Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  The Chinese, whom she loved to look at, stared at her light brown hair and towering presence. Children were aggressively friendly. The weather in Chungking was more extreme, and the water and clothes were always brown. Though the plum trees were in blossom, Julia had little time for touring. She was sent to reduce and organize the files (the staff was “dull, slow, dense”) in keeping with the system set up in Kunming, which would now be the central headquarters. Chungking, “a mail room run by a girl with a mind like a withered rose,” Julia wrote to a friend, made Ceylon look “civilized, beautiful, green, and comfortable.” With the usual woman shortage, there were plenty of dinner parties following gin after the hard workday. News that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had died arrived as Julia was leaving, and she was uneasy about getting back to Kandy.

  Returning to Kunming, she became increasingly aware that she would not be going back to Kandy. “China was more formal; Ceylon had been like a big family.” Yet three months later Julia concluded that China “is so much alive.” Betty MacDonald remembers being in the mountains of western China with the Japanese all around, “so it was a different feeling. You felt behind enemy lines. That made for camaraderie—several marriages and the breakup of others.” She became openly involved with Heppner.

  Julia did indeed like Kunming, for it reminded her of California with blue mountains beyond the eucalyptus trees. This city in the hills of southern China was in the backcountry, so it had what one historian calls “the atmosphere of a frontier town.” It was not only the end of the supply line to China, it was now the base of Detachment 202, from which all field projects were organized, where Chinese troops were trained, and where sabotage teams were sent into the field. The plateau was over 6,000 feet above sea level—west of Burma and north of Hanoi and French Indochina. The soil was the red soil of Burma and the surrounding hills were bare; but beyond the city lay Kunming Lake and high above it a cloudy Camelot of temples carved in the rocks of the mountains.

  The Chinese wore padded blue coats, tucking their hands into opposite sleeves; the shopkeepers wore embroidered slippers; and herds of black pigs roamed the countryside. It was all very colorful, but, as her friend Ellie said, an environment that was “ominous and austere.” The Chinese were either eking out a living or serving with the ragtag group of peasant soldiers exploited by greedy merchants (who sat out the war) and corrupt politicians. The scorn of ignorant GIs did not help, though the presence of so many missionaries’ children in China may have diminished some of the racism inherent in the war in Asia.

  Paul wrote to his brother:

  Julia and I managed to borrow a jeep from a friend last Sunday afternoon and, after buying a bottle of mulberry wine, struck off into the great unknown, for about 40 miles. The weather was incredibly inspiring: hot sun and cool air, sparkling sky, breeze enough, scattered clouds. The great mountains lay around us like back-broken dragons. God what beautiful country—the mud villages with their green-tiled towers, the herds of black swine, the blue clad people, the cedar smoke, the cinnamon dust, were all eternally Chinese, and connected us with the deep layers of past time. We saw a beautiful red sandstone (avon color) bridge set in the midst of a paddy-field. The stones were all wind-worn, like the tourelles at Château Neiric, so they looked like soft loaves of bread. We sat on it and drank our wine, and got sunburned, and looked at the mules going over it, and relaxed, and life came right for a spell.

  Paul smoked a new pipe given him by Charlie, who regularly sent cigars and film. After taking pictures of each other and wandering through a graveyard, Julia and Paul returned from “a good afternoon,” Paul concluded on April 17, 1945. Such tranquil moments were few.

  CHIANG VS. MAO

  The records Julia McWilliams kept in Kunming were more vital and her trustworthiness more important than ever before. The files bulged with data of the OSS training of Chinese infiltrators, of the internal political strife, and the bumbling of the Chinese, who had little heart for bravery or risk after years of fighting and internal corruption. Not only was the OSS caught in the crosshairs of Chinese political factions; it also instigated some of the conflicts. Julia, like the others, heard fascinating firsthand stories from the interior, stories they were not allowed to set down in words.

  The major internal conflict for years was between Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse-tung, especially since the Japanese split free China in two. Chiang in the south was a powerful warlord with shaved head who ruled official China in Chungking. He knew one English word, “darling,” for he was married to a Wellesley graduate. He “converted” to Christianity for her, but only by the widest stretch of the imagination could he even be regarded, in Theodore White’s words, as “an Old Testament Christian.” The OSS considered him and his loyal henchman and spymaster General Tai Li to be corrupt, ruthless, and more interested in fighting for power against the communists in the north than against the Japanese. In White’s view, Chiang ran a “corrupt political clique that combines some of the worst features of Tammany Hall and the Spanish Inquisition.” Stilwell, before he left, had called it “this rotten regime.”

  Julia shared the view of the old China hands that Chiang was a cruel despot. Many of her friends and colleagues were born in China, the children of missionaries, and loved the people. The missionaries’ children believed that the Allies would do better to back the communists in the north, who could fight with greater heart. Their views would, in the McCarthy era of the 1950s, cost many their careers and reputations. By the time Julia came to China, the U.S. ambassador, Patrick Hurley, nicknamed “the Albatross” by the OSS group (he once called Chiang “Mr. Shek”), was completely in the pocket of Chiang, and Wedemeyer had to apologize for courting the communists’ help in the war against the Japanese. Julia would confide in a friend eight years later, “We never ran into anybody who did not distrust and dislike the Chiang regime (possible exception of that fool, Pat Hurley).” Paul told his brother that “the war of back alleys, back rooms, big parties, magnificent whores, and equally magnificent blackmails … almost becomes the ‘real’ war and the news-war is only the surface expression.”

  Mao Tse-tung led the Yenan communists in the mountains of northern China. It was generally considered by those with experience in China that Mao and Chou En-lai (Paul Child was very impressed that he spoke excellent, though accented, English) would make effective allies against the Japanese. Overt diplomatic missions, long urged by Stilwell, to get the joint cooperation of these warring Chinese factions together to fight the Japanese were thwarted by Chiang. (His political clout was reinforced by a number of Americans who were paid for writing pro-Chinese propaganda.) Covert operations in both regions continued.

  THE OSS WOMEN

  Rosamond (Rosie) Frame, who spoke fluent Chinese and worked in covert espionage, exposed some Chinese nationals’ collaboration with Japan in the south. Her partner was later severely injured in retaliation for their mission. Rosie was enterprising. (She told the childhood story of being given $2,000 by her missionary parents for schooling in Switzerland and finding her way to the school by herself.) Later she went on to Heidelberg and the University of Chicago.

  According to historian Harris Smith, Julia’s intelligence files “bulged with reports about the incompetence of the Chinese [Chiang] military command.” He adds that “OSS officers were sickened by the treatment [that] the Chiang government afforded its troops.” They recorded attacks against OSS convoys by Chinese government troops posing as bandits and murdering Chinese agents who worked for the OSS. Despite these revelations and the shifting alliances, Chiang kept the public relations ear of the Allies.

  Rosie Frame, who had broken all the hearts on the ship from California to India with Julia and exposed the Chinese collaborationists, was compiling target studies for the Chinese in Chungking, where she was romanced by Paul in January. He told his brother that it was a “passionate friendship though not profoundly passionate.” Soon he realized she was not his ideal woman. After he left for Kunming and Julia
arrived in Chungking, Rosie helped Julia organize the intelligence files there. The daughter of a Christian college dean in China, she spoke Mandarin and Cantonese as well as French. Paul described her woman hockey player’s figure, yet praised her attractiveness, brilliance, and energy. Betty MacDonald called her “one of the most alert, brilliant women the OSS sent into the field, a modern Mata Hari.” She also called her “Sub Rosy” and described her romantically clad in fur-lined flying jacket, boots, and slacks, with a carbine strapped over her shoulder. After the war Rosie would marry Thibaut de Saint Phalle, whom Betty described as the “scion of a famous French family,” who was with the OSS on the China coast.

  Other friends from Washington and Ceylon lived with Julia in the women’s house: Ellie Thiry, Marjorie Severyns, and Peachy Durand, who was transferred from Chungking. Ellie, while working in Chungking the previous month, had fallen in love with a British major named Basil Summers (whom she would eventually marry).

  In the women’s house, white parachute silk draped the common room and deep blue coolie cloth covered the beds. The women were crowded five or six in a room, until Julia took over an addition to the women’s house, where she bunked with Mary Livingston Eddy, who had arrived (considerably later than expected, from Cairo) to take over the Registry. Because Julia had the office under control and Heppner wanted her to stay, she and Mary decided to divide the work between them.

  In a letter to a former colleague in Kandy, Julia confided that the OSS originally intended to send her to Calcutta when Mary arrived, and that she indeed received “propositions” to enter Secret Intelligence. But “by the time I learned anything about China the war would be over.” She was now convinced, she told her father, that China was the important place, “a life or death issue,” and “S.E.A. is now all British, and this is really US, and the OSS has a big contribution to make.” No one did her job better than she. She had an unflappable nature and daring enough to make a great spy.

  Mary Livingston joined the OSS to escape a failed marriage to a man named Eddy (she would marry Dillon Ripley after the war) and served in Algeria and Italy before China. She was five feet eight inches tall and elegant. Despite her New York 400 background she was adventurous and roughed it with aplomb. Unflappable as Julia, she enjoyed walking through the rice paddies to work with Paul, who remembered stumbling over a corpse there one day. Of her roommate, Julia wrote: “We had our sleeping bags and rolled them up on a cot made of ropes for a mattress across the bars of the cot. I would have loved to have Clorox because the plumbing, even when it worked, smelled so bad.” Mary: “I was in awe of Julia because she was older and so much in possession there; we knew what was going on and the people were fascinating. We had a big house and a cook who prepared American food, but Kunming had a lot of good restaurants and it was a treat to go out to eat.”

  They were accustomed to mechanical breakdowns (occasionally Julia would get all lathered up in the shower and the water would stop running), so when the projector stopped in the middle of a movie, everyone waited patiently. When the lights came up, they knew it was not an electrical failure, but a proclamation by radio: Churchill announced that Germany had surrendered that day, May 9, 1945. According to Ellie’s diary: “We listened to the announcement, and nobody said a word, except ‘that’s that,’ and we returned to the show. Soon it will end here as well, they all thought.”

  EATING CHINESE

  Julia was dining at a local Szechwan restaurant one hot summer night several weeks later with Jeanne Taylor and three men, including Paul Child and Al Ravenholt, a correspondent who spoke Chinese and knew the restaurant scene. On the other side of the pink silk screen was a Chinese general and his party of friends. After much noisy drinking the general became sick. “It was fortunate 2 gals were tough and worldly,” Paul wrote, “because there’s something about a Chinese general vomiting loudly a few feet away that might otherwise have taken the fine edge off the bowl of eels and garlic we were eating.”

  Julia was always hungry; in fact, Paul would later say, “she’s a wolf by nature.” But China awakened her discriminating taste: “[American] food in China was terrible; we thought it was cooked by grease monkeys. The Chinese food was wonderful and we ate out as often as we could. That is when I became interested in food. There were sophisticated people there who knew a lot about food…. I just loved Chinese food.” She was just as impressed that her sophisticated colleagues “talked so much about” the food they ate.

  In 1995, she recalled a visit to a family restaurant—probably Ho-Teh-Foo—in a building several stories high surrounding a courtyard where the kitchen was located. The waiter would “yell down the order and when ready they would pull the trays up by rope. The entire family was in the kitchen, mother and grandmother and children—just like the French family—everyone had a good time.” She relished the pleasure the Chinese took in dining, “making these great swooping, slurping noises as they ate.” She also preferred small portions of a great variety of food: “nuggets of chicken in soy sauce, deep-fried or in paper; always rice, pork, sweet-and-sour soup. The duck was always good, and everyone had a good time.” Manners dictated that when reaching for a bowl in the middle of the table, they had to keep “one foot on the floor, where we placed the tea when it was cold and the bowls when they were empty.”

  Though some praised the Army mess, the bland American food cooked by the Chinese in the barracks, Julia did not; she told Parade magazine in 1994 about “the terrible Army food: rice, potatoes, canned tomatoes and water buffalo [sic]. We would sit around and talk about the wonderful meals we remembered.” Betty remembers “mostly potatoes and stuff from cans” but not buffalo meat in the Army chow. This official cooking was presumably more sanitary, but Betty remembers that “we would get dysentery easily.” At one time or another, everyone (particularly Paul Child) suffered from some form of diarrhea or dysentery. One day one of the local chefs, who had been cooking over hot charcoal, was found dead on the floor. Dinner was served anyway.

  Those with educated mouths demanded taste and authenticity. Spending time with Paul meant more adventurous hunting for food, which was secured by OSS personnel who had been born in China and knew the language well. Louis Hector, who remembered the “beautiful Yunnan hams and the purple potatoes,” said Paul and Julia “organized the splendid feasts,” but Paul would remember that Theodore White first introduced him to the best eating places. Of course, in dining out they risked infection (the Chinese fertilized with “night soil [human waste]”), but the risk was worthwhile. Julia learned about Peking, Szechwan, Cantonese, Annamite, and Fukien techniques. As she noted in 1945, Chinese cuisine emphasized diversity, elegance (small portions), and health. “I am very, very fond of northern, Peking-style Chinese cooking. That’s my second favorite [cuisine]. It’s more related to French; it’s more structured,” she wrote.

  The restaurant as such originated in China (though its flowering in the West was due to French traditions) in the T’ang Dynasty (618–907 A.D.). According to anthropologists Peter Farb and George Armelagos, during the ancient Chou Dynasty twenty different methods of cooking were practiced in this oldest and most developed cuisine, where “a knowledge of food and drink marked one as educated.”

  Paul’s five years in France, beginning in 1925, led to talk of French cuisine and the dishes he looked forward to eating. He and Julia talked endlessly about food; as Gertrude Stein said about the French in general, they talk about talking about food. Paul met Stein and many other artists in Paris, including sculptor Jo Davidson and newspaperman Paul Mowrer, now married to Hadley Hemingway (Ernest’s first wife). He spoke lovingly of the preparation of quenelles and soufflés. For a girl who grew up thinking of the kitchen as “a dismal place,” Julia found revelations in the local Chinese cuisine and Paul’s food talk.

  THE CHILD TWINS

  Julia was learning a great deal about Paul and his identical twin brother, Charles (Charlie or Charleski), who was married with children and working for the State
Department, first in Washington and for a while in San Francisco. The father of Paul and Charlie died when they were six months old, and their mother, Bertha May Cushing (of the famous Boston Cushings), supported them and an older sister, Mary (or Meeda), by singing in Boston and Paris and through the kindness of strangers. His mother, an utterly impractical, pre-Raphaelite creature who died in 1937, taught her boys that (in Julia’s words) “artists are sacred.” Paul, whose only real family was Charlie’s family, returned from China with paintings and hundreds of photographs of the country and its people.

  Paul’s letters to his brother reveal his romantic consideration of several women in the compound. It had been Rosie Frame first in New Delhi, then in Chungking. Now it was Marjorie Severyns, who was bright, quick, and “my kind of woman.” The competition was “ferocious,” said Paul: “even the snaggle-toothed, the neurotic, the treacherous and the dim-witted among the women are hovered over by men, as jars of jam are hovered over by wasps.” But for Marjorie “the humming turns to an angry roar.” Guy Martin agreed: “She was sort of the ladylove, everybody thought of her as being very sexy; she had that kind of appeal. Marjorie and Rosamond were the best-looking ones.” Marjorie, the child of missionaries and a graduate of the University of Washington, had several affairs. However, Paul’s worldly charm (and devotion to women) could not defeat his chief rival, news correspondent Al Ravenholt, whom she would wed after the war. “None of the women seem to be the answer to my loneliness,” he wrote Charlie, after mentioning Rosie Frame and Nancy Davis, whom he still claimed to love deeply but who was writing only once a month. And he always came back to Edith Kennedy:

  You will never know what it is to feel profoundly lonely, to have y[ou]r vitals twisted by the need for companionship … but when you have sown the seed of love, weeded and watered its field, reaped its harvest and stored the golden grains, and: Then! The barn burns down, and the fields are flooded—well you become empty, unbased, and bereft…. since Edith’s death I am rootless, or soil-less.