortly after arriving, she had rescued a tiny chipmunk, which had fallen out of a tree; improvised an incubator; and lovingly nursed it with milk administered with an eyedropper. She called it Christopher and carried it around in her pocket. She’s “a fine sort,” Paul assured his brother. “She adores animals and people, draws with great style, and is worldly and often witty.”
Deeply fastidious by nature, his behavior modified at all times by a certain discipline and sense of decorum, Paul could not help but marvel at the breathtaking spectacle Jane made of herself. She was a lusty, independent creature, the sort who spooned her soup too noisily, slept outside because she loved the smell of the flowers, and clambered on top of an elephant with the gleeful abandon of a toddler mounting a rocking horse. Her capriciousness, like that of a spontaneous child, was both disarming and slightly alarming. To illustrate his point, Paul wrote of a “typical Janie gambit”:
She began telling me about a dinner-party she went to last night, starting with a wild spate of description, about the middle of the evening, not identifying anybody, with loose narrative threads flying all over the place. I said, “For God’s sake Janie, wait a minute. Go back to the beginning and give me the full history.” “Oh,” says she, in a heavy Russian accent, “so you vant the story of my laif? Vell, mister, I vasn’t always a prostitoot …” And I got ten minutes of charming and funny histoire, invented on the spot, and growing by leaps as she got her mind into the new idea. This, while she sat on the bed, skirts up to her hips, a chipmunk sitting on her shoulder, and drinking from a bottle of 3.2 beer.
In the meantime, various men dropped by Jane’s room, including a young Malaysian who apparently spoke no English and a strapping Australian flight lieutenant whom “she had apparently collected somewhere or other in the last week.” While they endeavored to have a conversation in a pastiche of Malay, English, Australian Cockney, and, of course, her faux Russian, a steady stream of servants came in bearing cups and teapots and black-market scotch, apparently procurable at five minutes’ notice from the Malay doorman downstairs. All around them lay dozens of Jane’s ink drawings spread out to dry, covering every surface and a good part of the floor, along with half-written letters, blouses, negligees, and other intimate gear tossed carelessly about the room. “The funny mistress of five or six accents,” Jane regaled them all with the story of her dinner party, successively taking the part of a lecherous old Oxonian who was trying to pinch her bottom, a drunk Ceylonese official, and a dry old colonial widow with a lorgnette. She topped off her performance by claiming that by the end of the dinner, pretending to be drunk herself, she shocked them “with descriptions of her early life (this in a thick brogue) in a family of 15 Irish in which the mother fought over the back of the fence with another lady.”
Paul was alternately drawn to and repelled by her whimsicality and wantonness. At heart, he knew himself to be far too shipshape a personality to put up with such prodigality for long. They were such opposites that any initial spark of sexual attraction he may have felt soon faded, though a certain fascination remained. To Paul, marooned in Ceylon, starved of company and conversation, Jane was like the circus coming to a remote town. She restored his good humor and revived his spirits. While he found their rundown hotel, with its incompetent staff and terrible service (“they make you wait three days for toilet paper and soap!”) wildly infuriating, she dubbed it “SNAFU Mansions” and laughed at its inadequacies. Similarly, the British-dominated war zone’s thickets of red tape that drove him to distraction, to say nothing of the “the stupid, arrogant, stubborn” stiffs the British called officers, were for her a source of endless amusement. For all her flightiness, there was seemingly nothing she could not get done by sleight of hand or obtain, if occasionally at shocking black-market prices. She always knew exactly whom to cajole, bully, or bribe. When in a particularly black mood he decided to demand a raise from the OSS, it was Jane who helped him craft “a masterpiece of a memo,” having at some time in her the past made “a special study of the loopholes, strictures, and legal verbiage of the Civil Service.”
Even in the narrow confines of the camp and hotel, she regularly managed some mischief. Every other day brought a new Janie escapade, another epic triumph or near disaster. The whole chaotic comedy of her life, he wrote his brother, was enormously diverting:
Yesterday her chipmunk fell out of the hotel window onto the slanting iron roof over the servants’ quarters, one story below. This roof is about forty feet above the ground but she was out of the window like a flash and down the drainpipe to the roof, her mind wholly on her pet. Picture to yourself the horror of the several stodgy British military characters who, hearing an unwonted scrabbling and clucking on the roof, looked out, and there saw Janie on all fours, a banana in each fist (for bait), chasing a squirrel, and alternately cursing and cooing in English and Malay. She’s the type who finds herself in such crazy situations all the time, as if by some Natural Law.
A few days later, as they were leaving the dining room, Christopher escaped from her pocket and disappeared under Stratemeyer’s table. Jane, in hot pursuit, dove under the table and, not seeing her precious pet, started feeling up the general’s pant leg. Stratemeyer ducked his head under the tablecloth and demanded, “Young lady, may I ask what you are doing?” Grinning like an embarrassed schoolgirl, she replied, “Looking for my chipmunk, General.” Just then she spied the little devil cowering by his shoe, crammed it in her pocket, and rushed from the room. After that, she stopped carrying Christopher around, and locked it in her office at night, where she made it a bed out of a typewriter cover.
Jane had a long history of such misadventures. She liked to tell the story of how she ended up babysitting a nine-week-old panda in Shanghai, going to absurd lengths to make sure the little black-and-white bundle of fur was out safely of harm’s way. The bear belonged to Mrs. William Harvest Harkness Jr., a wealthy American socialite whose explorer husband had captured it during an expedition in western Szechuan province and planned to sell it to Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo for a large sum of money. Her husband then died, leaving her to complete the mission. The problem was, Ruth Harkness ha
d taken ill and needed someone to help take care of the cub, which she named Su-Lin, Chinese for “a little bit of something cute,” and kept in a wicker laundry basket in the corner of her room at the Palace Hotel. The other problem, according to Jane, was that Mrs. Harkness needed to keep a low profile, “as it was forbidden, even in those days, to export pandas from China, although it was probably the best known ‘secret’ in all of China at the time.” Naturally, Jane volunteered to give the baby panda its bottle and burp it by walking up and down the hotel room and repeatedly slapping it on the back. Every time the cub belched, Jane recalled, “Mrs. Harkness would emit a croak, ‘Thank God,’ and fall back on her pillows.” Eventually the lady was well enough to travel, and with the help of Madame Chiang Kai-shek, who, in return for what Jane suspected was a hefty commission, helped smuggle the small creature out of the country.*
Julia, too, found Jane’s stories “fascinating,” and she looked up to her adventurous friend despite her occasionally “scatterbrained” behavior. “She was terribly funny,” said Julia. “All kinds of ridiculous things would happen to her. Everyone adored her because she was just so amusing.”
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