What professional blogger wouldn’t be excited about the imminent release of Julie & Julia, the first-ever film based on a blog? That said, the preview and the ads for the movie keep annoying me. Right at the beginning, the voiceover says that “before Julia Child changed the face of cooking, she was just a woman searching for her calling in life.” I suppose that’s true in some sense, and it nicely sets the story up as a cliché, but in fact before Julia Child was a famous cookbook author she was a spy, which is considerably more interesting:
The famous chef let slip the story of her war-era spying in a 2002 autobiography, but the release of thousands of documents from the U.S. national archives on Thursday confirms her participation in a secret organization formed by President Franklin Roosevelt during the Second World War.
Hidden among the 750,000 classified pages released Thursday is a picture of the vast spy network of military and civilian operatives called the Office of Strategic Services.
OSS was created during World War II as a wartime emergency measure. Later, as the US slipped into the “permanent emergency” of the Cold War, it was reorganized at the CIA. She worked directly as a kind of assistant to OSS chief William Donovan and then got posted to a field job in Sri Lanka. That’s where she met her husband who was also an OSS operative. Now that’s not to say that she wasn’t also searching for her calling in life, but it’s still pretty different from that “aw shucks” presentation the ad hints at. I hope the actual film manages to mention the considerably-more-interesting truth.
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