Julie & Julia May Bring Interest Back to Julia Child's OSS Work in WWII

The hunger to know more about Julia Child is still there, despite all her mouthwatering recipes still widely available in all her cookbooks and the heightening of that in recent years through Julie Powell's blog. When the biopic "Julie & Julia" was made, the intention was to base the segment of Julia Child's life on her autobiography "My Life in France" that focused squarely on her discovery of French cuisine via sole meunière as just starters. Up until the summer of last year, fans of Julia Child considered her years in France during the late 40's and most of the 50's to be the most significant part of her life that kicked off a culinary career. But once old files from the early CIA (Office of Strategic Services) were declassified in 2008, we found out Child had a completely different and adventurous life just five years prior to moving to France with her husband.

It's no surprise that none of it is covered in "Julie & Julia" because it was work as an international spy for the U.S. Government's OSS program in WWII. The only thing related to food in that elaborate tale? Think shark meat.

Well, no, Julia Child didn't reel in sharks and serve shark meat to the Nazis in order to obtain valuable military secrets. Instead, she put one other thing on her resume that she kept secret for the rest of her life: Helping to create a special shark repellant to place on explosive devices so there wouldn't be shark guts floating in the Atlantic Ocean rather than pieces of a Nazi sub. Yet this was just the beginning of the adventures and intrigue Julia Child dealt with while eventually finding herself stationed in South Asia working around secret military operations.

Because so much of what happened was kept classified for 65 years, the persona of Julia Child as the refined culinary connoisseur suddenly seemed so different. It more or less cried out for someone making a movie of it all years ago despite her never mentioning this story in life. Nevertheless, she must have known word would get out eventually based on the inevitability of declassification for government programs in prior decades. What couldn't be made into a movie then could certainly be made in the near future. And it wouldn't hurt to bring Meryl Streep back as a younger Julia Child (Julia McWilliams during WWII), despite the age disparity. With more advanced makeup to make actors look younger, the believability factor would still be there.

If you think a film biopic can't go backwards to explore a famous person's younger years in a prequel, then you've never seen movies such as "Young Tom Edison" or "Young Abe Lincoln." While those are movie products from the 1930's and 40's, the same procedure was done later with fictional characters. Also, someone might wonder why it's worth doing such a thing with Julia Child when Edison and Lincoln are more significant in importance. When you see what motivated Child to join the OSS and how she operated while there, you'll find it's one of the best American tales in how one person can unceremoniously make an important government program run more efficiently.
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If you ever had a chance to read about Child's OSS files when released last year, it's quite fascinating to see why she joined the government. Already willing to join the military at the start of WWII, her unusable tallness forced her to start out working for the Office of War Information with the unfortunate hack job of typing up index cards listing names of personnel working there. We see evidence that Julia Child was someone who was out to seek some adventure rather than capitulating to the role of being stuck behind a desk somewhere. Just the thought alone of Child trying to convince her superiors that she wants to join the OSS based on no reason other than boredom can fill in a lot of blanks about who she really was.

This isn't to say she didn't have a masterful Martha Stewart quality to her. Once she was sent to Sri Lanka to do classified work cataloging important and dangerous military operations, her sense of orderliness and later-known chipper attitude stood out from the rest of the staff used to more dour attitudes about their undercover work.

It's too bad then that a lot of the details of that work and her invention of the shark repellant aren't entirely known. So that's where the magic of a screenwriter comes in. Reports are that she had several close-calls while working in the South Asia office and dealing with testing the shark repellant. The story behind the invention of the repellant alone has as much comedic value as the scenes in "Julie & Julia" showing Child learning how to master the complicated art of French cuisine.

There's also a love story in there to make it worthwhile as a movie. Julia Child met her husband, Paul Child, while doing this work with the OSS in 1944-45. Showing the details behind their blossoming romance sets up a perfect companion piece to "Julie & Julia" where Julia and Paul are already an established husband and wife moving to Paris together where they satiate their lofty tastes.

As tasty as a French bon-bon, such a movie doesn't have to be very long to be interesting. It obviously won't be made, yet it could carve a more complete portrait of Julia Child who ultimately turned out to be one of our great Americans who helped us win the war through effective skills she later applied in media to help everybody eat more elegantly.

This isn't to say that Hollywood shouldn't still chew on the idea as an indie dish.

Bon Appétit, Hollywood...

Source:

https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2007-featured-story-archive/julia-child.html