Eve of a Hundred Midnights (24 page)

Getting the engagement ring to her was another challenge. In Hong Kong, Mel met with Bill Dunn, who was headed to Chungking on assignment from CBS, and entrusted him with delivery of the ring.

“It was my only time I played Cupid,” Dunn wrote, “and I mentally saluted Jacoby. . . . Talented and well-informed, [Annalee] would prove a valuable source of information for a reporter new to the scene.”

The plan was still for Annalee to join Mel in Manila, but Mel was growing concerned that she wouldn't make it before war spread beyond China. The fighting there was getting worse, as was the antagonism between the United States and Japan, leaving Annalee with fewer and fewer opportunities to find safe passage from Chungking to the Philippines. Each day Mel grew more pessimistic about “Washington's too obvious appeasement gestures” with the Japanese.

Mel also had to obtain a marriage license, a headache in Manila. He described the ordeal as a comedic goose chase.

“You ring up everyone in town,” Mel described. “Then you quit and ask someone who refers you to an office. You ring that office and after getting the room boy to speak takalog [
sic
] you get someone to speak English. Then he speaks at you to the effect that you can't get married and why get married when it
costs ten pesos for the papers when a common law wife is just as good and besides you can leave her if she is no good.”

This story, wildly embellished, went on and on. There were closed government offices to visit, multiple forms to fill out and send to embassies, and bureaucrats to bribe. At every office someone else asked a variation of the “why get married . . . common law wife is just as good” question until Mel, having been sent back to the first office he had gone to, finally said he was getting a justice of the peace and didn't want a big wedding.

“And he says why didn't you say so in the first place marriage is a great thing,” Mel wrote.

When Mel wasn't running around in circles trying to find a marriage license, he often took in the vista from his room at the aptly named Bay View Hotel. Over the tops of the trees lining Dewey Boulevard, Mel's gaze fell toward the southwest and the grayish-blue waters at the mouth of Manila Bay, which stretched across the horizon. Beneath the water's surface were miles and miles of submerged mines. U.S. destroyers and submarines carefully negotiated them, while smaller inter-island freighters ferried loads of rice and fruit between the capital and the rest of the Philippines.

Occasionally, Mel tracked Pan-Am's giant, silver-bellied Boeing 314
Clippers
as they crossed the sky, their whalelike hulls and slender pontoons gliding into the harbor during stopovers on their transoceanic journeys. Each
Clipper
flight between the United States and Hong Kong promised mail, supplies, and new visitors.

Soon, Mel hoped, one of those flights would carry the woman he planned to marry.

As October turned into November, Mel's attention turned to a more vexing matter: transferring the pandas that had been caught in Wenchuan to Manila. They were due to arrive on November 16, and Mel was responsible for finding a place for them to be stored and cared for.

“I've been going wild again over the Panda situation,” Mel told his parents in a mid-November letter, a day before the bears were due in Manila. “I've had to do everything from hire station wagons, to finding places for them to stay, to getting special kinds of bamboo and sugar cane flown down from the provinces on a chartered plane. What a business. People phoning all the time wanting to see the animals, or borrow them, sell insurance, an air conditioning plant, grape juice and everything imaginable.”

Even Annalee was roped into the chaos that seemed to surround the panda hunt. After she reached Chungking, much of her early work had involved preparing Madame Chiang's speeches about the bears, which had been brought to the home of Bertram Rappe—the missionary Mel had stayed with after the Press Hostel was bombed—after they reached Chungking. There they were placed under the watch of armed guards. Annalee, who found the bears incredibly cute but the source of many headaches, wrote scripts about the pandas for XGOY's broadcasts and proposed press releases about the hunt to find them.

Meanwhile, Mel was far from the only reporter told to relocate from China to the Philippines. Since Manila was an American possession and the entire U.S. Asiatic fleet was based here, this was the country's principal stronghold in the Pacific. Like other industries, the islands had long been the base for U.S. news organizations' operations in Asia, and many had located their bureaus there. As the prospect of war with Japan neared, it seemed likely that the first phase of the fighting would begin in the Philippines, so newspapers and broadcast
networks wanted their reporters to be in the commonwealth when that happened.

On November 14, an Associated Press reporter named Clark Lee met a Japanese source of his in a bar in Shanghai, where Clark was based. The source had a tip from the Japanese colonel who was his country's spokesman in Shanghai. Clark had recently reported that it looked like Japan was preparing internment camps in barracks outside of Shanghai. Through the source, the colonel warned Clark that if he didn't want to be interned in these camps once a war started, he should leave in the next ten days. Clark redoubled efforts he had already begun to find either an escape to Chungking or passage on one of the last few freighters left in Shanghai. Finally, he secured the last free cabin on a Dutch ship, the SS
Tjibak,
and left for Manila.

Born in Oakland, California, Clark was nine years Mel's senior. He was, as Mel put it, a “tall, dark, husky, handsome, experienced newsman,” and he had spent the past three and a half years reporting from Shanghai. Before going to Shanghai, Clark had been in Hawaii for two years. There he met and married Lydia Liliuokalani Kawânanakoa, a Hawaiian princess. She had come with Clark to Shanghai, but she left in August 1941, in part because of an earlier warning from Japanese officers who suggested that a possible war with the United States would make it impossible for her to flee.

Clark had also reported from Japan and in the battlefield, where he had accompanied the Japanese army and even ridden in one of their planes. However, he wasn't a Japanese apologist, and he had often reported critically on Japan's actions in China, thus earning himself the threat of imprisonment the colonel had made that night. Indeed, Clark's writing was far more jingoistic than Mel's. Mel's work was certainly patriotic, but he wasn't as melodramatic as Clark, who sometimes seemed to trade facts for color.

Still, Mel was impressed by Clark. The two met shortly after Clark arrived, and Mel suggested to David Hulburd in a cable that he “watch his stories.”

From the edge of Pan-Am's facilities along the southern arc of Manila Bay near the Cavite shipyard, Mel watched a Boeing 314 cross the sky. It was Monday, November 24, 1941, just three days before Thanksgiving.

Annalee was on the plane. As it landed she spotted Mel at the water's edge, clad in a gleaming white suit, white shirt, and yellow tie.

“I could see him when the plane landed in the water, and it seemed like hours until they pulled it up onto the beach,” Annalee later wrote to Mel's parents.

Finally, the
Clipper
's pilot cut the aircraft's engines. The plane coasted the last few feet to the dock, where its passengers disembarked. Annalee barely had time to say anything to her fiancé. After they embraced, Mel ushered her to a waiting car, which drove the ten miles from Cavite to Manila, turned right off Dewey Boulevard onto Padre Faura, then stopped at the Union Church chapel a couple of blocks away. Mel strode confidently up to the church, while Annalee, wearing a white nylon dress printed with palm trees, ukuleles, pineapples, and leis in green, yellow, and red, linked her arm in his, smiling widely, a broad-brimmed yellow hat tucked under her other arm. For a couple who never expected romance, it was as dreamlike as any fairy tale.

“It was just like I'd always hoped it would be,” Annalee wrote.

Carl and Shelley Mydans were there, as well as Allan Michie (a
Time
reporter about to transfer to England, Michie was also the author of
Their Finest Hour
) and the Reverend Walter
Brooks Foley. As soon as the couple arrived, the small procession gathered in an intimate reception room off the chapel decorated with white flowers and green drapes. Carl served as Mel's best man; Shelley was Annalee's matron of honor.

Reverend Foley performed the modest ceremony. Mel had always dreaded large, formal weddings. He had looked for a justice of the peace to officiate, but most of the ones he found spoke little English and held ceremonies in nipa huts—small stilt houses with bamboo walls and thatched roofs made from local leaves.

“The morning I came he found Reverend Foley, who was a short blond near-sighted angel, full of extravagant plans for choir chorales and processionals and borrowed bride giverawayers,” Annalee wrote.

Annalee may not have wanted a big to-do or an ostentatious ring, but she clearly couldn't restrain her delight at the occasion itself. Her smile did not subside throughout the ceremony. Her hands gently clasped Mel's as they exchanged vows, and she looked intently at her husband, her eyes grinning and warm. For his part, Mel couldn't mask the pride on his face, nor his joy.

Within an hour of Annalee's landing, she and Mel were married. After their wedding, they wrote letters to their families. In one, Annalee insisted to Mel's parents that she didn't go to China to marry Mel, but she “couldn't think of a better reason” to have gone.

The celebration continued at the Bay View Hotel, just a few blocks away. Gathered in the lobby were many of the couple's friends who had also transferred to Manila from Chungking, as well as others Mel had met since arriving. Those who couldn't be there sent their congratulations. Everyone, from Annalee's colleagues at MGM to Henry and Clare Boothe Luce, to all the Press Hostel residents, to the entire staff of XGOY (which also aired a brief item about the marriage), sent their good wishes.

“General MacArthur about knocked me over the other p.m. congratulating me,” Mel wrote. “Admiral [Thomas] Hart's staff nearly shook my hand off.”

There was a portable phonograph setting the tune with jazz standards and popular big band recordings. In between songs, the newlyweds ducked into a corner of the lobby where they took turns placing long-distance phone calls to their parents in Los Angeles and Maryland. And then they danced into the night. War was on the horizon and could arrive any day, but that evening it could have been a million miles away.

For a brief moment after the wedding, Mel and Annalee were able to escape the demands of reporting and the high-stress atmosphere of war zones. It didn't matter that they hadn't had the traditional wedding Madame Chiang had originally
wanted to throw back in Chungking. Or that all of their things—including most of Annalee's clothes—were on a ship that would end up diverted to Singapore when the war started. The two young reporters were in love.

“He types on the desk, and I type on the dressing table, and we both feel awfully sorry for the people next door,” Annalee told Mel's parents.

Slipping away for a brief honeymoon, Mel and Annalee drove up the slowly rising slope that led to the village of Tagaytay, forty miles to the southeast. Long a tourist destination, Tagaytay stretched along a ridge atop the many-fingered, horizon-spanning Lake Taal. The lake filled the crater of a massive shield volcano.

At its heart, a dusty, brown volcanic cone had built up after long-past eruptions. Within that cone was yet another small lake. This geologic matryoshka doll, the placid lake surrounding it, and the steep, verdant canyons beneath the ridge stretched below newly built Taal Vista Lodge. Constructed by the Philippines Railway just a few years earlier, the hotel's faux-Alpine lodge was its centerpiece. However, the Jacobys shacked up in one of a handful of small private cabins just west of the lodge. Overlooking the north ridge of the lake, the electricity shut off at night and the faucet dripped, but Mel and Annalee were in love and happy to be able to escape—if just for a weekend.

Even though they were honeymooning, the Jacobys weren't quite alone. Tied up next to their cabin were the two baby pandas that Madame Chiang had entrusted them to look after until John Tee-Van, the vet who would take them back to the Bronx Zoo, arrived from China.

News of the pandas' presence had spread quickly through Tagaytay, and they drew spectators, though not the huge crowds they'd drawn in Chungking. Even Clark Lee and the AP's Russell Brines were swept up in the commotion. While
on their way to explore war preparations in the southern reaches of Luzon, Lee and Brines stopped briefly to visit with the newlyweds and offered “unnecessary and unheeded advice” on caring for the pandas.