Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (19 page)

T
HE CHILD TWINS

Julia was learning a great deal about Paul and his identical twin brother, Charles (Charlie or Charleski), who was married with children and working for the State Department, first in Washington and for a while in San Francisco. The father of Paul and Charlie died when they were six months old, and their mother, Bertha May Cushing (of the famous Boston Cushings), supported them and an older sister, Mary (or Meeda), by singing in Boston and Paris and through the kindness of strangers. His mother, an utterly impractical, pre-Raphaelite creature who died in 1937, taught her boys that (in Julia’s words) “artists are sacred.” Paul, whose only real family was Charlie’s family, returned from China with paintings and hundreds of photographs of the country and its people.

Paul’s letters to his brother reveal his romantic consideration of several women in the compound. It had been Rosie Frame first in New Delhi, then in Chungking. Now it was Marjorie Severyns, who was bright, quick, and “my kind of woman.” The competition was “ferocious,” said Paul: “even the snaggle-toothed, the neurotic, the treacherous and the dim-witted among the women are hovered over by men, as jars of jam are hovered over by wasps.” But for Marjorie “the humming turns to an angry roar.” Guy Martin agreed: “She was sort of the ladylove, everybody thought of her as being very sexy; she had that kind of appeal. Marjorie and Rosamond were the best-looking ones.” Marjorie, the child of missionaries and a graduate of the University of Washington, had several affairs. However, Paul’s worldly charm (and devotion to women) could not defeat his chief rival, news correspondent Al Ravenholt, whom she would wed after the war. “None of the women seem to be the answer to my loneliness,” he wrote Charlie, after mentioning Rosie Frame and Nancy Davis, whom he still claimed to love deeply but who was writing only once a month. And he always came back to Edith Kennedy:

You will never know what it is to feel profoundly lonely, to have y[ou]r vitals twisted by the need for companionship … but when you have sown the seed of love, weeded and watered its field, reaped its harvest and stored the golden grains, and: Then! The barn burns down, and the fields are flooded—well you become empty, unbased, and bereft…. since Edith’s death I am rootless, or soil-less.

He was able eventually to tell Julia about the woman he had loved for seventeen years, who died painfully of cancer just months before he joined the OSS. He would tell her about their house on Shepard Street in Cambridge and the earlier apartment in the rue d’Assas in Paris. Edith was an intellectual, a friend of May Sarton and Helene Deutsch, and the mother of three boys before she became involved with Paul, nearly twenty years her junior.

What Julia did not know yet was that Paul and Charlie had had their stars “read” by an astrologer named Jane Bartleman and that Charlie sent periodic updates. Paul, since April 1945, had waited for his foretold “intelligent, dramatic, beautiful” woman to come, bringing “some complication inherent” in their relationship. He referred to this reading as his “cave-of-emeralds future.” In the margin of a May 13 letter to Charlie, which recalled the prediction and in which Paul confessed his loneliness (“More than all else—more than security, more than art, more than music—I need love), Paul wrote years later: “Julie, you Idiot! Wake up!”

At the time, Paul did not yet see Julia as a serious love interest, though she took it more seriously. Fifty years later she would remember that their romance began in Ceylon and continued in Kunming: “It was a gradual getting together; by the time we went to China we were in love. There were a lot of attractive women around. He loved women.” As the years went by, they would invest their love in China with a commitment beyond any evidence suggested by his letters. Indeed, he spoke of other women, one with whom he wished to “rise with the sea-tides, put the pungent flavor of wild sage on her tongue, and comb her hair with the wind.” He did write of Julia: “Tommy and Julie and I together last night at his quarters. I read them all your letters since 25th of April—Julia knows you by now” (June 2). “I am really
starved
for a certain kind of companionship” (June 10). “I am aching from the rudeness and savagery of life … I have lost the sense of savor, the feeling and creativity, the expansion that comes through love given and returned.” On June 19, he wrote: “I cannot seem to rid myself of the touchstone of Edith, against which I try the others. Nobody begins to measure up to that standard.” He threw himself into his work: “I shall bend my energies in large measure to this incredibly shocking, stupid and futile war.” On Edith’s birthday, June 27: “I miss her terribly.” He thanks Charlie for photos: “Julia and I have decided they look like some Fairy’s version of the real thing. Jeanne says they look as though you’ve ‘gone Hollywood.’” Paul wanted to be “released from the prison of this time and place,” but “where would I go?”

L
IQUOR IS QUICKER

The end of the European war brought more visits from friends, who carried in the liquor for what Julia called “the five o’clock refreshment period.” “A glass of pure water is as remote as Châteauneuf du Pape,” declared Paul, but finding spirits was somewhat easier. According to Betty MacDonald, it was difficult but necessary to get liquor: “We had parties at the big house. Because it was hard to get liquor in China, the pilots would come in with Carew’s gin. Then the Navy began to take alcohol out of the steering wheel box that lubricated the steering wheel. Anything for a drink. There was [also] some alcohol available through the French, who came out of Indochina.”

The music at the parties was the same as it had been in Ceylon, but without the British note, such as “There’s a Troopship Just Leaving Bombay” or “Waltzing Matilda” (the latter from Australia). The songs on the few phonographs in the camp included “You Are My Sunshine,” a favorite of 1942, “Pistol-Packin’ Mama,” and “Blues in the Night.” If the McWilliams backbone said do your job well, the Weston imp drove her to dance. For one party, planned by Paul, a jazz band of black soldiers played until 5:30
A.M
. for the boogie-woogie dancers.

Among the friends who were in and out of Kunming and Chungking were John Ford, the film director and now naval officer, who with his crew of cameramen seemed to be shooting another movie. Jane Foster, the party girl and leftist expert on Java, Bali, and Malaya, came briefly from Kandy, according to Paul’s letters. Ned Putzell, as he had in Ceylon, accompanied General Donovan on a Kunming visit. According to Mary Livingston Eddy, Donovan remembered most of the names of his OSS personnel. When Byron Martin was touring with another general, Julia ran to greet him: “She … grabbed me under the arms and lifted me to my toe tips (I was rather slight of build at the time) and planted a kiss. I felt as honored as I ever have been,” he wrote. Paul greeted Joe Alsop, who (he informed Charlie) was thinner, balder, and sporting an even “strong[er] atmosphere of Cafe Society, with quite a sound fake British accent.” They preferred his two brothers, Stewart and John, who were in the OSS in Europe.

Theodore H. White was a favorite of both Julia and Paul. He had been in China since 1939, when, as a twenty-eight-year-old with a Harvard fellowship, he continued his study of Chinese and worked as a translator in Chungking. John Hersey of
Time
found him, and White reported on the war for
Time, Life
, and
Fortune
. Years before Julia arrived in China, White was covering the war and explaining China and the Chinese to his American readers in a more comprehensive way than any other reporter. He believed that the real power of the Orient resided in the Chinese, not the Japanese. Julia found him affable, and Paul enjoyed his visits to Kunming.

While the Chinese transplanted the rice in the paddies and harvested the wheat, Julia joined Jeanne, Paul, Jack Moore, and another man for an overnight holiday. “We left Sunday afternoon at 4:30 packed in a jeep,” wrote Paul. There was a monsoon in progress and they all got soaked in spite of ponchos, “but nobody cared because it was lovely, lovely,
Freedom!”
They drove out past Paul’s favorite red bridge for another hour before turning off the main road to a lush valley surrounded by purple mountains. Here they checked into a tiny resort hotel at a hot spring. The next day in the rain they went walking along rice paddies, watching local peasantry transplanting rice, looking at the big waterwheels, swollen river, and deep mist on mountains. There were “startling patches of emerald green when the sun broke through and red brick soil where eroded,” wrote Paul. They sat on a high plateau and chewed pine needles, smoking and talking and taking pictures of each other.

Mary, Julia’s roommate, says that when Dillon Ripley came to visit and look at birds, Julia took him to the hot springs, about an hour’s drive away. Julia adored soaking in the hot water. According to Jeanne Taylor, she declared: “Do you realize that if everyone in the damned war had a Sani Hot Springs bath every day, it would be over by now?” Jack Moore, who worked with Paul, remembered trips with Julia and Paul to visit the springs, temples, journeys over “spine-crushing dirt roads” that were a sharp contrast to the British-built country roads of India, and to commercial restaurants for “real meals…. They had obviously done a lot of exploration with Chinese food.”

That summer Paul went to the hot springs with others, including Jeanne. It is not surprising, therefore, that Mary Livingston Eddy said, “I was not aware that Julia and Paul were romantically involved in China. I saw them together, but we all were together.”

By August both the war and the partying quickened. “There have been quite a few visitations of the big WD/IBT [General Donovan],” Julia wrote in a communiqué to Ceylon. Clearly the focus was on concluding the war in Asia. Personal life went on as usual, with Paul’s longing for “The Big Affair,” and Julia involved in busy social life, longing for him. She acted the role of Miss Preen in a production of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s
The Man Who Came to Dinner
with a cast of two dozen, calling themselves the Area Entertainment Guide. Lieutenant Colonel Birch E. Bayh, the Theater Special Services Officer (a future U.S. senator from Indiana), pronounced the production a “splendid success.”

The women were renovating their house during July for even greater parties. After hiring a new number one boy, redoing the floors, repainting the walls, and recovering the furniture (much damaged by the five resident dogs), they hosted the visiting generals and OSS personnel—seventy-five in all, says Ellie’s diary. The rains began that night and did not stop until three inches covered the new living room, while holes were drilled in the ceiling to keep it from collapsing. Somehow, by hiring help and working diligently, they cleaned the house up and hosted three hundred people (including General Donovan) for cocktails that August evening, with guests spilling out onto the large veranda circling the house. “The rain stopped, the party was a huge success, and the visiting general was very pleased!” Before the week was over, the compound was under three feet of water and Julia was frantically rescuing top-secret documents.

Within hours of the party, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima (August 6). Two days later Russia invaded Manchuria, and the following day another bomb obliterated Nagasaki. General Douglas MacArthur told Teddy White, “There will be no more wars, White, no more wars.”

If the war was ending, romance was heating up. Betty MacDonald remembers Paul coming over to spend time with Julia: “He would read to her a lot. One of the books was about sex. Dick [Heppner, said MacDonald] made fun of them and asked, ‘What’s Paul doing with this book about sex?’ Perhaps he was catching her up.” Betty was not the only one to notice that Paul was “blossoming around Julia.” For Julia’s thirty-third birthday he wrote her a poem about her “melt[ing]” his “frozen earth.”

A
N UNCERTAIN ROMANCE
AT WAR’S END

The poem is dated August 15, 1945, the same day the news arrived of the final surrender of the Japanese. In Kandy, Jane Foster won a case of scotch for correctly guessing the date of the surrender. She was sitting at a desk opposite Gregory Bateson when the loudspeaker announced the news that “an atomic device” exploded over Hiroshima. In Kunming, Ellie wrote to her parents: “It seemed unbelievable that it is over, and there was very little hilarity or celebration here—everyone was too busy I guess.”

The next day Paul wrote to Charlie that he was fond of Julia and hoped that Charlie and his wife would meet her someday, for “even in a USA context she will show up very well”:

Over the 18 months or more that I have known Julia I have become extremely fond of her. She is really a good friend, and though limited in relation to my concept of la femme intégrale, she still is understanding, warm, funny, and darling…. [S]he is a woman with whom I take much comfort, and she has helped me over many a rough spot by just simple love and niceness.

Everyone stayed up late at night talking about the coming peace accord and what it meant to their futures. The big excitement in the OSS was organizing commando groups to be sent to Japanese prison camps around Asia. It was the OSS’s last important operation, and historians agree on the valor of the OSS in rescuing POWs, among whom was General Jonathan Wainwright, captured by the Japanese on Corregidor early in the war.

Uncertainty about the future of China gripped everyone. America’s policy for a postwar China was a “model of ambiguity,” notes one historian. Indeed, there was no policy. With the Japanese defeated, Chiang now resumed his civil war against the Chinese communists, and OSS agents were left inside communist territory. Theodore White said that with their victory over Japan the United States had lanced a boil in China, and the killing would continue until it became the “greatest revolution in the history of mankind.” Both sides lied and killed, but Mao had the people on his side (White makes it clear that the United States chose the wrong side to support).