A Covert Affair (49 page)

Reflecting on her late-in-life success, Julia would often say, “The war made me.” She was very nostalgic about her years overseas with the OSS, when she finally came into her own, fell in love, and first tasted the spicy Indian curries and savory Chinese dishes that awakened her senses and her deep affinity for food. Yet she was never inclined to romanticize the past, remaining characteristically clear-eyed and forthright about the demagoguery that had blighted the postwar period. She and Paul had escaped relatively unscathed, but too many friends had not been as fortunate. For all that those years had brought them, they could never look back on that time, and Paul's
“shameful episode,”
without bitter regret, like “the taste of ashes” in their mouths.

JANE FOSTER lived in exile in Paris for another two decades. It was a quiet, cosseted existence, underpinned by a generous monthly income from her indulgent parents. She moved to an ancient, elegant apartment at 10 rue Chanoinesse on Ile de la Cité, an island in the very heart of medieval Paris, just steps from Notre Dame. In time, she acquired a second home, a fifteenth-century stone cottage in the Dordogne region in southwestern France. Jane created a small studio in her apartment and continued to paint and to exhibit her work. She kept up with a few old friends, meeting them for drinks on Tuesdays at Harry's Bar. She never lost her taste for the finer things in life. She was always beautifully dressed in Chanel and Dior, her once-unruly mane of blond curls coiffed to perfection. George, who had always been nattily attired, wore hand-tailored suits, Burberry coats, and Gucci shoes. In his later years, he carried a brass-tipped cane. They frequented five-star restaurants and entertained lavishly at home, where Jane took wicked pleasure in laying her table with copious settings of family silver and then waited to see which of her guests knew what to do with the ice cream fork. They were by all accounts convivial hosts, and loved to discuss current affairs and trade gossip. The one rule that was always observed was that no one made any reference to the past unpleasantness.
“It all receded into myth,”
recalled Susan, a frequent visitor to the Ile de la Cité apartment in the 1960s and 1970s. “And it was never spoken of.”

Despite her claim to have followed the example of Sara and Gerald Murphy, the wealthy, handsome members of the so-called Lost Generation who famously remarked, “Living well is the best revenge,” Jane's comfortable expatriate life never afforded her much in the way of happiness or satisfaction. She defiantly declared she would
“never go home again”
but at the same time was haunted by the tenuousness of her fugitive status. For years she suffered from the recurrent nightmare that she was trapped on a ship or plane headed for the United States and unable to get off or turn back, unable to save herself from the terrible fate that awaited her there. When she awoke,
“seized by terror,”
it would come as a huge relief to find herself safe and sound within the familiar four walls of her Paris bedroom. “The worst part of the dream,” she wrote obliquely, “was that I always realized that I did it myself and that nobody forced me.” She did not find much solace in her marriage. She and George continued to drink and squabble, and close friends were often dismayed by his surly moods and violent outbursts. The two separated for a time, then drifted back together. They were miserable together, but they had shared the same lifeboat too long to know how to survive apart.

Then, in 1970, as her eighty-eight-year-old father lay dying in a San Francisco hospital and her eighty-year-old mother, who was already sick with cancer, was left to cope on her own, Jane suddenly wanted nothing more than to be allowed to return home. Her longtime New York attorney, Leonard Boudin, and the lawyer her parents retained from a white-glove San Francisco firm, both warned her not to risk traveling to the United States. There was still a warrant out for her arrest. In jail, she would be of no help to her ailing parents. Her mother called and begged her not to come. Desperate, Jane asked Boudin to contact the Justice Department to see if there was anything that could be done to improve her legal standing.

After ordering a review of the case, Chief Judge Sydney Sugarman of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York requested advice from the FBI and the Department of Internal Security on any changes that might have occurred in the intervening years. The FBI advised that it had received identical inquiries concerning the
Zlatovskis in Paris and the Sterns in Prague. As the bureau regarded the two cases as
“intrinsically tied together”
from the very inception of the conspiracy, all aspects of their situations would need to be considered together. More than thirteen years had elapsed since the indictment, and both of the principal witnesses against the subjects—Boris Morros and Jack Soble—had since died. A FBI memo dated August 4, 1970, stated, “While it would appear difficult to sustain prosecution against these subjects in the absence of the aforementioned witnesses, the existence of the outstanding indictment appears to be a major deterrent against the return of these persons to the U.S.” While it was “doubtful” that Jane could be prosecuted successfully, the bureau noted that Myra Soble was still alive and living in New York, and of sound mind, and her testimony could “possibly be of value.” The memo concluded that in view of the subjects' past history and activities, “the Bureau would consider their presence in the U.S. to constitute a grave danger to the internal security.” The Justice Department informed Boudin that the indictment would not be dismissed. If his client attempted to reenter the United States, she would be arrested upon arrival.

The news came as a terrible blow to Jane. It meant she would be unable to say good-bye to her father, who had seen her through such terrible times and, whatever his private reservations, had been unwavering in his support. She saw it as a final act of cruelty by a heartless country. When the Greek actress Melina Mercouri, who had been stripped of her Greek citizenship and was on the wanted list for her opposition to the military dictatorship in her country, had petitioned for the right to return to Athens to attend her father's funeral, even the
“Fascist junta colonels ruling Greece,”
Jane wrote scathingly, “still had the decency to give her a twenty-four-hour safe conduct.” That the “non-fascist American government” refused to extend her the same courtesy was something she would “never forget nor forgive.” Jane's mother buried her husband in June 1971 and a few weeks later underwent surgery. She survived and rallied sufficiently to fly to Paris, where she remained until her death two years later. In 1976, Jane and George again petitioned to return to the United States, to no avail. Then, to their surprise and relief, after two decades of legal maneuvering they were granted
French citizenship. It meant they could at last fulfill their long-held desire to travel. They celebrated by taking a drunken cruise through the Greek islands.

Jane had been able to keep going as long as she had her parents, but with their deaths she lost the last remaining ballast in her life. Even though she inherited a substantial sum—she was convinced a government conspiracy lay behind the maddeningly slow probate—she grew increasingly melancholy. She withdrew from the world and devoted herself to her painting. When she was diagnosed with macular degeneration, and could no longer see to paint, she lost all interest in living. After a routine operation on her leg for phlebitis, from which her doctors fully expected her to recover, she refused to walk or make any effort to get better, despite the danger of developing a blood clot. She spent her days sitting by the window of her apartment brooding. She dictated her memoir from that perch, finishing the last chapter just before her death from thrombosis on September 24, 1979.
“She willed herself to die at age sixty-seven,”
said Susan. “She was a very bitter, unhappy woman at the end.”

After the funeral, held at the small side chapel of Notre Dame, Susan had tea with Jane's closest friend and former nurse, Mazella Swarbrick, and received an appalling account of George's behavior. His womanizing, which had always been a problem, continued unabated, and he had invited all kinds of companions back to the apartment. He had
“opened Jane's closets to his
putains
[whores],”
she reported with disgust, and allowed them to paw through her finery. All of her beautiful clothes, her minks and jewels, were gone. Jane, of course, had left no will—when had her affairs ever been in order?—and George had taken malicious pleasure in dispersing her belongings at whim. It was George who arranged for the posthumous publication of Jane's memoir,
An UnAmerican Lady
, by the London publisher Sidgwick & Jackson in 1980. He personally oversaw the editing process and approved the title and provocative cover, a photograph of Jane superimposed on the American flag. His involvement, however peripheral, places a question mark by her memoir—already a highly selective set of revelations—as a reliable record of Jane's experience.

In any autobiography, there are usually reasonable doubts about
the credibility of the author's account of the most controversial events, but in Jane's case there is compelling evidence that she refused to confront the truth about herself at the most fundamental level, her denial and self-delusion casting doubt on her whole story. A passionate idealist, she had spent her whole adult life cultivating an image of herself as a humanitarian, an individual of great heart and deep principle. She had joined the Communist Party for the best of reasons, believing she could help make the world a better place. She had joined the OSS in much the same spirit and had volunteered for dangerous assignments, fully committed to the idea that the liberation of the poor and oppressed was something worth fighting for. But in her eagerness to devote herself to the cause of the downtrodden, she blithely put her faith in the hands of a group of Communist Party activists, even when their ideological fervor and conspiratorial arrangements caused her to have doubts. She was so determined to prove her commitment—to prove she was not just another wealthy dilettante who had latched onto the proletariat cause—and so eager for their acceptance and approval that she turned a blind eye to what was going on until it was too late to turn back.

It is impossible to read her saga without being haunted by one question: When Jane told the DST she had been deceived by Martha Dodd Stern and Boris Morros and deliberately misled into working for the Soviets under the guise of doing odd jobs for the Party, was she telling the truth? Or was it, at least in part, a case of wishful thinking? Surely she was too intelligent, and too sharp, not to have seen through them eventually. And when she finally realized she was working for the NKVD, did she allow herself to be further drawn into its scheme rather than risk incriminating herself and her entire circle of friends? For all her wit and charm and generosity of spirit, the woman who emerges from the final chapters of her book seems tremendously insecure, lonely, and adrift, a rudderless vessel. She knew she had fallen in with bad company but was incapable of breaking away. Instead, she blundered on, lying to herself and others, at all times her own worst enemy.

On the last page of her memoir, she identifies herself with the martyrs of the McCarthy era, whose lives were
“scarred and ruined”
by the anti-Communist hysteria and by the people who had created it, “motivated by their greed for notoriety, money, and, above all, power.” There
is no doubt that in their relentless drive to root out spies in America, McCarthy and his followers did more harm to the country, and the constitutional liberties they held so dear, than the handful of conspiracies they managed to unmask. In numbering herself among the persecuted, however, Jane was attempting to obscure her own culpability under the cover of a greater tragedy. Nothing can undo the damage done by McCarthy's assault on the State Department and the ravaging effects of the fear and hatred he unleashed. But at the same time, no one was more to blame for Jane's foolishness and misguided loyalties and ultimate naïveté in allowing herself to be hustled and entrapped by the unscrupulous Boris Morros than she herself. Jane was never an archvil-lain, smuggling out nuclear secrets and imperiling the security of the nation, but she was not as innocent as she pretended. To the end, she clung resolutely to her vision of herself as a victim, a hapless dreamer who stumbled into a den of traitors, rewriting history the way alcoholics excuse the previous night's transgressions, always making someone else responsible for leading them astray.

While Jane never confessed in her memoir to engaging in espionage, she does acknowledge an ambiguous form of guilt in a telling quote from Aeschylus's
Prometheus Bound:

With open eyes
, with willing mind I erred. I do not deny it. Mankind I helped but could not help myself. Yet I dreamed not that here in this savage solitary gorge, on the high rock, I should waste away beneath such torments.

A snob to the core, Jane, in a final act of unreconstructed bourgeois class consciousness, arranged to be buried in the famous Père Lachaise Cemetery, home to a who's who of painters, poets, and musicians and known as “the grandest address in Paris.” After George died in 1985, his ashes were added to her crypt.

JULIA and PAUL CHILD made Cambridge, Massachusetts, their home for the next thirty-two years. After three houses in Washington, two in Marseille, one in Paris, one in Bonn, and one in Oslo, they never
wanted to move again. Once Paul had installed Julia's immense
batterie de cuisine
, with every pot and pan hung in its place on the green pegboard lining the kitchen walls, everything from cheese graters to colanders and sieves sorted, and more than seventy-five separate pieces of equipment meticulously arranged in a fashion
“suitable for framing,”
it was impossible to imagine ever doing it again. Her now-famous kitchen is on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.