Julia Child - Cooking Up Intrigue

When Julia McWilliams left Newport News, Va., by troop train to travel to California before her assignment in Southeast Asia, she was instructed to tell people she was a file clerk. She had been sworn to secrecy and forbidden to keep a diary. It was February 1944.

After seven days' travel by train and seven days of orientation in California, Julia and several other women were issued gas masks, fatigues, bedrolls, canteens, and pith helmets. In Long Beach, as these female civilians boarded the ss Mariposa, a cruise ship converted to a troop ship, they were greeted by the loud music of a band and the raucous wolf whistles of 3,000 enlisted men.

At sea the following morning, Julia, ever a leader, organized her friends to spread the word that they were traveling missionaries. (The men never fell for it.) The nine women shared one tub, toilet, and sink and washed out their stockings in their helmets. Stopping once along the way to take on fresh water, "We jumped off in Perth, Australia, and promptly hit the bars, then went looking for kangaroos," she recalled recently. Their ship was under military escort for the final week of travel, for fear of encountering Japanese submarines.

"Then, right after arriving in Bombay," Julia says, "we were startled by the sounds of a great explosion - a true snafu!" she chortles. "A ship in the harbor had caught fire and gotten loose from its moorings. The British, who ran everything in those days, were accustomed to taking two-hour lunches. So the unattended ship drifted into an ammunition ship, which then blew up."

Thus began the service and subsequent adventures of the woman we now know as Julia Child (her married name). Three-plus years in the newly organized Office of Strategic Services (OSS) - the first centralized U.S. spy service - would forever change the life of the late-blooming, 31-year-old Californian.

A carefree start Maids, a gardener, a Scottish nurse, and an Irish cook helped create a comfortable life for Julia, her parents, and a brother and sister in Pasadena, Calif. Hers was a family of strong historic East Coast roots, but her paternal grandfather had been drawn to California in the 1840s by the Gold Rush. Among her ancestors are Priscilla Alden, William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and that great adventurer, Richard Henry Dana, who wrote Two Years Before the Mast (The Narrative Press, 2001).

A tall child, Julia remembers always being hungry. In school plays, she acted in roles of an emperor or lion - never a princess. According to Noel Riley Fitch, author of a biography of Julia, Appetite for Life (Doubleday, 1997), "Julia was a tomboy who loved the rough-and-tumble life and competing with boys in sports: hiking, hunting, swimming, and playing golf and tennis." She wasn't taught to cook. Noisy, outgoing, mischievous, she and friends once removed a chandelier from someone's house.

After high school she went east to Smith College, as her mother had before her. Always at the center of good times, Julia later confessed in her college oral history project, "Someone like me should not have been accepted at a serious institution. I spent my time growing up and doing enough work to get by." Her marks reflected this: She received only two A's. After graduating in 1934, she worked in public relations in New York City and then returned to California, where she resumed a life of seeing friends, playing sports, and going to and giving parties.

"When the news came that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, I had, as usual, been out late the night before," she recalls. "I walked into our breakfast room, where my father was listening to the radio. His face was ashen." Julia soon volunteered for the Red Cross and the Aircraft Warning Service. By mid-1942, motivated by a desire to serve her country, she decided to go to Washington, D.C.

A new beginning Julia attempted to sign up with Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service but was rejected because she was 2 inches taller than its height limit (6 feet). "After that I always filled out forms with my height as '6 feet'," she says. She rented a room at the Brighton Hotel, installed a hot plate on the top of the refrigerator, and continued to party.

"I took a job - a horrible, horrible job - at 'Mellot's Madhouse' in an office building opposite the Willard Hotel. Day after day, I typed names on cards, names of anyone who was anyone in Washington, D.C., for the research unit of the Office of War Information, in the State Department. I thought I would go crazy." In two months she typed 10,000 names. When she left, "I worked so hard, they replaced me with two people."

"I had friends in the OSS, which sounded like a much nicer place to work. I had no skills, really, except language (and typing), but they needed office help in William J. 'Wild Bill' Donovan's office." She fit the mold that Donovan was looking for: a graduate of a good school with intelligence and a willingness to work hard. Although the work also was typing, Julia quickly rose to a leadership position and was promoted to senior clerk.

By midsummer 1943, she transferred to a new section, the Emergency Rescue Equipment, funded by the OSS but composed of personnel from several branches of government. As Fitch writes, "One of the experiments was to see if survivors in life rafts could squeeze a fish and drink the water from the fish's body. Naive, perhaps, but certainly in keeping with experiments of America's first espionage organization." Julia referred to it as the "fish-squeezing unit."

"Then, I heard they were recruiting people to go to India and China. I always knew I would get to go to Europe someday, but I never figured on getting to the Far East, so I jumped at the chance and was chosen to go." She said her good-byes to family and friends in March 1944.

In his book, The Greatest Generation (Random House Inc., 1998), Tom Brokaw wrote that the war was a pivotal event for so many members of Julia's generation, "As it did for so many women, the war liberated Julia Child, because she had no plans for her life." Caught in a time when there were not many career choices for young women, she was then thrust into demanding work. As she organized files in the OSS registry and created systems that allowed the secret intelligence work to function, she developed a work ethic that Brokaw extolls: "When the United States entered World War II, the government turned to ordinary Americans and asked of them extraordinary service, heroics and sacrifice."

Heading east After crossing the Pacific and arriving in India, the women discovered their assignment post had been changed. Instead of New Delhi, it would be Kandy, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where Supreme Commander Lord Louis Mountbatten had moved his headquarters. From the capital, Colombo, the women went by train to the town of Kandy. Along the way, Julia recalls, "Monkeys would fly into the train compartments, causing a ruckus."

Once at Kandy, Julia and the other female staffers were brought to the Queens Hotel, an old-fashioned place with canopy beds, mosquito netting, running water (occasionally), and clogged drains. "The doormen wore elaborate costumes - skirts, really - of golden material kept in place by ornamental belts, and were barefoot." The men assigned to the OSS, on the other hand, lived in 10-by-11 huts.

Headquarters was 7 miles away, at a tea plantation on Nandana, a British colonial estate. Julia's office was in a basha (palm-thatched) hut, located just beyond Mountbatten's botanical gardens. Guerrilla warfare against the Japanese was plotted in this beautiful setting, which overlooked a lake with flowering trees and terraced rice paddies. Nearby, elephants hauled logs and bathed themselves at the end of the day. Scorpions, tarantulas, leeches, and termites thrived in the warm tropical climate. For a woman whose only other "overseas" adventure had been day trips to Tijuana, Mexico, this was a foreign land indeed.

Though Julia would later say, modestly, "I was just a file clerk," she had a high security clearance for her work, which included all classified papers for the invasion of the Malaysian peninsula. She tracked sensitive documents, dispatches, and espionage/sabotage under the South East Asia Command, then headed by Mountbatten. A colleague in Air Force Intelligence, Byron Martin, stated that Julia "was privy to every top secret ... which required a person of unquestioned loyalty, of rock-solid integrity, of unblemished lifestyle, of keen intelligence." And Betty MacDonald McIntosh, who later wrote a book about the women of the OSS, Sisterhood of Spies (United States Naval Institute, 1998), reported, "Morale in her section could not be higher."

In July, Julia met Paul Child, a "one-man art factory," as she called him, who was 10 years her senior and quite sophisticated. He worked closely with the generals to set up the various war rooms, creating maps, drawings, and photography for the OSS's Presentation Department. She was enamored of Paul, but he was looking for a princess. It would be a while before he recognized that he preferred a lion.

The men and women who served in Kandy led lives of pressure, for the war was ever present. Julia and the other OSS staff would finish their day at 5 o'clock, "usually near some gin." In Kandy, many journalists, celebrities, and friends of friends would arrive, often expecting to be entertained. Communal dinners, cocktail parties, and social events were planned for some of the visiting bigwigs, including filmmaker John Ford, newsman Eric Sevareid, and writer Noel Coward as well as OSS and military visitors. On one occasion, Julia and her roommates hosted 300 OSS and military guests.

Grace under pressure By March 1945, the OSS had moved to China under the command of Navy Capt. Milton Miles. The base of operations was first Kunming, then Chongqing (Chungking), which was the free capital. The Marines had taken Iwo Jima and Okinawa; Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur was in the Philippines.

Julia was sent to China by way of Calcutta, India, and then flew "the hump" over the 15,000-foot peaks of the Himalayas. The turbulent, unpressurized flight on a frigid and rickety c-54 caused some people to get sick and others to pray. McIntosh, onboard the flight with Julia, says, "The c-54 shuddered, leveled off with a roar," and eventually found a hole in the clouds and landed south of Kunming. McIntosh thought Julia was "so cool" as she chatted with others and then confidently read a book.

Both Julia and Paul spent time in Kunming and Chongqing. In Kunming, as she had in Kandy, Julia set up a file system, employing her now well-regarded efficiency and tact. There were difficulties coordinating and directing the complex machinations of the rival Chinese leaders, the Nationalist Chiang Kai-shek and the Communist leaders Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai. According to Paul, "Julia was privy to all messages, both incoming from the field, or Washington, etcetera, and outgoing to our agents and operatives all over China-Burma-India."

By April, when Julia arrived in Chongqing, Chiang's headquarters, there was talk of her being spy material, as she possessed the kind of native intelligence and derring-do necessary for risky assignments. Yet, the war was coming to an end. On May 9, 1945, Germany surrendered; on Aug. 6, the United States dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.

In the final months before leaving China, the worldly Paul and the exuberant Julia began to pursue their romance. It was ironic that a woman who had never really cooked for herself was being courted by a man who had lived in France for many years, had cosmopolitan tastes, and was himself a good cook. Under Paul's tutelage, they frequented local restaurants, which were excellent - a welcome respite from the events of the war (and Army cooking). Julia began to study the differences between the Pekingese, Szechuan, Cantonese, and other styles of cooking, and to this day she rates Chinese her second favorite food (after French, of course).

Once back in the United States, Julia and Paul married and then moved to Paris in 1948, where Paul worked for the U.S. Information Service, in charge of exhibits and photography. Julia cultivated her growing interest in cooking by enrolling in the Cordon Bleu cooking school, where her strength, good humor, and willingness to work hard were noted by her instructors. In 1951, she and two French women, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, began their own cooking school. This partnership grew as they began collaborating on a cookbook that would become a classic.

American know-how Mastering the Art of French Cooking, published in September 1961 by Alfred A. Knopf, ended up 734 pages long and weighed in at 3 pounds. Finding, copying, and improving recipes; procuring the best ingredients; and then measuring, cooking, and altering proportions were all part of the eight years of work that went into Julia's first book. Her attention to detail was now a way of life, although it might never have happened without her training and experiences in the OSS.

The book was highly praised by such food luminaries as James Beard, M.F.K. Fisher, and Mimi Sheraton. Promoting the book, Julia appeared on a TV show called "I've Been Reading," on WGBH, a PBS affiliate in Boston. Of the 27 letters that the station received after the show (and this was in the days when public television station management wasn't sure that even 27 viewers were watching), nearly all appealed, "Get that woman back!"

By February 1963, WGBH had put together a small budget to tape a pilot show but didn't allot anything to rehearsals. The result, most observers later agreed, was both culinary and television history. There was Julia, panting and swooping around the studio kitchen, about to become a most unlikely, most unrehearsed star. With her broad shoulders, height, and utilitarian haircut, she looked more like a drill sergeant than Betty Crocker. She came to nationwide attention in a matter of weeks and, with a French chef then in the Kennedy White House, became the foremost interpreter of French cooking. Americans were on their way to bouillabaisse, coq au vin, and charlotte russe, even if they weren't sure how to pronounce them.

Many thought it was merely her unusual persona - the warbly voice that trilled up an octave, her forthright manner and exceptional good humor - that made her a success. If that were so, she would have lasted just one or two seasons. Russ Morash, her WGBH producer, pointed out that Julia is "a scholar, because she eats and breathes her subject, researches every detail, can take a set of directions and understand what the result will be, is totally comfortable with her subject, and is a recognized authority."

At age 90, Julia remains happy to give her theories on the approach to healthy and happy eating, "Eat half portions and try everything in moderation, concentrating on quality, not quantity." A culinary lion and an intrepid OSS file clerk, Julia makes a compelling case for living life to its fullest.

In all the years I watched and learned from Julia, I never had a clue about her politics.

I will remember her as the lady who taught me ("The French Chef Cookbook")page 25 how to make the best damn Mousse au Choclat dans le monde!

What a life and I never had an inkling before! (Take that John sKerry.) Never heard about her politics before except the one undetailed comment on this thread. People can have their opposing politics--especially if they serve this country well.

I didn't know her politics until now either, and can't let it shield my admiration for her cooking skills, shows and books. There have been so many afternoons I have enjoyed watching and learning from Julia! She reminded me so of my Grandma, who also passed last year at 91. They both taught me, along with my Mom, the joy of baking and cooking. I have many happy memories of watching Julia Child on PBS as a child (I think she followed Mister Rogers in the late afternoon) and she made me want to learn to cook. Seeing her on the Food Network a few years ago with Emeril brought a tear to my eye because you could see Emeril's admiration and pride in having her cooking next to him and how important that was to him, and allowing her to dictate. She was also a hoot to watch alongside of Jacques Pepin - they were always bickering like an old married couple, and actually published a cookbook "Cooking with Jacques and Julia" where they would each give their own version of a classic dish. I always thought that was a neat concept for a cookbook.

I'll lift a glass of wine to her tonight at dinner and hope she knows how many people she inspired to cook during her life's journey...she will be missed.

I remember reading a few years ago that she was on the board of directors for Handgun Control Inc. Not exactly something that endears me to anyone, however I do have to say that she never did introduce politics into her show that I know of. I wish her family the best at this difficult time.

We will forever remember the picture jiggling all over the screen, as the cameraman broke up on a livebroadcast decades ago.

Julia: "today, we are going to make a stew..."

"First, I will take a carrot, and chop it up, and throw it into the pot.

Next, I will take some celery, and chop it up, and toss it into the pot...

And now, I will take a leek..."

That was just too much for the poor guy to bare, as the audience started to snicker.

Poor Julia looked up, wondering what was wrong, but never missed a beat with the knife.

I prefer to remember her for the good things she contributed, not her later politics.

And it seem from the article she contributed a lot more than most of us knew.

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