A Covert Affair
Page 46
Major General William J. (“Wild Bill”) Donovan, director of the OSS, recruited what one employee called “rare, strange personalities” from every walk of life, including academics, journalists, assorted criminals, and Communists.
Lieutenant Colonel Richard Heppner, the brash young head of Detachment 404, complained of constant interference by British intelligence so much that at times it was hard to tell they were on the same side.
The Queen’s Hotel in Kandy, a Victorian relic, was a breeding ground for mosquitoes, so Julia, Jane, and the other OSS women billeted there promptly contracted dengue fever.
The charming Mountbatten, who Paul Child called the “one hero” in his life, selected the King’s Pavilion as his elegant headquarters, and decreed Kandy “probably the most beautiful spot in the world.”
General Joseph Stilwell (far right) scowling as he poses with Mountbatten, who is flanked by Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek, and Lieutenant General Brehon Somervell in Chungking, the wartime capital of China. Stilwell had nothing but contempt for the corrupt Chinese Nationalist leader and the imperialist ambitions of the British.
The OSS headquarters in Kunming was as bare bones as a cavalry outpost, consisting of a few two-story buildings scattered on a dirt parade ground. Paul described the atmosphere as “rather like a party which has gone sour.”
Betty MacDonald standing with colleagues in the doorway of the flooded MO print shop during the historic 1945 flood in Kunming. The camp’s well-fortified walls turned the OSS compound into a three-foot-deep lagoon, and they were forced to commute between buildings in life rafts.
John Carter Vincent (among the Foreign Service Officers known as “China Hands”)
John Service (among the Foreign Service Officers known as “China Hands”)
John Paton Davies (among the Foreign Service Officers known as “China Hands”)
Owen Lattimore (among the Foreign Service Officers known as “China Hands”)
McCarthy investigated Communist sympathies in the movie industry and succeeded in jailing the “Hollywood Ten”—including the screenwriters and directors Samuel Ornitz, Ring Lardner, Jr., Albert Maltz, Alvah Bessie, Lester Cole, Herbert Biberman, and Edward Dmytryk—shown here on their way to federal court in Washington, D.C., to face trial on charges of contempt of Congress for their defiance of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
David Schine (left) and Roy M. Cohn (center), who Paul called “fascist bully-boy types,” with McCarthy during a subcommittee hearing in 1953.
After a bumpy courtship, Julia and Paul were not about to let a pre-wedding car accident keep them from exchanging vows on September 1, 1946.
Dick Heppner and Betty MacDonald also married in the summer of 1946, and were thrilled that other members of their detachment had found happiness after the war.
The Childs in their grand “Roo de Loo” apartment in Paris with their cat, Minette, who was the beneficiary of many of Julia’s early failed soufflés.
In a pointed repudiation of the charge of homosexuality, Julia and Paul boldly posed naked in a tub of bubbles for their 1956 Valentine’s Day card.
Julia spent most of her time in Paris practicing what she had learned at the Cordon Bleu school in her tiny kitchen, where the stovetop was back-breakingly low.
Jane Foster returned to painting after the war, and Paul envied her small studio in Paris, where she sometimes produced a picture a day.
Jane’s woodcut of the U.S. Board of Passport Appeals in Washington, D.C., which in March 1955 turned down her passport application on the grounds that she “followed the Communist party line.”
Jane’s husband, George Zlatovski, peeking through the half-open door at the mob of reporters outside their Paris apartment the morning after they were indicted as Russian spies.
Jane had expensive tastes in everything from clothes to restaurants and always lived beyond her means.
The beautiful Martha Dodd and her wealthy husband, Alfred Stern, threw fabulous parties in their penthouse apartment in the Majestic that attracted such notable leftists as Lillian Hellman, Paul Robeson, Margaret Bourke-White, and Clifford Odets.
The mysterious Boris Morros, a Russian-born Hollywood producer, posing here with Ginger Rogers, was secretly working as a double agent and spent twelve years helping the FBI corral Soviet spies.
Jack Soble, in handcuffs, and his wife, Myra, being led by a federal agent, pled guilty to “receiving and obtaining” U.S. defense secrets and testified that Jane and George were members of their Soviet spy ring in return for a more lenient sentence.
Jane’s self-portrait, drawn after her first breakdown in 1955, while she was in Cornell University Hospital in New York hiding from “the men in gabardine coats.”
Betty never believed Jane was disloyal but had her doubts about George, who she visited in Paris in the early 1980s and again found to be “a strange man.”
After they left the Foreign Service in 1961, Julia and Paul settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they lived happily for the next thirty-two years, but they never forgot the friends who were not lucky enough to escape the McCarthy era unscathed, and they remained passionate Democrats.