Eve of a Hundred Midnights (18 page)

Aware of himself as a man born in “old China,” Luce spoke to the assembled moguls of Chungking and “new China,” a place of “frightful and heartrending hardship” whose “story of unconquerable faith and fortitude” was one with which Americans were insufficiently familiar.

“It is partly because news, like the sun, travels from East to West,” Luce said, appealing to his audience members' sense of themselves as culturally influential. “Hitherto the most notable exception to this rule has been the news of Hollywood. You people are, as you well know, big news—you are the principal traffic on the westbound course of news.”

Luce believed that the story of China's “heroism” in standing on its own against Japan was a story that his audience's grandchildren would consider one of the greatest in history, one for the moguls to “rend as if our very lives depended on it—our lives and the happiness of our children's children.” He was convinced that “by the year 2000 magnificent picture dramas will be derived from the episodes of this struggle.”

Nineteen-forty-one was the pivot. It was in that year, Luce
insisted, that he and his peers were “determining that those future dramas shall spell out the triumph of the human spirit.”

Before he left for China to see for himself where the drama now stood, Luce pulled aside one of the dinner's guests, Walt Disney. Disney was a natural fit for one of United China Relief's fund-raising efforts, the Campaign for Young China. The animator agreed to lead this campaign. Before he left, Luce sent a special message to a secretary at his New York office making sure she had noted Disney's commitment.

Henry Luce knew the dinner's attendees wanted their influence to continue west across the Pacific, but to sustain America's attention to the crisis in China, his relief organization would need for news of China's plight to travel back east across the ocean. United China Relief would need more than money. It would need a story to tell, and it would need people to tell that story, people who knew China and had connections and access there.

Mel Jacoby and his new friend, Annalee, were such people.

While Luce made the final preparations for his trip to China, Mel was sailing aboard the SS
President Taft
in first class—China's publicity bureau was paying for the journey—across the Pacific. Not even three months after he returned from his dangerous tour of Indochina, Mel was going back to Asia. He couldn't believe he was traveling again.

“Thanks for everything at home—still doesn't seem I'm headed back to China, guess it will take a bombing to wake me up,” Mel wrote to his mother.

Mel would take the
Taft
to Honolulu. From there, he would fly across the Pacific on the
American Clipper,
one of the enormous flying boats owned by Juan Trippe's Pan-American Airways. The airline's
Clipper
routes were luxurious journeys
that cut weeks-long ocean crossings into affairs of a few days. (Though Mel flew on a plane called the
American Clipper,
his trip followed the route known by the same name as its sister plane, the
China Clipper
.)

Both
Click
and
Newsweek
had assigned Mel to cover his trip aboard the glamorous
Clipper
. Before he could, Mel had to clear his reporting plans with U.S. naval intelligence officers in Honolulu, who set constraints on what he could cover. So Mel got in touch with some of his navy connections in Washington, and they wired their counterparts in Honolulu to ask them to help Mel out.

“Friends are a great institution,” Mel wrote.

Even before the security concerns, Mel was annoyed that he had been bumped from the San Francisco-to-Honolulu leg of the trip. Then he learned that there would be further inconveniences. His departure from Hawaii was delayed for two days, and he'd now be flying out with some of the same high-profile passengers who'd bumped him in the first place. Mel quickly discovered that among those passengers was Henry Luce, as well as the publisher's wife, Clare Boothe Luce, a playwright and future congresswoman who often contributed to
Life
.

“Not so good for the
Click
story,” Mel wrote. “I'm afraid to have a rival publisher's face in the pics.”

Mel was more than annoyed. He was angry that he had been kicked off the passenger list at the last minute for the San Francisco-to-Honolulu leg of the journey and that people like the Luces could so easily get permission to leave the United States when others couldn't. Despite his frustration, Mel remained professional enough to save his gripes for a letter home. He knew that his friend Teddy White worked for Luce, that
Time
had offered him stringer work in China, and that John Hersey was going to dine with Annalee to discuss a position for her with United China Relief.

On April 29, the night before Mel's departure upon the
Clipper,
Annalee wired Mel a bit of good news. Someone at MGM liked the screenplay the two of them were working on.

“She sure is a live wire,” Mel wrote in a letter home mentioning Annalee's message.

If the damn thing does sell—if—and I get some money, the check will come to me, but half is hers.

That's all except thanks again for everything and I'm already looking forward to home again. I'll be careful —love, mel

With a roar and a shudder the
Clipper
lifted from Pearl Harbor on April 30. As gas fumes that would linger throughout the flight drifted through the cabin and its passengers started mingling, another reason for the security precautions became clear: the plane's passengers. If the United China Relief dinner Mel attended in New York had gathered some of America's most powerful philanthropists and business leaders, the
Clipper
manifest featured a spectrum of less widely known names that were nonetheless either incredibly powerful in 1940s Asia or about to make dramatic contributions to the course of World War II. Aside from the Luces, they included generals, spy chiefs and commandos, industrialists, and artists. The largest group was a party of U.S. Army Air Forces and Marine aviation officers headed to Asia to advise the Kuomintang's air forces, study Japan's strategy in its bombing raids, and plan air defenses in the Philippines. There was also a British businessman and onetime member of Shanghai's governing municipal council named Valentine Killery, who was leading a team on its way to Singapore to set up an ill-fated arm of the United Kingdom's clandestine special
operations network. And one woman on board the plane would become a lauded hero by helping to feed thousands of Shanghai's Jewish refugees.

Mel liked the plane's crew much better than its “motley crowd” of passengers. Most of the passengers were stuck-up, rude, and inconsiderate to him, especially the British passengers, “who think they own the ship.” While the plane's captain helped Mel get photos, one of the Brits, Phyllis Gabell—who was secretly traveling with Killery to set up the clandestine unit in Singapore—threatened to sue Mel for taking her photo. The two American generals on the plane were more cooperative; one even tentatively agreed to go on the air with Mel in Chungking.

Eight thousand feet above the Pacific, somewhere between Guam and Manila, “really beautiful” cloud formations and blue waters rolled in from every direction. Only an hour or two of turbulence disturbed the four days of otherwise pleasant island-hopping from Hawaii to Midway, to Wake, to Guam, and then, finally, to Manila before most of the passengers flew on to Hong Kong.

Mel got a special treat during the flight: an invitation to see the crew quarters on the
Clipper
's upper level.

“Only myself and two generals rated,” Mel wrote. “Me to take some pics. The Generals to play around with the controls.” Having those generals at the controls, Mel later reflected, “gave passengers their only rough bump” of the trip.

At long stops on Guam and Midway, Mel and Luce started talking. Because of their mutual interest in China, their talks meandered extensively. This was unusual given Luce's penchant for shutting down conversations on his own terms when
he decided he was done with them. Mel must have made a strong impression.

The
Clipper
landed in Manila on the morning of May 5. It was a Sunday, so there was little opportunity for Mel to see the people he wanted to see in their offices. He caught up briefly with Dick Wilson of the United Press, who'd been one of his editors while he worked in Indochina, and two other friends, but spent his short stay at the Manila Hotel doing little else. He didn't even have a chance to call Elza and Manfred, which he would regret when he was on his way to Hong Kong soon thereafter.

“My hectic stay here in Hong Kong is the initial real reminder that I'm back in the Orient,” he wrote. Mel discovered, to his dismay, that flights from the British colony to Chungking were fully booked four months out. But Mel knew that “a certain group here”—meaning Kuomintang leaders and other VIPs—could always get a seat on the planes, and he used the pull he had with this group from his XGOY days to secure such a ticket. He'd be flying with CNAC on a special flight with the Luces.

Mel dined with Mickie Hahn his initial night in Hong Kong, bringing with him the first copies Hahn had seen in print of
The Soong Sisters,
her biography of the powerful siblings. She was one of “thousands” of other friends Mel met up with during his brief stay in Hong Kong. It was a busy, hectic visit that also included a stay at the city's best hotel.

“Never thought I'd come to that—did everything from order a belt for the Generalissimo to go to Madame H. H. Kung's for dinner last night, and tea yesterday with Mme Sun,” Mel bragged. “Both of course interesting and all that but I'm a bit tired.”

As the sun comes up and the clouds clear, we look down upon a land of intricate and fairylike beauty. It is the land of the terraces of rice paddies and the land of thousands and thousands of hills, each hill terraced nearly to its top with rice paddies of infinitely varied shapes, some square, some round, but mostly like the sliver shape of the new moon, shapes within shapes until all but the wooded hill or mountaintop is full. It is the landscape which might have been dreamed by a child of pure imagination. The hills in Chinese paintings which seem quite fantastic are representative of those hills.

—Henry R. Luce, “China to the Sea,”
Life,
June 30, 1941

For different reasons, Luce and Mel each felt a sense of homecoming as their CNAC plane descended past Chungking's mountains toward Shanhuba. Luce—who was on his first vacation in two years—saw the embodiment of the newest chapter in the grand tale of the country where he was born. Mel was returning to the place that had given his life purpose, opportunity, and community.

Though there was a crowd at Shanhuba to see Luce and his wife, a sizable group of Mel's old Chungking friends also turned out to welcome him “home.” Well, to welcome Mel and the seventy-seven pounds of “stuff” he lugged from Hong Kong along with him.

It was, Mel understated, “sort of good to be back.”

So much had changed for Mel in the four months he had been away from Asia. He didn't have a permanent job, but now his prospects for secure work in journalism were strong. When he boarded his
Clipper
flight, he had been disgusted by the
preferential treatment granted to Henry Luce, yet by the time Mel arrived in Chungking he was not only impressed by the publisher, but the publisher had been impressed with Mel. In fact, it sounded from Teddy White like Luce was going to offer Mel a job with
Time
and
Life
. Indeed, Luce had taken a liking to Mel on the
Clipper
and cabled New York to inquire about him after they'd landed.

Chungking had also changed. Perhaps everything but the city's sodden air and slippery steps was different. The country was unraveling. On January 6, the day Mel had left Hong Kong to head back to the United States, a crisis that came to be known as the “New Fourth Army incident” had erupted, washing away the foundations—already eroding—of the United Front between the Communists and Nationalists.