A Covert Affair (48 page)

Jane's parents considered the charges preposterous and believed the government's case was a pack of lies supplied by a paid informant with the improbable name of Boris Morros. From the perspective of her sturdy Yankee father, the fact that Morros was a Hollywood producer was reason enough not to believe a word out of his mouth. None of it made any sense. Not long after the indictment was handed down, Harry Foster got a call from the American Embassy in Paris asking him to come in for an informal chat.
“Will I be able to go out again?”
he had inquired in a skeptical drawl.

“Oh, Dr. Foster!” the voice on the line spluttered, feigning shock. When he reluctantly met with embassy officials, they pleaded with him to use his influence to persuade Jane to return to the United States to testify. They told him it would be for the best. He would not hear of it.

George's family also rejected the espionage charges and regarded the pair as victims of a savage game of Cold War politics. His sister, Helen, stood by him and sent money to help pay the legal fees.
“The family always viewed the charges against them as trumped up,”
explained Helen's daughter, Susan. She added that, if anything, they always held George to be the more accountable of the two. “Everyone knew he was a loose cannon. I wouldn't put it past my uncle to thumb his nose at the world in ways that were not judicious and possibly bordered on the treacherous.” Either way, she could not imagine that he was ever much more than a nuisance. He had been engaged in one kind of political mischief or another since his days as a union organizer in the 1930s. His big mouth and back-parlor posturing had gotten him into trouble too many times for anyone to trust him with anything remotely important. As for Jane, Susan always had the sense that she had
made herself an easy target. She was “vulnerable”—by virtue of her easy way with money, readiness to embrace anyone who flouted convention, and fondness for alcohol.
“She liked the high life and her party-loving friends,”
Susan reflected. “I don't think she was very particular about who she surrounded herself with. Jane and George drank too much, more than they could hold. It's possible that one or both of them may have been used.”

Julia and Paul did not know what to believe. On the face of it, the government's case against Jane appeared overwhelming. Yet experience had given them a very jaundiced view of the FBI's so-called evidence. It was now clear to them that Paul's loyalty hearing had been an ugly sideshow to a much larger investigation. The FBI had lumped him in with Jane in their Washington-to-Paris web of conspiracy, and because he was a fellow artist they were all too ready to believe he was also a flagrant fellow traveler. Had he not shouted his innocence from the rooftops, called every friend he had, and enumerated his father-inlaw's right-wing bona fides, he might have ended up another casualty of their reckless hunt for coconspirators. He and Julia hated even to think how close he had come to being pulled into the “Mocase” morass.
*
They also understood that Jane's choice of exile did not necessarily implicate her. It was less an admission of guilt than an expression of sheer terror. They had all seen what a grueling process these hearings were and the toll they had taken on much tougher people. It was not hard to see why Jane did not have the stomach for it.

Julia and Paul recalled that on one of the last times they had seen Jane in Paris she had speculated that all her problems with the State Department might have been the result of her sharply worded criticisms
of U.S. policy in Indonesia and Indochina at the end of the war. When she returned from overseas, she had been angry and disillusioned and had spoken out passionately against the Dutch and French efforts to reclaim their former colonies, warning that it was not in America's interest to support their European allies in this unjust cause, which would result in guerilla warfare for years to come. She had
anticipated
revolution, saying precisely what Washington policy makers did not want to hear at that combustible moment in history, when they feared revolution could spread like wildfire across Southeast Asia, consuming Thailand, Burma, Malaya, and the whole Indonesian archipelago. State Department officials, angered and alarmed by her ad hoc support of nationalism, had accused her of a breach of security. She had broken rank, and her intemperate remarks had created friction with their European allies at a time when American diplomacy was focused on cementing relations and resisting the Communist challenge. Looking back at everything that had happened since then, Jane could not help wondering if she had made powerful enemies in the defense establishment. If her dissenting views had aroused the first stirrings of suspicion and disapproval, planting the seeds that led to her loyalty investigation and eventual indictment.

Jane's suspicions were borne out in late 1957 when the House Committee on Un-American Activities began investigating her wartime activities in Indonesia. The notion that one of the OSS's agents in Indonesia was a spy fit in perfectly with HUAC's theory that all the policy difficulties in that part of the world derived from communist subversion of the U.S. government. A leading proponent of this argument, Major General Charles Willoughby, MacArthur's former chief of intelligence, charged that the current crisis in Indonesia could be
“traced directly to communist subversives who had ‘induced the United States Government to champion Sukarno,'”
whom he labeled a Japanese collaborator and communist sympathizer.
*

Every time Julia and Paul had been confronted with the possibility of Jane's suspect loyalty in the past two years, they had rejected it. Every instinct they had told them she was not capable of such duplicity. In all the time they had known her, Jane's utopian beliefs and assorted political causes had never amounted to anything in the way of the ideological commitment it would take to become a traitor. The only thing she had ever seemed really committed to was her painting—and having a good time. They decided to stick by their earlier conclusion: Jane might be indiscreet, but she was not dishonest.
“We talked about it and Julia and I shared the same feeling,”
Betty recalled. “Jane might have been foolish at times, she might have said things that were unwise, and kept company with all kinds of crazy characters. So what? That would be entirely in character for her. But a spy, definitely not.”

The idea that she could be a traitor was absurd.
“Jane was a wonderful person who had done so much during the war,”
Betty insisted. “The idea that anyone could suspect that she wasn't ‘a loyal American' was just incredible to me.” In the hellish months that followed the indictment, Betty received several letters from Jane. “They were very sad, full of the things the FBI was doing to her and how unhappy she was. They were still trying to prove she was guilty. But Jane had been framed. There was nothing to prove.”

Jane's friends and former colleagues were divided as to her culpability. There were plenty of people who had no trouble believing she was subversive and were quick to say they had never trusted her. A number of her old OSS colleagues, however, kept faith with her and sent letters expressing their support and offering assistance. Jane never received them.
“She was very hurt by it,”
Susan recalled. “It seems many of their letters were ‘lifted,' so they never heard from many of their friends and family members all during that dreadful time. It made them feel abandoned. Jane was so angry about it that she cut herself off from everyone. She refused to call or write anyone from home. It was a typical act of arrogance on her part.”

Jane was resigned to life in exile. She was a fugitive from justice in her own country and a political prisoner in France, unable to venture beyond its borders without risking arrest and extradition. It was the
peculiar, precarious existence of the stateless. The first months were the most difficult. In late 1957, the French authorities asked Jane and George to surrender their identity papers and offered them a choice: they could leave France for whatever country would have them or agree to live for an “unspecified period” in the
département
of Gard, in southern France. The Gard was where the French administration banished persons under
assignés à résidence
(forced residence orders) while their legal cases were under review. It was also where the French regularly stowed members of parliament who had misbehaved or were being penalized for one reason or another. Jane and George had not been accused of any crime, but they were “guests” of a foreign government and this was an invitation they could not refuse. Of course, they opted for the Gard and rented a house in the Cévennes region in which to wait out their sentence.

After being banished for almost a year, they were allowed to return to Paris to pick up the pieces of their life. Their French identity cards were restored, and they went back to being
“ordinary people again.”
After initially feeling terribly humiliated by their outlaw status, Jane had come to learn that the French did not attach the same disgrace to political dissidents. Being labeled a Communist carried no social stigma; in some circles, it was almost a badge of honor. They were warmly received by their neighbors and local shopkeepers on rue Mazarine and quietly protected as old residents of their
quartier
. Jane's parents wanted to hire a new set of lawyers to see if they could get the indictment quashed, but she told them not to bother. It would be throwing good money after bad.
“Simply to be accused of being Soviet spies in the climate of the 1950s was to be automatically found guilty by the courts and the press, even on the testimony of a madman, Soble, and of a psychopathic liar, Morros.”
She had no hope of rehabilitation and did not want it.

Jane turned her back on America. She refused to see old friends. She severed all her ties with the past. Betty stopped receiving letters. After a Christmas card with a brief, scribbled note, she heard nothing more. She knew of no one from their old gang who was still in contact with Jane, not even Julia and Paul. She was not sure, in all honesty,
how hard they tried to keep in touch. Betty's husband had just been appointed to a big job; as deputy assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, he had to tread carefully. He wanted her to be careful, too.
“Julia was braver,”
she said. “Perhaps, because of her work, she could afford to be. But Paul had a government job. Jane made him nervous and with good reason. He knew he had to steer clear of the whole situation. That's just the way it was then.”

In 1959, Paul received another transfer abroad, this time to Norway. It would be their last post. After two uneventful years in Oslo, Paul decided he wanted to retire. He was sixty years old and fed up with working for a government bureaucracy he had never really liked in the first place. He was done scaling the career ladder. He knew perfectly well he would advance no higher. He wanted to devote himself full-time to his painting, photography, writing, and music, which he had relegated to weekend hobbies for too long. Julia, who was tired of moving her kitchen every few years, was more than ready to try another way of life.
“We decided we would take a gamble,”
recalled Paul. “We said, ‘O.K., we'll quit and we'll go back home and be Americans and we'll see what happens.” They did not have much in the way of savings left and were not certain what they would live on. Julia could give cooking lessons, and perhaps, if her book was well received, she could become a food writer for a magazine and he could take the pictures to accompany her articles. For Paul, it was all part of the adventure. “You never know what's going to happen unless you do it,” he challenged Julia. “It's all theory until you subject it to the ‘operational proof.'”

They decided to settle in Boston, Paul's old home base, because California at that point
“seemed so far away.”
They found an old clapboard house in Cambridge they could just afford. It had formerly been owned by the Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce and so would provide a good, solid intellectual foundation for their new life. Paul threw himself into designing an elaborate kitchen / cooking laboratory he called Julia's “war room,” while she put the finishing touches on her opus, now ten years in the making. The original manuscript had run to 850 pages, so huge that even after Julia and her two coauthors reluctantly hacked it down to 684 pages it was still rejected by Houghton Mifflin as overly
long and formidable for the average American housewife. Julia had just about given up hope when Alfred A. Knopf agreed to publish it in all its unwieldy glory. Paul helped her with the proofreading and indexing and took hundreds of photographs from which a sketch artist made the final drawings for the book.
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
came out in the fall of 1961. It created an immediate sensation. The book received overwhelming praise and was hailed by the
New York Times
food critic Craig Claiborne as
“the most comprehensive, laudable, and monumental work on the subject.”
An appearance at Boston's public television station, WGBH, four months later to promote the book led to her being asked to tape three pilot programs on cooking. The result was the development of her popular television series
The French Chef.

Julia, who had been in search of a career her whole life, stepped eagerly into the limelight. Her “bigness,” once the cause of so much grief, made her a natural star. Paul stayed in the wings, becoming her protective manager as well as
“prime dishwasher and baggage carrier.”
They made a splendid team. Julia, acknowledging his
“enormous”
contribution, never spoke of her work except in the plural.
“We do everything together,”
she would tell journalists fascinated by their devoted partnership.