Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child

by Bob Spitz

  This was a far cry from the Pasadena country-club set, even from the marriage-minded party crowd at Smith. These people were a world apart—they were informed on the issues of the day, on the arts, on culture, on a far deeper level than the parochial planes of Julia’s usual acquaintances. Julia had never taken an interest in such business before, but everything they said, the way they looked at things, fascinated her. These people stimulated something in her brain that none of the private schools or elite colleges had been able to do. Julia had developed as someone who took an interest in the life of the mind, but in a social setting as opposed to an academic setting. Someone droning on about the indigenous sects of India in front of a blackboard set her to daydreaming; but around a table and over navy grub—that was an altogether different story! Perhaps there had been a capacity in her all along to appreciate a wider world. It was all in the presentation. There was no getting around the fact that Julia was a social animal.

  In the midst of so much brainpower, Julia’s insecurities quickly resurfaced. The way this crowd expressed itself had underscored her shortcomings. “What kind of mind do I have?” she wondered in a shipboard diary entry larded with misgiving. What was she meant for? Where was she destined? In page after page of reflection, everything she believed in had suddenly come under scrutiny: her politics, religious beliefs, sexuality, upbringing, especially her potential—all of it now thrown into uncertain disarray. It was as if she had had her footing kicked out from beneath her. Not on terra firma, but in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, surrounded by “world thinkers,” and on her way to God-knows-where—a hell of a place to start questioning your existence!

  Still, she always struggled with what she considered to be her intellectual inadequacies, which were now brought out by this crowd of super-smart people whom she admired, causing her to reevaluate and revise long-held beliefs. Fortunately, Julia McWilliams wasn’t undone by candid appraisals; she wasn’t someone who crumbled under doubt. Rather, she drew strength from challenge and ever-changing situations. Her clear-eyed contemplation was direct and earnest. She had enormous reserves of raw untapped intelligence that would reveal itself in many ways—but always from a position of a late bloomer. “All my life I’ve had to push myself,” she allowed, “to keep up, to earn my place at the table.” Interestingly, it was a place at the table she coveted, not a place behind a desk or at the head of a class.

  Through the rest of March and into the ripeness of early April—every day for two weeks brought nothing but sunshine and star-filled nights—Julia gorged herself on the scholarship of her brainy shipmates, monitoring their charged conversations and dissecting their views. Mostly, she gravitated toward the anthropologists, whose abstracts about relationships and society she grew to adore. Julia was particularly attracted to an extravagantly tall, horsy man with a posh British accent who was engaged by the Morale Operations division of OSS to develop psychological warfare. Gregory Bateson had been to New Guinea and to Bali with his wife, Margaret Mead, where they studied the effects of outsiders on native cultures. Julia was entranced by his experiences and intensity, as well as his eloquently articulated ideas about developing societies. She remembered their conversations as “head-turners” that introduced her to concepts such as national character and genetics. Julia wrestled with the ideas, which she entered in her diary, trying to bring her own thoughts and opinions to them as best she could. Following one such conversation, thirty-one-year-old Julia came to the conclusion that she’d been seriously adrift, just “vegetating” all these years. “None of my college career or anything I had done in the way of work was of any use at all,” she realized. And she made the choice, then and there, to cultivate her mind.

  Any metamorphosis would have to wait, however, as the Mariposa approached the Indian coast. The troop transport had been at sea for thirty-one days and the anticipation and suspense of touching down on Indian soil was all-consuming. Word had begun circulating miles from shore that the ship’s landing orders were in flux. In fact, there was a last-minute detour, from Calcutta to Bombay, and as the ship drew near, preparing to make berth in the harbor, everyone on board came topside to take in the scene. Bombay: primitive yet contemporary; opulent yet riddled with poverty. Julia got the whole samosa in a sensational sensory blast. She “could see and smell the haze,” patches of dense, ashen smog that hung over the city like porridge from a spoon. It was a sight that cowed even the most worldly travelers. The stretch of landscape on the shore was an unholy congestion, its banks clogged by the bulk of a magnificent fleet, a treacherous labyrinth of ghats braced by countless matchstick planks, and a human eddy—thick swarms of dark- and light-skinned people milling, thronging, through the soupy setting. Clinging to the guardrail that encircled the deck, Julia gasped: “Oh, my God, what have I gotten myself into?”

  Culture shock abounded as the ship’s passengers stumbled down the gangplank into the maelstrom that was Bombay. Fisher Howe, who had arrived months earlier, recalled how “the swell of sensations just hit you like a sledgehammer.” It was stimulus overload, he said, “filthy, sweltering, foul-smelling, blinding, everywhere you turned was another thrilling effect.” On Easter Sunday, April 9, 1944, Julia surrendered herself to the mysteries of the city. For eighteen days, until new orders were drawn, she soaked in as many aspects of this new exhilarating experience as she could, sightseeing, eating, dancing, eating, golfing, eating some more, even swinging through Bombay’s notorious red-light district. It was great theater, an education like she’d never experienced before. Not that the others in Julia’s traveling party shared her fascination. “Have met practically no one who likes India,” she wrote in her Bombay diary pages, though typically, gamely, she insisted: “I do!”

  When her orders finally came through, however, she was downcast. India, it seemed, was now off the table. The situation there had become too explosive, too unpredictable. As a result, Lord Mountbatten, who oversaw the South East Asia Command (SEAC) as well as consulted with the OSS, decided to relocate his headquarters from New Delhi to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Julia’s papers had a new destination inscribed on them: she was due in Colombo on April 25.

  CEYLON WAS EVERYTHING India wasn’t—peaceful, temperate, fragrant, civilized, a tropical paradise far removed from the wages of war. Long coveted as “a beautiful place to work and play,” Ceylon provided a safe haven for the Americans who were starting an intelligence office there under the vast umbrella of Mountbatten’s central command. Its focus was in support of SEAC’s ongoing operations in Siam, the crossroads for Japanese troops traveling between Indonesia and China and the seat of the Allies’ organized resistance. In the chess-like gambits of its high-stakes spy scheme, OSS dropped agents and equipment into jungle hideouts, from where they filed reports detailing, among other things, troop locations and bombing targets. Where specifically were the Japanese stationed? Which local people were assisting them? Julia McWilliams would be responsible for the dissemination of these reports. As head of the Registry, she was privy to the most sensitive intelligence—and in charge of who else got to see it.

  Fortunately, the headquarters wasn’t in Colombo, a bustling port town not unlike Marseille or Newark, but in Kandy, seventy-five miles inland, nestled atop a heavenly mountainous range. From the moment she and her colleagues climbed on the old-fashioned train out of Colombo, Julia entered another world. The scenery was breathtaking as they wound through palm groves, tea plantations, wild bush, and lush jungle, across mountain streams and under the crags of ragged limestone boulders. Adam’s Peak, around which Buddha is said to have walked, loomed conspicuously on the horizon. Their arrival in Kandy, two hours later, was even more of an eyeful. The town was “like Shangri-La,” Julia thought, right out of a fairytale. No wonder it was the stronghold of the ancient Sinhalese kings. As her eyes adjusted to the sun-flecked spectacle, she could see dense groves of coconut palms and papaya trees that bordered the town, a few Buddhist temples in the foothills above a terraced rice paddy, and thic
k folds of exotic vegetation all around. Monkeys played in the branches above the roofs, while “monks in bright saffron robes and shaved heads” threaded through the narrow weave of streets. The almost intoxicating spicy-sweet nectar of cinnamon blossoms filled the air. At more than 1,700 feet above sea level, the air was thinner and drier than on the coast, a condition Julia luxuriated in as being “skin-warm,” perfect to the touch. Mountbatten considered Kandy “probably the most beautiful spot in the world,” and from where Julia stood she would have had to agree with him.

  Since money was no object when it came to the war effort, OSS rushed to create the kind of cushy lifestyle that, back home, had been reserved for the country-club set. “Mountbatten’s headquarters became a byword for elegance and luxury,” an eyewitness observed in a chronicle of the campaign, “a place where well-groomed staff, many of them titled, were chauffeured in shiny limousines to offices scattered throughout the lush tropical gardens.” Dress was casual, formalities were few. The OSS sector, unlike most posts that served the military, was housed in a colonial estate on a tea plantation called Nandana, on the shore of a gorgeous artificial lake. The way one officer described it, that facility “was nothing so much as like a western university in summer session.” The campus itself resembled a tidy village green, crisscrossed by a grid of inlaid walks. The civilian staff worked in palm-thatched huts, or bashas, which had just enough conveniences to create the illusion of comfort. An open-air officers’ club overlooked the water, a communal mess hall stood a short walk away. Aside from the scorpions and cobras, the place felt just like home. “It is somewhat primitive, but airy and far from dressy,” Julia recalled. All in all, however, she found the life there “pastoral.”

  If only her work had given her as much pleasure. The Registry, Julia discovered, was no more than a euphemism for “running the files,” a job she’d loathed back in Washington for its “menial” routine. The grind in Kandy was no different—it bored her silly. Two days into the operation was all she needed to realize it.

  Exactly how she managed to deal with this isn’t known, but Julia determined to make the most of a tedious situation. One thing is clear: her sense of humor came in handy. Nothing crossed her desk that wasn’t worthy of a poke in the ribs. Fake missives, especially, became her stock-in-trade. She bombarded department heads with official-sounding memos detailing rule changes that were obviously a goof. A new file system, for instance, in which all documents were classified under the first letter of their last word. Or a directive warning recipients that when the files were full they would be sealed forever, in a vault. All of these had to be read and initialed, and it amused Julia no end that they came back approved. Other barbs served as her way of dealing with all the infuriating red tape. “If you don’t send Registry that report we need,” she warned a colleague in the States, “I shall fill the next Washington pouch with itching powder and virulent bacteriological diseases, and change all the numbers, as well as translating the material into Singhalese [sic], and destroying the English version.”

  In any case, by October Julia had the Registry up and humming. “Our in-and-out material has been snowballing,” she reported to headquarters, in D.C. “Of 365 Washington pouches received in September, there are about 600 pieces that had to be accessioned, cross indexed, circulated, filed. This figure does not include our operational and intelligence input from the field.” A further description reveals her high level of clearance: “We keep master cards on each current subject, which means my staff must be completely familiar with what’s going on. For example, cards for S.I. [Secret Intelligence] include names of all agents, student recruits and their various code names.”

  As one operative put it: “Julia McWilliams was keeper of the secrets.” She knew who all the undercover agents were, where they were located, and what they were engaged in for the OSS. All the more tactical, as their instructions were also channeled through the Registry’s confidential filter system. Throughout her life, Julia insisted she was nothing more than a file clerk, but “that was so much poppycock,” according to Fisher Howe. “Those files practically ran the Secretariat, with all its operational and sensitive intelligence. It had to be handled very carefully, which was entrusted entirely to Julia.” She wasn’t a spy, if that was her criterion for professional stature, nevertheless OSS classified her as a senior civilian intelligence officer: keeper of the secrets.

  While the job required resourcefulness and precision, life in Ceylon was anything but taxing. “Everybody in OSS had a very social time of it,” Howe says. “We were a congenial group of people and kept pretty close together.” A lot of festive meals were shared on that faraway outpost, even though most of the restaurants in Kandy were off-limits to Americans due to the fact that they served cat on the menu. Still the nightlife provided suitable diversion. “There are movies and dances twice a week at the American officers’ club,” Julia recalled, “walks in the moonlight. On Sundays there are picnics, golf, tennis, swimming, or a weekend down in Colombo, depending entirely upon the enterprise of yourself in enticing the enterprise of the other gender.”

  How clever Julia was at that enterprise, as she put it, isn’t known, the accounts having been excised from her diary. There were a few superficial crushes that weren’t acted upon, several platonic relationships that sufficed—for the time being. Two, in particular, that she rekindled in Kandy were with her recently acquired friends, Jack Moore and Gregory Bateson. Moore worked across the quad from Julia’s basha in the Visual Presentation unit of Research and Analysis, where he ministered to the War Room with maps and diagrams. Bateson was a regular drinking companion, who beguiled her with his enormous brain. Together, they often picnicked in a clearing of jungle palms, with “a breathtaking view practically all the way to the sea.” They may have accompanied others to Colombo or Trincomalee during the spring of 1944. By the beginning of May, however, their friendly outings took an intriguing detour when both men began inviting a mutual acquaintance to join them. In a matter of only a few weeks, Paul Child would turn their foursome into a twosome.

  Six

  Paul

  A twosome. No configuration meant more to Paul Child. From the moment he was born, the power of two was implanted in him like a unique component of DNA.

  According to family records, he was born in ’02, just a few minutes after two on an icy winter’s morning in Montclair, New Jersey. It would always be noted that Paul arrived first—“the first out of the womb”—followed by his twin brother, Robert, two minutes later. There, in the hospital, surrounded by family and curious staff, small crowds pressed against the glass to the ward where the newborns lay swaddled, looking from Child boy to Child boy with utter delight. One word echoed repeatedly through the well-scrubbed corridor: identical. It was impossible to tell them apart. But while Paul and his brother may have looked the same, sounded the same, deep down they were anything but identical—an issue that would complicate the rest of their lives.

  And life for the Childs was already complicated enough. Paul’s parents struggled to keep the family intact while they managed a schedule of nightmarish logistics. Each week, Paul’s father, Charles Tripler Child, left their split-level home on Clairemont Avenue and made what was then a grueling six-hour trip to Washington, D.C., where he was director of the U.S. Astrophysical Observatory at the Smithsonian Institution. His wife, mustering her resilient New England spirit, played her part as the dependable housewife during her husband’s frequent absences, but it wasn’t without great effort—and she wasn’t happy about it.

  Julia in Kandy, Ceylon, with the legs that transfixed Paul, July 19, 1944 (Photo credit 6.1)

  Bertha Cushing Child had “given up her soul” for that family, at least that was the way it often felt to her. In her youth, she had been teeming with promise, a potent mix of beauty and talent that ran counter to the profile for an itinerant minister’s daughter. There was a time, early on, when Bertha shared her father’s Christly piety, but gradually her ambitions f
astened on more worldly pursuits. Like the Boston Brahmins whom she envied and in whose shadow she had grown up, she longed for a life of refinement, a life of music and culture, salons and soirées. The men closest to her, however, seemed more inclined to bollix up those plans. Her father spent much of each year traveling the back roads of New England, preaching to wayward communities in need of salvation, while Bertha and her siblings handled the mundane household chores. Now her husband was gone for long stretches, as well, stranding her in a suburb with a family to raise, but she never stopped longing to be a part of another, very different world.

  Bertha’s circumstances hadn’t always felt that bleak. For the longest time, Charles’s career had been on a steady upward trajectory, its influences reaching into all levels of society. As a result, Bertha set her sights on a more cultured lifestyle—and for good reason. Electricity was the rising technological sensation and Charles Child, riding the current, was poised to release it into the new century. When it came to the cutting edge of science, no one, other than perhaps Edison, was more learned, more inventive, more visionary. Before the age of twenty, Charles had already earned graduate degrees in physics, chemistry, and mathematics from Johns Hopkins University, with language proficiency in French, German, Italian, and Greek. In 1888, he designed and supervised construction for twelve electric railway systems and set up the first storage-battery traction lines at Toledo, Newark, and New York. He then formed his own company for manufacturing power supply stations, inventing much of its equipment, before joining the Smithsonian, where he directed experiments on the infrared solar spectrum, whose space-age instruments he constructed from scratch. In his spare time—spare time!—he edited the Electrical Review and published The How and Why of Electricity, the preeminent work on the subject.