Eve of a Hundred Midnights (23 page)

Everyone was thrilled. A few weeks after he told his family, Mel came back from a party and found a stack of congratulatory letters from members of his father's, mother's, and stepfather's extended families. That was all in addition to the telegrams he'd already been sent, all of them so complimentary that Mel said he felt embarrassed.

“Let them compliment Annalee, that's okay,” he wrote before slipping in a key parenthetical. “(Look at the choice she made. What brains.)”

Mel's eleven-year-old cousin Jackee Marks even wrote a poem about the pending nuptials. The verse acknowledged that the wedding might occur during a war that even a child could anticipate.

“Here comes the bride and groom / Although the bombs drop boom!,” the poem began. It closed similarly: “So know although / The subs are under and the planes overhead / There'll be two more people sleeping in a double bed.”

On October 2, Mel left Chungking for Manila. Once again, he was going by way of Hong Kong, where he planned a six-day stop. As each of Mel's stops in Hong Kong had seemed to be since he attended Lingnan, this was a busy, gluttonous, and joyful layover. Holly Tong had business he wanted to conduct in Hong Kong, so he came along with Mel for that leg of the
trip. Every night, it seemed, Mel and Holly “went on a spree for beer and beer and beer and lobster and prawns, and oysters and double of everything good until 4:00 a.m.”

But while Mel and Tong ate and drank, they also heard a great deal about Annalee, as Mel told his parents in a letter home from Hong Kong.

“Amazing what a swell impression Ann makes everyplace,” Mel wrote. “My friends down here in Hong Kong who entertained her are all crazy about her.”

Like Annalee, Mel was dedicated to his job, and he'd just been given a tremendous break. He had sought full-time journalism work for years. Moreover, the new position at
Time
would ultimately be good for his marriage. The realities of married life that Mel saw on his horizon only made the new job—and its secure, increased salary—more attractive. As much as Mel understood his and Annalee's professional commitments, he was eager to marry quickly.

“I have been trying to hurry her, but she won't be hurried,” he wrote from Manila. “She wants to finish some work first.”

Anxious that if war broke out, travel between China and the Philippines would be cut off—it was already a complicated journey involving perilous flights—Mel nudged Annalee to leave Chungking as soon as she could. Still, he continued to understand her commitment to her work, and both of them were willing to wait.

“Naturally I wanted Ann to leave right away with me,” Mel admitted once he was in Hong Kong on his way to Manila. “But we both felt that she had a job to do, although she is under obligation to no one.”

Holly Tong also told Mel how pleased he was that Annalee was staying to work in Chungking. Tong wrote Mel repeatedly about how much everyone in his office liked Annalee and her
work. Aside from Madame Chiang, her sister Ay-ling—H. H. Kung's wife—had also taken a strong liking to Annalee.

“A good thing you are taking her away from Chungking right away because Madame Kung has a strong liking for her and her efficiency plus,” Tong told Mel, somewhat confirming Mel's earlier joke that Annalee had better come to Manila before “they really tie her down.”

When Mel wrote home to tell his parents about his engagement, he took care to stress the importance of Annalee's sense of professional independence. Yet he knew his proposal must have seemed sudden given how rapidly his relationship with Shirlee Austerland had crumbled less than a year earlier, and given the role his work played in ending that relationship.

Elza didn't seem too concerned. She later told
Time
's John Hersey that she “couldn't conceive of a more suited person” for Mel. The couple had much in common, Elza explained, in that “both are of tremendous depths of love for humanity and interest in China and, as you know, they are together writing.”

Though Mel was disappointed that Annalee wasn't coming right along with him to Manila, he appreciated the break from Chungking life and felt more energetic than he had in a long time. Aside from indulging in Hong Kong life with Holly Tong and “millions” of other friends he had there, Mel worked hard, wrapping up multipage briefings for
Time
to send out on the
Clipper,
writing letters, and putting together a ten-minute broadcast for NBC about the fighting outside of Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, where, after a Japanese drive, Chinese forces came back and encircled the attacking Japanese troops, achieving their first major victory of the war.

While Mel enjoyed the comfortable living in Hong Kong as a break from Chungking, when he finally reached Manila he
found the modernity and creature comforts of that city unsettling. With Hong Kong, even though the British weren't yet fighting the Japanese, everyone seemed to be getting ready for war. Manila, on the other hand, appeared peaceful, and life was surrealistically leisurely. To be sure, it was an uneasy quiet, as if Manila was also waiting for war, but the city's many luxuries and its nervous calm made for an unfamiliar reality for Mel to negotiate after his second straight summer in Chungking.

“Everything is completely strange and foreign to me here, and you have to sit around sipping cocktails and hire cars and all that,” Mel wrote. He didn't find himself well suited for the artifice necessary for Manila's politics and social schmoozing.

“The job here in Manila scares me to death,” he admitted. “Not like China where everything comes to me so easily and naturally.”

Manila was relatively comfortable in part because the Philippines was a commonwealth and still effectively a U.S. colony. “The government of President Manuel Quezon was completely subordinate to the office of the U.S. high commissioner, Francis Sayre, and the economy of the entire archipelago carried a ‘Made in USA' label,” CBS reporter William J. Dunn later wrote.

Dunn described Manila as “the Pearl of the Orient.” Indeed, many American expats relished the very characteristics that Mel found stultifying. In some eyes—possibly those with colonial lenses—the city was the Paris of the Far East. Tree-lined grand avenues built during the near half-century of American occupation, airy but shaded arcades, and vast plazas invited the pedestrian ease of late imperialism. Even as tumult roiled in nearly every direction, in the fall of 1941 Manila seemed peaceful.

But the peace was chimeric. Only six years earlier, a revolutionary movement—the Sakdalistas—had tried to overthrow
U.S. rule, shortly before the United States and the newly established government of Manuel Quezon signed an agreement promising the Philippines independence by 1946. This tumult represented only the latest incident in centuries of conflict and colonization.

As early as the fifteenth century, Muslim sultans from Malaysia and Indonesia began expanding into the Philippines, an attractive prize to outsiders. Around the same time, Chinese pirates regularly plundered the region. Then came Spain.

Ferdinand Magellan arrived in the Philippines in 1521, during his fleet's circumnavigation of the globe. Magellan established the Philippines' first Catholic church and began nearly 400 years of Spanish occupation, before being killed by a
datu
—a member of the region's ruling class—named Lapu-Lapu. Despite Lapu-Lapu's ensuing hero status, the Philippines had still not shaken Europe's hand from its throat by the twentieth century. The U.S. defeat of Spain in 1898 only transferred the islands from the clutches of a descendant colonial power to an ascendant one.

Though American propaganda cast the Philippines as a loyal partner, its population was hardly passive.

Mel worked hard to keep his mind off how much he missed Annalee. Though his new position came with a raise and official status as a
Time
employee, it wrenched away all the stink and beauty and adrenaline of Chungking. The visceral experience of a capital under constant bombardment subsided, replaced by an anxious cycle of socializing and politics.

Mel felt dizzy from all the rushing around he was doing. He likened it to times in the past when he'd rush back home to get a million things done at once before taking off again to who-knew
-where. In Manila, he couldn't use the same excuses he'd used in Chungking for not getting things done.

“You have to get things done quickly and efficiently,” Mel wrote. “You can't blame anything on bombings or slow Chinese or anything.”

Mel's new post consisted of “a very gay and artificial and very expensive life.” One night in September 1941, he spent $40 to take a group of army officers out on the town, though he won some of the money back betting on the races with his guests. At the time, Mel's salary was $250 per month, but three-fifths of that figure paid for his small hotel room on the sixth floor of the Bay View Hotel. Though Manila wasn't cheap,
Time
did cover Mel's other expenses, plus he had the raise he received when he took the new job, and he had another pay bump to look forward to in January. Meanwhile, being in the publishing titan's employ made it easier for Mel to develop sources among high-level officials.

“Fortunately the name of Luce behind me helps,” Mel wrote. “In fact the doors just swing open.”

But maintaining those sources required going on expensive outings. He also had public relations duties on behalf of the Luce empire, giving speeches and mingling at civic clubs.

“So much contact work in this business,” he told his parents. “Meeting big shots, impressing them, and getting their confidence in 10 easy lessons that it's getting to be a routine struggle.”

Mel needed to nurture relationships with U.S. Army and Navy officers, Filipino military figures, and government officials. Though he may not have liked the glad-handing, Mel transitioned comfortably from officers' clubs and diplomatic receptions to shared cigarettes with enlisted American soldiers and Filipino reservists. He also befriended shipping magnates,
businessmen, and assorted other characters, such as Amleto Vespa, a “screwball” former Italian spy who invited Mel to his map-plastered Manila flat for rambling conversations about Axis strategy in Asia and the Pacific. H. J. Timperley, the China News Service rep who worked with Earl Leaf, wrote the introduction to Vespa's 1938 book,
Secret Agent of Japan,
the movie of which was filmed in Chungking in 1940, when Mel first worked in the Chinese capital.

Aside from cutting ties with his contacts in Chungking and dealing with the politics of working in Manila, Mel also had to give up most of his broadcasting. NBC said he could continue to contribute, but the network already had a full slate of reporters in Manila. Opportunities for Mel to report on the radio were infrequent.

But Mel appreciated the access he had in Manila, even if he felt out of his element there. He was also comforted that many of his friends were surfacing in Manila. Meanwhile, neither his cabled reports to
Time
nor his private communications were censored the way they had been in Chungking.

When Mel was preparing to leave Chungking, he'd written about his promotion coming with a second raise on top of the one he'd been given at the end of August and the promise of a third raise in January. He was also getting a bigger expense account that would cover most of his living costs in Manila, and in Manila he'd be able to keep in better contact with his family because the mail went more regularly and he had access to phones.

“And still I [
sic
] rather be in Chungking where things are happening,” he wrote.

In Manila, where things weren't happening, Mel groused that others saw him as a spectacle simply because he'd come from Chungking. Any mention of the city was met with oohs
and aahs. Westerners still untouched by war were curious about the Chinese capital's constant air raids, but almost as quickly as they asked what it was like to endure such frequent bombings, they lost interest, returned to their drinks, and resumed the usual society gossip that pervaded Manila.

Mel didn't lose interest in the war. In his first two and a half months in the Philippines, he collected news, constructed personality backgrounds, assembled political roundups, and analyzed war preparations. He crammed these reports into hundreds of pages of detailed cables he sent to Hulburd, who used these reports as the basis for weekly news roundups. The magazine's editors picked the best or most interesting items, rewrote them, and ran them without bylines. Though most in
Time
's huge audience in America didn't know it at the time, Mel was their only link to what was happening in China—and their window into the buildup for war in the Pacific.

As Mel and Annalee's wedding day approached, the letters he wrote to his parents in California suggested that he was anxious about his upcoming nuptials. In one note, he asked his family to “advise to last detail” what a ring should cost. Possibly before they could respond, and despite Manila's rising cost of living (though the residents of Manila acted like war wasn't on the horizon, rapid inflation in the Philippines in the fall of 1941 reflected economic insecurities about the conflict in Asia), Mel spent $746—three months' salary—on two rings. Even though Annalee had told him not to buy even one, he wanted to give her both an engagement ring and a wedding band.

One of the rings was a jade and “platinum affair with just a bare outline and simple design.” The other featured a square-cut
one-and-a-half-carat diamond head with small diamonds branching off its platinum mount.

“Looks like half a milk bottle it is so big,” Mel told his parents when he bought it.

Mel even bragged to his family that he bought the rings “Grandpa style” by haggling the jeweler down 20 percent. Even with the bargain, Mel felt a pinch. But ever the romantic, he wanted to provide Annalee with some semblance of a normal engagement.