Eve of a Hundred Midnights (40 page)

Annalee soon followed his lead. Clifton Fadiman, the public intellectual and host of the quiz show
Information Please,
also
curated the influential Book-of-the-Month Club, which selected
Thunder
in 1947. The worldly Fadiman—who, coincidentally, had attended college with Chambers, the paranoiac
Time
editor—appealed to Annalee's intellect. She fell in love with him, and they married in 1950. Together, the Fadimans had two children, a son, Kim, and a daughter, Anne.

In November 1982, Annalee, Carl and Shelley Mydans, and a number of other surviving journalists who had lived and worked with Mel in Chungking's Press Hostel—as well as a broader community of wartime reporters and press officers who worked in China before and after them—were reunited for a last academic gathering at Arizona State University; there they dissected the role of journalists covering wartime China. (Teddy White could not attend, but submitted an essay that was read at the conference and included in a book transcribing its proceedings.)

“It was a remarkable meeting, bringing together those who, from radically different perspectives and backgrounds, had seen the Chinese revolution run its course,” Walter Sullivan of the
New York Times
wrote of the conference for
Nieman Reports
. Sullivan had been in China during the Chinese Civil War. “So much time had elapsed since the participants had seen one another and discussed such issues that, for at least some of us, it was like meeting in heaven and looking back in serenity at a period when, as Teddy White put it, we were young, ignorant and immersed in one of the greatest upheavals of human history.”

In 1985, Annalee returned to Chungking (which was then, as now, more accurately transliterated as “Chongqing”) one more time. With her were a number of other surviving members of the Press Hostel gang, including Peggy and Till Durdin,
Hugh Deane, and other friends of hers and Mel's. Invited by the Chinese government, the returning journalists also went to Yenan, Shanghai, and other cities. The excited journalists even returned to the site of the Press Hostel, near a district in contemporary Chongqing known as Lianglukou.

In the 1990s, after years of vacationing on the island of Captiva off the coast of Florida, Annalee and Clifton moved there. They became well-loved fixtures in the town. Clifton Fadiman died in 1999. In the summer of 2001, Annalee's brother, Sharp Whitmore, passed away from heart failure.

The next winter, sixty years after her great adventure with Mel, Annalee faced the prospect of deteriorating health and the possibility of losing her independence. She had been diagnosed with both breast cancer and Parkinson's disease.

On February 5, 2002, Annalee Whitmore Jacoby Fadiman ended her own life with the same sense of purpose and self-determination with which she had lived it.

Annalee's suicide was neither sudden nor unaddressed. Though it still upset her children, it was a reasoned response to a terrible situation and a decision she made as a member of the Hemlock Society (now known as Compassion and Choices), which advocates for the right to die.

But Annalee, ever the stickler for accuracy, did not end her life before correcting the historical record where it concerned herself. In late 2001, she sat down at her home in Captiva with her daughter Anne to discuss her impending death. Aside from talking about personal matters, Annalee dictated a series of corrections in texts that had addressed her life and the events she participated in.

“She had complained to me that much of the stuff that had been written [about herself or Mel and their travels] was riddled with errors, although much was correct,” Fadiman said.

A compulsive and thorough note taker, Annalee filled nearly
every book she owned with extensive marginalia and other notes. Before she died, she fulfilled her daughter's requests and went through her library page by page to discuss the stories written about her and clarify any errors.

“There is a tremendous story here which someday soon we hope will be told in full,” Mel had written Henry Luce early in 1942, when he and Annalee were still on Corregidor. “So far it has been touch and go each day so I hope you'll understand the reasons why my stories are not quite as full and colorful—and perhaps truthful—as they might be.”

Like any story, the one Mel and Annalee shared faded as the decades passed. Nevertheless, one is strongly tempted to wonder what might have been. Even Anne Fadiman, who would not exist had events not proceeded the way they did, ponders such questions.

“I've often wondered what would have happened had [Mel and Annalee] stayed together,” Fadiman reflected in 2013, explaining that while Annalee clearly loved her father, Clifton Fadiman, she always carried a torch for Mel. “She thought they were the perfect match.”

Fadiman knew that her mother's love for Mel was a different sort of romance than she had with Clifton, even though it was always difficult for Annalee to discuss Mel. Their marriage may have been brief, but part of Annalee remained in love with Mel.

“She was always twenty-five,” Fadiman said. “They never got old.”

I
n January 1944, nearly two years after Mel's death, the Walsh-Kaiser Company completed construction of the SS
Melville Jacoby
. The vessel was one of twenty-five “Liberty” ships named in honor of the war correspondents who'd been killed covering the U.S. war effort to that date. Built to ferry supplies, the
Melville Jacoby
earned a battle star for its role in the invasion of Normandy in June 1944.

Decommissioned in 1947, the 7,176-ton
Melville Jacoby
was then sold off by the government. Sailing for decades as a privately owned cargo vessel, the
Melville Jacoby
eventually became a Spanish-flagged ship renamed the SS
Dominator
.

On the night of March 13, 1961, thick fog and stormy waters surrounded the
Dominator
as it neared its destination in the Port of Los Angeles. Stuffed with beef and grain from Vancouver, British Columbia, the ship negotiated around the Palos Verdes Peninsula. In the bad weather, the
Dominator
's crew misjudged the vessel's course and ran her aground on a nearby reef. The impact tore through the ship's hull. Though the
Dominator
's
entire crew survived, efforts to recover the ship failed. The
Dominator
sank, as did one of the vessels sent to recover it.

Ever since, pieces of the ship once known as the SS
Melville Jacoby
have washed ashore mere miles from the place where its namesake was born. Fragments of the ship still remain on the rocky beach under the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Its ruins have long been a secret for scavengers who pick over the vessel's carcass and teenagers who hike down to it to smoke cigarettes and make out, hidden by rusted bulkheads.

Elza Meyberg died two decades to the day after the vessel named after her son shipwrecked. While Peggy Cole and Jackee Marks—Elza's nieces and the executors of her estate—were putting her Bel Air home in order, they noticed a neglected closet and looked inside. The shelves were stuffed with boxes of letters, albums, and envelopes full of photos and film negatives, sheets of foreign stamps, piles of yellowing newspaper and magazine clippings, a stack of wound 16-millimeter canisters, a treasury of silk scrolls with Chinese motifs, Asian swords, jade jewelry, and other artifacts. Nearly all of the treasures had been produced in the 1930s and 1940s, when Jackee and Peggy were growing up in Los Angeles.

Many of the photographs on the shelves depicted a young, dark-featured man, laughing, and a petite woman with wavy hair grinning with local residents of some Pacific island. In a set of Peggy's favorite images, the pair wore makeshift swimsuits and drank from coconuts on a sun-drenched beach. Other pictures captured candid glimpses of titanic historical figures like Chiang Kai-shek, Douglas MacArthur, and Manuel Quezon.

Eventually, the sisters had a chance to watch the home movies. In one film, a glamorous young lady from Macau sashayed in an evening gown along the former Portuguese colony's Avenida de la Republica. In another, American students feasted on corn during a temperate-weather Christmas on a
college campus in southern China, competed with Cantonese kids during a track meet, and traveled through crowded river waters on a boat rowed by a grinning Chinese dorm mother.

Many of the clips featured the handsome young man who appeared in the photos and a handful of his friends riding in a sampan to a warlord's compound deep in the lush countryside of the province of Guangxi or exploring the dusty landscape outside the thick walls of Xi'an. In one brief segment, he negotiated the rushing chaos of China's wartime capital, Chongqing.

On the closet's shelves were incredibly fragile glass LPs. Their labels identified them as recordings of radio broadcasts from World War II. The vast majority of anything published among the papers featured similar bylines: Mel Jack, Mel Jacks, and, most often, Melville Jacoby. Something else was in that cabinet: a stack of meticulously lettered invitations to the christening of a ship named after Mel, as well as newspapers and letters between the company that built it and his family.

Among the many documents were folders and folders overflowing with eulogies, statements from civic organizations and other institutions memorializing Mel, and dozens of obituaries clipped from newspapers and magazines.

These remembrances were written by journalists. They were written by politicians. They were written by publishers. They were written by friends. They included famous figures from World War II, such as General MacArthur and Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who honored Mel as if he had been a soldier fallen at the side of their troops. Even Madame Chiang and Philippine president Manuel Quezon expressed personal regrets and the regrets of their nations' people. Old college sweethearts, former colleagues, professors and classmates from Stanford and Lingnan, all wrote of their sorrow.

Everything in the cabinet was a reminder of the cousin
Jackee and Peggy once revered. Aside from family mementos, much of what they found were the documents and dispatches that Annalee and Elza had gathered so that Annalee could finish “This Is Our Battle,” though she set them aside when her father died. Over time these materials had been all but forgotten.

Peggy recalled that she, her sister, and their parents had hung on every bit of news about Mel that made it to their Los Angeles home: the excitement of Mel's marriage to Annalee Whitmore, the hilarious reports on the pandas they babysat, the dark accounts and uncertainty that arrived with Manila's fall, the months of intermittent stories from the Pacific Theater, their pride in their cousin Mel's work, the rush of excitement when they learned that Mel and Annalee had made it safely to Brisbane, and the crackle of the radio their father used to receive the
March of Time
broadcast that recounted the young couple's escape. How proud the whole family had been, especially Peggy and Jackee's father, Eugene.

Then there was that horrible day at the end of April 1942. Seventy years later, the Stern sisters could still recall hearing the news. Their tight-knit family was devastated.

“I remember it like it was yesterday,” Peggy said in 2012. “My mom was crying. My dad was crying. My sister was crying. He was our hero, and we looked up to him all the time we were growing up.”

After Peggy and Jackee found the trove of Mel's artifacts, they puzzled over what to do with it all. The rest of their family was caught up in other pursuits—finishing school, beginning careers, starting new families of their own—so Peggy brought the collection home with her. She pored over the papers Elza left behind, discovering nuances of Mel's life that she hadn't known or understood as a child. The more she explored the files the more she felt that her cousin's story needed to be told.

The journalism department at Stanford—which Peggy said she decided to attend after Mel first showed her the campus during a visit with her parents in 1935—helped transfer the audio recordings and home movies to modern formats, but little else ultimately happened. Mel's memory began to fade once more as the demands of daily life rose to the fore.

Then, in 2004, as Peggy prepared to move to Bakersfield, she came across Mel's artifacts again. That year she gave me the typewriter that would ultimately send me on his trail. Over the ensuing years, she shared with me the boxes full of documents related to Mel that she'd recovered from Elza's home. She knew what I came to realize after she gave me Mel's typewriter: had someone written his story as fiction, he'd have been dismissed as an unbelievable character.

“He was wealthy, handsome, and he was a wonderful human being,” she said. “He was too good to be true. If a fiction writer invented him, the reader would say, ‘That's a lousy book.'”

As I searched through all the documents in my grandmother's possession, and as we discussed what we found, marveled at the countless photographs, and even argued occasionally about which bits were most relevant to include in a book—which Peggy was certain I'd one day write—piecing together a bit more of Mel's story became a ritual every time I visited her. As we worked together, we became closer.

Through discovering Mel, I discovered levels of my grandmother's character I hadn't known when I was younger.

Cobbles on a sunburnt shoreline rattled beneath receding waves. Two bearded men in their early thirties and a slender twenty-something woman scrambled over loose rocks, dead stingrays, and discarded beer bottles. Gusts from the cloudless sky whipped a green windbreaker against the young woman
's body, causing her to stumble as strands of her brown hair flipped loose from her ponytail, pulled through a black ball cap that read, in white lettering, Port of L.A.

One of the men—in faded jeans, a white T-shirt, and a blue Dodgers cap—helped the woman down from a discarded chunk of concrete. Their feet scraped across the field of rounded stones that passed for a beach. They slipped on ropes of seaweed. The tide inched across the rocks, drawing the sea nearer to the trio. If they remained much longer, the three friends would have to turn back from their six-mile hike or scramble up a cliff into the backyard of some millionaire's oceanfront roost.

Then they saw it: six or seven feet of a seawater-soaked pipe caked red with rust. A few hundred yards ahead, the second man—stubble on his chin and clad in a gray jacket, shorts, and Converses—called back to the group, though the crashing of the waves muffled his words. His friends caught up. All three walked together toward another stretch of metal farther down the beach. There, slivers of orange and brown iron mingled with the eroded rocks at the friends' feet. The group's spirits lifted, and they rushed around a bend. Dark shapes rose above the tide line's aquamarine curve. The first was an elaborate piece of machinery. Tanklike treads topped by a rusted maze of gears climbed over a bed of rocks.

Sitting just at the water's edge, the vehicle appeared frozen in the middle of some decades-old invasion. A few yards away, a slightly curved sheet of metal, jagged at one torn edge, stretched into the air. Waves sloshed over the recessed portion of the bowed slab's center, while a porthole dotted a section reaching to the sky. Yet farther away rested another enormous hunk of crusty, red metal. Thin ribbons of the crumbling material framed rectangles of the landscape beyond. Palm trees and sea spray and bluffs topped with immaculate lawns appeared between each, like postcard vistas of Los Angeles.

The man in the jeans and the Dodgers cap waited for a break in the waves, then climbed to the top of the biggest chunk of wreckage. He surveyed the detritus, his friends took his picture, and he sat in silence for a moment, staring out to sea. All three poked about the beach a little longer as they ate a packed lunch. Before they left, the first man grabbed a small triangular piece of the shipwreck. Slivers of the artifact—a piece of a ship once known as the SS
Melville Jacoby
—flaked across his hands, darkening his shirt and turning his fingertips the same bloody mix of red and orange and brown staining the shore.

The friends found a shortcut along a drainage culvert and emerged between two homes. They walked to a park atop the cliffs where a lazy Sunday afternoon crowd was gathered. Reaching the park, they heard a series of whirs and whines.

Tiny airplanes soared beyond the cliff's edge. The model planes dove, twisted, and raced above the ocean. Their lovingly painted bodies displayed deep, dark greens and smooth, silvery grays. Gleaming yellow letters, bright white stars, brilliant blue stripes, and lush red circles accented the sleek shapes dancing and darting across the spring sky. The planes were beautiful, loving re-creations of fighters from a war nearly three-quarters of a century past. Carefully and skillfully flown, they dove toward the ocean, then arced gracefully back toward the sun.

The scene these planes performed was but a dance, an idyll through the blue sky of a Sunday afternoon, beneath which 8,000 miles of Pacific Ocean and seven decades of history stretched to a place where the war machines these toys were modeled on had flown in a fury as violent as this afternoon was pleasant, a place that nevertheless brought these three friends together to share a moment, not of danger, but of peace.