Somehow I missed the recent revelation that cooking celebrity Julia Child served in the OSS, the WWII precursor to our modern CIA:
She took the Civil Service Exam, applied to the Waves (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Services) and the WAC (Women’s Army Corps). She was, at 6-foot-2, however, apparently considered too tall for the service. Nonetheless, she moved to Washington, where, she told a friend, “the action” was. “The war was the change in my life,” she wrote.First as senior typist in the Office of War Information (August 1942), then as junior research assistant in the office of OSS Director “Wild” Bill Donovan, Julia joined America’s novice intelligence team: the Ivy Leaguers, the Martini-drinking best and brightest, many of whose names have only recently been revealed, including Allen Dulles, later head of the CIA, and future Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg. The OSS members were disparaged as fly-by-nighters, “Oh So Social” or “Oh Such Snobs.”
Julia “rose through the ranks” from senior clerk to administrative assistant, organizing a large office. She lived in the Brighton Hotel, cooked (badly) on a hot plate that splattered the wallpaper with chicken fat, she admitted.
When she heard in 1943 that the OSS wanted volunteers for service in India, she applied; bored and in search of adventure, she was “free, white, and thirty-one,” ready and eager to go.
And it was in Asia, not France — especially on assignment in China and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) — that the palate of the star of the future “French Chef” TV series would first be awakened, weaned from the golden age of canned, frozen and other processed food, the world of Pasadena home cooking.
And it was Asia that changed her life, for it was there, in May 1944, in Kandy (Ceylon) that Julia McWilliams met Paul Child, 10 years her senior, a connoisseur of wine, women and cuisine, who became her lover, mentor and initiator into those fine tastes available even in war-torn China and Ceylon.
The move to HQ in the Shangri-La setting of Kandy had a serious purpose: guerrilla warfare against the Japanese. Though Julia knew more of golf clubs than international cables and spies, she had high security clearance to file and process classified dispatches for the SEAC (South East Asia Command) under Lord Mountbatten.
While she came to hate the routine of office work, Julia thrilled at the secrets and at the proximity of danger and of her new-found colleague, Paul Child, who worked in graphics and photography designing war rooms. With Paul she came to share passion, but also a passion for the Rijstafel curry table with “as many condiments as the human imagination can devise.” She brought to the table her keen sense of humor and her propensity for practical jokes.
After 10 months in Kandy, Julia flew, via Calcutta, to Kunming, China, to set up and run the OSS Registry. It was March 1945 (Germany was to surrender in May), and Asia was now the focus of the war.
Paul designed Gen. Albert Wedemeyer’s China War Room, and Julia, with a staff of 10 assistants, opened, numbered and directed all forms, devising new systems for code names and filing secret papers. The conflict between Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong was already in the offing, and Americans were divided in their loyalties.
Meanwhile, Chinese cuisine beckoned: “American food in China was terrible; we thought it was cooked by grease monkeys. The Chinese food was wonderful, and we ate out as often as we could. That is when I became interested in food. I just loved Chinese food.”
More than that, her sophisticated Ivy League colleagues talked so much about the food they ate. Julia, Paul would later say, was always hungry: “She’s a wolf by nature.”
The war against Japan ended in August 1945; Julia’s career in espionage, almost as soon. For a brief two years Julia became the consummate Georgetown housewife with a newly jobless husband, Paul, to feed, depleting his OSS savings and her family inheritance. Julia studied “The Joy of Cooking.” Eager to please her new husband, she struggled with recipes, relying on Paul’s savvy.
A move to France, where Paul joined the U.S. Information Agency, came none too soon in October 1948.
On Nov. 3 of that year, Julia was to “master the joy of devouring French cooking,” having her personal gastronomic epiphany when she sat down to a feast of oysters, sole meunière, Pouilly-Fuissé and tarte tatin at Restaurant La Couronne on the Place du Vieux-Marché in Rouen. “The whole experience was an opening up of the soul and spirit for me. I was hooked, and for life, as it turned out.”