Julia Child's 'Covert' life had a taste of intrigue

NEW YORK  Was Julia Child a spy? Was bon appétit! some kind of secret code?

Those thriller-esque questions are unraveled in Jennet Conant's new book, A Covert Affair: Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS (Simon & Schuster, $28), on sale Tuesday. It recounts the years Child and her future husband worked for the Office of Strategic Services, predecessor to the CIA.

Child will be forever celebrated as the irrepressible television chef and cookbook author who introduced French cooking — sole meunière and canard à l'orange — to a meat-and-potatoes America.

But Conant chooses a Chinese restaurant — nothing French about it — for this interview.

After all, during World War II, it was Chinese food — crisp duck and baby frog legs in sweet-and-sour sauce — that Paul Child, a sophisticated, well-traveled artist, introduced to Julia McWilliams, a naive California socialite. They met in Asia, working for the OSS.

Julia Child, by the books Six books by or inspired by Julia Child have made USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list since 1999, most boosted by the hit 2009 movie adaptation of Julie & Julia. Their highest rankings: Julie & Julia (2009) by Julie Powell.

Rank: No. 9 My Life in France with Alex Prud'Homme (2009).

Rank: No. 13 Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1 with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle (2009.

Rank: No. 15 Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 2 with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle (2009).

Rank: No. 71 Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home with Jacques P pin (1999).

Rank: No. 94 Julia's Kitchen Wisdom (2000).

Rank: No. 101

Over a lunch of spring rolls and string beans ("Paul and Julia would have ordered something more exotic"), Conant says her new book grew out of the tour for her last book. The Irregulars explored the adventures of writer Roald Dahl (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) as a British spy in Washington at the start of World War II.

That 2008 book tour coincided with the U.S. government's release of what Conant calls "a treasure-trove" of documents on OSS operatives. News stories focused on the unlikely ones: Moe Berg (a major league baseball player), Arthur Schlesinger (the historian) and Julia Child.

"Wherever I went," Conant says, "someone would ask, 'Was Julia Child a spy?' I didn't know." After three years of research, her answer is no.

They weren't spies in the operational sense. Julia filed cables and other documents. Paul designed and built war rooms. But they were entrusted with secrets, worked with spies and were friends with spies.

Jane Foster, one of their best friends during the war (Paul was infatuated with Jane before falling for Julia), would later be charged with spying for the Soviet Union.

And Paul would be swept up in what Conant calls "the witch hunt" led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. The FBI would question Paul's loyalty to the United States, and his sexuality, as a kind of smear.

Paul had nothing to hide, Conant says. The couple offered a pictorial response to the FBI's questions about "treasonous homosexuality" in their 1956 Valentine's Day card, posing "gloriously naked," as Conant puts in, in a bathtub full of soapsuds.

The making of Julia Child

A Covert Affair deals with political intrigue and love. The story's outlines are known, but Conant, more "a storyteller and journalist than a proper historian," fills in details and the drama.

Much of the book deals with the years before Child learned to cook, before the period celebrated in the 2009 movie Julie & Julia with Meryl Streep (as Julia) and Stanley Tucci (as Paul). Conant was intrigued by "Julia Child before she became the Julia Child we know. She would never have become that person if it weren't for the war and for Paul. She wanted to be more like him and the women in his life."

They met in 1944 in Ceylon, then a British colony, now Sri Lanka.

She was 32, a Smith College graduate who had yet to find a husband or a career. Her California family was wealthy and conservative. Except for an afternoon in Tijuana, she had never before traveled outside the USA. As a writer, she collected rejections. As an advertising copywriter, she was quickly fired.

At 6-foot-2, she was rejected by the Women's Army Corps as "too long," as she later wrote. But she found a home in the OSS, a collection of blue-blood academics, journalists and artists, dismissed by critics as "Oh So Secret" and "Oh So Social."

The war, Conant says, "gave Julia a second chance to make something of her life." And it gave her Paul.

He was 42, an artist from Massachusetts who had lived in Venice and Paris. Two years after the death (from cancer) of a longtime companion, he was on the "prowl," as Conant puts it, for a new girlfriend.

In letters to his twin brother, Paul described his "dream" woman: a sophisticated, goddess-like "Zorina," in honor of the ballet dancer Vera Zorina.

Gangly, inexperienced Julia McWilliams was no Zorina. Paul's letters pegged Julia as a "grown-up little girl ... trying to be brave about being an old maid." He liked her "pleasantly crazy sense of humor" but was put off by her virginity.

Julia fell for Paul but settled for a platonic friendship, nourished by adventuresome meals — until one night at the end of the war.

"When they finally went to bed," Conant writes, "it was an act less of passion than of compassion. It was almost as if Paul, in his role as tutor, wanted to make sure she completed the lesson plan."

They decided to test their relationship in peacetime. He would visit her family in California. She prepared by taking her first cooking lessons. They ended up driving back East.

"By the time they reached Maine," Conant says, "they were madly in love."

Married in 1946, they moved to Paris in 1948, where Paul designed exhibits for the United States Information Agency, and Julia fell in love with French food.

Beyond the good times in Paris, Conant was attracted by the story's moral complexity and the idea that Julia, "so iconic and beloved, quintessentially American," was threatened by McCarthyism.

Julie & Julia, the movie, was based on two best-selling memoirs: Julie Powell's Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 525 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment (2005) and Julia Child's My Life in France, written with Alex Prud'homme (2006), published a year after Child's death two days short of her 92nd birthday.

The movie has a short scene of Paul being grilled by investigators. Conant says Streep and Tucci were great, but "the whole FBI ordeal was dismissed with a passing remark."

Uncovering their life together

Conant, who is married to 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft, calls "that whole world of 'China hands' (U.S. diplomats and others blamed for the fall of China to the communists) something I had grown up with, although two generations after Julia and Paul."

Conant, 50, was born in South Korea to American parents who met there. (Her mother is an art historian; her father is a documentary filmmaker who worked as a U.N. information officer.) She grew up in Tokyo, Cambridge, Mass. (home to Harvard, where her grandfather, James B. Conant, was president), and New York, where she now lives.

She never met Julia or Paul (who died in 1994 at age 92) but remembers seeing Julia around Cambridge, her home for 32 years. She vividly recalls the TV cooking lessons: "She came on after Perry Mason and before Walter Cronkite."

And it was at a Harvard library, where Julia and Paul donated their letters and diaries, that Conant found details of a past that even Julia's friends and colleagues knew little about.

Cookbook author Dorie Greenspan, who worked with Julia for several years and wrote Baking With Julia, a 1996 companion to Child's TV series, Master Chef, can't remember Julia talking about World War II, "except for the occasional mention of the food in China."

Greenspan says Julia often talked about Paul — "always referring to him as 'my Paul' " — but never about how he was caught up in Cold War security investigations.

A spy among them

Conant found all the intimate details a writer could want in Julia's and Paul's letters to family, friends and each other. "Most of us edit ourselves," Conant says. "They didn't."

Paul was eventually cleared by the FBI, but that experience — and seeing others smeared and careers ruined — left both of them with a hatred for Joe McCarthy.

"I am terribly worried about McCarthyism," Julia wrote to a friend in 1954. "But what can I do as an individual? It is frightening. I am ready to bare my breasts (small size though they be) stick out my neck, won't turn my back on anyone, will sacrifice cat, cookbook, husband, and finally self ... ."

It never came to that. But their old friend, the reckless and flamboyant Jane Foster, a former Communist who excelled at propaganda and counterespionage for the OSS, was indicted in 1957, accused of aiding a Soviet spy ring.

Avoiding trial, Foster lived the rest of her life in exile in Paris.

Conant notes that Julia, in hundreds of interviews in her career, never said a word against Foster until 1991, in an oral history interview for the Association of Diplomatic Studies and Training.

Julia fondly reminisced about a "fascinating and amusing girl, Jane Foster," then, matter-of-factly added, "who turned out to be a Russian agent."

In recently released Soviet documents, Conant found evidence linking Foster with a spy ring, although it's unclear whether she was merely indiscreet or actually passing on information.

What is clear, Conant says, is the "fantastic juxtaposition" between the two wartime friends: "One became an American icon. The other was accused of being a Russian spy."