The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2 (4 page)

When the family gathered in Maine that summer, B. F. Smith called his grandsons to his estate in Warrenton Park overlooking Glen Cove. At ninety-four, B. F. was as sharp, canny, and proud as he had ever been. He explained that the good Smith name was in danger of disappearing.

Dudley, Clifford, and Grafton looked uncomfortably at their cousin, Clifford Warren Smith, Jr., the only son of their late uncle who had died of the burst appendix over twenty years before. He was a Smith and already married; surely he would be able to sustain the Smith name? But as they glanced at Clifford Junior, they saw that he sat slumped in his chair and, although it was only two in the afternoon, he looked as if he had been drinking. The young man had been an embarrassment for years. B. F. had bought him out of many scrapes with the law; there had been an assortment of very young girlfriends; and, the family feared, a messy divorce loomed. Perhaps B. F. was right; if his legacy depended on Clifford Junior, it could be an ignoble end.

For his part, B. F. didn’t want to chance his family legacy on this reckless boy having a son who could carry on the Smith name. As much as he had tried to instill the work ethic and a sense of responsibility into Clifford Junior, it was his daughter Mabel’s three boys who had made him proud: Grafton was an accomplished sailor who also showed promise as a horse breeder; Clifford had finally shaped up and taken over the family business; and Dudley had come back from Europe a decorated war hero and was an even greater talent than Grafton at the helm. Turning to his three Wolfe grandsons, he offered a proposition; if they would change their name from Wolfe to Smith, he would make them direct heirs of his fortune, rather than secondary beneficiaries following the death of their mother.

Dudley exchanged looks with his brothers, but each seemed afraid to ask the obvious: What about our legacy, the Wolfe legacy? What about our family name? Dudley looked hard at his grandfather, wondering if he knew about the London Wolfs and if this had anything to do with forever burying the Wolf name and its Jewish origins. But his grandfather didn’t betray a thing and Dudley didn’t ask. He had too much respect for the old man to challenge him.

For his part, B. F. did not mention Dudley Wolfe Senior at all and simply went on to explain that for their trouble they would be rewarded handsomely. Variously estimated at $70 million to $100 million ($1.05 billion to $1.5 billion today), the Smith fortune was rumored to be the largest in all of New England, and certainly one of the largest in the United States at the time.

Not knowing what else to say to their formidable grandfather, Dudley and his brothers agreed. Soon afterward, they stood before a judge in Knox County, Maine, where they swore their name change into effect.

Dudley immediately felt regret at his decision. Later that summer, as he wrote his application to Harvard, he hesitated before signing the letter but finally did so as “Dudley F. Wolfe” and mailed it off to Cambridge. Days later a letter arrived from the admissions office telling him he didn’t have the proper credits for enrollment. Almost relieved, Dudley sent a letter acknowledging his lack of credentials and immediately called the Manter Hall Tutoring School in Harvard Square, where he attended preparatory classes for the next year. But when he reapplied the following summer, it was as if his heart just wasn’t in it. Using many of the same answers to questions such as “What games do you especially like?” and “What is your intended profession?” as he had given in his 1924 application, Dudley wrote, “sailing, hunting and camping,” and “business, most probably” but gave no indication of the man behind the pen.

Meanwhile, he struggled with his agreement to become a Smith. The name felt fraudulent to Dudley and insulting to his father and his newfound family in London. But in deference to B. F., he tried it on. In the summer of 1925 he entered his new single-masted sloop, the
Bonita IV
, in the Brooklyn Yacht Club’s deep-sea Challenge Cup, as Dudley Wolfe Smith. Besting larger, more powerful boats and some of the sport’s most seasoned sailors, Dudley won the race, an honor that put him among the likes of Jack Dempsey, René Lacoste, and Johnny Weissmuller in the
New York Times
listing of “Champions of 1925.” It would be the one and only time he used the name Smith in a race. If he were to gain national fame again, he wanted his father’s name in the records. In his next race and every subsequent race, he entered as Dudley F. Wolfe.

Soon after the race, he went to B. F.’s rambling clapboard house on the hill, Clifford Lodge, and asked to have a word. As calmly and evenly as he could, Dudley explained why he wanted to return his legal name to Wolfe—that he felt the change disrespected his late father who also deserved a legacy. Hadn’t he in fact been named for his father, who had evidently shared B. F.’s desire to see his name live on? And if B. F. felt he needed his legal heirs to have the Smith name, Dudley understood; he would make his way in the world either with or without the Smith millions.

The old man sat and listened, impressed by his grandson’s honesty and honor; he knew Dudley could easily have waited until his death to change his name back without any risk to his inheritance. B. F. looked at his grandson and realized he loved the boy who, unlike the two Cliffords, had never been anything but gentle and respectful, eager to excel and now proving to be a genius at the helm. And yes, Dudley Senior also deserved to have his name live on.

When Dudley was finished, B. F. slowly rose out of his chair and took his grandson’s hand, assuring him that his inheritance was safe and that he had his grandfather’s blessing to return his name to Wolfe.

Within the week, Dudley contacted a lawyer in Portland and had his name changed back to Dudley F. Wolfe. B. F. kept the trust as written with Dudley a full heir. Grafton and Clifford would remain Smiths the rest of their lives.

In the fall of 1925 Dudley was finally accepted to Harvard. Although he still lacked crucial credits, the college allowed him an “uncredited grade” for Latin, which he had failed.
^*
Just as he had at Phillips, he played football, earning a coveted Harvard letter. He also immersed himself in the secret clubs society, and he was a popular member of several despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that he was ten years older than his classmates. Beginning his sophomore year with the Institute of 1770, he later joined the “Dickey,” as Harvard’s unofficial chapter of the fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon was known, and finally the Owl Club.
^†
Entry at all levels into the Harvard club elite depended primarily on wealth and family social standing, two criteria Dudley easily met. Deciding not to live on campus in Cambridge, he rented a brownstone at 177 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. It sat just down the street from B. F.’s sprawling mansion at 21 Commonwealth Avenue in fashionable Back Bay, a neighborhood of 15,000-square-foot houses running west for ten blocks from the Boston Botanical Gardens. Dudley, a reticent but generous host, welcomed his new group of college friends to his home, offering them the finest whiskeys and cigars, and, when pressed, telling tales from the front lines of a war they had only read about and of his twenty years at the helm of his own boats.

O
N
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ARCH
14, 1927, just shy of his ninety-seventh birthday, the family patriarch, B. F. Smith, finally died. Although he had loved him, Dudley nonetheless felt a new freedom after his commanding grandfather was gone. While he had lost a source of emotional support, he had also lost his most critical judge, the witness to his every failure.

Although Dudley realized he wouldn’t meet his graduation requirements by June 1929, he knew he would earn his bachelor’s degree the following year—the first diploma of his life. Perhaps as a reward, he commissioned a double-masted, sixty-foot schooner from his sailing friend John G. Alden of Boston, who modeled his boats on the Grand Banks fishing vessels: heavy, sturdy, and strong enough to withstand gales. Soon after the yacht’s completion in Wiscasset, Maine, Dudley christened it the
Mohawk
at the Camden Yacht Club, just up the road from Rockport. As he walked through the venerable but rustic one-room clubhouse after the ceremony, he saw an entry notice for the King and Queen’s Cup Classic, a transatlantic yacht race from New York to Spain. Knowing that races across the Atlantic had always demanded a larger class of sailing yacht of at least one hundred feet, he leaned in to read the specifications and was gratified to see that they didn’t limit the class of boat. Looking out the club window at his powerfully built
Mohawk
he thought, why not?

Although no yachtsman in history had taken the risk of racing a sixty-foot boat across the ocean, Dudley was confident that the
Mohawk
could not only perform well but could maneuver easily around the larger, more cumbersome boats. While smaller yachts had certainly been sailed across the oceans, no one had ever raced one; and, as any sailor knows, pleasure-cruising from point to point, motoring into ports, even sailing off course when necessary to avoid storms, was very different from nonstop, point-to-point racing across 3,000 miles of unforgiving sea.

A week into the race, Dudley spotted a steamship off the
Mohawk
’s port side. He grabbed his field glasses and saw that it was the Italian luxury liner
Conte Biancamano
on its route from New York to Genoa. While he had never been on that specific ship, he’d been on many like it and was familiar with their luxurious appointments. Now, with seven days’ worth of stubble on his chin, salt crusting his eyebrows, and sweat stains under his arms, he looked at the far-off ship; its marble baths, leather and oak bar infused with the smells of fine whiskey and Cuban cigars, and wide promenade deck seemed a world away.

With a final look at the billowing smokestacks disappearing over the flat ocean, Dudley returned his focus to the
Mohawk
and to a storm brewing in the skies behind him. He ordered the crew to lock down the hatches and prepare for the gale, trimming the sails and lashing themselves to the mainmast and cockpit. For nearly six hours the
Mohawk
heaved from side to side, the storm soaking her decks and battering the men. Several times a crewman lost his footing and was nearly washed overboard, but his lash kept him on the boat, albeit bruised and exhausted. Finally, the gale moved off and calm returned to the sea and the
Mohawk
. Those would be the only rough seas of their nearly month-long race. Most of their remaining days to Spain were spent like any other enjoyable sail in fair weather off the New England coast, with Dudley watching the woolly telltales tied to the bottom of the sail for any whisper of air to be captured in the thousands of square feet of canvas above. Their nights were spent quietly, even serenely, as each man took his turn at the helm while his mates caught a nap or ate. One night Dudley watched a pod of porpoises play alongside the
Mohawk
, jumping through its wake as if through an invisible circus hoop. Then, as if touched by a giant torch, the seas lit up with phosphorescence through which the
Mohawk
sailed, leaving an aisle of shimmering green light in its wake.

Twenty-five days after leaving New York, the
Mohawk
raced to a second-place finish in Santander, Spain. Her crew looked more like a band of pirates than Ivy League men, each sporting a beard and their tattered college sweaters. Welcomed like heroes home from a successful battle, the men of the
Mohawk
accepted an enormous silver chalice from King Alfonso XIII and Queen Eugenia Victoria. That night, the streets of Santander were alive with celebration, and everywhere the crews of the various yachts went they were feted by handsome, dark-eyed women offering the men bottomless carafes of sangria.

In every race he entered, Dudley listed himself as “owner and captain.” While he enjoyed the trappings and gentility of the sport, it was more about the boat and the ocean and the race and he wanted to be crucially involved at its heart—the helm. It was a love he shared with his younger brother, Grafton.

Grafton Wolfe Smith was a charming man with a beauty that was almost ethereal. From his earliest days he attracted friends and lovers and gained easy entry into high society’s finest clubs and private organizations from Maine to Palm Beach. Like Dudley, he owned and sailed his own yachts, and for years, on any given weekend, at least one of the Wolfe/Smith brothers could be found racing in regattas off the eastern seaboard. Grafton also developed a love for horse breeding and racing, and, in September 1931, while driving his new car home to Hamilton, Massachusetts, from the racetrack in Saratoga, New York, he lost control and hit a telephone pole. The car had been going so fast and the impact was so violent that three wheels were sheared off. Grafton was thrown clear of the wreckage, unconscious but still alive. Passing motorists stopped at the scene, piled him into their car, and drove him to a nearby hospital. His wife, Janice, was called, and she raced through the night to the hospital. But when she arrived, he had died of head injuries. Perhaps suspecting that alcohol may have been involved, the family ordered a toxicology report which came back clean; no alcohol or drugs were found in his system. The young man had simply been driving too fast.

After Grafton’s death and perhaps growing weary of New York, Boston, and Maine society, Dudley decided to return to Europe where the parties had more dignity and the sports more adventure.

Having driven through the Alps during the war, Dudley was familiar with the premier climbing and skiing areas of Europe: Zermatt, Chamonix, the Arlberg, and Davos. There, he hired renowned mountain guides to help him become proficient in his new sports. Solidly built and strongly muscled, he always showed resolute determination and good humor as he struggled to master the ropes, crampons, and ice axe maneuvers of climbing. But on skis, as he had on deck, he found that he had a natural sense of balance and coordination which allowed him to excel. As with sailing, he found he loved the thrill and speed of racing and entered many regional competitions. At the sharp pop of the gun, he would throw his weight down the slope, his strong legs hugging the heavy wooden skis close together, almost casually transferring his weight back and forth along the carved edges, the tips clattering along the icy course as he sped to the bottom of the steep runs. Because he competed against much younger men who had been reared on the racecourses, he never won an event, but he always crossed the finish line. He also loved the physical challenge and exhaustion of ski touring, and while exploring and conquering largely untouched peaks on his skis and skins, he achieved over thirty difficult summits and traverses, chief among them a ski traverse of the Mont Blanc massif.