A Covert Affair (34 page)

Only now he was in New York, fresh off a troopship, and had rung up and asked to see her. After receiving her letter, he had sent a terse reply explaining that with no one waiting for him at home he had decided to stay on in Europe. He had responded to an army circular looking for Russian-speaking officers to volunteer for liaison duty in Berlin or Vienna but instead had been assigned to the Military Intelligence
Service and sent to a training school in Oberammergau in Bavaria. After months of silence, he had dropped her a line stating that he would be coming to the States in the fall. Jane, in another moment of weakness, postponed her trip to Reno.

Betty could still remember the first time she met George Zlatovski. Jane had brought him by the house for a drink, and they were both pretty well lubricated by the time Betty joined them in the library. George was of medium height, wiry, with a narrow face, high cheekbones (Jane described them as “Mongol”), and a thin, aquiline nose. He had a slightly lopsided mouth that in repose made him look somewhat churlish. He wore his clothes well, with a certain Continental élan, and knew how to turn on a courtly Old World charm. Betty could appreciate that he might appeal to the ladies, but it did not take long for her to see that he had an enormous chip on his shoulder.
“There was something about him,”
she said with an ambivalent shrug. “I had a feeling he wasn't quite up to her level.”

Jane later told her that her husband had been born Alexander Mikhail L'vovich Zlatkovski but had opted for the more American-sounding name George Michael Zlatovski when his family moved from Russia in 1922, when he was twelve. (His family also dropped the first
k
in their last name.) The offspring of a doctor to nobility, he and his younger sister had enjoyed a life of privilege in prewar St. Petersburg; they had been raised with servants, dachas, private tutors, and music lessons. When the Russian Revolution began in 1917, his family fled to the Ukraine, returning to their devastated home three years later. His father was no Communist, but because he was deemed a
“socially useful element”
he was treated fairly well for a while. When he eventually fell afoul of the new Soviet authorities, the family followed the example of their cousins who had earlier settled in Duluth, Minnesota. George clearly held the decision to emigrate against his father, blaming him for a youth blighted by misery, poverty, and prejudice. Adapting to a new country and culture had been difficult. His mother retreated into silence and depression and died of tuberculosis a few years later. George became an angry, disaffected teenager who suffered the humiliation of being called “Trotsky” by classmates and was forced to dress up and
play classical recitals at the local Rotary, Kiwanis, and Lions clubs for pocket money. His mother had wanted him to try for a scholarship to the Juilliard School of Music in New York, but in a desperate attempt to fit in with his midwestern peers he opted to study engineering at the University of Minnesota. He regarded it as the biggest mistake of his life.

Jane made no attempt to gloss over his left-wing politics. George had graduated in the midst of the Depression and with no chance at a job had drifted into various labor organizations, several of which were affiliated with the Communist Party. He quickly became radicalized and spent the next few years as an agitator, street-corner orator, and union organizer, mostly trying to enlist the support of unemployed immigrant steel workers.
*
In 1937, imbued with revolutionary ardor, he ran off to the Spanish Civil War to be a hero and fight the fascists with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. He returned to New York one year later, disillusioned and broke. Like Jane, he had been married before, to a dancer he had met in Duluth named Kathleen O'Brien.

Jane met him shortly after she moved to New York in 1941, introduced by mutual friends at an antiwar rally sponsored by the American Peace Mobilization, the liberal answer to America First. Jane was immediately attracted to his dark, brooding looks, and to catch his eye she began attending various antiwar meetings and Communist Party fundraisers. A child of the Depression, she, too, had dabbled in left-wing politics after college but had succeeded mostly in infuriating her father. In 1938, while attempting to eke out a living doing political caricatures for Bay Area publications including
People's World
, she had joined the local chapter of the Communist Party. At the time, it had seemed to her like a way to take
“a strong, uncompromising stand against the economic crisis, war, Fascism, Nazism, and colonialism.”
Her fellow travelers were almost all artists, most of whom were working for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), set up by Roosevelt's New Deal administration
to put unemployed painters and sculptors to work decorating public buildings. Even though some of them were not very good artists, Jane thought it was a grand idea.

She liked to joke that neither she nor George were ever cut out to be Communist. He was too insubordinate—even by Party standards—and liked money too much. George was an awful snob, and part of Jane's appeal for him was her wealthy background and fine sensibilities. Jane, too, was
“a bit of a snob.”
She considered all the Party rules and regulations a bore, and was disappointed that her comrades in arms were not exactly what one would call “jolly companions.” Moreover, she was “useless” at Party tasks. Once, when told that every member was expected to sell the
Daily Worker
on street corners, Jane got all
“gussied up”
in her mink coat and Bergdorf Goodman suit and made rather a spectacle of herself in Union Square meekly offering the paper to passersby. She managed to sell only a handful of copies while earning a lot of queer looks, but she obstinately maintained it was better than going around “like one of the slouching, leather-coated characters who gave the Party a bad name.” She and George “so hated this chore” that they took to dumping their allotted issues in the garbage and just pretended that the money they handed over the next morning was from paper sales. The Communist Party was not for her, and with the advent of the war her focus shifted to fighting the fascists.

The more Betty saw of George, the less she liked him, but the opposite was true of Jane. After a few weeks, it was apparent that their relationship was very much on again. They went out on the town night after night, racking up huge tabs in expensive restaurants and clubs, giddily spending their war savings. Each regarded the other as exotic and ungovernable without ever stopping to consider that their lack of anything in common might one day pose a problem. What united them as Catholic and Jew, according to George, was that they were both
“incurable romantics,”
fueling each other's passions and propensity for martyrdom. It was an ill-considered union, in Betty's view, but they were too entangled to part. What could she say anyway? That she had a vague feeling of unease about George and
“did not really trust him”
? She and Dick had gotten married in June and were caught up in their
own lives. Since moving out of the apartment she shared with Jane, she had seen less and less of her old friend. They moved
“in very different circles.”

Once they reunited, Jane and George fell in with the same careless bohemian crowd they had known before the war. At the center of their group were Martha Dodd Stern and her husband, Alfred K. Stern, a wealthy investment banker. The couple threw huge parties in their penthouse apartment in the Majestic on Central Park West, and all sorts of artists and intellectuals, rebels, and radicals came to eat their hors d'oeuvres and drink their liquor. Among the regulars at the Sterns' soirees were Lillian Hellman, Paul Robeson, Margaret Bourke-White, Clifford Odets, and Isamu Noguchi, along with members of the Soviet and Eastern European diplomatic set. Regarding the crowd of famous faces, one amused guest dubbed the Sterns' salon
“La Très Haute Société Communiste.”

Jane had been introduced to Martha at a concert at Carnegie Hall when she first moved to New York, and they quickly discovered they had much in common. (It was Martha's brother, Bill Dodd, Jr., who lent Jane his apartment.) Jane and Martha came from similar backgrounds: Martha was an “F.F.V.” (as in first families of Virginia), had toured Europe with her parents, and, like Jane, had lived in Berlin during the 1930s, although the two did not know each other at the time. Martha, who was pretty, blond, and amorously adventurous, had written a surprisingly frank book,
Through Embassy Eyes
, chronicling her early infatuation with Hitler and her affairs with handsome Gestapo officers before she understood what was really happening in Germany. She eventually saw the light, switched to Communism, and became equally fervent about her new cause. Despite her Bolshie politics and love of all things Russian—the two swans that ruled the lake on the grounds of her Ridgefield, Connecticut, estate were named Vladimir Ilyitch and Krupskaya—she was cagey about her party affiliations. She boasted about slipping Nazi secrets to her Russian lover in the early days of the war, and, as far as Jane could tell, she
“loved intrigue, both political and personal, for its own sake.”
She was always hatching plots, and she would create compromising situations between friends and then “slyly
hint” about what she knew. Jane resented Martha's meddling in her relationship with George, and the degree to which he seemed at her beck and call, but continued to see her on the cocktail circuit.

In the fall, Jane announced her intention of getting married. As far as her parents were concerned, she was finally wedding her longtime beau, whom they had met briefly before the war. On September 26, 1946, she and George carried out the charade of their second nuptials—even taking themselves downtown to the New York Municipal Building and obtaining another license—all in the name of sparing her parents “the pain” of their secret elopement. Though if Betty had to venture a guess, she was pretty sure that given Mr. and Mrs. Foster's feelings about George's radical politics and his influence on their only daughter, they would have preferred the pain of a divorce. Since George was still in the army, he had to report back to Vienna at the end of his three months' leave. Jane, who was thrilled to have an excuse to get back to Europe, made plans to join him. Naturally she could not resist splurging on a week's holiday in her
“adorable, adored Paris.”
Betty genuinely wished her the best. With all the disappointments and lost dreams of the war, there was something reassuring about knowing that for a few members of their detachment, at least, it had ended in a happily-ever-after.

By this time, Paul Child was back in Washington and, since the liquidation of OSS, officially an employee of the State Department. Paul was initially quite pleased, and not a little impressed, to find himself working for such a venerable institution.
“Break out my striped pants and my
chapeau haut-de-forme
, my monocle, my gardenia, and my pearl gray spats,”
he had instructed Charles prior to leaving China. “I want to look reet when I arrive in Washington.” The thrill faded quickly enough, though he enjoyed the executive-level position and freedom from drudgery. He had the catchall title of project director, which meant he was responsible for planning and executing all the visual media presentations—from short films, slide shows, diagrams, and exhibits to articles and brochures—required by the different departments, as well as for big meetings and international conferences. He had a large office, adequate staff, and all the supplies and specialized equipment he had dreamed of back in Kunming. If the job was not particularly creative
or inspiring, at least it paid the bills. He planned to apply for another foreign post, preferably in Europe, when his life was more settled.

He was temporarily bunking with Charles and Freddie, and their three young children at their large home at 1311 Thirty-fifth Street in Georgetown. As much as he loved his brother, being back in the bosom of family was at times quite taxing. Paul had an extremely complicated, competitive relationship with Charles, and he spent most of his life defining himself in opposition to his identical twin. It was not that Paul resented his brother's good fortune; he did not. It was just that he could not help feeling left out or, more precisely, left behind:
“This brings up the difference in our timetables,”
Paul once wrote, lamenting his perennial rear view of life's promise. Everything always happened to Charles “first”: he was the first to marry, to get a government job, to merit a raise, to move to Washington, and, last but not least, to advance up the career ladder to an important new position (with UNESCO). “If you think back, or just wait for the future to unroll, you will see that I am right,” Paul added. “You are always ahead.”

Julia's fly-by visit in November on her way home to California was a salve to his wounded ego. There she was, the devoted friend featured in so many of his wartime letters, larger than life in the crowded sitting room, radiating admiration and affection for him and him alone. Just seeing her did him good.

Julia had traveled back on a packed troopship with Rosie Frame and was full of funny stories. It had been a long, boring trip, and naturally there was a certain amount of fraternization between the troops and female civilians on board. One night on the mild Indian Ocean, a young OSS officer, Bob North, and a secretary were caught in flagrante delicto on the top deck by the master at arms. In his haste to get away, North tossed most of their clothes down the steep ladder, swung his date—who was passed out cold—over his shoulder, and carried her to the women's quarters. Julia, who found him struggling to get into her cabin, relieved North of the half-naked girl, telling him with good-natured disapproval,
“I'll take her from here.”
By the time they arrived in New York, she and Rosie were
“tired and bedraggled”
and smelled like they had come by “cattle boat.” Thibaut de Saint Phalle,
who was waiting on the pier to meet his fiancée, took one look at them and stopped by the nearest phone, called the Elizabeth Arden salon, and took them both directly there for a thorough beauty treatment.