Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child

by Bob Spitz

  Julia’s name didn’t appear on his wish list, although she’d obviously registered somewhere in the back of his mind. In July, Paul sent Charlie a grainy snapshot of her—pin-ups routinely illustrated his letters—in which he drew extra attention to her fine long legs. Stretched across a rickety basha cot, her king-size frame an obvious spectacle, Julia looked resplendent, decked out in a cotton print dress, a strand of pearls suspended loosely at her neck, with fresh coats of lipstick and nail polish for good measure. She was propped on an elbow, wearing a dreamy, flirtatious expression—her “look of anticipatory lechery,” she called it—that signified, somewhat bashfully, her willingness to play the part. But—those legs! They seemed to go on forever and must have made quite an impression, because six months later they were still on Paul’s mind. In another letter written from Kandy, he described her thusly: “lovely legs, very tall, 31 years old, a darling warm girl, but with a slightly girl-like overtone in relation to age.”

  Julia’s interest also began to bloom. Following a “lovely Sunday” outing, in which Paul had invited friends to join him as he photographed elephants parading along a palm-lined ridge, she had what amounted to a romantic epiphany. “I decided I thought Paul was really very attractive,” she said, while bemoaning the fact that his interests seemed to lie elsewhere. From what she could tell, he desired women who were “more worldly Bohemian types.” She, alas, was the polar opposite, a veteran of the big leagues—Junior and, socially, Ivy—which had begun to seem as frivolous to her as surely they must to someone like Paul Child. Intellectually insecure, she seldom gave herself much credit for having the right kind of allure. By her own account, she lacked charisma, gravitas. How could she expect him to take notice of her? That night in her diary, she wrote: “Wish I were in love, and that what I considered really attractive was in love with me.”

  Maybe someone like Paul’s astrologer might have noticed their stars were aligning, but Paul and Julia didn’t. Not yet, at least, not with the winds of war starting to swirl around them.

  By late 1944, the campaign in China was heating up anew; fresh strategies were essential, “desperate remedies” necessary to keep China in the war and to offset threats against America’s efforts on the mainland. To that end, Paul was working under the gun, “fourteen to sixteen hours a day,” building a war room—including specialized graphic presentations used in counterespionage, destructive devices, air-supply drops, and paratroop operations—for Mountbatten’s American chief of staff, General Albert Wedemeyer. Julia saw Paul almost every day, but they were both too involved in their work to respond.

  Yet the relationship began to change. Paul’s brother, Charlie, was the first to sense his interest, even though it was insulated with ambivalence and disclaimers. In a long, rambling letter from Kandy, Paul told him plenty about Julia McWilliams, that “warm and witty girl” with the legs from Pasadena, with whom he spent quality time whenever they got the chance. “I believe she would marry me,” he said archly, “but isn’t the ‘right’ woman from my standpoint.” Nevertheless, he found her “extremely likeable and pleasant to be around.” He appreciated her passions, especially for music and food, but questioned her maturity, “the lack of worldly knowledge, the sloppy thinking, the wild emotionalism, the conventional framework,” the fact that she “had almost no challenge in her life” up to this point. That was a deal-breaker for someone as sophisticated and urbane as Paul. The teacher in him thought that she had limitless potential, but it would take work, too much, perhaps, for him to take on; all the “training and molding and informing” would be daunting. And sex—sex was an altogether different concern. Julia’s status as a virgin was particularly unappealing. He sensed real conflict, her “fear” and “fascination” with sex. “I know what the cure is,” he boasted to Charlie, “but it would be too much for Dr. Paulski to risk attempting.”

  For the time being, Dr. Paulski was content to play the field. There were several women whose company he kept on a regular basis, all OSS colleagues, all friends (Julia among them), who continued to meet regularly for a movie or a meal. There was hardly an opportunity for anything serious to develop. But Julia kept a close eye on Paul throughout the fall of 1944, as developments on the base at Kandy tightened around them.

  On October 19, after a flurry of high-level meetings in Mountbatten’s pavilion, word passed through the ranks that General Joseph Stilwell was being recalled from China, a victim of his personal war with Chiang Kai-shek. Paul’s boss, General Wedemeyer, would succeed him as chief of staff. The implications sent shock waves from basha to basha. Many of the “Kandy Kids” would be packing as a result, moving from their tropical paradise to a posting in Chongqing, China’s wartime capital, a remote, provincial city that Stilwell considered a “sloppy mess.” The first prominent transfer was Julia’s boss, Richard Heppner, who immediately recruited Paul for a critical job. In January 1945, after a nostalgic New Year’s bash, Paul left Ceylon “on two hours’ notice,” and flew to Chongqing to set up a war room for Wedemeyer largely modeled on his successful design in Kandy. It happened so fast, Julia hardly had time to say goodbye.

  For Julia, Paul’s sudden departure was almost as crushing as Tom Johnston’s rejection nine years earlier. For nearly ten months in Ceylon, through a succession of increasingly warm encounters and shared intimacies, Julia had never stopped angling for a way into Paul’s heart. Lately, she felt as though she’d been making some headway. They’d grown closer, confided in each other, talked and talked and talked some more. On more than one occasion a friendly kiss had turned serious. His standards for women were often severe. But there were qualities about him she grew to treasure—assuredness, expertise, gentility, character. Paul Child was the kind of man who could captivate her forever. But—China? Chongqing? They were separated by the Himalayas, a world apart. Her prospects, it seemed, were doomed to failure.

  After almost a year abroad, Julia was suddenly adrift again. She relished her experience in the OSS, but the team she’d come to love and respect was splitting up, moving on. Few familiar faces were left on the post. The replacements were younger, more independent. The camaraderie she thrived on was gone.

  Long frustrated by her repetitive workload, Julia put in for a change of scenery. For a while, it appeared likely that she’d be relocated to Calcutta. There were also some rumblings—Julia called them “propositions”—about a job with the Secret Intelligence branch. A spy! At last, the dream job she’d always fantasized about. Unfortunately it was offered too late in the game. “By the time I learned anything about China,” Julia decided, “the war would be over.” Still, it was determined that she could do a lot of good there, if not as a spy then in an administrative role, and in the spring of 1945, Julia was transferred to the OSS advance base in Kunming, four hundred miles south of Chongqing.

  China would be a new adventure. Yes, she’d still be mired in the Registry, still be snowed under huge drifts of paperwork, but the exotic locale, the unfamiliarity of it, would go a long way toward relieving much of the tedium. Getting there, however, was an entirely different matter. On March 15, 1945, with a contingent of transfers from Kandy, Julia flew from Calcutta to Kunming, a route known affectionately as going “Over the Hump.” The name may have sounded like an amusement park ride, but in point of fact it was anything but that. It was death-defying in the most literal sense, a 550-mile adventure over jagged 15,000-foot spurs of the Himalayas, “through air currents so turbulent they could break up an airplane”—and often did just that. “You could look down and see the twisted wreckage of planes that didn’t make it,” recalls Fisher Howe. More than four hundred were lost there during the first four years of the war, which is why pilots considered it “the most hazardous flight route in the world.”

  If the Hump was that much of a calculated risk, no one seems to have told Julia McWilliams. She seemed oblivious to the danger during the treacherous three-hour flight. “We were caught in a storm the whole way,” recalls Betty McIntosh, who
sat opposite Julia in a cramped jumpseat. The plane was a rattletrap, an unpressurized Douglas C-54 troop transport, forcing the passengers to wear parkas and carry oxygen masks. McIntosh says, “People prayed during the flight. You could see fear on their faces, especially during the descent. No one was sure whether we were landing—or crashing.”

  The plane hit an air pocket and went into a steep dive over the West Mountains, bucking hideously as it plummeted toward the ground. The lights went out inside the cabin. Gasps echoed through the darkness and worse—a few muffled shrieks, some crying. In the mayhem, Betty McIntosh remembers looking across at Julia, “who calmly read a book, while all the rest of us were preparing to die.” Jacques Pépin would later joke that Julia had sweet cream running through her veins, but at the time McIntosh was convinced it was ice water. “She was one cool customer,” McIntosh says. “It surprised me that anyone could contain themselves to the extent she did.”

  China was odd, oddly familiar, more formal, Julia thought. From what she could see, a wounded beauty blanketed the crenellated landscape where the conceit of ancient civilizations had left its indelible mark. There were crevices of dry red clay etched in the rain-washed earth and a supernatural stillness in the air. The climate and vegetation might have initially suggested Pasadena, but Julia, who had an eye for nature’s subtle distinctions, could see clouds clinging to the temples carved in the rocks surrounding the city and, beyond that, the fertile lake basins at the foot of the Mazong Ridge streaked with the muted indigo of a Chinese calligrapher.

  Kunming was a medieval walled city, whose importance to the war had left it a vestige of its former status as a go-to destination: the City of Eternal Spring. Before the Japanese incursion it had functioned as a resort for French colonials thanks to its location at the terminus of the Yunnan–Vietnam Railway and a gateway to the Burma Road. Now there was something “ominous and austere” about it, a burden that had sucked the life out of Kunming. The war: it had stripped the city of its dignity. The Chinese lived in coolie conditions, mudcaked villages with barely enough to sustain. A governing infrastructure was blatantly corrupt.

  The OSS was headquartered outside the city, in a compound surrounded by towering walls. In a matter of days, Julia had the Registry up and running, a super-sized version of it, with a staff of ten. It was a sleeker, systematized operation thanks to Julia’s know-how and a proximity to the war that made precision more urgent. This wasn’t Kandy, that much was clear. Nothing was laid-back or remote, the way it had been in Ceylon. In China, the war was on the Allies’ front doorstep. The Japanese were all around; their presence was felt, if not their actual hostilities. The Allied field operations, once deployed in far-off positions, were launched directly from headquarters in delicate detail.

  Julia’s responsibilities became more elaborate. In addition to handling all the encrypted intelligence reports—dispatches from Washington, information about the position of all OSS agents, and bulletins pinpointing the enemy’s positions, to name but a few—she also dispensed the reserves of “secret currency,” chunks of “operational opium,” paid directly to the spies. Every measure and stratagem was channeled through the Registry in Kunming. As such, her judgment of who saw what information was a highly sensitive, if not tricky, task—not too shabby for a woman who, only a few years earlier, was fired for incompetence by a furniture showroom.

  Intrigue aside, Julia still hated the work. She hated the tedium, hated what she considered an unimaginative clerical desk job. Her colleagues at the Registry were “dull, slow, dense.” Her social life could also be described in the same terms. Since arriving in Kunming, entertainment was reduced to a succession of endless cocktail parties or dances with unstimulating men to the same scratchy recordings of “I’ll Be Seeing You,” “Lili Marlene,” and “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree.”

  Julia’s OSS adventure had lost its pizzazz.

  In April, however, an unexpected turn of events reversed her creeping malaise. The war room was moved from Chongqing to Kunming, accompanied by its chief architect, Paul Child.

  ENCOUNTERING PAUL AGAIN lifted Julia’s spirits. He brought excitement back into her life, with his easy mix of wit and wisdom. And always in the background: the possibility of romance. It was a breeze picking up where they’d left off in Ceylon, getting back into the groove with him, socializing and talking. Paul was an amiable conversationalist, Julia a devoted listener. Both seemed eager to enjoy the other’s company. But nothing more than that at the present time. Paul was “extremely fond of her,” as he wrote to his brother, but in no more capacity than that of “a very good friend.” Warmth, humor, and intelligence aside, she was “limited in relation to [his] concept of la femme intégrale.”

  He had missed Julia while he was in Chongqing, but in the interim, apparently, Paul had had a fling or two. Julia knew the score. “There were a lot of attractive women around,” she acknowledged. No getting around it: “he loved women.” He’d spent January romancing Julia’s friend Rosie Frame, a young, pixie-like OSS agent who spoke eleven Chinese dialects. But while he found her “wonderfully interesting and alive … very attractive physically,” theirs was nothing more than a “passionate friendship.” The same could be said about his involvement with Jane Foster, “une Bohémienne of a fine sort,” with whom he entertained only a mild flirtation. Despite these dalliances, for that is all they really were, Paul was increasingly frustrated in his pursuit of the perfect mate. “When am I going to meet a grown‑up dame with beauty, brains, character, sophistication, and sensibility?” he wondered.

  He never dreamed, at the time, that she was right there in front of him. Julia and Paul each knew they had met someone remarkable, but couldn’t quite get to the heart of their interest. Julia suffered from being compared to Edith Kennedy. “Christ, there are only a few people like that,” Paul bemoaned to Charlie in early 1945, acknowledging, as a result, that he was “really spoiled for other women.” The more Julia tried to measure up, the more she stumbled, either expressing herself too vehemently in that high-strung comic warble, or else blurting out a whopper that betrayed her uninformed worldview. On more than one occasion, Paul scorned her incautious tongue. “I don’t see why the Indians just don’t throw out the British!” he reported her saying, topping it (if that were at all possible) with: “I can’t understand what the Indians see in that horrid little old Gandhi!”

  True, Julia often said whatever was on her mind—but so did Paul, who was quick and opinionated, especially when it came to his criticism of others. Clearly, he did not give Julia enough credit. She was not Edith Kennedy, that much was certain, not as deep or as polished to that degree, not by any means. But Julia McWilliams was a diamond in the rough: curious, open-minded, high-spirited, witty if not yet clever, with personality enough to light up any room. She didn’t have a mean bone in her body. She wasn’t at all pretentious, like some of Paul’s friends. She may not have been discriminating—yet; or an intellect—yet; or an authority on some aspect of the arts—not yet. Still, she had a lot to offer, though his assessment of her was instinctively narrow. After months of heart-to-hearts, their hearts seemed far apart.

  It is only fitting that what brought them closer was food.

  First, “the terrible army food,” as Julia adjudged it: “rice, potatoes, canned tomatoes and water buffalo.” She and Paul could barely put it in their mouths. Even the local Chinese cooks hired to work the mess lines were unable to give the food a discernible makeover. It was nasty, beyond inedible. Fortunately, there was a Plan B they put into motion. “The Chinese food was wonderful,” Julia said, “and we ate out as often as we could.”

  Kunming was the capital of Yunnanese cuisine, traditional savory dishes that lean heavily on bold flavors. In the warren of restaurants tucked back along the narrow dirt streets, Julia and Paul encountered dishes like guo qiao mi xian—rice noodles in a dense stock beneath a layer of oil served with a platter of thinly sliced raw chicken and vegetables that, when tipped into t
he broth, cooked instantly at the table. They also could find qi guo ji, a well-spiced chicken stew cooked in a clay pot with a steam-chimney venting up through its center, as well as the ubiquitous leaf-wrapped dishes, such as ba jiao ye zheng yu (fish steamed in plantain leaves) and duck with bamboo pith fungus. The more adventurous palates ordered Yunnan delicacies such as snake, civet cat, and even black bear.

  The Chinese food was a revelation to Julia, with its extraordinary infusion of ingredients and aromatic spices. She adored the exotic preparations, the barrage of new textures, new tastes, new combinations. They defied all expectations. Each plate held another wonderful surprise. It’s hard to imagine how appealing this experience was to a young woman who enjoyed eating as much as Julia did, how different Chinese cooking was from anything she’d eaten before. The dining experience itself was a source of endless discovery. The restaurants were noisy and chaotic: cleavers chopped, woks sizzled, pots bubbled, and the clatter of rickshaws rumbled in through the open windows. Waiters would yell orders to the cooks across the din. Even the local Chinese contributed a persistent throaty accompaniment, “making these great swooping, slurping noises as they ate,” Julia recalled.

  Paul was a good guide for her in this mysterious new milieu. He knew his way around the restaurant scene, thanks to some guidance from his friends, journalist Theodore White and the United Press International correspondent Al Ravenholt, both of whom had been in China since before the war began. And he was a virtuoso when it came to using chopsticks, teaching Julia how to wield them with workmanlike finesse.