Appetite For Life_ The Biography Of Julia Child Part 3

On September 6, 1936, Tom wrote a "Dear Julia" letter, in which he said he did not love her, and immediately left town. Two weeks later she bought a gold-leafed, lockable ledger to confide her heartbreak. She called it jilting-she sobbed when he told her before fleeing to Detroit-and she called it "excruciating." It hurt her stomach. When a friend told her this was not unusual, she concluded it was merely a biological fact.

She lost him to a Smith College acquaintance a few years ahead of her: Isabel (Izzy) Holmes McMullen (Smith '32), and she felt betrayed when she found out he had been seeing her all along. But she gave her emotional "blight" one year. Her roommates comforted her, as did Dort during a visit to the city, and Gay Bradley, who was living there at the time. One called him "a jerk ... he did not tell her he was going with another girl, typical male behavior if they can get away with it." Julia also found comfort in poetry, copying Elinor Wylie's "My heart's delight, I must for love forget you" into her diary (the next December she wrote "pooh!" beside the poem).

Julia converted her heartache into action for her younger sister, Dort, who was studying at Bennington College and had come to visit Julia during the Bennington weekend dance. Julia gave her a good talking-to about accepting her height. Julia understood the feeling of being "big and unsophisticated"-wrote her a "fighting" letter about learning to be at ease socially. Perhaps because Dorothy was even taller than her six-foot-two-inch sister and without Julia's status as the eldest child in the family, she cultivated her distinction by joining others who were outside the traditional gang. She sought out the artists and misfits, with whom she identified. They were also more interesting. Julia, in part because she was the "responsible" older sibling with self-esteem, and in part because she truly wanted to be accepted, chose the role of cla.s.s clown and best friend.

In talking about the social and financial advantages of being tall, John Kenneth Galbraith, Julia future's neighbor, says: General De Gaulle once said to me at a big gathering in Washington, "Professor, what is your philosophy of your vast height?" So I said what I've said before, "We tall men are taller than anybody else, therefore we're visible, therefore we're more closely watched, therefore our behavior is better, and the world instinctively trusts tall men." And De Gaulle said, "Magnifique" "Magnifique" And then in a wonderful rolling voice added, "There's one thing you have forgotten. The small man must be treated without mercy." And then in a wonderful rolling voice added, "There's one thing you have forgotten. The small man must be treated without mercy."

The advantages of height for adult men may be evident, but the price that is paid for taking up s.p.a.ce and power as an adolescent girl is a high psychological one, despite the future advantages.

Julia spent the next several months a.n.a.lyzing her emotions and what men want in women. She made a list of what she wanted from marriage, beginning with intellectual stimulation and ending with "FUN and complete mutual understanding and respect." She concluded that she had little sense emotionally and later regretted that she had written Tom that she still loved him. She called on discipline and daily heroism after reading Aldous Huxley's Eyeless in Gaza Eyeless in Gaza. Her turn to books helped her get over her heartbreak, especially reading Huxley, for she admired his life of discipline and "greed for achievement." Having discipline must be ecstasy, she declared, before deciding that her diary "is a catharsis of the emotions!" An immature catharsis. She was also reading Gertrude Stein, finding that her work may sound pretty clever, but lacked discipline, "like playing the piano and missing the tempo." And she read Bernard DeVoto on James Joyce's Ulysses Ulysses, the novel she had tried to read at Smith ("the last chapter is ... the holy devil to read until you get in the mood"). Punctuation and order were a.s.surances she needed at this time in her life, she said in a brief essay on the subject in the back of her diary.

During a c.o.c.ktail party she was giving in January 1937 to introduce Gay Bradley to friends, she was told privately that Tom and Izzy were married on New Year's Day. She broke down in tears again. When his letter came informing her of his marriage, she wrote several bitter and childish drafts of a return letter into her diary, expressing anger at his deception, then mailed a breezy and affectionate congratulations to the newly married couple. She determined she disliked writing publicity stories, because she hated "pushing" and "selling" things. Finally, she found herself "bored with nightclubs" and champagne. "Julia of the almost spring," she wrote self-mockingly toward the end of her diary keeping. It was April, and when she would go home for Gay's wedding in May, she would stay.

Though later Julia believed she left New York in the spring of 1937 because her mother was ill, family letters reveal that no one knew how ill her mother was at that point. Though her diary declared she was leaving the city because "I do not want to be a business woman!" her job at Sloane's had never been better. She received a raise to $30 a week and her boss had great confidence in her. When she informed him she was leaving in May, he insisted, "In two years, I can make you the biggest advertising woman in New York City!" She joked in her diary that she already was the biggest! was the biggest! Perhaps the compelling reason for her flight, other than emotional immaturity, was depression over the failure of her first pa.s.sionate love. This girl of boundless energy had lost her confidence. She started missing deadlines in the office. Perhaps the compelling reason for her flight, other than emotional immaturity, was depression over the failure of her first pa.s.sionate love. This girl of boundless energy had lost her confidence. She started missing deadlines in the office.

New York offered a post-baccalaureate education without specialization, though she honed her writing and management skills and acquired a bit more sophistication (Babe certainly considered her more worldly-wise; Caro called her "more methodical and business like" and "less nervous.") In fact, Julia's face-to echo a Graham Greene line-bore no experience beyond the school. Years later, when a friend complimented her on her "wonderfully worldly expression" in a photograph, Julia replied, "It is the face I always try to wear when I am in New York, with no success." She was also slowly changing her social and political views, voted for Roosevelt in 1936, and was reading more socially engaged literature. One of the book reviews she tried writing was of Give Us This Day Give Us This Day, Louis Java's story of a struggling baker whose daily one hundred hand-kneaded loaves cannot compete with the machines of big business. Beneath a brief and sympathetic review of this mediocre novel, someone typed a tough statement that could have been written by her father saying that the novel was "communist" and "full of dull defeated people."

She herself was not ready to compete in this tough city, especially not emotionally. She shared the belief of John Steinbeck, who fled the city (from her neighborhood) in defeat several years earlier, that the "climate is a scandal ... traffic is madness ... compet.i.tion is murderous"-but if you can succeed, it has "everything." After returning with success behind him in 1943 and making the city his home, Steinbeck added, "All of everything is concentrated here ... and its air is charged with energy." Julia also would embrace the city after her own success, but it would take her more than a decade.

CARO'S ILLNESS When Julia arrived home in Pasadena, her mother was ill with what they thought was the "indigestion." In fact years of (then) uncontrollable high blood pressure had affected all her mother's organs. But the family was not fully aware of the extent of her deterioration. A touch of "the flu" was really kidney damage-uremic poisoning. She had already been regularly to Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla for "successful" blood pressure and kidney treatments. When her complexion became yellow and her nausea and dizziness increased, she was taken by ambulance to San Diego again. On July 10, Julia wrote Dort that their mother was "100% better." She died at sixty years of age on July 21, 1937, two months after Julia's return. Julia was the only child at her side because John was in Ma.s.sachusetts working for the Weston Paper Company and Dort was doing summer theater stock in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

The loss of her mother-a loss that grew more devastating for Julia each month-drove her back to the diary she began in New York City at the loss of her first great love: "I had a feeling, I guess I really knew before I came out here that she would die. I knew it, I knew she'd be dead by this fall, but I didn't realize it. I could have been much nicer to her. I could have been with her more...."

After Dort and John returned from the East Coast together, Julia Carolyn Weston McWilliams was cremated and a minister conducted a simple funeral in the family home. Unknown to the children, their mother's ashes were kept in an urn in their father's office.

Julia would remember staying home to help supervise the house staff and offer support for her father; but her siblings remember that w.i.l.l.y took over the management of the house. Instead of breaking with her father's conservatism, Julia was brought back into his world, playing golf with him at the Midwick Country Club. Filial love softened the edges of the distance she always experienced with this reserved man.

He is a strange but wonderful man [she wrote in her diary], and doesn't have much of the light touch or the abandon that would make this easier. He has wit and humor of course. I can see something else, he does not have an abandon for life. He sees it well-planned and sober, and, I think, pretty unexciting.... that McW family is pretty sober and serious, and he, being his Father's only son, had a great deal of resp[onsibility] drummed into him from the beginning.

Julia's brother remembered that during these years when he and his sisters were older and brought strong opinions of their own to the table, Mr. McWilliams sometimes stormed out of the dining room. His children could no longer "be seen but not heard."

Julia loved the sprawling, sunny openness of Southern California, which demanded an a.s.sertion of will against its broad s.p.a.ciousness. Her will, however, was not strong just then. She did not stay home just to support her father. During this fall there were two job opportunities sent to her from Smith College: a.s.sistant to the advertising manager at Harcourt, Brace & Company in New York City and secretary at Reid Hall in Paris (a residence hall for the International a.s.sociation of University Women). Though Julia had long wanted a job in the publishing world, she did not respond to either opportunity. Grief-stricken and still under the influence of her father, who wanted her to stay home, she felt as though her wings were clipped. She also had a job writing a monthly column on Southern California fashion for a new magazine to be published by family friends in San Francisco.

Coast, which she described as a New Yorker New Yorker type of magazine, would publish in 1938 and go bankrupt in mid-1939. Julia spent the fall of 1937 contacting the major department stores in Los Angeles for information about their clothes and accessories. Before she left to spend a family Christmas with Aunt Theodora in Dalton, she sent in an article on fall suits, coats, hats, and accessories at Los Angeles stores and informed the magazine that she was stopping in New York City to contact the major department stores about getting fashion information early, as did type of magazine, would publish in 1938 and go bankrupt in mid-1939. Julia spent the fall of 1937 contacting the major department stores in Los Angeles for information about their clothes and accessories. Before she left to spend a family Christmas with Aunt Theodora in Dalton, she sent in an article on fall suits, coats, hats, and accessories at Los Angeles stores and informed the magazine that she was stopping in New York City to contact the major department stores about getting fashion information early, as did Vogue Vogue and other publications. Though it was not a full-time job, her work at and other publications. Though it was not a full-time job, her work at Coast Coast had promise (even if they were late in sending her the $25-a-column fee). had promise (even if they were late in sending her the $25-a-column fee).

The pieces she researched and wrote each month demonstrate a growing sophistication. Her style moves from a respectable "with matching accessories" style to her own jaunty voice ("On this matter of ski wear, I should like to say with sepulchral firmness: Don't dress yourself up like a b.l.o.o.d.y Alpine Christmas tree"). The essays gave the inside tips on society and clothes, with price and location, revealing that Julia got around and talked to many people (always at Bullocks-Wilshire, Robinsons, Saks Fifth Avenue, and several other stores from Beverly Hills to Palm Springs). An essay describing a group of stores ent.i.tled "Fifth Avenue on Wilshire" (June 1938) covered the opening of Saks Fifth Avenue and included photographs of Mrs. Gary Cooper, Dolores del Rio, and Sophie Tucker. Other essays focused on ski equipment and clothes (January 1938), travel clothes (July 1938), Paris fashions available in Southern California (October 1938), and the clothing styles of UCLA, USC, and Scripps College students (September 1938). For each essay Julia arranged photographs and quoted prices. The energy and ingenuity of her administrative and artistic skills as Southern California fashion editor went largely unrewarded when the magazine went bankrupt. But they show, even in a restricted and cliche-ridden medium, that Julia's writing skills were strengthening.

SOCIAL b.u.t.tERFLY.

By January, Julia told her diary: "Have decided I am really only a b.u.t.terfly. All I want to do is play golf, piano, and simmer, and see people, and summer and live right here." She would later call the five years after her mother's death her "social b.u.t.terfly" years. Sometimes when she sat for interviews about her life, she would leave out this period altogether. There were moments when she was bored, restless, hopeless, impotent, and depressed that everyone else was married. "I shall be interested to see if I am ever a happy success."

She a.s.sessed herself in her diary in 1940 and decided to have energy and enthusiasm: "Charm-get it!" she wrote. She was following her mother's dictates: "personality is everything." Caro had written in a letter to Dort on January 17, 1934: "You two girls certainly are following my old motto 'personality is everything.'" Two months before she had written: "Get up and do more things and be much more-don't be a n.o.body." Thus, Julia kept active. Her alb.u.ms are full of photographs of her hunting, golfing at Pebble Beach, skiing in Idaho, playing tennis. Her favorite sport was golf. She cut back on skiing after she again damaged the lunar cartilage in her knee. By May 1941 she had to have cartilage removed from one of her knees, exacerbating her early injuries. As with many people taller than average, her knees would be her weak spot all her life, yet she traveled from Tijuana, Mexico, to San Francisco, where she conferred with the editors of Coast Coast and frequently visited with her friend Gay Bradley Wright. Julia was full of energy and curiosity about the world around her. Reading (Ortega y Ga.s.set) and music absorbed her also, and she went to the Los Angeles Symphony, where Marian Anderson appeared in March 1938. In the back of her diary, she listed texts that had inspired her, and she continued to study music and language in this era of self-improvement and Dale Carnegie. and frequently visited with her friend Gay Bradley Wright. Julia was full of energy and curiosity about the world around her. Reading (Ortega y Ga.s.set) and music absorbed her also, and she went to the Los Angeles Symphony, where Marian Anderson appeared in March 1938. In the back of her diary, she listed texts that had inspired her, and she continued to study music and language in this era of self-improvement and Dale Carnegie.

In June 1939 she attended both Dort's graduation from Bennington and her own fifth reunion of the Smith cla.s.s of 1934. Connie Thayer (now Cory) planned the reunion, which saw them dressed in Scots kilts, sash, and hat in honor of President Neilson. The day of the parade, they marched at dawn to the president's home and sang to him and his wife, in bathrobes: "Oh, President Neilson, to you we sing / Whatever may happen, what'er time may bring ..." A lot of giggling and fun, it seemed to Julia, who also observed that everyone, including Connie, was pregnant and talked a lot about babies. When her girlfriends went home to babies, living out the dream of the "socialized" young woman of that time, Julia returned to Pasadena alone.

Julia became more involved with the Junior League, which turned out to be an outlet for her playwriting and dramatic talents as well as a commitment to her civic responsibilities, following in the footsteps of her good-citizen father. The league, which met at the Huntington Hotel, gave plays for children in the civic auditorium to raise money for charities and family services. Julia played Abu, the faithful servant of an inventor in Arabian Nights Arabian Nights, on February 10 and 11, 1939. Mary Frances Russell and other friends saw in these performances the star quality, drama, presence, stature, and commanding voice of would-be famous Julia Child. As she had done for the attic productions of the McWilliams and Hall gang, Julia wrote several of the plays for the Junior League, including "Bean Boy," a two-act musical set in Monterey in 1820, "The Bells of Brittany," a two-act fantasy, and "The Mississippi Belle," set in 1875. In each, she placed young people in period clothes either on the water or in caves, escaping an evil figure. Among these scripts in her private collection is a tight and cynical black radio drama set in New York City, "A Helping Hand," which is certainly not intended for children.

Julia also wrote essays for the Pasadena Junior League News Pasadena Junior League News, a professional publication, including an essay, "The Intelligent Woman Voter," which encouraged involvement in the League of Women Voters. She continued to write book reviews, as she had in New York, which reveal a growing depth of a.n.a.lysis and sophisticated writing style, though the choice of books was sometimes questionable. Even a two-page witty verse encouraging Junior Leaguers to sell tickets to the annual dog show at the Santa Anita Kennel shows a writer in development.

Apart from civic involvement, Julia now had an active social life: "I want lots of people around who are stimulating and with whom I feel intoxicated and clever and charming and a part," she told her diary. Now that Gay Bradley was in San Francisco, her closest friend was Katy Gates, who in November 1939 had married Julia's friend Freeman (Tule) Gates. The Gates family had long been friends of the McWilliamses, and Tule, like her male cousins, was a graduate of the Thatcher School in Ojai. He was a strapping guy like so many of her California friends. Their parties centered on San Malo, where the Meyers twins lived next door, and on the ranch of Tule's cousin Florence Baldwin in Ojai, near Santa Barbara. Julia remembers the "wild weekends" at San Malo, where her father had built a large dormered, Ye-Olde-English house on a cliff above the beach, a home with brick walls surrounding the house.

Then there were the games in Ojai, at Rancho Matiliji, "a sort of Tibetan monastery made of weathered wood." Robert Hastings, who graduated from the Thatcher School as well as Yale (after Harvard Law School he would found a great law firm in Los Angeles), characterizes their weekends at the ranch by the play they all wrote and dramatized, "The Legend of the Screeching Cliff." After some serious drinking, the group pretended a shoot-out, throwing a dummy over the cliff, with Harrison Chandler (of the Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times family) filming it all. Julia was probably paired with Chandler, a thirty-seven-year-old graduate of Stanford, that weekend; though Hastings remembers that they were all just friends, Gay Bradley Wright remembers that "he was crazy about Julia." Except for Katy, who was five years her junior, most of these friends were older. "I took to Julia absolutely," says Katy, "loved her straight off because she is so outgoing and so much herself." family) filming it all. Julia was probably paired with Chandler, a thirty-seven-year-old graduate of Stanford, that weekend; though Hastings remembers that they were all just friends, Gay Bradley Wright remembers that "he was crazy about Julia." Except for Katy, who was five years her junior, most of these friends were older. "I took to Julia absolutely," says Katy, "loved her straight off because she is so outgoing and so much herself."

Despite the mores of her time that expected her not to have a career, Julia had enough Scots and Puritan heritage in her to believe that she should be doing something "useful." In the fall of 1939 she weighed a job offer to be advertising manager of the Beverly Hills branch of W. & J. Sloane. She balanced the loss of freedom against the opportunity to meet new faces, especially male ones, and a sense of doing something valuable.

By the time Julia began her job at Sloane's she had come into her mother's inheritance and was feeling confident about herself. She was in charge of public relations and advertising and had one secretary. She confided in her diary, which she had taken up again briefly, that at sixteen she had been hurt when people looked at her with curiosity and that her earlier lovesick ramblings about Tom in her diary displayed "callow adolescence." Every year "brings more peace of mind, adjustment, and pleasure," she a.s.sured herself. The security of her own money and the responsibility of her job, which paid $200 a month, even lessened her worry about her unmarried state.

"And thank heaven I am getting over that fear and contempt of single maidenhood (or should I say maiden head-guess not)," she wrote in her diary. "I am quite content to be the way I am-and feel quite superior to many a wedded mouse. By G.o.d-I can do what I want! Though I do hate to have to scurry around for extra men every time I give a party-and of course-s.e.x is nice. But it is a mighty difficult subject-and a mighty self-indulgent one too." Julia made it very clear in later years that "I had had several affairs before meeting my husband, but we did not go all the way.... One did not in those days."

In the back of her diary, in an undated entry, Julia copied the following verse: Oh why do you walk though the fields in gloves, Missing so much, so much?

Oh fat, white woman whom n.o.body loves, When the gra.s.s is as soft as the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of doves And shivering sweet to touch Why do you walk through the fields in gloves- Missing so much and so much?

From the first of March 1940 until the summer months, Julia arose early and drove down the hills to Los Angeles and Sunset Boulevard, which took her through Hollywood to Beverly Hills. There was no freeway yet, though the county was building one, much to the distress of John McWilliams, who lobbied against it. Julia loved progress and change. She detailed the basis of her confident and happy life in her diary: a grand house, plenty of money, "each with independent incomes," good social position and heritage, the freedom to do what she wanted, and a "pleasant perfect relationship" with her father.

As inspiring and as much fun as her job was, Julia was in a position beyond her training. With a budget of $100,000 a year, she had to hire newspaper artists, typographers, and printers, plan advertising campaigns and write copy. She believed she was doing well after four months until an incident when she forgot to clear the copy for a policy statement with national headquarters before sending it to the printmaker and the newspapers (actually she forgot to call in the changes when they arrived because they seemed minor). The New York office was deeply and rightfully angered, and Julia was fired for rank insubordination. She apparently took it well, because four years later she recorded on a government job description an explanation why she left W. & J. Sloane: "Fired, and I don't wonder. One needs a much more detailed knowledge of business, buying, markets, and more experience in advertising than I had had for so much responsibility. But I learned a great deal, and did pretty well in establishing the mechanics of the office and the business personnel."

During one of Julia's big c.o.c.ktail parties when brother John was home for the holidays, he took one look at Josephine Smith, who had been brought by one of the Meyers twins, and it was love. Jo was fair and handsome, a cla.s.sic California girl. Following their marriage in June 1940, the young John McWilliams moved to Ma.s.sachusetts and the Weston Paper Company. Though he continued to manage the investments of his sisters-their inheritances had been equal-Julia would never again spend a sustained length of time with him. Indeed, especially during the war years to come, they did not even remain in correspondence for periods of time.

Dorothy, on the other hand, finally returned home to Pasadena after a year of work at the Cambridge School in Waltham, Ma.s.sachusetts, and some theatrical stage-managing for Menotti's operas The Medium The Medium and and The Telephone The Telephone in New York City. Her presence eventually allowed Julia to take a job in the East. Dort had probably been closer to w.i.l.l.y than to her sister ("I do not think I was a particularly good sister because I did not know Dorothy very well. She was young and a nuisance," admits Julia). Now, as adults, the sisters became close friends. Indeed, as they aged, people often confused their voices and figures. in New York City. Her presence eventually allowed Julia to take a job in the East. Dort had probably been closer to w.i.l.l.y than to her sister ("I do not think I was a particularly good sister because I did not know Dorothy very well. She was young and a nuisance," admits Julia). Now, as adults, the sisters became close friends. Indeed, as they aged, people often confused their voices and figures.

After nearly four years at home, Julia had matured emotionally. Certainly the equanimity with which she took any possible shame in her firing from Sloane's, which she blamed on herself, ill.u.s.trates this. The return to Pasadena had been a step backward when it was taken, yet by 194041 Julia herself began to notice, upon rereading her diary, her burgeoning maturity. Without tearing out the childish pages, she added dated notes in the margins: beside a lovesick poem, she wrote "trash;" beside her emotional reaction to her jilting, "history of delayed (or prolonged) adolescence. May 7, 1941." She had now even forgotten the boy's name, she claimed. Perhaps this "delayed adolescence" was a gift from her emotional mother, set down in Julia's loving diary at her mother's death: "She was really run by emotions ... child-like ... fresh and spontaneous.... she would give of herself and her energies actively and aggressively, with her whole heart and interest. I should like to be like Mother in all that."

At the same time, Julia's diary shows her growing skepticism about religion, politics, and herself. "I think it is particularly interesting how the years dissolve n.o.bility of spirit. When I was in school and later, I felt I had particular and unique spiritual gifts. That I was meant for something, and was like no one else. It hadn't come out yet, but it was there, warm and latent.... It still lingered in N.Y., and here at B.H. Today, it has gone out and I am sadly an ordinary person ... with talents which I do not use." In another pa.s.sage in which she declares, "Lord, how I hate the good," she deplores such self-conscious goodness in favor of "an unconscious wicked devilish goodness." Using her only reference to food, she writes: "I like [the] 'good' but it must be with salt and pepper, a small onion and a bay leaf. August 3, 1940."

She thought through her religious beliefs and values during the painful recovery from knee surgery in March 1941. The highest value, she concluded as the rain fell outside her hospital window, was in relations with others; introversion and self-a.n.a.lysis were fine for creative geniuses, but for a "happy full life," human relationships are paramount. Her religious beliefs were moving far away from those of her Presbyterian ancestors: the human spirit, a part of G.o.d that returns to G.o.d (the "G.o.d Stream"), is trying to make "his kingdom come on earth." Rejecting resurrection and miracles, she writes that while Jesus was the perfect living example for human behavior, all earthly events could be explained by natural causes.

POLITICS AND A PROPOSAL.

When Julia decided to leave home to enter government service and the international arena in 1942, it was not a sudden move. With j.a.pan's invasion of China in the fall of 1937 she began her first political commentary in her diary. When Hitler demanded the right of self-determination for Germans in Austria and Czechoslovakia the following February, she began reading political articles. Still, in the autumn of 1939 she felt the war was "remote" and not "our war." By June 1941, even while she was continuing those weekend parties for twelve in San Malo (followed by pages of limericks in her diary-probably written under the martini influence: "Residue of W[illiam] C[ullen] Bryant, arise!"), she wrote not of dating Harrison Chandler but of the crisis in world affairs. For her, Roosevelt's speeches signaled approaching war.

As her father's daughter, Julia was always involved in civic concerns. She had discussed the building of Union Station in Los Angeles, argued with her father over the building of the Pasadena Freeway (opened on New Year's Day 1941) and the merits of FDR's social programs, and had done local precinct work during elections, as well as raise scholarship funds for Smith College. She had two favorite columnists-Walter Lippmann and Dorothy Thompson-and used their arguments in her conversation, clipping the best articles for her diary. When she decided to do precinct work and vote for Wendell Willkie instead of FDR ("I voted for Roosie in 36"), it was less her father's influence than her own belief that FDR's reform had gone far enough. She wanted more individual freedom and responsibility, for she had just read Huxley's Brave New World Brave New World and Dorothy Thompson's article about the WPA, which argued that Roosevelt's WPA, by paying according to a man's needs, was conditioning him to "increase his needs and decrease his abilities." Julia pasted the article into her diary. She admired Thompson's style and was provoked by her ideas. Pages of a.n.a.lysis in the diary reveal Julia's lively intelligence and a well-read mind. This keen interest in politics and world affairs would never leave her. and Dorothy Thompson's article about the WPA, which argued that Roosevelt's WPA, by paying according to a man's needs, was conditioning him to "increase his needs and decrease his abilities." Julia pasted the article into her diary. She admired Thompson's style and was provoked by her ideas. Pages of a.n.a.lysis in the diary reveal Julia's lively intelligence and a well-read mind. This keen interest in politics and world affairs would never leave her.

Her first proposal of marriage capped the summer of 1941. Harrison Chandler, who had been part of their San Malo and Ojai ranch crowd for years, asked her to marry him. She always thought that when this flattering moment arrived she would "handle that situation with enormous elegance and Sat.u.r.day Evening Post Sat.u.r.day Evening Post finesse-but I found I was just as embarra.s.sed as he was and didn't know at all what to say." Harrison was a good friend, handsome, well dressed, and good company. Gay thought he was not exciting enough for her. Actually, he was shy and would not marry until he was fifty-five years old (to a fifty-one-year-old divorcee in 1958). Harrison Gray Otis Chandler, one of six children and the middle son of Harry Chandler and Marian finesse-but I found I was just as embarra.s.sed as he was and didn't know at all what to say." Harrison was a good friend, handsome, well dressed, and good company. Gay thought he was not exciting enough for her. Actually, he was shy and would not marry until he was fifty-five years old (to a fifty-one-year-old divorcee in 1958). Harrison Gray Otis Chandler, one of six children and the middle son of Harry Chandler and Marian Otis Otis Chandler, became, when the dynasty was inherited, the head of the Times Mirror printing operations. How different life would have been for Julia and the cooking world had she taken the easy choice and married into this Los Angeles establishment. Chandler, became, when the dynasty was inherited, the head of the Times Mirror printing operations. How different life would have been for Julia and the cooking world had she taken the easy choice and married into this Los Angeles establishment.

Julia did not know if she liked Harrison enough to marry him. She asked him that late August day if he wanted to live in Pasadena and have three or four children (there is no record of what he said). "I have an idea I may succ.u.mb," she told her diary, waiting to see what Dort thought of him. Julia was flattered and continued to date him, testing her feelings toward him. "I took him seriously for about a month," she admitted in 1996. "He was very nice in a somewhat stiff way. I don't remember what happened to him."

While Julia was making up her mind (and dating him for seven more months), she began volunteer work with the American Red Cross of Pasadena in September 1941, serving as head of the Department of Stenographic Services, typing and mimeographing. Following the j.a.panese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, she was caught up in the need to have her country join the war: "I am definitely anti-isolationist. What kind of world would it be if we were alone surrounded by enemies." Her reasoning was not ideological, but based on her recently articulated philosophy of the primacy of human relationships.

Because of the world war, the Tournament of Roses was canceled New Year's Day 1942. The next month, as j.a.pan took Singapore, Rangoon, and Burma, Julia added the Aircraft Warning Service to her Red Cross work. A short undated clipping from the local newspaper reveals how well she worked with this group: "Everybody called everybody either 'Mr.' or 'Mrs.' at the Fourth Interceptor Command with the exception of Julia McWilliams whom everybody addresses as Julia."

The only relationship she could not seem to find charming was the one with Harrison Chandler. In the second week of April she declined his marriage proposal. "4/10/42-NO. A cooling from both parties. And-I hope I shall maintain this position-it is a SIN to marry without LOVE. And marriage while utterly desirable, from my point of view, must be the right one. I know what I want, and it is 'sympatico'-companionship, interests, great respect, and fun. Otherwise and always-NO."

Continuing her double volunteer work, she added the occasional line of poetry at the back of her diary, such as Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Now that love has perished" stanza that begins by addressing her "erstwhile dear" who is "no longer cherished" and has a line about love having "come and gone." But the times called for action, not poetry. Her friends, including Bob Hastings and Tule Gates, were joining the Navy. Janie McBain, a San Francisco friend whose husband was stationed in Italy, urged Julia to come and stay with her in Washington.

Pragmatism-an efficacious activism-ran through Julia's body like a current. She was a doer. After asking herself several times in her diary what she should do about her strong political beliefs, she took the Civil Service exam, stopped keeping a diary, essentially ceased her writing practice, resigned her Red Cross and aircraft warning work, and applied to the WAVES and WACS. She wanted to be in the Navy and knew that Dorothy would stay home with their father. In midsummer she packed her bags and typewriter and boarded the train for what would prove to be her most life-changing journey. Katy Gates, who was already in Washington with her Navy husband, said, "Washington was where the action was. New York was pa.s.se. Julia always wanted to be where something was going on. She wanted to keep up with the times." Julia added: "The war was the change in my life."

MISS MCWILLIAMS.

GOES TO WASHINGTON.

As Julia left the magnificent Union Station with her suitcases, Washington, DC's white monuments seemed to intensify the summer heat. The spirit of action in the city was contagious, young civil servants caught up in the midst of world events. The arena fit her size. The sight of the Capitol brought tears to her patriotic eyes. Volunteering for the Aircraft Warning Service and the Red Cross in Pasadena had not been enough.

After a brief stay with Janie McBain, whose father was an influential San Francisco lawyer who knew many leading figures in the political world, Julia settled in the Brighton Hotel on California Street and waited for news about her application to the WAVES. The Naval Reserve returned her letter with an "automatic disqualification." The form was checked as a "physical" disqualification, though the category listed only "under five feet," with no mention of the other extreme. But someone had circled the phrase in her letter mentioning she was six feet one inch, an understatement at that. "I was too long," she would explain later. Thereafter, she would list her height as six feet-a shaving-off of two inches.

With adventure on the high seas beyond her reach, Julia took a job the end of August 1942 as Senior Typist for the Research Unit of the Office of War Information, Department of State. In short, "Mellot's Madhouse," after the Director and the frenetic environment. The a.s.sistant Director was n.o.ble Cathcart, husband of her cousin Harriet. She worked in a building opposite the Willard Hotel, madly typing white file cards for every government official mentioned in the newspapers and official doc.u.ments, listing full t.i.tle and agency. In two months she had typed herself through 10,000 cards and to the door of madness. She applied for a job with the Office of Strategic Services, where she had friends. "I worked so hard they replaced me with two people," she said of her stint at Mellot's Madhouse.

Still a social animal, Julia, when she was not typing and enlivening the office madness, partied with her growing number of friends in Washington from Pasadena and Northampton. The dinner parties and martinis of Smith College and San Malo beach continued in Washington, but the nights were not as late.

In December, wearing a new leopard fur coat to the work, Julia began her career in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) as Junior Research a.s.sistant in the office of the Director, William Donovan, on E Street. She was now in the Secret Intelligence (SI) branch of government. Her immediate supervisor was Marian O'Connell, an old friend of the Director and in charge of the Registry, which processed all records and correspondence. Edwin J. (Ned) Putzell, Jr., the Executive Officer and a.s.sistant Director of the OSS, remembers Julia as "the life of the group. Julia was energetic, light of spirit, always of good humor-and willing to jump into any a.s.signment." Aline Griffith, who later became a countess and auth.o.r.ed The Spy Wore Red The Spy Wore Red (1987), also worked with Julia before going to work in Spain. (1987), also worked with Julia before going to work in Spain. The Spy The Spy captured the cloak-and-dagger atmosphere quite dramatically. captured the cloak-and-dagger atmosphere quite dramatically.

Occasionally they were visited by the Director himself, who flew in from world hot spots. William (Wild Bill) Donovan was a corpulent, rather dumpy-looking man who was anything but wild. He had intense personal magnetism, but spoke with a restrained voice when he was in the office or in the field. Unemotional, but a risk taker. Julia's personal memory of him was that she only said "yes, sir" and "no, sir" to him: "He was rather small and rumpled [with] piercing blue eyes; and it was said that he could read a doc.u.ment just by turning the pages, he was so fast at it, and he was ... somehow fascinating [to people]. He gave you his complete attention and you were just fascinated by him."

Donovan had been a Wall Street lawyer and Republican when Franklin Delano Roosevelt and he planned what would be called the OSS, America's first espionage unit. FDR was impressed with Donovan's prophecy that Britain would withstand the n.a.z.i blitz and wanted an intelligence organization equal to that of the "Brits." Nothing like it had existed in any previous American war.

Donovan reported only to FDR, a status that, together with his loose administrative style (he was in fact a terrible organizer), provoked much jealousy and criticism from other government people, particularly in the military. Donovan (a lawyer) was not of the military establishment, nor were his Ivy League employees. Just as the British Secret Intelligence Service seemed to be staffed from Burke's Peerage Burke's Peerage, so the Office of Strategic Services was composed of blue bloods or, as some called them, "a bunch of college professors" or "Donovan's amateur playboys." Like Julia, they came from wealthy families and did not need the money; hence Donovan reasoned they were not bribable.

Political views were irrelevant to the Director-indeed a number of communists were recruited. He valued creative intelligence, a love of adventure, and a willingness to fight the enemy. And he left them alone to plan their capers. At the time this was positively un-American-shrouded in secrecy and outside any military or governmental system. And it was exhilarating-not only for Julia and the file keepers in Washington-but for those abroad. Thus Donovan gathered around him the best and the brightest, from James B. Conant to Moe Berg of Red Sox fame; from filmmaker John Ford to David Bruce, Allen Dulles, and Junius S. Morgan. One cynic said that Donovan staffed the OSS with "potential postwar clients."

Julia was promoted to Clerk within the Director's office in the spring of 1943, and at the beginning of the summer she became Senior Clerk, reaching the salary of $1,800 a year, all of which was transferred to the First Trust and Savings Bank of Pasadena.

When a new section concerning air-sea rescue opened in midsummer, Julia was transferred out of Donovan's office. Several branches of government were involved, but the OSS paid for the office personnel, equipment, and s.p.a.ce. The Information Exchange of the Emergency Rescue Equipment (ERE), started by Harold Coolidge and Henry Steel to aid fliers downed at sea, was located in Temporary A Building at the corner of Second and T streets. Julia dubbed it the "fish-squeezing unit" because one of their experiments was to see if survivors in life rafts could squeeze a fish and drink the water from the fish's body. Julia and her colleague Alice Carson carpooled to the market and bought the fish for their test. Naive, perhaps, but certainly in keeping with the experiments of America's first espionage organization. ERE's most important work was developing exposure suits, and their pioneering work, according to one of Julia's colleagues, became "the founding of the Coast Guard's air-sea rescue service."

The OSS budget was "largely unvouchered," claimed one historian, who doc.u.mented that Donovan bought ships, houses, printing plants, and planes. "Every eccentric schemer with a harebrained plan for secret operations (from phosph.o.r.escent foxes to incendiary bats) would find a sympathetic ear in Donovan's office."

Histories of the OSS are filled with stories of the early attempts at black espionage against the Germans and the j.a.panese. Because the OSS was filled with Ivy Leaguers and professors, and Donovan did not want to stifle action and creativity, there were some inventive plans to sabotage the enemy's reputation in occupied lands, including the manufacture of a substance that smelled like dung, to embarra.s.s the j.a.panese in China.

Only Donovan's closeness to Roosevelt kept him safe from his detraetors. The military believed that the OSS was a "fly-by-night" organization; West Pointers called it "Donovan's dragoons;" the isolationist Charles Lindbergh said the organization was "full of politics, ballyhoo, and controversy;" J. Edgar Hoover was a bitter rival; and Herr Goebbels called it a "staff of Jewish scribblers." By the end of the decade, it was clear to everyone that "Donovan's Dreamers" were idealistic and "helter-skelter but brilliant," a far cry from the view that today demonizes its successor, the Central Intelligence Agency.

Long before Julia was promoted from Senior Clerk to Administrative a.s.sistant, she was supervising an office of forty people (directly overseeing eight), securing office furnishings, hiring clerical help, and initiating procedures related to financing, office security, and supplies. When Julia wanted to talk to Lieutenant Commander Earl F. Hisc.o.c.k (Coast Guard Reserve, which eventually took over the unit) about the many sinkings of merchant vessels carrying supplies to Europe (this bureau was gathering all the information on sinkings, survivors, and possible new equipment), she turned over the waste-basket to sit on and talk to him at eye level, according to her friend Alice Carson, who later married Hisc.o.c.k.

While Julia was working six days a week in a domestic branch of America's Secret Intelligence, she lived in her cramped apartment in the Brighton Hotel with a two-burner hot plate on top of a refrigerator in her living room. She did what she later called "some minor cooking" and had "nice crowded parties." Alice Carson, who graduated from Smith the year Julia enrolled, remembered eating a fried chicken dinner at Julia's apartment. Julia remembered, "I got chicken fat all over the wallpaper," in her awkward attempt at cooking.

Another friend whom she met in the "fish-squeezing unit" was Jack Moore, art school graduate and Army private who worked for a civilian named Paul Child in the Presentation Division (photography, graphics, maps). Jack and Julia met in the Naval Yard because the ERE needed some graphics. His boss had just been shipped out to New Delhi to work for Supreme Commander Mountbatten, and Moore would soon follow. Moore, who would be the initial ill.u.s.trator for her first cookbook, thought of Julia "as a woman of extraordinary personality. She was just not any kind of an American stereotype. By virtue of necessity-I mean, here is this six-foot-two-inch-tall American woman looking down on all the males she ever meets-she had to evolve a sense of herself that was different from the person who is a physically standard specimen."

Her promotion at the end of 1943 placed Julia closer to her dream of more active service, even if it meant returning to files again. She became Administrative a.s.sistant in the Registry of the OSS, returning to Donovan's office. There was a $600 raise for the new year and a feeling of being part of America's first espionage organization. Donovan had decided he could not collect intelligence by having all his people in Washington, DC, and began establishing bases around the world. Julia wanted to serve overseas (her brother John was in German-occupied France, though they had no news of his whereabouts). When she heard the organization wanted volunteers for work in India, she applied. She was free, white, and thirty-one.

Chapter 6.

INDIA I INTRIGUE.

(1944 1945) "A cook should possess generous worldly experience."

NORMAN DOUGLAS, South Wind

THE THREE WOMEN had their orders to leave Newport News, Virginia, by troop train on February 26 for Wilmington, California. Julia McWilliams, Eleanor (Ellie) Thiry, and Dr. Cora DuBois (a well-known anthropologist) had been sworn to secrecy, a vow that precluded keeping a diary. "If people ask you why you are here, tell 'em you are file clerks," they were instructed. "We were a very bedraggled-looking bunch," said Julia. The civilian women were a source of curiosity and amazement to the soldiers on the train, wrote Ellie Thiry, who (against orders and with several others) kept a diary of her experience. Ellie had dark, curly hair and was practical (she would always decorate the women's living quarters). had their orders to leave Newport News, Virginia, by troop train on February 26 for Wilmington, California. Julia McWilliams, Eleanor (Ellie) Thiry, and Dr. Cora DuBois (a well-known anthropologist) had been sworn to secrecy, a vow that precluded keeping a diary. "If people ask you why you are here, tell 'em you are file clerks," they were instructed. "We were a very bedraggled-looking bunch," said Julia. The civilian women were a source of curiosity and amazement to the soldiers on the train, wrote Ellie Thiry, who (against orders and with several others) kept a diary of her experience. Ellie had dark, curly hair and was practical (she would always decorate the women's living quarters).

SLOW BOAT TO INDIA.

After a week by train, there were seven more days in California being "orientated" in a barracks, attending movies and lectures, being issued fatigues and gas masks and told to practice ship evacuation by rope over the side. Rewarded with a couple of days of free time, the women went to the McWilliams home in Pasadena, where they met Julia's handsome father, now the object of several widows' attentions. Until they headed for Wilmington, their port of embarkation, the women filled the house on South Pasadena Avenue with laughter.

With bedroll, canteen, gas mask, and pith helmet on her back, Julia and nine other women boarded the SS Mariposa Mariposa, a cruise ship serving as a troopship. They were greeted that March 8 by band music, wolf calls, and whistles, the only women on board with more than 3,000 men. This raucous reception stoked the flames of adventure in some, fear in others. In addition to Julia, Cora, and Ellie, there were Rosamund Frame, Virginia (known as Peachy) Durand, Mary Nelson Lee (of the Virginia Lee family), and two other women. "An utterly strange experience," wrote Julia, who had started a short-lived diary (ent.i.tled "Oh So Private") two days out to sea. Naturally, the captain set aside a portion of the deck "exclusively for the gals," said Peachy. "We were called girls," insists Julia (who was called Julie). The next morning Julia organized the women to spread the word they were traveling missionaries. The ploy never worked.

Among the civilians on board was Gregory Bateson, an eminent British anthropologist (married to Margaret Mead) who spoke Malay. He was six feet five inches tall and looked "like a sardonic horse," Paul Child later described. He "had a veritable genius for making the obvious obscure," wrote one OSS colleague, but another called him a "dazzling conversationalist." Julia liked him, and not just because he was her height: "He always looked like his pants were falling off because they hung low on his hips. He and I took Chinese lessons on the deck of the ship. He was very interesting because he was asking about relatives and relationships." These conversations with Bateson, DuBois, and some of the other well-educated civilians (such as Rosie Frame, who was giving the Chinese lessons) made Julia feel she had been "vegetating" mentally, physically, and spiritually.

Julia longed to talk to someone to help "crystallize" her ideas about this voyage. Hence the origin of a new diary. "What kind of mind do I have?" she asked herself after being in the presence of "anthropologists, world thinkers, and missionaries" on board. She questioned her religious beliefs, her lack of permanence, the war, even the designs that one woman seemed to have on her (probably Cora DuBois, a lesbian who was to head the Research and a.n.a.lysis Division in Ceylon). Julia's initial revulsion, based on inexperience and fear, was soon replaced by what would become a lifelong friendship. Years later Julia would say that "the OSS was my first encounter with the academic mind."

There was not a chair on board except at the dinner table, so the women sat on their life vests or on their bunks. Because Julia typed the ship's newspaper, she got below deck and learned about the sailors' att.i.tude toward the war, which fell far short of her patriotic idealism. She wrote sketches of each woman for the newspaper: Ellie joined the ship's band, which practiced each day; the pet.i.te and dark-haired Rosie Frame was breaking all the hearts on board-even Bateson thought her "a little minx"-but she was romancing a man named Thibaut de Saint Phalle.

In cabin 237, the nine women slept on three triple-decker bunks, using one tub for cold salt.w.a.ter baths, one toilet, one sink, and one drawer each for their personal items. Two cups of water in their helmets washed their panties. When they docked on March 28 in Australia and took on fresh water, the women soon had their bunks strung with lines of drying clothes. Naked bodies moved about, looking for missing socks. Julia remembered with discomfort the "ma.s.s living" at the Katharine Branson School and Smith College. Compensating for the lack of privacy was the beauty of the sunsets, the star-studded nights, and ahead India and China, the greatest adventure of her life.

Because of the possible presence of j.a.panese submarines, they had a military escort during the first week in April before reaching Bombay (they were originally a.s.signed to land in Calcutta). On the thirty-first day, Julia later said on several occasions, "the ship drew up to the coast and I could see and smell the haze. Oh, my G.o.d, what have I gotten myself into? After that, I never had any fright." Despite a bad cold, Julia could smell the leafy cigarettes, incense, and ancient dirt of India when she and Peachy disembarked on Easter Sunday.

India housed many war-weary British and American military. The CBI (China, Burma, India) personnel called themselves Confused b.a.s.t.a.r.ds in India. Julia did not share the cynicism of those Americans who had been there a few months and picked up the British colonial hatred of the Indians; they called her an "eager beaver." "Have met practically no one who likes India. I do," she wrote in her diary. She described the lazy clip-clop of gharries, squeaky shoes, the white-jacketed, skirt-panted men with black crooked-stick umbrellas, and baskets of fruit and vegetables with live chickens softly lying in the middle. The children would swarm around her, curious and laughing: "You desire to sit?" they said to the tall American woman.

She accompanied a few of the men, including Joseph R. Coolidge (another OSS colleague, a cartographer, who kept a diary of the train and boat trip), to dinner and then on a merry motor tour of the red-light district. She liked John Bolton-Carter, a South African, who invited her and Mary Nelson up for drinks. She later went golfing and dancing with him. Rosie Frame, fluent in Mandarin as the daughter of missionaries in Peking, wanted to go to China, but was first sent to New Delhi. The women remaining shared a comfortable house for a week, shopping and sightseeing freely until there were severe explosions at the docks. Soon they were told they would not go to New Delhi but to Ceylon, where Mountbatten had moved his headquarters. The confusing orders were snafu (situation normal, all f.u.c.ked up).

There was "a killing train ride across India, four in a compartment with a tremendous lot of luggage," Julia wrote (though fifty years later she described the trip as "beautiful" and "fascinating"). Ellie Thiry and another woman slept on top, Julia and another woman on the bottom. The dust rushed into the train's every crack from the vast and relentlessly flat terrain. When they stopped, Julia was struck by the yelling of "incomprehensible languages." One Singhalese police officer talked to her at length about Buddhism and the 150-year oppression of Ceylon (a pear-shaped island near the southern tip of India) by the English. The heat bothered everyone except rail-thin Julia. From Madras they ferried to the island. At every stop there were groups of officers to escort them around town ("pursued by the U.S. Navy," is the way she expressed it), men about whom she speaks disparagingly in her diary.

LAND OF THE LOTUS EATERS.

On April 25 they arrived in Colombo, Ceylon (later to be called Sri Lanka), and were met by S. Dillon Ripley ("I always liked his looks"), head of the Secret Intelligence Division there. A year younger than Julia and typical of the OSS bra.s.s, Ripley, a Yale and Harvard biologist and ornithologist, was an authority on the birds of the Far East and had lived in the region. He would later spend two decades of his life administering the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution in Washington, DC.

"I want to fish and shoot, and meet some active sports! But this is Wah." She settled for swimming in the Indian Ocean. Colombo was a hot and steamy port city, ten degrees from the equator. Gnats hovered in the air above her head as if buzzing in a thick soup. At 8 A.M A.M. the next day they boarded what the Americans called the Toonerville Trolley (Julia called it the Mountbatten Special, for it was run by the British). They traveled through lush tropical hills to reach Kandy, a safe headquarters 1,200 feet above sea level.

Two months to the day after they had left Washington together, Julia and Peachy were sharing a large room in the Queens Hotel in Kandy. She liked Mary Nelson and Cora DuBois and Peggy Wheeler (daughter of General Raymond Wheeler, a Deputy Supreme Allied Commander), but "Peachy and I see eye to eye," she told her diary. "Peachy was like our kid sister, a woman with dark hair, innocence, and enthusiasm," she remembered years later. They slept in canopy beds (four-posters with mosquito netting) and contended with clogged drains and occasional water.

Life is pastoral and easy-going [she wrote]. We are wakened at 7:15 by our room boy who knocks heavily at the door, murmurs "Morning, Missie," and paddles into the room in his bare feet carrying morning tea and fruit. We leisurely dress, leaving 5 minutes for breakfast, and at 8:05 our 2-ton truck is at the door of the Queens Hotel and we are off, at the fast clip of 19 to 24 miles an hour to our office, 7 miles away.

Headquarters was a tea plantation-a colonial estate called Nandana-where they worked in basha (palm-thatched) huts connected by cement walks and surrounded by barbed wire. Primitive, airy, and comfortable is the way Julia described it. Her basha was just beyond Mountbatten's botanical garden. Supreme Commander Lord Louis Mountbatten (who oversaw the OSS) had arrived April 15 to live in the King's Pavilion; "Kandy is probably the most beautiful spot in the world," he declared, settling into the miniature white palace. Everyone ate lunch together in a thatched mess hall on a hill about three-hundred yards from the offices, which closed about 5 P.M P.M. The civilians then had two hours of sunlight for tennis and golf ("It was nice to have a transportable hobby").

A Shangri-La setting with a sinister purpose: guerrilla warfare against the j.a.panese. The move to Kandy, according to historian Barbara Tuchman, signaled a "direction [to] the sea ... providing a fleet base in the Indian Ocean" to attack j.a.pan, for General Stilwell believed "the future of Asia was at stake." The headquarters camp looked over the lake to the surrounding mountains and the flowering trees and terraced rice paddies below. Eighty degree temperatures (Julia described it as "skin-warm"), banyan trees, and monkeys. "Land of the Lotus Eaters," one woman called it. The wide porch of the main bungalow had deep summer chairs. Palm-straw padding covered the walls and roof, and the appearance was rustic but neat. Colonial.

Kandy was inhabited by gentle Singhalese, who were Hinayana Buddhists (as opposed to the Hinu Tamil or the fierce-looking black Muslim Moors in the north). Their gongs and fire crackers punctuated the days. The women wore saris; the OSS women wore cotton dresses. Heavy work was done by small elephants, who would bathe in the lake at the end of each day. Coolidge remembers the day that Julia climbed on one of the elephants, straddling its neck, and the animal produced an erection of at least three feet. "When she dismounted, the thing was still evident, and she crowed with laughter."

Though she knew more about golf clubs than international cables and espionage, Julia, with a high security clearance, was head of the Registry, which processed all cla.s.sified papers for the invasion of the Malay Peninsula. After spending the second day filing treatises, she wondered in her diary, "Why did I come over as Registry. I hate this work." Yet she soon discovered she was good at organizing the central headquarters for dispatches, sensitive orders, and espionage/sabotage for the South East Asia Command (SEAC), headed by forty-four-year-old Mountbatten (Supremo, in British shorthand).

General Douglas MacArthur, according to several OSS historians, did not cooperate with Donovan's OSS or Britain's MI6, whose work in Southeast Asia was under Mountbatten and was directed from this island off the east coast of India. The word was that MacArthur, who had his own Army Intelligence, hated Donovan (a civilian) and threatened to arrest any OSS caught in his his territory. The intellectuals disdained the Regular Army, and the att.i.tude was mutual. territory. The intellectuals disdained the Regular Army, and the att.i.tude was mutual.

The warm tropical climate and palm trees reminded her of home, until she discovered scorpions in the drawers. There were also tarantulas, tiny noiseless mosquitoes, leeches, ravenous termites, and four-inch c.o.c.kroaches. The vegetation was tropical and the rain arrived about four each afternoon. "Penicillin" grew on folded clothes. Yet Julia awakened each morning thrilled with the adventure, if not with the routine of her office. She was eager to be a part of the civilian intellectual world of Cora DuBois, Gregory Bateson, and Dillon Ripley, opening her mind to stimulating ideas and sophistication.