Jennet Conant, A Covert Affair: Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS
04/07/2011 7:00 pm
Bestselling
author Jennet Conant brings us a stunning account of Julia and Paul
Child's experiences as members of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)
in the Far East during World War II and the tumultuous years when they
were caught up in the McCarthy Red spy hunt in the 1950s and behaved
with bravery and honor. It is the fascinating portrait of a group of
idealistic men and women who were recruited by the citizen spy service,
slapped into uniform, and dispatched to wage political warfare in remote
outposts in Ceylon, India, and China.
The
eager, inexperienced 6 foot 2 inch Julia springs to life in these
pages, a gangly golf-playing California girl who had never been farther
abroad than Tijuana. Single and thirty years old when she joined the
staff of Colonel William Donovan, Julia volunteered to be part of the
OSS's ambitious mission to develop a secret intelligence network across
Southeast Asia. Her first post took her to the mountaintop idyll of
Kandy, the headquarters of Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, the supreme
commander of combined operations. Julia reveled in the glamour and
intrigue of her overseas assignment and lifealtering romance with the
much older and more sophisticated Paul Child, who took her on trips into
the jungle, introduced her to the joys of curry, and insisted on
educating both her mind and palate. A painter drafted to build war
rooms, Paul was a colorful, complex personality. Conant uses extracts
from his letters in which his sharp eye and droll wit capture the
day-to-day confusion, excitement, and improbability of being part of a
cloak- and-dagger operation.
A Covert Affair chronicles
their friendship with a brilliant and eccentric array of OSS agents,
including Jane Foster, a wealthy, free-spirited artist, and Elizabeth
MacDonald, an adventurous young reporter. In Paris after the war, Julia
and Paul remained close to their intelligence colleagues as they
struggled to start new lives, only to find themselves drawn into a far
more terrifying spy drama. Relying on recently unclassified OSS and FBI
documents, as well as previously unpublished letters and diaries, Conant
vividly depicts a dangerous time in American history, when those who
served their country suddenly found themselves called to account for
their unpopular opinions and personal relationships.
Jennet Conant is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington and Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II. A former journalist, she has written for Vanity Fair, Esquire, GQ, Newsweek, and The New York Times. She lives in New York City and Sag Harbor, New York.
