Eve of a Hundred Midnights (13 page)

When the driver stopped, Mel and Rinden both jumped from the car and tried to walk to the hotel. Before they could, the soldiers surrounded them with their guns drawn. Rinden told someone to get the local French police, who tried to get the Japanese soldiers to let Mel and Rinden at least go to the hotel. The troops again blocked their way.

“The French police were unable to cope with this,” Mel wrote to Consul Reed.

The Americans' pursuers wanted to take them to their headquarters, but Rinden refused. As a compromise, the French brought them to their own police headquarters, where a “Commander Fradin” admitted that he was more or less helpless. Another writer later recounted Mel's recollection of the conversation he had with Fradin:

“Who is the sovereign power in this country,” Jacoby asked him, “you or the Japanese?”

“We are, of course.”

“Well, if you are the masters, how does it happen that we can be arrested on French territory by the Japanese?”

The officer smiled sadly and answered, “When a man has lice in his hair, who is the master?”

Fradin tried to get Mel and Rinden to sign a statement that the Japanese actions had been justified, but Mel refused. Then
Fradin asked for Mel's camera. Mel surrendered it after asking Fradin to agree not to hand it over to the Japanese.

Mel and Rinden returned to Hanoi that night, with a French escort for their safety. There Reed lodged an official complaint with both French and Japanese officials in Indochina. Four days later, Joseph Grew, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, formally protested the incident to Japanese foreign minister Yosuke Matsuoka, calling it an “especially flagrant” violation that represented the latest in a “deplorably large number of incidents involving American nationals and the Japanese military in China.”

After Mel's arrest—which Mel downplayed as a “foolish camera incident” in a letter to his family the next day—Japan would demand that the French expel him from Indochina. But first Vichy gave Mel a personal minder, a former Standard Oil employee named Daniel Armand de Lisle, who accompanied Mel everywhere he went for the remainder of his time in Indochina and worked as his “personal censor.”

On Mel's first night back from Haiphong, he and de Lisle went to Hanoi's airport to meet Alice-Leone Moats, a
Collier's
magazine scribe who was flying up from Saigon. She was at the beginning of an around-the-world reporting trip that would also bring her to Chungking, Russia, and Africa. For the next two weeks, she, Mel, and de Lisle would travel all over Indochina together. But when Moats arrived, she was surprised to see Mel at the airfield. She had heard about his arrest right before she left Saigon and didn't know he'd already been released.

“By that time, however, the Jacoby affair had become an international incident and the French made out an order of expulsion,” Moats later wrote in her book
Blind Date with Mars
. “Then, after thinking it over, they changed their minds. He was leaving soon anyway, and it seemed wiser to allow him to remain until his successor arrived.”

Mel and de Lisle brought Moats from Hanoi's airfield to the Metropole. Despite its grand French Colonial architecture and the leafy, bucolic neighborhood where it was located, to the ever-judgmental Moats the hotel was a “dismal, grimy place with lumpy beds and limp curtains that looked so dirty I preferred not to touch them.” Clearly, she was in for a surprise when she later arrived in Chungking and saw that city and its accommodation options. (Mel, coming from the other direction, found the Metropole immeasurably luxurious after eight months living in the Press Hostel.)

However, Mel's arrest amplified what Mel later called French Indochina's “stiffling [
sic
] atmosphere.” For one thing, he was being followed. Shortly after the arrest, French police told Mel that agents loyal to Wang Ching-wei, the puppet leader in Nanking, were chasing him. Wang's henchmen had beaten and tortured numerous reporters in Shanghai, including Mel's friends Randall Gould and Hallett Abend.

Mel acquired a .45-caliber pistol to protect himself, though the precaution made him uncomfortable. His new status as a target also earned him a bodyguard, not to mention a “snoop” who followed him everywhere he went.

“The latter though is quite a distinction because even the diplomats have them now in Hanoi,” Mel wrote, adding that it was remarkable “how low my opinion is of the French now.”

Just after Mel's arrest, conditions were becoming tense along Indochina's border with Siam (Thailand). With his replacement for the United Press headed to Hanoi, Mel drove with de Lisle through Laos before meeting up again with Moats in Saigon, then traveling with both to Cambodia, where he would report on some of the border tensions. In Laos, he was struck by the sight of the “perfect blue sky,” the elephants and
tigers, and the villages squeezed between the Mekong River and palm jungles.

“The trouble out there with modern planes and guns all taking part seems unbelievable,” he wrote. It was December, and the French were happy with Mel's coverage of the Thai border, but the Japanese continued to pressure Vichy to expel him. Consul Reed reported to the State Department that the colony's secretary-general thought it would be wise for Mel to leave on the next boat, which was departing on December 26.

Mel lamented that he would miss Christmas. He admitted that he kept finding ways to stay away from home and said it “ruined his humor” that his return had been delayed so frequently. But Mel's actions don't seem to have coincided with his words. He was getting deeper into his story even as he told his family and Shirlee that he desperately wanted to go home. As much as he insisted he would try to buy the earliest ticket home and apologized for not writing enough, it was clear that Mel's heart was in Asia.

“Am terribly sorry because two months ago I would have bet my stamp collection that I would be home,” he wrote. It's hard to believe he really wanted to go home, or at least, that he hadn't changed his mind.

“I must say that to date this trip to the Orient has been a good one, and I feel that the time has been well spent,” he wrote to his mother. “I have a feeling that I'll be coming back again—just as I did four years ago.”

By New Year's Eve, Mel was back in Hong Kong. He stayed at the Phillips House, a missionary residence where he'd often stayed during weekends away from Lingnan. In fact, four years earlier he had stayed in the exact same room while visiting Hong Kong for the same holiday.

In Hong Kong—which was becoming a sort of bookend for the transitions in Mel's life—he was happy to give up his pistol and reconnect with friends from Chungking. This was a particularly busy visit, full of meetings with friends and official contacts. The visits helped Mel show off his knowledge and experience to powerful figures. This Mel was a confident man far removed from the wide-eyed kid who had first visited Hong Kong four years earlier, and even the uncertain reporter who'd arrived in Shanghai a year previously without a job.

In Hong Kong he ate lunch with Ed Snow and Bob Neville, the foreign editor of a New York paper called
PM,
and went to parties hosted by Emily Hahn, the doyenne of
The New Yorker
. He had lunch with England's top spy in the region and with Hong Kong's chief colonial administrators. He also took tea privately with Madame Sun, with whom he now felt comfortable speaking candidly about the affairs of the nation that her husband had led out of monarchy just a couple of decades earlier.

Finally, during his last hours in China, Mel met with Madame Sun's sister, Mayling, the Generalissimo's wife. In this frank conversation about wartime strategy with the country's most powerful woman, Mel helped Madame Chiang develop an idea that would soon grow into one of the war's most romanticized fighting forces.

“Madame Chiang asked me if I'd be interested in getting an American volunteer air force, after I suggested it as the only solution to China's very weak position right now,” Mel said. Soon the American Volunteer Group, or “Flying Tigers,” the squadron of mercenary American flyers who fought the Japanese, was born.

In Hong Kong, Mel also received a letter from Mo Votaw, the professor with whom he had shared his office at the Press
Hostel in Chungking. Votaw told Mel that Holly had a plan to have Mel come back to work at XGOY if Mel wanted to. But he warned that Mel would have to temper his expectations until the engineering staff at XGOY got its act together. That, Votaw cautioned, would require getting the engineers to cooperate with the station's programmers.

“We thought of having a showdown with them, but finally decided it would mean more disruption than anything else, and more stink than good, so for the time being we must simply go on doing our best and hoping the others will see the light and be willing to do their best,” Votaw wrote.

But Mel didn't want to accept that offer, at least not yet. Now he actually did want to go home.

As much opportunity as Mel was leaving behind in Asia, on New Year's Eve he finally began to come to terms with just how long he had been away from home. It had been more than a year since he'd first left for Shanghai, and many people awaited his return.

First, there was Chilton Bush, his professor and mentor back at Stanford. Bush had told Mel when they'd corresponded that summer that he thought Mel should write a book informed by his experiences in China, and that the Institute for Pacific Relations, he suspected, would publish it. He had seen Mel's career progress rapidly and knew he was on the verge of something significant. He told Elza as much after she wrote to find out whether Mel was making wise decisions for himself. Bush believed the United Press would go to great lengths to hire Mel as a regular contributor, not just as a stringer.

“He is extremely modest,” Bush wrote to Mel's mother. “I don't think he has an inferiority complex, but is just modest,
which is a characteristic that makes him friends. At the same time he has an unusual amount of courage which speaks for itself in what he does.”

Though Mel would return to the United States newly emboldened by his experiences in Indochina and Chungking, and do so with an established network of professional contacts willing to go to similar lengths, leaving Asia wasn't easy—not then, not when so much was possible for his future, in which “there are a thousand and one things that I could do.”

Shirlee Austerland had also waited a long time for Mel to come back. She'd anxiously anticipated every bit of news about him throughout this long, dangerous year. Mel had left for China at the peak of their romance. The entire time he was there Shirlee wrote him
and
Elza frequently.

But paradoxically, now that Mel was finally on his way home, Shirlee—who continuously asked when he might return and whether she should come down to Los Angeles to be there when his ship arrived—suddenly decided she was done waiting for Mel. When the
Tarakan
reached Manila, Mel phoned Shirlee for the first time in ages. She told Mel that he had taken too long to come home. She ended things, gently but firmly.

In his letters and in person, Mel had easily expressed to his mother how much he loved and valued Shirlee, but he was never able to do the same with Shirlee herself. As much as Mel said he loved and missed her, the Chungking air had settled into him. For months he had put off deciding where Shirlee fit in his life. His great adventure through Indochina may have cemented his love of journalism and Asian affairs, but it only stretched the patience of Shirlee, who had tired of Mel's empty promises to return. By the time Mel finally did arrive in the United States—even before he made it to the mainland—he knew his love affair with Shirlee had disintegrated.

“I gave up a chance, in fact several chances out here, to come home and decide on Shirlee,” he told his mother as he informed her that, when he contacted Shirlee, she had indicated—diplomatically—that things were over between them. Mel was “disheartened” that things turned out that way, especially because of the opportunities he'd just passed up, but, he said, “I'll be home soon and all will work out. One way or the other.”

Elza, meanwhile, was the person Mel most looked forward to seeing in California. He didn't want a big scene when his ship arrived in Los Angeles. He was exhausted. The idea of his many relatives coming to greet the ship, then offering their opinions on his relationship and career prospects, was too stressful for him.

“Hope only you and MM [Manfred Meyberg] are meeting me—
Please
no family,” he requested, underscoring “please” three times. “Also would be swell if the family didn't barge in the very first night so I could talk to you both.”

Once he was on his way home through Manila, Mel wrote Elza a more candid letter. It was her birthday. He hadn't planned to miss the date for a second year in a row, and he admitted that he knew the toll his long travels must have had on her, not to mention what she must have felt when she heard about the arrest in Indochina and about other dangers he'd encountered over the past year.

This letter, as Mel indicated, was one of the most honest he'd ever written to her. “It seems so terribly long that I've written a letter like this to you, that I'm almost ashamed,” he wrote.

And then on second thought I know you understand I am always thinking about you and a letter makes no difference anyhow.

There have been times during the past months when I've felt that I should come home. I know how reports of the Far East
must sound. But then again, I have always felt the whole world is so upset and that I'm so much better off comparatively, that we should just be grateful and nothing else.

There have been many times, of course, that I've been in some sort of danger, but I must say it doesn't bother me a bit. Particularly when I know so many others are facing the same things. I suppose I'm a full-fledged fatalist now—with a small measure of caution thrown in—(that's between us) . . .