Julia Childs, Spy
What professional blogger wouldn’t be excited about the imminent release of Julie & Julia, the first-ever film based on a blog? That said, the preview and the ads for the movie keep annoying me. Right at the beginning, the voiceover says that “before Julia Child changed the face of cooking, she was just a woman searching for her calling in life.” I suppose that’s true in some sense, and it nicely sets the story up as a cliché, but in fact before Julia Child was a famous cookbook author she was a spy, which is considerably more interesting:
The famous chef let slip the story of her war-era spying in a 2002 autobiography, but the release of thousands of documents from the U.S. national archives on Thursday confirms her participation in a secret organization formed by President Franklin Roosevelt during the Second World War.
Hidden among the 750,000 classified pages released Thursday is a picture of the vast spy network of military and civilian operatives called the Office of Strategic Services.
OSS was created during World War II as a wartime emergency measure. Later, as the US slipped into the “permanent emergency” of the Cold War, it was reorganized at the CIA. She worked directly as a kind of assistant to OSS chief William Donovan and then got posted to a field job in Sri Lanka. That’s where she met her husband who was also an OSS operative. Now that’s not to say that she wasn’t also searching for her calling in life, but it’s still pretty different from that “aw shucks” presentation the ad hints at. I hope the actual film manages to mention the considerably-more-interesting truth.
29 Responses to “Julia Childs, Spy”
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July 27th, 2009 at 8:36 am
That’s incorrect. The OSS was eventually split into two different agencies…State Department’s INR and the CIA. The reason why the CIA has been so hopeless over the years is largely because of this little noticed bureaucratic split. The analysts from OSS went to INR while the operations went to CIA. That explains why the CIA is more opt to “do something” without the proper analysis to support their actions.
BTW, you still owe the police officer an apology. Spend a moment correcting the record. The old media (New York Times) it would appear has beaten you there…
July 27th, 2009 at 8:43 am
Neutral Nation (punk band from Providence, RI) had a song called “julia childs was a spy”. It should be on the movie soundtrack.
July 27th, 2009 at 9:03 am
The movie does mention this. The setup has the couple stationed in France after the war. With no spying (or paper pushing as the couple claim) left for Julia she becomes disaffected with house wifery, hat making, etc. The film does quite a good job setting up the cliche search for purpose in straight forward and realistic manner.
July 27th, 2009 at 9:27 am
This was on last night (a show on MI6). It’s pretty interesting:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00ls8ll
July 27th, 2009 at 9:32 am
Okay, one: _Child_, not “Childs.”
Two: no one loves Julia more than I, but we don’t have to pretend she was off garrotting Nazis in back alleys. She worked for the OSS–I’m not sure that’s really enough to make one a “spy.” She started as a clerk, and certainly handled a lot of classified information. (She also worked on developing a shark repellant at one point.) But I don’t think there’s any indication she was ever an _operative_ for OSS.
July 27th, 2009 at 9:39 am
But it’s more fun to imagine that she was an operative, because the idea of a 6′2″ American woman with a big brassy voice infiltrating Axis intelligence circles is inherently amusing. I can see her garrotting a Nazi in a back alley while shouting “You really thought I was a literature student from Hamburg? Domkopf!” I know it didn’t happen, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have.
July 27th, 2009 at 10:02 am
“Save the livers.”
July 27th, 2009 at 10:05 am
I can see her garrotting a Nazi in a back alley while shouting “You really thought I was a literature student from Hamburg? Domkopf!”
Your imagination is limited. I sort of imagine her garroting a Nazi in a back alley with kitchen twine, then stuffing him in a preheated oven to broil for 25-30 minutes as she chops up some shallots with which to make gravy.
July 27th, 2009 at 10:09 am
The famous chef let slip the story of her war-era spying in a 2002 autobiography …
This has not really been a secret. I recall her discussing her work during the war in SE Asia in a (very entertaining) speech at the National Press Club in the early 1990s.
July 27th, 2009 at 10:31 am
Re “OSS was created during World War II as a wartime emergency measure. Later, as the US slipped into the “permanent emergency” of the Cold War, it was reorganized at the CIA.”
—————
Er..not quite. The OSS was terminated. Then the CIA was started from scratch a year or so later. While some OSS personnel were recruited for CIA, many were not. One problem was that OSS was riddled with Commie infiltrators.
Which was fine when several million Commies were killing several million Nazis on the Eastern Front. But after Germany collapsed, the Commies were not needed –or wanted –any longer. Especially when whispers started coming in from something called Verona.
July 27th, 2009 at 10:36 am
This is reminiscent of major league catcher Moe Berg’s work for Donovan and OSS.
July 27th, 2009 at 10:43 am
Well, this is Julia Child, not Hannibal Lecter.
July 27th, 2009 at 11:07 am
Even if Julia Child wasn’t really an ops. person, there is no reason why a (fictionalized) movie about her life during WWII shouldn’t essentially be a James Bond-style flick, but with the James Bond character being played by Meryl Streep and cooking lots of good food.
July 27th, 2009 at 11:29 am
Matt, please correct “Childs” to “Child.” Second, most good intelligence is about appropriately organizing all the information you have to make the best conclusions you can on a particular topic. My grandfather worked on the field intelligence for the Normandy invasion — they started by collecting every tour book and map they could from British citizens. Dozens, hundreds of “clerks” worked to organize this information so it could be used systematically. It’s not that different from Child’s very analytical approach to understanding French cuisine and then figuring out the best way to present that understanding to an American audience. In effect, Julia was our intelligence operative for French cuisine, reporting to the American people. Not surprisingly, the same grandfather was one of Julia’s earliest, most enthusiastic readers, and he helped turn my grandmother from a good cook to a great chef!
July 27th, 2009 at 11:37 am
Two: no one loves Julia more than I, but we don’t have to pretend she was off garrotting Nazis in back alleys. She worked for the OSS–I’m not sure that’s really enough to make one a “spy.”
Very few “spies” garrot people in back alleys. They’re more likely to get killed or jailed than to hurt anybody. They’re supposed to collect information in secret, not kill half a squad with bare hands.
And by the (rumored) standards of the CIA today, Julia Child was James Bond.
July 27th, 2009 at 11:39 am
njorl wins the thread.
July 27th, 2009 at 11:42 am
Really, let’s not get carried away. As far as I can tell, OSS is where they parked the rich Ivy league WASPS so they could avoid being grunts. I mean, they did real stuff, but it looks to me like a lot of the time it was the military equivalent of the “gentleman’s C”
July 27th, 2009 at 11:54 am
The Culinary Institute of America was founded a year before the Central Intelligence Agency. Buried somewhere with several other of my ideas for bad novels is a few pages about a disaffected former high government official, Randall “Randy” Pinkerton, who chucks it all and goes to the CIA to become a chef. A summit meeting is held at nearby Hyde Park, and he pulls strings to get on the guest list for the party. He puckishly signs in “Randy Pinkerton, CIA.” When the shit hits the fan, he’s grabbed up by the stunning Randi Pinkerton of the Central Intelligence Agency, who thought he was pretending to be her. They work together to save the world and have outrageous sex and great food in the bargain. Key line: Randall whips out a chef’s knife and eviscerates some bad guy. Randi is impressed. Randall shrugs it off: “I was first in my class in Knife Skills.”
This isn’t quite as bad as my murder mystery based on the idea that every eligible American is assigned a spot in the line of Presidential succession and No. 37 starts bumping people off, but it’s pretty bad.
July 27th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
Julia Child: International Super Spy would have been a lot better movie than Julia Child: Inspiration for some self-indulgent yuppie blogger– but I repeat myself.
July 27th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
This isn’t quite as bad as my murder mystery based on the idea that every eligible American is assigned a spot in the line of Presidential succession and No. 37 starts bumping people off, but it’s pretty bad.
Kind Hearts and Coronets.
July 27th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
Matt, please correct that “Childs” typo. The plural is “Children”.
July 27th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
Thanks for the tip, Jeffrey. I’ll check it out. Maybe I’ll pull out my CIA/CIA manuscript and get back to work. Could be a movie in it after all.
July 27th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Julia Child: International Super Spy would have been a lot better movie than Julia Child: Inspiration for some self-indulgent yuppie blogger– but I repeat myself.
Very true.
It’s interesting (but not shocking) how many women we now see as un-assuming mothers and widows were actually gun-wielding partisans and spys during the world war II who made Rambo look like a lily-livered pacifist. But the only countries (that I know of) who really officially recognize them in a veteran-like way are France and Israel. Does Russia offically recognize anyone else than Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya?
I blame the patriarchy.
July 27th, 2009 at 3:01 pm
I too would watch Julia Child: International Super Spy. Or a movie about Dr. Ruth working for, IIRC, the pre-Mossad. So many awesome stories, lost to ‘but wait, we can only have a white male hero.’
July 27th, 2009 at 3:04 pm
You think she dipped into the cooking sherry whilst spying?
July 27th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Maybe she plied the bad guys with sherry laced with sodium penthathol.
See, this movie would be awesome.
July 27th, 2009 at 4:38 pm
Julia would never use cooking sherry. She always insisted that you cook with a wine you would be willing to drink.
July 27th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
If the guests were in the living room, where they were supposed to be, they wouldn’t have noticed her dropping a turkey.
July 27th, 2009 at 7:42 pm
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