Jennet Conant on Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS

Julia Child, a spy? Though hardly a revelation (Child herself wrote about her secret-agent career), it’s one of those pairings that boggle the mind, like the fact that Richard Nixon composed for the piano or that Marilyn Monroe married Arthur Miller. A gangly six-feet-two-inches tall, the cheerful and utterly sensible television chef hardly seemed a seductive Mata Hari or killer from La Femme Nikita.

In fact, she was neither. She wasn’t really a spy at all, but rather a kind of office manager, albeit an effective one, for the Office of Strategic Services, an intelligence and covert-action agency created during World War II.

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‘A Covert Affair: Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS’ by Jennet Conant (Simon & Schuster. 395 pp. $28)

That’s precisely the problem for Jennet Conant — and for readers of her new book, “A Covert Affair.” The subtitle promises the story of “Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS,” but derring-do the two did not. Paul and Julia, then Julia McWilliams (their romance and wedding came after the war), faced hardships, bureaucratic rivalries and the unfamiliar cultures of India, Ceylon and China, but they blew up no bridges and stole no secrets. Paul, for one thing, was an artist who designed war rooms.

That’s probably why Conant, whose previous books include “The Irregulars” and “Tuxedo Park,” devotes most of her pages to Jane Foster, an OSS colleague. Magnetic, mischievous and piercingly intelligent, Foster dominates the narrative. She was the life of her own moveable party, a quipping, knowing, dazzlingly dressed woman of the world. Born into San Francisco’s high society, she studied art in Europe, lived in Java, and traveled around the Pacific rim before joining the OSS. There she worked in Morale Operations, dreaming up loony schemes to depress Japanese soldiers.

Conant writes in a breezy, amiable voice, reflecting Foster’s wisecracking and tippling style. (If her career were a film, it would be a cross between “The Thin Man” and Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s “Road” movies.) The light tone is winning, but there’s little narrative drive. One set of minor hijinks follows another, to no particular end. Ultimately I found the rollicking Foster to be less interesting than the more conventional Julia McWilliams. Conant nicely captures Julia’s transformation into a cosmopolitan, intrepid, yet still cheerful soul. The account of how her friendship with the older Paul matured into romance is particularly good. He was quite full of himself, initially dismissing Julia as both “a grown-up little girl” and “an old maid,” but becomes an increasingly appealing character as he gradually realizes that Julia loves him.

Foster, on the other hand, remained a seemingly frivolous person who never grew — with one important exception. At war’s end, she was sent to the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), where she protested against U.S. support for the Netherlands’s brutal suppression of the independence movement. She alienated the State Department, which inherited the remains of the OSS. When McCarthyism marched in, she was investigated, hounded and ultimately indicted for spying.