A Covert Affair

ALSO BY JENNET CONANT

The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington

109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos

Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II

Simon & Schuster
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Copyright © 2011 by Jennet Conant

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition April 2011

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Photo credits appear on page 397.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Conant, Jennet.

A covert affair: Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS / Jennet Conant—1st Simon & Schuster hardcover ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Child, Julia. 2. Child, Paul, 1902–1994. 3. World War, 1939–1945—Secret service—United States. 4. United States. Office of Strategic Services—Biography. 5. Intelligence officers—United States—Biography. 6. Child, Julia—Homes and haunts—Europe. 7. Child, Paul, 1902–1994—Homes and haunts—Europe. 8. McCarthy, Joseph, 1908–1957. 9. Anti-communist movements—United States—History—20th century. 10. United States—Politics and government—1945–1954. I. Title.

D810.S8 C3863   2011
940.54'85092273—dc22                2011002875

ISBN 978-1-4391-6352-8
ISBN 978-1-4391-6850-9 (ebook)

To Betty

for all her stories

Thanks to the human heart by which we live
,

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears
,

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

—William Wordsworth

1 Special Inquiry

2 Initiation

3 Late Start

4 A Fine Sort

5 Instant Fame

6 The Great White Queen of Bali

7 Chickens Coming Home to Roost

8 Whispers in the Willow Trees

9 Incurable Romantics

10 Open Season

11 The Nightmare

12 The Taste of Ashes

Epilogue

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

A COVERT AFFAIR

It started with the arrival of a telegram. Ever since the war, the thin slip of a letter had become permanently fixed in people's minds as a harbinger of death and disaster. Why Julia believed for one moment that it would be good news she could not recall—just that she had been so sure. The cable, which reached them in Bonn on Thursday, April 7, 1955, was addressed to her husband, Paul Child. The cursory message took the form of an urgent summons to Washington:
REPORT SOONEST
FOR CONSULTATION.

Julia had been over the moon. She knew exactly why Paul was being called stateside. They were going to make him
“head of the department.”
She had even told him as much, her voice brimming with confidence and pride. Incapable of containing her excitement, she had been ready to celebrate then and there. It was silly of her, but characteristic, too. She had gone on happily speculating about the telegram the rest of the evening. Paul had eventually gotten caught up in her mood, his reluctant, mock impatience giving way to anticipation. This, at last, was his promotion, long deserved and long overdue. Then again, when had the State Department ever done anything in a timely fashion?

She supposed they should be grateful. Paul had never been particularly ambitious and because he had little patience with bureaucracy had remained mired in the middle ranks of the Foreign Service. He had never intended to pursue a diplomatic career and lacked the necessary instincts. He had simply been rolled into the State Department after the war and eventually found himself, along with most of his old department, reorganized into the newly formed United States Information Service (USIS).
*
His particular field, “visual presentation,” which had once involved designing and running war rooms in such exotic locales as India and China, now encompassed such mundane matters as arranging press and special events for the agency's European missions. As Foreign Service jobs went, it was a somewhat unglamorous backwater, and it was unlikely he would rise very far. That suited Paul just fine, Julia knew. It meant he would have more time to devote to his artistic sidelines—the writing, painting, and photography that he found infinitely more satisfying. The job was just something he got on with, did well, and left on Fridays at five. Still, it was only right that after years of toiling under a succession of bores and simpletons (his current superiors were known to the staff as
“Woodenhead the First”
and “Wooden-head the Second,” or WH1 and WH2 for short) Paul was finally going to get his due. Perhaps he would get to run his own show or, at the very least, be allowed to pick the members of his own team. There were few things more demoralizing, in Julia's opinion, than “working for people you don't admire.”

It was just the morale boost they both needed. Six months earlier, Julia and Paul had been forced to leave their beloved France and, crueler still, an adorable apartment in the old port city of Marseille, because of an inane government decree that a diplomatic post in any given country could not exceed a period of four years. The three years they had spent in Paris directly after the war, followed by a fifteen-month stint on the southern coast, meant they had exceeded the limit. They had no choice but to pack up and go where they were told.

The transfer to Bonn could not have come at a worse time. Julia had been in the midst of testing recipes for a French cookbook she was contracted to write for the Boston publisher Houghton Mifflin with two fellow gourmands she had met in Paris. She knew that the new assignment for Paul not only would take her farther from her collaborators, but would remove her from the country in whose cuisine she should be immersing herself. As difficult as it had been for her to box up her kitchen in Marsailles, Julia understood that the move was infinitely harder on Paul. He had spent his formative years in France, and the language had become second nature to him, as had the internecine squabbling of the locals. The country had captured his heart long before it had taken hold of hers.

Leaving Paris for Marseilles had been a wrenching experience, but it was nothing compared to the jolt that Julia and Paul experienced upon learning they were being posted to Bonn. Paul was fluent in a number of languages, but German was not one of them. It was a poor use of his skills, and he was beside himself. While he had long since reconciled himself to the fact that few things in their government agency followed the dictates of logic, this yank of the chain was particularly galling. Julia could think of nothing to say to cheer him up. She had never set foot in Germany and was
“horrified”
at the thought. Her memories of World War II were too fresh for her not to dread the idea of settling in Bonn, which had temporarily replaced Berlin as the official seat of the government because it reportedly had less historical baggage. She could only hope she would think better of the new West German capital for having escaped the brunt of the Nazi boot.
“To think of living in Germany,”
she grimly wrote Paul's family. “Will I ever get over the imagined smell of the gas chambers and the rotting bodies of the Concentration camps. Will we ever be able to learn the language in a couple of months?”
*