A Covert Affair

by Jennet Conant

  When at their wit’s end, they could always refer to the pearls of wisdom contained in the OSS booklet on the China theater: “Lack of patriotism on the part of many Chinese may discourage you. Remember that their social system has been built on a strict loyalty to family rather than state.”

  All this contributed to the state of utter confusion that characterized life in Kunming. Every meeting adjourned with the idea that the day’s issues or resolutions needed further review at Chungking levels, the official seat of Allied high command, where Heppner kept his OSS office, close to Wedemeyer’s headquarters and Chiang Kai-shek’s center of government. In the meantime, brass was pouring into their little backwoods corner of the country. They were tripping over generals, senior staff officers, strategists, and tacticians, along with representatives of rival intelligence apparatuses, all of whom had their own elaborate schemes and agendas. And that was before taking into account Chiang’s people, who had to give official “clearance” to any proposed OSS operations, and plotted over cups of tea, aided by polite but sly interpreters. “The warp and woof of war-in-China is complex beyond belief,” Paul observed:

  The inner workings, the who-influences-who’s, the deals, the sleights of hand, the incredible chicaneries, the artistic venali-ties, the machinations and the briberies. Some facts are so incredibly romantic and sinister that only hearing hundreds of verbal reports from the mouths of the horses themselves finally convinces me of the dreadful reality of the under-the-sea war—the war of back alleys, back rooms, big parties, magnificent whores and equally magnificent blackmails. It almost becomes the “real” war, of which the news-war is only the surface expression.

  The chances for honest-to-God peace in China seemed almost impossible. Even with the European part of the war officially over, the action in their part of the world seemed to be amplifying. “Here all is preparation,” Paul reported to Charles with dismay. “Building up, plans for months ahead, materials and personnel being striven for and allocated, anticipated dangers faced.”

  With the prospects of going home anytime soon growing dimmer, the small OSS contingent dug in for the long haul. Their first experience of a Chinese spring made it more bearable. The mild weather lifted their spirits, and the gradual change of season and shy rays of sunlight made for a delightful change from the endless midsummer furnace of India and Ceylon. The plum trees blossomed, and jasmine and mimosa scented the air. They shed their heavy wool uniforms for lightweight khaki (unlike in India, everyone wore fatigues here, even on their days off) and organized sightseeing excursions, picnics, and boating parties on the lake. With the exception of the occasional movie on the compound, and the crowded, tacky Tennis Club, one of the few American nightspots, there was little entertainment except what they made for themselves.

  Paul, intent on exploring the area despite the warnings, organized “photo-walks” with the girls. They went up to the West Gate, where they could look down on a rolling sea of tile rooftops in the town below, or four miles out to Jialing, where they could go down to the river and watch the junks being rowed by twelve-man crews chanting songs as they passed. Julia was thrilled by the sight of a flotilla of baby ducks being guided by a young Chinese duck herder, who had no trouble keeping his charges in line with the stern flick of a long willow stick.

  One Sunday afternoon, Paul managed to snag a jeep and a bottle of mulberry wine, and he and Julia “struck off into the great unknown”:

  The weather was incredibly inspiring: hot sun and cool air, sparkling sky, breeze enough, scattered cloud. The great mountains lay around us like back-broken dragons. God, what a beautiful country—the mud villages with their green-tiled towers, the flocks 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 Neuvic, 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.

  Although it was “a good afternoon,” these platonic outings did little to assuage the deep loneliness that assailed him. He did not lack for company, but it was the true companionship—the deep connection that came with a long-term, committed relationship—that he craved. Paul was increasingly consumed by the fear that he was fated to spend the rest of his life alone. He had been in the Far East for more than a year, and his sense of frustration and unfulfilled need were beginning to take a toll. “Perhaps you will never know what it is to feel profoundly lonely,” he wrote his twin, who was happily married with a brood of three. “Well, you become empty, unbased, and bereft.” Paul regarded his brother, Charles, and his wife, Freddie, to be joined at the hip, and routinely addressed them in his letters as “Chafred.” The latest cause of his discontent was Marjorie Severyns, a striking twenty-five-year-old green-eyed brunette from Yakima County, Washington. She had recently come from Delhi, where she had manned the MO office with Betty MacDonald, and had been asked to help set up their intelligence office. To Paul, everything about her—from her trim frame to her perfectly tanned skin—seemed to exude the best of the American West, and she bowled him over with her health, beauty, and stamina. He had never been one to believe in “love at first sight,” he told Charles, but now he knew himself to be “a victim.” Here was his Zorina, a “superior spirit,” at last and enfin:

  I’ve talked to her once—at table—but we sat for an hour after the meal was over and then walked through some rice paddies for another half an hour, both reluctant to stop. I feel strongly drawn to her and she to me. She understands double entendre, and suggestion, completely, which makes conversation creative…. She has a first class brain and is widely informed, wonderfully quick, subtle and humorous, but very earnest about life and its problems and possibilities. You begin to love women like that the moment you see them, almost.

  Paul’s feelings intensified in the weeks that followed. “Marjorie continues to be an unusual and darling human being,” he wrote, adding that the situation was not particularly hopeful as there was a long line of suitors (“all wolves”) beating a path to her door ahead of him, including a tall, young United Press reporter named Al Ravenholt who was movie-star handsome. The competition for women in their conglomerate American outpost was “ferocious.” There were at least forty men for every woman, and the most fetching (Peachy and Rosie) were reportedly dated up to three weeks in advance. Ellie Thiry was already being monopolized by a Major Francis Basil Summers, a dashing British army intelligence officer who had been on the stage in London before the war and positively reeked of derring-do. Summers had spotted Ellie standing next to Julia at an officers’ club party their first night in Kunming and announced then and there that he was going to marry her.*

  “A good many of the men here are extremely attractive, competent, experienced, and interesting, as you can imagine they would be in such a place at such a time,” Paul fretted in a letter to Charles. “Even the snaggle-toothed, the neurotic, the treacherous, and the dim-witted among women are hovered over by men, as jars of jam are hovered over by wasps.” When it came to someone as lovely and beguiling as Marjorie, that hovering-over turned to “an angry roar.”

  The danger and isolation, together with the confined nature of their existence within Kunming’s tall walls, conspired to bring people closer together. “We were pulled together by circumstance,” recalled Betty, and inevitably quite a number “paired off.”

  Betty had fallen in love with her handsome CO, Dick Heppner, during the year they spent in Ceylon, and by the time they reached Kunming there was no longer any point in trying to hide their relationship. Everyone knew everything about everyone else in their tiny circle. After work, she and Dick often went for long walks in the ancient cemetery just outside town, trailed by his adopted little cocker spaniel puppy, Sammy. As they made their way among the grave mounds and c
rumbling monuments, Heppner poured out his anxiety and guilt about all the young men he sent into the field and feared would not come back. “We talked and talked and talked,” said Betty, “he was terribly worried.” She had not seen Alex for many months, and had no idea where he was or what he was doing. Heppner had not seen his wife in Washington in over two years. “We did not know what was going to happen next week or next month,” she added. “Everything was uncertain. It was like being in limbo. And we were all very lonely.”

  By mid-May, Paul’s infatuation with Marjorie had him in a state of acute misery. He had courted her patiently and tenderly, twice invited her to dine in his rooms, read to her, written intimate letters (she never answered them) and a love poem, all to no avail. If Marjorie was not the long-awaited wonder woman of Bartleman’s predictions, “how could it be any other?”

  With what he saw as almost “calculated perversity,” the pattern fate had laid down for his emotional life was repeating. Once again, as in Dehli those many moons before, his friend Tommy Davis had arrived on the scene and turned the head of the one woman on whom Paul’s heart was set. Now that he had tired of Nancy Toyne, the glamorous, married Tommy had moved on to Marjorie, who appeared all too amenable to his attentions. “So now, as before, I am twisting over the fire,” Paul wrote Charles. “I find it hard to sleep, food nauseates me slightly, and my mind virtually refuses to remain on anything but my personal problems.” He did not blame Tommy for his predicament; it only added “a drop of gall to the mixture.” That did not make it any easier to watch them together—laughing as they bicycled to work, holding hands as they crossed the compound, cooing and cuddling like newlyweds.

  Sick with jealousy, he sent Marjorie a letter confessing his torment (“all the classic symptoms”) and asking for her understanding if he seemed cold or distant. She had warned him she would not be able to reciprocate his kind of love, but the interdiction came too late. He penned another poem—not written to or for anyone—but designed only to help purge the bitterness that curdled his soul. This he forwarded to his twin with a full account of his suffering:

  These prison-wires strung round my bones

  Bear cryptic messages from the heart.

  Wasteland, wasteland—never a bush—

  No gushing coolness under the rock,

  Devoid of butterfly and buttercup.

  Vacant as an idiot’s eye.

  These pipes, pulsing in my flesh,

  Water no garden, fertilize no flower.

  Bitter, bitter on the sand is love.

  Love lost, love never gained, love unfulfilled.

  The teeming world is lonely as a mooreland,

  As a bird in the middle of the sea.

  Paul had no choice but to retire with grace. He wrote Charles that he was swearing off young girls for good. He had finally learned that it would never work. (“I know too much and they don’t know enough.”) In the meantime, he hated his life. He had no gusto for anything—not eating, or painting, or reading. Not even the articles about V-E Day that Charles had sent and the realization that war was really over in Europe could cheer him up. The days dragged by monotonously. He devoted himself to his job with great determination and rigidity. He slept, ate, and worked. Work was his great escape. He would have preferred love, but “the work was available.” He had dinner with Tommy, who was soon heading off on a mission, and Julia, who had been transferred permanently to Kunming. They drank copious amounts of vodka, made by yet another White Russian. “We talked about the future, which is futile, and the past, which is even more futile,” he reported. His spirits were very low. He had heard that two officers he was fond of had been killed in one week. It was “hard to take.”

  In July, Jeanne Taylor arrived from Kandy, and she and Julia did their best to cheer him up. Paul wrote Charles that their intellect and humor were “morale-building,” far more than the latest bulletin from Jane Bartleman, who had told him to expect “a year of plugging still to come.” One night Paul and the girls went to dinner with Al Ravenholt, who regaled them with the story of his big scoop—when CBS correspondent Eric Sevareid’s plane went down over the Hump and everyone was desperate to find out what had happened to him and the crew. Ravenholt had beat out all the competition by raising Sevareid on his walkie-talkie and reported to the world that they had all parachuted to safety in the Burmese jungle. Julia surprised them by capping his story with an amusing anecdote. The OSS officer Duncan Lee had gone down in the same plane as Sevareid and had told her that the newsman had been cool-headed enough to rescue one item before he jumped: a quart of gin he had promised a friend in Chungking. “He was terribly conscientious about it—and delivered it intact,” continued Julia. “Didn’t touch a drop during the two days he was walking through the jungle.” Although she insisted it was true, no one believed her.

  As the night wore on, they found themselves in the same long room—separated by a pink silk screen—as a Chinese general and his party of friends. The Chinese got very drunk, particularly the general. “It was fortunate our two gals were tough and worldly,” Paul noted in his first cheerful letter home in weeks. “There’s something about a Chinese general vomiting a few feet away that might otherwise have taken the fine edge off the bowl of eels and garlic we were eating.”

  A few days later, Paul reported that he, Julia, and Jeanne, along with two other guys, had spent a pleasant weekend together. They had all packed into a jeep and driven forty miles up the Burma Road, where they turned off and headed up into the mountains to a tiny hotel with hot spring that had been built by Governor Long Yun of Yunnan province in 1943. The resort was called Wenjen and was a favorite of off-duty GIs as well as high-ranking members of the Kuomintang, who came to partake of the curative benefits of the radium baths. They all soaked in the steaming water that bubbled up from an underground stream, meekly choosing one of the more temperate baths after the moon-faced manager warned that only hardened veterans—those who stayed for more than a week—could brave the premium pools. These, he boasted in his incongruous English, were “hotsy totsy.” Afterward, Jeanne recalled a glowing, pink-skinned Julia declaring: “Do you realize that if everyone in the damned war had a Sani Hot Springs bath every day, it would be over by now?” That night, Paul and his two male colleagues piled into one bedroom, while Julia and Jeanne shared another. The next day they all went for a long walk in the pouring rain along fields of ripening rice and up through a trail of thick pines to a monastery. The mountains looked magnificent cloaked in a heavy mantle of gray mist. Looking down on the emerald green valley, Paul again felt inspired by the beauty and drama of China.

  Paul did everything with Julia that other couples did without acknowledging that they were one. They planned their days off together and went on hikes in the hills, jeeped to the Black Dragon Pool temple to collect rare stone rubbings, and went sampaning at twilight on the lake. They went on shopping trips, explored the crowded flower markets, and visited out-of-bounds Chinese restaurants where they sampled the different cuisines—Fukinese, Pekinese, Annamese, Szechuan, and Cantonese. He applauded her adventurousness in bypassing the flown-in American chow available at the Red Cross canteen to join him in these forbidden feasts, in which they binged on steamed dumplings, crisp duck, mixed green vegetables, and succulent baby frog legs swimming in sweet-and-sour sauce. Invariably, the outings were followed by bacillary distress (dysentery), which might as well have been on the menu and was, as a consequence, a major topic of dinner table conversation among Chinese and Westerners alike. Paul took pleasure in helping to educate Julia’s meat-and-potatoes palate, and he looked on with real pride as she became a champion chopstick wielder. “They were an odd couple, but it turned out to be a very good match,” recalled Thibaut de Saint Phalle. “Julia did not feel she was very beautiful and was delighted to be with someone like him. Paul felt he was in charge of her, and she let him think that, and they were very good together.”

  Over the course of these outings, Paul began to see Julia in a
new light. He was impressed with her competence in riding herd on a staff of ten assistants and “running a very complicated operation with great skill.” He also liked that she was gutsy; he observed in a letter to Charles that she was “a wonderful ‘good scout’ in the sense of being able to take physical discomfort, such as mud, leeches, tropical rains, and lousy food.” She seemed completely “unflappable,” as in Betty’s account of their white-knuckle flight over the Hump—when the lights began to flicker and the plane bucked and rolled through lightning and icy rain, and she looked over to see Julia calmly reading a book as though she had made the Himalayan run a million times. “The China theater was a lot rougher than Ceylon,” acknowledged Betty. “Julia rose to the occasion. It brought out the best in her.”

  All the time Paul and Julia spent together did not go unnoticed. “They were always together,” recalled Betty, laughing. “We were all rooting for a romance. We watched their relationship develop day by day.” They lived in very close quarters, and everyone could see exactly what was going on, even though the couple in question remained clueless. Most evenings after dinner, Paul would head to Julia’s room, taking his artwork, along with favorite novels and volumes of poetry. Though he had earlier complained to his brother that part of his problem was that he “never liked the idea—which is so appealing to many men—of Man the Sculptor, molding and shaping a woman to his desire,” Paul had made rather a project of Julia. “He sort of took her on like one of the trainees in his design section,” mused Betty. “He would read aloud to her for hours. Everyone knew she was completely mad about him. I don’t know why it took him so long to get it.”