Eve of a Hundred Midnights (14 page)

N
ineteen-forty-one was a fulcrum, dividing war and peace, history and modernity, West and East, uncertainty and direction, opportunity and frustration. It marked a boundary between two vastly different frontiers. Soon after the beginning of this pivotal year, for Mel as well as for the world, he was back in the United States searching for a career in journalism.

Mel arrived in Los Angeles on February 10. As happy as he was to see Elza, Manfred, and his dog Elmer, he was restless. His time in Chungking and then Indochina had shown him a world rapidly changing, and he had proven to himself that he was ready to report on those changes. Having lost Shirlee, Mel now turned his attention fully to his work.

A little over a week after returning, he spent an afternoon with the
Los Angeles Times
columnist Lee Shippey, who wanted to discuss Mel's experience in Indochina, especially his views on what Japan's increased influence there meant for the rest of Asia. The following Saturday, Shippey recounted their conversation in his “Lee Side o' L.A.” column.

Shippey wrote that, according to Mel, “those who believe Japan is bankrupt, economically weak and almost exhausted by its war in China are merely wishful thinkers.” While pillaging
much of China, Japan was teaching its children, Mel said, that “it is Japan's duty and destiny to rule all Asia and get the British, French and Americans out of that part of the world,” as part of its Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Mel then detailed for Shippey multiple examples of Japan's military advantages over China and its successes in Indochina. He also predicted the exact strategy that Japan would ultimately employ when it turned its military ambitions toward the Western colonial possessions straddling the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

“Jacoby says Japan will not stick its neck out but will certainly take the Dutch East Indies, Singapore and the Philippines when it sees the chance and only positive action by this country can prevent it.”

Mel didn't remain long in Los Angeles.

“I thought that I would want to stay at home for a while,” he wrote to Teddy White's mother in a letter a week after he returned. “But now I find that I am anxious to return to China.”

Mel was so anxious to return to China that he left Los Angeles again only a week after he had arrived home, this time on a trip, first to San Francisco and then to the East Coast, in search of an opportunity that would take him back to Asia. It would be a trip full of reunions: with companions from his travels, with colleagues from his days in Shanghai and Chungking, with contacts he'd written to but hadn't met in person, and with dear friends from his Stanford days. One such reunion, which began as a simple phone call to a minor acquaintance from the
Stanford Daily,
would be life-changing.

Mel was busy as soon as he reached the Bay Area. It seemed like every hour he was at a different meeting. He met with
editors at the
San Francisco Chronicle
and the United Press, had lunch with his Stanford mentor, Chilton Bush, visited contacts in Chinatown whom his friends in Chungking had asked him to see, and secured a strong letter of recommendation to the president of NBC from a friend in the radio business.

While in San Francisco, Mel also met with friends, including his old chum John Rice, another Stanford alum who had worked at the
Daily
. Rice was the friend who hosted Mel while he was taking Chinese lessons from George Ching before he left for Shanghai in 1939.

Seeing Rice helped mute any residual sting Mel felt about Shirlee Austerland's decision to end their relationship. When they were at Stanford, San Francisco was a popular escape for Mel, Rice, and other students. On this visit, after Mel was done with his appointments, he ate dinner at John's apartment, and then the two of them set out for a night on the town.

It was like old times. During the reunion, Mel and John swapped stories about what their old friends were up to, and John was reminded of one of their former colleagues at the
Daily
. The question John asked Mel seemed insignificant at the time, but it began a chain of events that would do much more than help Mel quickly get over Shirlee.

Did Mel remember a woman named Annalee Whitmore?

Of course Mel did. She had been a copy editor and then an occasional night editor when he was a reporter at the
Daily
before he left for Lingnan, and she was famous at the paper for having become the first woman in eighteen years to serve as its managing editor. They weren't close, but Mel remembered Annalee. She had been a smart, no-nonsense editor when he was at the paper. The
Stanford Daily
had been only the beginning of her career. As John explained, she'd accomplished much more since graduating from Stanford. What was more?
She was deeply curious about China, the war there, and efforts to support the Chinese people, and she was eager to meet someone who knew more about the country.

In 1916, four months before Mel Jacoby was born, Anne Sharp Whitmore lay across the kitchen table of a farmhouse in Price, Utah. It was May 27, weeks after Anne's due date. Finally, there in the kitchen, Anne gave birth to her first child. She and her husband Leland compounded their first names and dubbed the twelve-pound baby girl Annalee. The first of the Whitmores' four children, Annalee took pride in her tabletop origin throughout her life. It was a story she told whenever she was asked about her upbringing.

When Annalee was a child, Leland Whitmore had worked at a bank. In October 1929, when Annalee was thirteen years old, the stock market crashed, destroying the financial sector and setting into motion the Great Depression. Annalee's father lost his job almost immediately. The Whitmores' money and social status vanished almost as quickly. Like countless other hard-on-their-luck families, the Whitmores moved to California. After a few months in Berkeley, they settled in Piedmont, another Oakland suburb.

Having lost everything in the Depression, the Whitmores had to work hard to scrape by after settling in California. Leland had been an amateur pilot before losing his banking job. At first he earned money selling real estate by flying clients in homebuilt airplanes over available properties. It still wasn't easy to make ends meet. Then, in 1934, as the Roosevelt administration laid out its New Deal policies, Leland Whitmore went to work at the newly created Federal Housing Administration (FHA), where he made a successful, lifelong career for himself.

Meanwhile, as Elza Meyberg had done a decade earlier in
Los Angeles, Leland and Anne Whitmore converted to Christian Science. This adopted faith buoyed the Whitmores' spirits in the lean times of the Depression. However, the religion never became a significant part of their daughter's life.

To help support her family, Annalee worked a series of summer jobs. In one office position she held during high school, she typed so hard and so long that by the end of each day her fingers bled. Though Annalee labored tremendously for her family, she still had fun. For a while she even dated Robert McNamara. The future secretary of defense was a fellow Piedmont High student.

Despite her family's challenges, and perhaps in part because of them, Annalee—who had an extraordinarily high IQ of 170—excelled in school and was a voracious reader. Family legend holds that at just five years old Annalee read Edith Hull's
The Sheik
. She decided then and there to become a writer. Whenever Annalee had a question as a child, her mother urged her to look for answers in a book. When she matriculated at Stanford in 1933, she earned the highest score anyone had ever received on the English A entrance exam. She was so far advanced when she began her studies at Stanford that she entered as a sophomore. Annalee maintained her commitment to academic rigor at the school and graduated as part of its Cap and Gown Society.

Annalee had been the first female editor at Piedmont High School's student paper. This was the first of many times when she was the “first woman” so-and-so. However, she was never motivated explicitly by feminism; she was driven instead by her passion for writing and language. At Stanford, Annalee joined the staff of the student paper, the
Stanford Daily,
where she started out reviewing plays and other performing arts.

“Eyes closed, expression intent, Mischa Elman last night justified all predictions regarding his second Stanford concert, exceptional
power and depth of feeling setting this former child prodigy apart as a violinist of the first rank,” opened Annalee's first bylined story in the
Daily
. In the piece, Annalee displayed the descriptive flourish she would develop throughout her career. Her style featured visual detail that may have seemed extraneous for a simple profile of a visiting musician, but brought to life a routine story that might otherwise have been overlooked.

Annalee's intricate description may have been a vestige of her uncannily accurate photographic memory, but at least on the fall day this article was published, her evocative style enlivened the
Daily
's otherwise dull front page (with the exception of an uncredited football story that ran the same day in which the anonymous writer described fullback-turned-quarterback Frank Alustiza as “that chunky lad from Stockton with the questioning eyes.”)

For her first year as a
Daily
reporter, Annalee wrote mostly arts and campus life stories. She also reviewed theater and film, at one point earning herself the nickname “Annalee ‘New Theater' Whitmore.” In fact, she was also a member of Ram's Head, a dramatic society whose members were chosen based on their participation in existing members' productions.

At the
Daily,
Annalee wanted to do more than simply trumpet her classmates' accomplishments. For example, Stanford's fall social calendar was highlighted by the annual “Big Game” pitting the school's football team against its rivals from the University of California at Berkeley, across the San Francisco Bay. In 1935, at the beginning of Annalee's junior year, she wrote a column dismissing the behavior of other women in the stands during the game against the Cal Bears.

“Why do supposedly intelligent women still gaze down, enraptured, at some thug in football clothes and say ‘I do wish Tiny would send in Bill—he sits in my history section and has
the cutest profile,'” Annalee lamented, perhaps with a note of irony given that, after this article ran, she would date a football player named Bill McCurdy, mostly during her senior year.

Annalee was a unique woman who didn't like to do things to conform with those around her. At the end of her junior year, she was photographed with a group of other newly elected sponsors of Roble Hall, a Stanford residence hall. Seated in the front row of the photo, she shyly looked away from the camera. Her feet dangled from her chair, and she wore a bright print dress and cardigan combo that starkly contrasted with the plain, muted outfits worn by the rest of the group.

Though Annalee was once recognized as among the campus's best-dressed women—a
Stanford Daily
article noted that Annalee, presumably feeling more financially secure than she had at the beginning of the Depression, netted a dark green suit and a long coat with a beaver fur color that she wore “with brown accessories and a smart off the face hat” during a shopping trip to San Francisco—sartorial distinction isn't what makes the Roble photo so striking. Rather, her incongruous posture reveals a woman lost in thought and seemingly impatient with the photo shoot's ceremony. One might surmise that even in the spring of 1936, Annalee was destined for grander experiences and knew as much.

Annalee
was
photogenic, but she also charmed through less quantifiable traits. “Five feet three, with a neat eye-catching figure, she can wear a tailored suit, a G.I. uniform, even a pair of old jeans with the effect of extreme femininity,” Shelley Mydans wrote. “But it is more than good looks. A better part of the charm lies in the tense, flattering concentration with which she listens to your conversation and in the breathless humming voice that spills out her quick answers.”

Annalee was less interested in the artificialities of societal convention than she was in the thoughts, expressions, and contributions of her companions. Perhaps something outside the frame of the staged Roble Hall photo caught her attention. Whatever may have motivated Annalee to look away from the camera in that shot, it turned out to matter little. Soon after she was offered the sponsorship post at Roble, the student-led editorial staff of the
Daily
elected Annalee as one of two co-managing editors for the coming fall. She resigned her position at Roble in order to take the job.

In the fall of 1936—Annalee's senior year at Stanford—she served as the paper's first female managing editor in eighteen years. However, Annalee didn't outwardly seem to care much about her gender-role breakthrough; she was more interested in her actual job. Similarly, it appears that Annalee's commitment to her work at the
Daily,
rather than any intentional move to expand the paper's gender diversity, was what earned her the position. After all, when the paper announced its new management, it described Annalee's work for the paper and other campus activities over the previous three years as “indispensable.”

“Extracurricular work on many committees and in many activities, together with a rapid, accurate judgment trained to sound journalism, make her the ideal person to handle the administration of the
Daily
's news coverage,” the departing editors wrote.

The same spring Annalee was elected to manage the
Daily,
she also led the revival of Stanford's chapter of Theta Sigma Phi, a women's journalism society now known as the Association for Women in Communications. Annalee was voted the group's president when it returned to Stanford in 1936.

Leadership wasn't what Annalee sought, but she sometimes found it anyway. As later explained by her daughter, the author
Anne Fadiman, she was “used to being the first woman to do ‘x'.”