Eve of a Hundred Midnights (2 page)

The reporters continued to dissect their options in the Jacobys' hotel room. Despite the danger, Mel thought that remaining in the city might guarantee Annalee's safety better than escaping to some uncertain destination, but when he made this suggestion, Annalee wouldn't hear of it. She was certain Mel would die if they didn't flee.

“We're going, Mel,” Annalee insisted.

Even this early in their marriage, Mel knew he wouldn't be able to change Annalee's mind.

Still, they needed a way out. Mel remembered that earlier he'd met two merchant mariners whose tug hadn't yet left Manila; if he could find them, he might be able to convince them to smuggle some reporters out of the city. In search of the captains and their ship, Mel left the hotel room and descended into the frenzy engulfing Manila's waterfront.

J
esse Lasky arrived at downtown Los Angeles's La Grande Station on a Santa Fe Railway train. He told a cab driver he was looking for a place called Hollywood. It was January 1914, and the driver hadn't heard of the place. Eventually, however, they found a quiet development amid rustic canyons and orchards about seven miles west of downtown.

Lasky was looking for a business associate, Cecil B. DeMille, an unknown filmmaker from New York who ended up in Los Angeles after trying, unsuccessfully, to direct a feature-length movie in Flagstaff, Arizona. DeMille had wired his principal backer, Samuel Goldfish—who would later change his last name to Goldwyn—who dispatched Lasky to find out what the director was doing with their money. Eventually, Lasky and his driver arrived at the address DeMille had provided, a five-acre estate of palm trees and lemon orchards at the dusty intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street. Lasky headed around back, near Selma Avenue, where he saw a barn. There, to his surprise, he found that DeMille had turned the barn into a film studio where crews were busily completing a western.

DeMille hadn't told Lasky or Goldwyn that he had sublet the barn from two other early film pioneers—Louis Loss Burns and Harry Revier—or that he was now using it to produce a movie. Lasky was sufficiently impressed by the production, however, and he and DeMille agreed to completely take over the lease. They used the barn to finish Hollywood's first feature, the unfortunately titled
The Squaw Man
. Released in 1914, the film was a success, and the partnership behind it led to the formation of Paramount Studios.

DeMille's and Lasky's success as filmmakers might not have come as easily had they not crossed paths with a Jewish, German-born merchant named Jacob Stern. In 1889 Stern moved to Fullerton, a then-rural town in Orange County, California. There Stern and a cousin opened a general store. Stern soon had six locations and shifted his business interests to real estate.

In 1904 Stern bought the property at Hollywood and Vine. It was a comfortable home where he and his wife Sarah could raise their four children: Harold, Elza, Helen, and Eugene. Eight years later, he leased out the barn that DeMille ended up using. It became one of the key sites around which Hollywood's film industry grew, and Paramount Studios kept its lot at that corner until the company grew too large to remain there.

Amid the hoopla of the movie business's early days, the Sterns' second daughter, Elza Stern, fell in love with a young man named Melville Jacoby, whose father, Morris, had come to Los Angeles from Poland and started a retail clothing business with his four brothers. Like the Sterns, the Jacobys emerged as one of Los Angeles's first commercially successful Jewish families.

Elza and Melville Jacoby were soon married. Their son, Melville Jack Jacoby, entered the world on September 11, 1916.
A booming Hollywood glimmered around the boy and his family, who thrived in the burgeoning city.

That is, until 1919. The First World War had just drawn to a close, leaving millions dead in its wake. An even deadlier scourge followed: Spanish influenza. The epidemic—believed to have originated in China—killed somewhere between 20 million and 40 million people around the globe. In the United States, nearly one-quarter of the population contracted the disease, including the elder Melville Jacoby. In January 1919, before his son was even two and a half years old, Jacoby died.

Elza Jacoby had a nervous breakdown following her husband's death. The Sterns swooped in and brought Elza back to their home at Hollywood and Vine, where together they cared for her and Mel. For the next four years, Elza's parents, siblings, and household staff helped raise the boy. Elza eventually recovered from her depression, strengthened in part by converting to Christian Science.

“As young as [Mel] was, he seemed to sense how very much a young mother needed him,” Elza later told the writer John Hersey.

When Mel was six years old, Elza purchased a house in L.A.'s Benedict Canyon, where she tried to care for Mel on her own. Elza was attentive, and her son was dutiful, possibly too much so.

“My chief difficulty was to get him to go outside and play, so long as there was as much as a wastebasket to empty inside,” she recalled, perhaps with a bit of motherly embellishment.

Mel's frequent visits to his grandparents' home while he was growing up let him observe Hollywood's early days. Despite the bustle around him, Mel seemed happiest in the Sterns' swimming pool. Elza always fretted about his long dives beneath the pool's surface. But Mel appealed to her newfound
religion, insisting that “God's under that water too. He'll show me how to come up again.”

A few years after her first husband's death, Elza fell in love with Manfred Meyberg, another member of Los Angeles's tight-knit Jewish community. He had worked his way up from office boy to president at Germain's Seed and Plant Company, one of the era's largest agricultural supply companies.

On March 8, 1922, the year Manfred bought a controlling stake in Germain's, he and Elza wed. The marriage lightened Elza's spirits as well as Mel's. Though Mel welcomed “Uncle Manfred” into his life, he still spent enough time at his grandparents
' home that their youngest son, Eugene, considered Mel—ten years his junior—more akin to a younger brother than a nephew.

If Mel felt smothered by Elza, he didn't make such feelings known. Still, Elza sent Mel away to summer camp when he was eight years old, in part to help put some distance between them.

“I still remember the expression on that little fellow's face, when I drove away and left him with all those strangers,” she wrote nearly two decades later. “When he saw I was beginning to weaken, he said ‘you promised me you wouldn't cry,' and I didn't—nor have I the many times in the past six years, when I have bid him goodbye—only because Melville has helped to make me a stronger woman.”

Despite his father's early death, Mel had a happy childhood full of typical boyhood passions. He was a lifelong stamp collector, or philatelist, who would search for new designs throughout his journeys around the world. Mel's “boy” Elmer, a black and white Australian shepherd, meant so much to him that he sometimes sent postcards home addressed to the dog from his many travels; over the years lovers and friends would know to ask after Elmer, having either heard about or met the dog.

Mel also started writing early, beginning with small pieces that appeared in Hollywood's Selma Avenue Elementary School's weekly paper. After transferring to Hawthorne School in sixth grade, he became a sports editor. By the time he was a junior at Beverly Hills High—where he was an honor society member—Mel was the school paper's business manager and, later, its news editor.

A fan of camping and being outdoors, Mel also grew up when much of the Los Angeles area was still undeveloped and blanketed with sagebrush, oaks, and poppies. He had ample space to freely explore the wild hills and canyons surrounding
Beverly Hills and Hollywood, collect Native American artifacts, and attend summertime concerts at the Hollywood Bowl.

He often refused the box seats offered to his well-connected family and chose instead to climb the outdoor amphitheater's stairs to its highest row. There, lying on a bench and staring at the night sky, he would lose himself in the stars and the music.

This wistful streak reflected in Mel's stargazing nights grew into a restlessness as he got older. He recognized as much as anyone his need for direction. Despite the relative comfort of his childhood, Mel was eager to succeed through his own efforts. Nevertheless, Mel wooed dates, impressed employers, made friends, and developed sources with charisma augmented by a dry sense of humor, handsome features, and a slim but athletic body sculpted by years of swimming and recreational boxing. At six-two, Mel was certainly tall. A hirsute man descended from Central European Jews, he had fair skin with dark hair and eyes, traits that later prompted a newspaper in China to describe him as “a rugged dark featured young American.” Quick to flash his amused, closed-lip smile, he had a habit of absentmindedly stroking his cheek as he thought.

“Mel was tall, dark, and slim, alternately boyish and then mature beyond his [years],” another of his contemporaries wrote.

After high school, Mel went to Stanford University. There he signed up with the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) and even learned to fly. He also joined Stanford's water polo team and made varsity by the end of his sophomore year.

“I'm nuts about water polo, and I can't wait to get into the pools,” he told his parents, undeterred by the black eyes, cut lips, and bruises he also frequently acquired through the sport.

Two more friends of Mel's came with him to Stanford from Beverly Hills: J. Franklin “Frank” Mynderse and Winton “Whimp” Ralph Close. The trio were inseparable, and the
friendships garnered Mel a nickname from Whimp that would fit his entire life: Tony Tramp, “because he always wanted to go someplace.”

In one citizenship class during his second semester at Stanford, Mel wrote a paper he titled “My Private Utopia.” This “harmony”-themed society seemed to draw from the same idealism that helped shape Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. Mel's utopian vision featured a heavily managed economy, treasured scientific and industrial innovation, and insisted that beauty be “embodied in factories as well as homes.” (In what must have been a nod to his stepfather's seed business and his mother's prizewinning yards, it even called for a home with a garden for everyone.)

This vision prioritized travel as a societal value and inextricably linked the economy to environmental preservation. Mel, who had taken several childhood trips through the country's young national park system, envisioned protecting nature as society's paramount cultural goal. Film, dance, and fashion were necessary for happiness, Mel wrote, but “they would [lose] their appeal if natural beauty should suddenly vanish.”

Toward the conclusion of the paper, Mel seemed to return from some kind of mental vacation as he acknowledged that “ambitions, greed, fear, and drudgery” were realities that had to be addressed. Still, he had presented a beautiful dream.

Wrote his professor upon returning the assignment: “Don't you ever come clear down, will you?”

Though Mel easily made new friends at Stanford, he complained about the difficulty of fitting in with Stanford's fraternities and “eating clubs.”

“Well, I've started being left out,” he reported a month into his studies. “Mr. Wadsworth, bev. high, sent recommendations
to his fraternity here for all Beverly kids except Mel. I guess he didn't mention me because I don't hold my nose right. I am going to try out for the
Stanford Daily
staff tomorrow.”

It was the next day that Mel began to find a place for himself. He joined fifty other “tryouts” vying for work at the
Stanford Daily
and made the cut as a reporter (though it was demanding and time-consuming work, especially alongside his water polo commitments). Around the time Mel tried out for the paper, a sophomore named Annalee Whitmore was a copy editor; she was a class ahead of Mel, and the pair rarely interacted.

In 1936, when Melville Jacoby entered his twenties, his life permanently pivoted, beginning with a family crisis.

At the beginning of the year, Elza and Manfred Meyberg were expecting their first child. But on the morning of January 20, Elza felt that something was wrong. Manfred rushed her across Los Angeles to Good Samaritan Hospital. Elza went into labor and gave birth to a daughter, Marilyn. But Marilyn never had a chance, and twelve hours after birth, she died. It was ten days before Elza's birthday. She and Manfred never had another child.

Elza, Manfred, and Mel were understandably devastated, but as summer approached Mel had exciting news: he had won a scholarship to study abroad, through a new student exchange program between the United States and China. Instead of returning to Stanford the next school year (when he would have been appointed an Army second lieutenant through his ROTC work), Mel would continue his studies at Lingnan University, a missionary school in Canton (Guangzhou), a southern port city on the Pearl River (Xi Jiang) Delta.

This student exchange program was part of the Pacific Area
Exchange, which a Hawaiian-born student named Frank Wilson began after independently enrolling in Lingnan three years earlier. By 1936, thirty-two students—mostly selected from the Ivy League and other elite American universities—had been invited to participate after intensive interviews, letters of recommendation, and an essay contest. They joined a Lingnan student body comprising primarily children from China's wealthiest families, as well as a number of American-born students of Chinese descent, who generally looked down upon their counterparts whose families hadn't left Asia.