Rascals in Paradise

by James A. Michener

  After her departure he married—he had had two previous wives in the United States—and picked up dozens of others Tahiti style, but he found no lasting gratification. His later riotous behavior merely demonstrated the emptiness he suffered.

  His epic fights with his neighbors, Tahitian and European alike, added to the legend, for they protested against his fantastic building program, his boisterous parties, his drunken Tuesdays and almost his very existence as an alien in the colony. He, in reply, scorned them, calumniated them, ground their noses in the dirt when he had a chance. He had to suffer lawsuits, threats, ostracism, but he always bounced back with some new outrage to command attention. And he loved every minute of the fighting. “To hell with their petty jealousies,” he wrote to Davis. “If I busied myself with such pettiness I would not get any farther than they do. I’m intending to go places and I can’t stop to kick at the curs snapping at my heels.” He used the vilest language to describe his enemies and gloated indecently when he triumphed over them: “The Philante is giving us some good publicity here making these green-eyed #$%&%#$& groan when they brag about your gallery and how Leeteg rates in Hawaii.”

  His running fight with academic artists degenerated into abiding bitterness. It had started in Honolulu when Academy of Arts judges turned down some of his velvets as not being art but more like leather tooling or embroidery. He stormed the exhibition, cursed his rivals, accused the judges of assigning themselves all the prize money, and issued a statement which forever precluded acceptance of his velvets by Honolulu artists: “The tourists who gape at the current exhibition are probably of the opinion that they have seen better similar art on the end of a stableboy’s shovel.”

  Later he stated his views even more forcefully: “Please don’t bother submitting any of my work to art societies or museums as I hold them long-haired bastards in contempt since I know a lot about how and why they operate. Leave them to plug for their own darling daubers. We don’t need them and they are just cheap fourflushers in frock coats. To hell with them even when they come to you. Tell them Leeteg is very particular about hanging his paintings in a museum in the same room with some of the stuff that is now classed as art. If this modern crap is art, I prefer not to have my stuff labeled as art, but just call them beautiful but not art, or beauty because it is not art. Fight back at these snobs. I do and I’ve went a long way without their help. It’s really a drawback to tie up with them. We are selling our pictures and they cannot sell their works so they put them in museums so people will have to look at it when they come to see the real art of the old masters there. But Rembrandt and Rubens would get the brushoff if they approached the art guys with their works today. I could tell a lot about these #$%&$&#%@ in pince-nez, but I just boil when I talk about them S.O.B.’s.”

  A most regrettable by-product of this hatred for academic artists was his lifelong bitterness toward two inoffensive Honolulu artists, Ben Norris and Madge Tennent, to whom he turned again and again through the years with savage diatribes. They had won prizes the year his velvets had been disqualified. The intemperate language he used prohibits quotation.

  So the legend grew, pretty much as Leeteg had originally intended. Often he wearied of his role and would write that his exhibitionism was wearing him down, but of course it kept people talking about him, which, he said, was the important thing. One of the authors met Leeteg once when he was in such a mood. The interview started in typical Leeteg fashion, with the artist announcing in Quinn’s Tahitian Hut, “I suppose you’re one of those #$&$%@#@ who’s gonna write a book about Tahiti and tell a lot of #%&#&$% lies and spoil it for honest @#%&$@% like me!” Then he got offensive and claimed that nobody could understand the South Pacific, not even Leeteg, who had laid more native girls than the writer could count. Finally he subsided and in a gentle mood of reflection said it was a tough life, a very tough life. He said he got very tired at times and he guessed that the writer had already discovered there were never enough hours in the day to complete the work one intended. But the conversation in Quinn’s ended when he spied a sailor who had offended him. “Hey, you contemptible #@%&$@#,” he bellowed, and late that night he was dragged into the writer’s hotel, a bloody mess.

  In many ways he was a very gentle human being and spent his money lavishly to help others. Whenever he received a sizable check from Honolulu he would spend a share of it buying the paintings of Tahiti artists whose work was not selling. Then, on the Mitiaro heading back to Mooréa, he would stand at the gunwales and toss the canvases into the wind like playing cards. He kept urging Davis to sign on younger artists, but he hated bitterly anyone who presumed to copy his work on velvet: “I think that when all the velvets arrive you will have enough for a real exhibit, and maybe follow this by an announcement of $50 prize (deduct from my account) for the best velvet painted by a Hawaii artist. Exhibit them along with one or two of my best and let the public make comparisons, but after the exhibit is over tell the winner his stuff is not good enough for your gallery. This will end most of my up-and-coming competition. Also have all the entries in your hands two weeks before the exhibit, which is enough time for their colors to dry thoroughly and fade if they are going to fade and crack. Savvy?”

  The Leeteg legend reached its climax in February, 1953. The yacht Philante had returned and was again stern to at the quay, and Leeteg had a series of monstrous nights with two members of the crew, Reggie Chambers and Herb Case. Once when the latter was cruising in Mooréa waters, Leeteg spotted him, hauled him off the boat, and made him stay at Villa Velour for three days. Case says, “We had a party every night till two, but at six Edgar was at his easel.”

  When Case left, Leeteg promised, “I’ll see you in Papeete this week-end!”

  “You mean you’re coming over on the Saturday Mitiaro?” Case asked.

  “Sure! Gotta give you boys a party before you sail.”

  When Case reported this, Chambers and the captain said, “Jesus, we’ve got to keep Leeteg out of here Saturday. You know how he can bust up a party, and we’ve got to entertain the government officials.”

  “We just won’t tell him about the party,” Chambers suggested.

  “He can smell a party at ten miles,” Case warned.

  And sure enough, the Mitiaro had docked only ten minutes that Saturday, February 1, 1953, when squat, roly-poly, short-legged Edgar Leeteg trotted briskly up the gangplank, roaring, “Hear there’s a brawl organizing!”

  Chambers recalls that he and the captain took Leeteg aside and put it to him straight. “This is a formal affair, Edgar, and you’re not welcome.”

  “I ain’t gonna drink.”

  Everyone laughed at this and Leeteg raised his hand solemnly. “I’ll sit here and act like a gentleman.”

  “Like you did at James Norman Hall’s?” somebody asked.

  “I was drunk that day. Today, nothing.”

  So the Philante let him stay and Chambers says, “He was the perfect guest. He bowed to all the officials and didn’t curse the ladies.”

  At dusk, when the formal guests had departed, the Philante crowd decided to go west of Papeete for a farewell dinner at Les Tropiques. Lew Hirshon, leader of the American community, and his beautiful Tahitian wife were driving their cars and invited Leeteg to join them, but Leeteg preferred to climb on the back of a blue Harley-Davidson motorcycle owned by Herb Case, and together the two friends roared through the tropical night. Leeteg shouted, “First time I’ve ever been on one of these things sober!”

  At Les Tropiques the party separated into two rooms. Hirshon acted as host in one, Leeteg in the other. He gathered about him a gang of barflies and native girls and began to raise hell. “I promised to stay sober until the guests left, but now we’ll have some white wine.” He started to guzzle from the bottle, then primly put it down. “Tonight I’ll stay sober, in honor of the Philante.” He tried to get some dancing started, prancing about the native girls in tiny steps, but there was no music and the project faded. When the bill ca
me, he characteristically wanted to pay it all.

  The two parties broke up simultaneously and it was agreed that everyone would roister out to the Lido, where some of Tahiti’s wildest brawls occur. Again Hirshon offered to drive Leeteg, since it was obvious that Herb Case wanted to carry his vahine on the back of his motorbike, but Leeteg liked the feel of wind on his face and shouted, “I’ll ride here, on the back seat.” Accordingly he shoved Case’s girl into one of the cars and climbed aboard the motorcycle.

  It was not a back seat he had; the motorcycle was an oversize single-seat job on which a passenger, usually a girl, perched while she wrapped her arms about the driver’s body for protection. This Edgar did, but at the start the wheels spun in the Tropique gravel, and he almost fell off. Therefore he grabbed Case more tightly, and in this way they roared onto the highway.

  They had gone only a few hundred yards when Leeteg cried, “We’ll turn off and see Ten Francs!” referring to a retired admiral whose name—du Saint Front—when pronounced rapidly sounded like Two Five Francs. He was Leeteg’s only firm friend in the French colony, and on most visits to Papeete, Edgar sought him out for counsel.

  What happened next is unknown. Some claim that Leeteg, dead drunk, started throwing his hefty body around. Others say he grabbed Case so tightly the motorcycle veered. Case says he thinks Edgar grabbed at the handle-bar grip to turn up toward Admiral du Saint Front’s, accidentally turning the throttle. No one knows.

  We do know that the motorcycle, partly out of control, went into an S-curve leading to a bridge by the school, that it struck a concrete abutment, and that Leeteg was thrown head-first into a low cement wall. The back of his head was split open, and he was instantly killed. At the hospital the attendants, when they saw him bloody and still, said, “He’s been on another drunk,” but when they saw the back of his head completely smashed in, they laid him out in a big zinc tray and covered him with a sheet.

  The automobiles had carried the rest of the party on to the Lido, and there the news was sent that Leeteg was dead. The Philante crowd hurried back to the morgue and saw the stiffening little body. Then the party broke up to look after two dissimilar jobs. Lew Hirshon, who had never approved of Edgar Leeteg, said he would take care of the funeral and offered his family crypt for the burial.

  While Lew Hirshon attended to the funeral, the Philante crew hurried to the yacht, got up a full head of steam, and sped across the bay to inform Edgar’s mother, on Mooréa, of what had happened. But when the yacht tied up at Villa Velour, the crew discovered that Edgar’s elderly mother was too ill to make the rough journey to Papeete. “When we suggested that she return to Papeete with us,” Reggie Chambers reports, “she said weakly, ‘I can’t leave Mooréa!’ So we held the funeral without her.”

  The services took place in a church, where the pastor delivered such a lukewarm eulogy that Hirshon, always impetuous, swore during most of the service and was heard muttering, “This is a hell of a way to bury a man.” At the end of the prayer he said in a loud, sharp voice, “What a hell of a way to dismiss an old friend!”

  The procession was led by a black hearse with cut-glass windows, drawn by black-draped horses. Out toward Les Tropiques the cortege went, and up the hill to the cemetery to where a pergola formed a dismal arch, under which the lead horse balked so that it had to be led by hand. Hirshon growled, “By God, everything’s going wrong at this funeral.” But the worst was now at hand.

  At Hirshon’s vault a perfunctory prayer was mumbled and the casket was slipped off the hearse and into the crypt. It had gone only six inches when it jammed. Extra hands were called for and it was started again. Once more it jammed and Hirshon cried, “For God’s sake, can’t you see it’s too wide?”

  It was, and a hurried consultation took place, after which a messenger ran down the hill to borrow a chisel. While flies droned in the tropic heat, the mourners fidgeted and tried to find shade under coconut palms. In a few minutes the runner, sweating furiously, produced a hammer and chisel, and for the next interval the cemetery echoed with the dull hacking sound of the workmen chipping away all the plaster-of-Paris decorations on the right side of the casket.

  The workers were not skilled and Hirshon groaned, “I wish they would hit that chisel squarely just once.” Then the job was done and with a strong shove Edgar Leeteg was laid to rest, at which Hirshon mumbled prayerfully, “Thank God! I hope when they bury me they do a better job.”

  Within a year he had his wish and now lies sleeping in the crypt beside a man he had never especially liked. There they are, two fiery Americans, each of whom had come to Tahiti in the 1930’s and each of whom had stayed for the remainder of his life.

  No epitaph was placed over Leeteg’s grave, but he had given himself one in his letters to Barney Davis: “That fornicating, gin-soaked dopehead, The Moron of Mooréa.”

  We have not yet mentioned the major controversy that raged over Leeteg, for it was a technical problem and deserves to be discussed at length. Critics, and French and American government officials, claimed that Leeteg’s velvets were not art, contending that he painted them by means of projecting photographs onto the velvet and filling in the backgrounds with an airbrush, leaving a few highlights to be added by hand. In defense of his right to enter his work into the United States duty free as fine art, instead of under heavy charges as mass-produced artisan’s work, Leeteg finally enlisted the help of a museum official, whose report became the justification of Leeteg’s plea to customs officers that his work was art.

  Willis Shook, of the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, reported to the government: “I sat beside him and watched him begin, develop, and complete several paintings. I am quite willing to state under oath that he draws the figures from life, freehand, paints them in exactly as does any artist producing work that is called ‘fine art.’ He uses no mechanical aids whatever in the production of his paintings, neither airbrush, stencil, reflector, projector, nor any other means other than his eye and hand. I have seen no such magnificent effect in any other artist’s work.”

  The story that he stumbled upon the medium through the help of a Chinese salesgirl who substituted black velvet for monk’s cloth is also incorrect. In conversations with Bill Erwin, the Honolulu artist, he repeatedly stated, “When I was still living in St. Louis I went to a museum and saw some very old velvets. Italian maybe? The artist had used heavy paint on thick velour. It had caked, of course, and up close the pictures looked like hell. But from a distance everything fell into place and the contrast between the places where the paint was thin and the caked areas gave a wonderful feel of life. Right there I had the idea that you could get even better effects if you didn’t pile the paint on all at once but applied it in very thin layers. I experimented with this and found that it worked O.K.”

  In one letter Leeteg stated that he had started painting velvets in 1933, but in another he said 1935. We know, however, that by the earlier year he had already sold a few paintings in this medium.

  It is not difficult to paint on velvet, for thousands of Victorian young ladies used to decorate lush purple and blue chunks of the stuff for chair backs. Flowers and deer on crags silhouetted against a dark sky were popular. And as Leeteg had already discovered, Renaissance artists often dabbled in the art.

  What is difficult is to paint well on this fabric, and the reason most serious artists abandon the effort is twofold. First, paint cakes so that the liveliness of the cloth is killed by globs of oil which harden and thus imprison the individual threads of the piling. This means that velvet is a self-defeating medium; its living quality and its ability to reflect light from many different angles are destroyed by pigments. Second, the black dye used in making velvet is so harsh that it materially modifies the chemistry of other pigments. Bright red becomes a dull rust, clean blue a dark and muddy purple, and white a dirty gray. Even when the dye chemical does not organically affect the paint, its power is so great that in order to mask it, one must use so much pigment that it cakes. It is
understandable why artists prefer canvas, which instead of fighting oil and pigment seems to augment them.

  What are the compensating virtues of velvet? First, shadows do not have to be painted; they merely have to be left in the design, whereupon the black dye of the velvet shows through. Since ordinary media require the artist to paint both the highlights and the shadows, velvet cuts the work in half. Second, if each strand of the pile can be kept free and not caked to its neighbor, the result is a painting which seems to have an added dimension. Any shift of light, any breath of wind gives the work a vitality that a flat piece of canvas cannot attain. And finally, black velvet gives the effect of lushness and opulence. The authors do not know why this is so; possibly it stems from our Renaissance culture, when nobles were accustomed to dress in velvet; possibly it is a carryover from the Victorian era, when people who lived in big houses used velour for their draperies. Regardless of the reason, many people consider velvet paintings ideal for a night club, where a sense of opulence is required.

  Leeteg solved the technical problems of painting on velvet—actually, he used velveteen most of the time, originally from France, later from New York—and ultimately turned out paintings that were technically flawless. Each strand of pile stood free with its own specks of color. The dye of the velvet had been neutralized so that it no longer chemically affected the pigments. And the entire painting was kept in balance. Many artists contend that anyone who wanted to could have mastered the problem of oil paints on velvet if he had applied himself. Leeteg did it.