A Guest of the Reich

by Peter Finn

Morris—the brother not chosen—was the best man. The reception for several hundred was held at the family’s Seventy-Second Street mansion, where Emil Coleman and His Orchestra played in the ballroom filled with pink roses. The newlyweds spent the night at the Waldorf.

  Hot-cheeked with delight at her catch—the tall, square-jawed, gap-toothed, tanned, and handsome Sidney—Gertie said, “I must confess that I was rather proud of myself.”

  The honeymoon, inevitably unorthodox, was a camping trip to British Columbia’s Cassiar Mountains, where the couple waded through snowdrifts and had to sit out a blizzard for several days. “It was glorious,” Gertie said.

  5

  Hanoi

  Gertie and Sidney were still in Canada when the United States experienced the Wall Street crash of October 29, 1929, the harbinger of the most devastating economic crisis in the nation’s history. But the financial shock and the hardships of the Great Depression largely passed the couple by. “Father had very little money in stocks,” Gertie explained. “The misery of much of the world was unknown to us.”

  On their return to the United States from their honeymoon, the couple decided to forge a new life, away from both New York and New Orleans, where Sidney’s family lived. They took a leisurely drive through Virginia and the Carolinas looking at property. Friends near Charleston asked them to a picnic at a plantation called Medway that was up for sale. The old estate had a large but simple brick house, built at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The dilapidated structure stood in the shadow of great oaks covered with dripping moss and was surrounded by an area rich in forest, swamps, wetlands, ponds, and wild game, particularly quail and duck. The front lawn swept down to a black lake. There were miles of riding trails through longleaf and loblolly pine woods. The place was derelict, even eerie, but Gertie was attracted by “a sense of remoteness and serenity…the slight decay of everything and the deception of timelessness.”

  Gertie’s father had at first insisted the couple reside in Manhattan or Palm Beach. Gertie couldn’t abide the idea of living in a city, and Florida, with “the thrashing of those damn palm trees,” seemed equally disagreeable. Her father relented and provided $100,000 for the purchase of the house and 2,500 acres in South Carolina’s Low Country. By 1934, they had acquired a total of 7,110 acres around their new home, about twenty-five miles outside Charleston.

  The Legendres tried, with mixed success, to turn Medway into a working plantation, experimenting with rice, wheat, corn, hogs, cattle, and chickens before settling on marketable pine trees. Gertie remembered Sidney falling asleep in the evening as he read Farming for Profit or How to Farm Timber. To bolster their skills, they attended some courses at the Cornell Agricultural School, where Gertie studied nutrition and car mechanics. “We learned enough theoretical knowledge to run any farm successfully,” Sidney noted in his plantation diary. “Unfortunately farms are not run on theoretical knowledge but on experience and hard work. Neither of these two virtues are inherent in me, neither do either of us know them except by hearsay.”

  Sidney, at times, considered selling and moving north. “Virginia has so much to offer compared to South Carolina,” he decided. “There was no fever. It was a year round place, [one] to which we could return at any time…There were no mosquitos, ticks and we hoped not as many plantation worries as besieged us at Medway. We could have a smaller place, [one] that would be relatively inexpensive, and one that would not give us that frustrated and desperate feeling that we have so often here.” But he also admitted that one of those “startlingly beautiful” days that Medway produced could dispel their doubts, pulling them back into the plantation’s embrace until the next crisis soured them again.

  Medway was staffed by black field hands and servants, some of whom lived in cabins on the grounds. Gertie built a two-room schoolhouse for black children in the neighboring community of Strawberry, after consulting her old principal at the Foxcroft School. The Promised Land School was named after a church of the same name that had burned down. “I have found in my long life that nothing makes one love a place more than being a constructive part of it, and if you can give those colored people ‘a leg up’ and get them trained for some future job, you are doing something real for your South Carolina and something that will make Medway a real part of your life,” Charlotte Noland, the founder of Foxcroft, wrote to Gertie in 1941.

  Medway was a world of master and servant. Gertie treated her staff well, feeling genuine affection for them, but also maintained an aristocratic distance from all but her society friends. The plantation, despite the best efforts to make some money off the land, became the center of Gertie’s life as a hostess. “She loved to entertain,” her grandson recalled.

  Guests arrived for a week of hunting, and the plantation staff addressed every need for the large parties—preparing the guns, marshaling the horses and dogs, serving lunch in the field, then cocktails and dinner. Medway was staffed around the clock. One guest remarked on the “breakfast trays every morning for the ladies, high tea [and] finger bowls at supper.”

  Sidney described one meal after a morning of dove shooting in December 1940: “Luncheon was laid under the pines and tables covered with yellow cloths and set with crude pottery plates…Everyone was seated and then sherry was passed…Gertrude had ordered a marvelous meal. Hot bean soup, chicken mushroom and rice all mixed together. Sweet potato pie with marshmallows on top, and succotash…a heaping plate full of corn bread sticks…and beet…And then to end, we had apple pie and cheese, finished with coffee.” Sometimes a nap followed on Gertie’s zebra skins in the grass.

  * * *

  —

  Gertie and Sidney continued to go on expeditions—Gertie said she had an almost physical need for them—beginning with French Indochina in 1932 for both the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and the American Museum of Natural History. They left San Francisco on July 30, 1931, stopped for two weeks in Hawaii, where Gertie took a “terrific beating” learning how to surf, before continuing on to Japan. After visiting Tokyo—“an ugly brawling city”—they took a boat to Shanghai, followed by a fifty-four-hour train ride to Peking. “The city breathed antiquity, charm, intrigue,” Gertie wrote in her diary, also noting that it was “filthy. I have seldom seen filthier.”

  As they waited for their hunting licenses to be processed, they played polo and tennis, went to the races, partied at foreign legations, and spent weekends in Peking’s western hills. Merchants flocked to Gertie’s room at the Imperial Hotel. “I recline in bed like an oriental princess, with a breakfast tray, and yards of brocade hang over the bedroom door. The bed is strewn with jade and figurines, and earrings and the walls are covered with scrolls, paintings, Ming, Sung.”

  The expedition, again including T. D. Carter from the American Museum of Natural History, was planned to find mouflons—wild sheep—and other specimens. After arriving in Vietnam, they stocked up in Hanoi for a six-month trek: “saddles, zinc-lined chop boxes, tents, folding chairs, cots, mosquito nets, medical supplies and pounds and pounds of tinned food.” Evenings before their departure from the city were spent on the terrace of the Café Metropole, sipping gimlets out of champagne glasses as they watched the rickshaws pass by.

  The party traveled across the northern part of what is now Vietnam and passed into Laos before continuing along the Mekong valley, sometimes by canoe, to Cambodia, then returning to Vietnam. It was a tough trip, with backbreaking hikes in sometimes scalding heat through thick jungle and across mountainous terrain. They frequently stopped at the French army posts that dotted the countryside, attending formal dinners with the local commanders. Otherwise, they ate what they killed—goat, partridge, pheasant, deer, and monkey, which Gertie “did not like the idea of” and “did not enjoy.”

  Gertie reveled in the adventure, fascinated by the forbidding physicality of the jungle and spellbound by the ancient civilizations of the region. Approaching the ci
ty of Angkor “in full moonlight for the first time is almost indescribable,” she wrote in her diary, “the thick dark walls, the high narrow doorways, the flight of stone steps; the bats coming out of the tower, the pillars etched against the velvet sky—impression of grandeur, beauty, symmetry of ancient splendor.”

  It was an enthusiasm and wonder she brought to every expedition, whatever the hardship. After sleeping under a rocky outcrop in Iran in 1937, with a freezing wind blowing off the Alborz Mountains, she made her way back to base camp, where a warm bath and a hot supper—antelope roasted in a gasoline tin, blackberries, and the local yogurt—“seemed equal only to the Ritz.”

  Sidney, on the other hand, never seemed quite as enamored with the rough life and surprises of their foreign trips. “It was very fortunate that [Gertie] did feel strongly, because I never did,” he said. “I never expected camp food to be marvelous, nor did I think that sunrises or full moons were extraordinary. I am not what you would call a vital person.”

  Beginning with the Indochina trip, Sidney wrote a series of books about the expeditions. He was a lively travel writer who could re-create in confident prose the landscapes through which he passed, but his work was also infused with smugly racist assertions. He characterized the Annamites, as he called the Vietnamese, “the most despicable race of people I have ever had the misfortune to deal with. Cringing, lying, thieving, sneering and cruelly treating those weaker than themselves are their main characteristics.” He called the offspring of French colonists and local women “half-castes.” As they “become more and more numerous,” he wrote, “the government becomes weaker and weaker. This is because the strength of a Colonial Government is based on the natives’ recognition of the superiority of the white race.”

  * * *

  —

  By late February, the hunting party had reached Saigon—a chance to catch up on news from home and relax “in the wickedest city in the world.” Gertie was determined to visit an opium den. Accompanied by Carter, she and Sidney went to a restaurant in the Chinese section of Saigon, and after dinner a long reedlike pipe attached to a bowl was delivered to the table. A server heated the brown liquid opium until it hardened into a small ball, then it was placed in the pipe. Gertie, lying on a couch, inhaled deeply four or five times before the opium burned out. “Two pipes had no effect on me whatsoever,” she complained. “I had no dreams or feeling of elation.” Carter said he felt intoxicated, and Sidney, who had smoked before, complained about “the bitter foul flavor of an old uncleared pipe.” He described the sensation of smoking opium as being at complete ease, “so that you look down as from a great height on the trials and tribulations of the world and wonder why they should have troubled you.” But on this evening that kind of high proved elusive.

  Before they left Vietnam, there was one last excursion: a tiger hunt in Di Linh, about 150 miles northeast of Saigon.

  The group set up camp by a small lake where Gertie saw fresh tiger prints on the beach when she went to take a bath. Carter and some of the local hires began to build blinds—wooden boxes covered in long grass and tied with rattan vine. A hunter could sit but not stand in these small enclosures—called bomas—which had peepholes to shoot out of. Four of these hunting boxes were placed along jungle trails, near where the tigers tended to hunt. Large bait—recently killed buffalo or sambar deer—was tied to a stake just thirty feet from each boma.

  Returning to inspect the bait, they found one of the buffalo had been eaten, its hind quarters ripped off, and the tears were so fresh they feared they had interrupted the tiger during its meal. The local guides beat on the bamboo and talked loudly to keep the animal at bay while Gertie slipped into the boma. Then the rest of the party withdrew, leaving her alone with her rifle, a shotgun, a camera, and a wooden case to sit on. She had brought some chocolate but threw it out because the blind was soon crawling with ants.

  “I sat and waited,” Gertie recalled. “It was hot. The odors of the decaying carcass blew in my face at frequent intervals.”

  Ten hours passed and dusk came. Gertie could just make out the dead buffalo in the fading light. And then she heard “a bound and the tearing of flesh.” She could barely see the tiger but distinctly heard the “rip and tear,” the crunching of bones, and a licking sound as he savored the blood. “Suddenly, I saw his two red eyes, far apart, staring at me.” Spooked by the noise of people returning to get Gertie before it got too dark, the tiger turned and ran.

  Gertie was up at 2:00 the following morning, gulping down breakfast and preparing for another day in the blind. Sidney tried to persuade her to stay. “If you take my advice you’ll come back to bed and get some sleep,” he said. “Then we can buy a nice skin in Saigon and no one will know the difference.”

  “Don’t you ever do anything for the sport of it?” Gertie replied.

  They arrived at the blind with the usual noisy fanfare to keep the animal at a distance while Gertie entered the box and the guides retreated. And then suddenly the tiger was there, racing out of the semidarkness, standing broadside to Gertie as he tore at the buffalo’s entrails. Gertie pushed her gun through the peephole. The animal turned, looked at Gertie, and spat loudly before vanishing into the undergrowth.

  But he wasn’t gone. He was behind the blind, prowling and continuing to spit, just thirty or forty feet from her position. “I could hear him just outside the door through the slits of my grass hut,” Gertie said. “I could see his shadow pass by me…I sat transfixed.” Tigers have been known to charge blinds when disturbed or wounded, and “there is nothing but a shield of straw between you and the most powerful beast in the jungle.”

  Gertie’s gun was pointing in the wrong direction. Her heart was pounding. Her mouth was dry. And she wondered if the cat would smash through the flimsy cover to reach her. And then he was gone again. “I was saved, but I also felt I had lost my chance to shoot him for if a tiger is frightened he rarely returns,” Gertie wrote ruefully.

  But she couldn’t leave the blind until the guides returned. She passed the time killing ants or being bitten by them. “Flies buzzed around the half-eaten carcass in a black cloud. Vultures circled overhead; the heat was intense.” At about 4:00 p.m., a monitor lizard climbed on the buffalo and tore at the flesh, its pointed face quickly smeared with blood. The minutes continued to tick by slowly, the ants continued to bother Gertie, and, very quietly, she tried to shift her position so she wasn’t overcome by stiffness and cramp. “It is often said that hunting from a boma over a kill is poor sport,” Gertie said. “Maybe it is, but it is not all as soft as a bed for roses…One must have colossal patience.” And nerve.

  The light was fading when Gertie heard the rush of the tiger returning—a swift, almost stealthy arrival. She pushed her gun through the hole. The tiger had its two front paws on the kill, its head facing the blind. Gertie fired and the tiger fell. Still alive, he lifted his head. Gertie fired again. She threw down the shotgun and grabbed her Mauser rifle, pushing the blind aside as she moved. She raced to the animal. Its feet and tail were still moving. “I gave him a bullet in the head for good measure and he became motionless.”

  Summoned by the gunshots, Sidney and the guides hurried to the boma. “I broke into a run cursing myself that I had ever let her sit alone,” Sidney said. “And then we arrived and I cursed myself for running. There she sat smoking a cigarette on top of an enormous tiger. I should have known it, everything always ended this way.”

  The tiger was carried back to camp, its feet suspended from two long poles. The animal weighed six hundred pounds and was eight feet, eleven and a half inches from his nose to the tip of his tail.

  The expedition was over. After nine months away, it was time to return home.

  * * *

  —

  The dismal condition of the United States, mired in depression, and a world steadily marching toward war rarely intruded into Gertie’s concerns—at least
as they were reflected in her diaries. While in Indochina, she noted that “business is evidently as blue as ever in America—unemployment no better…and the news of the world is certainly gloomy and depressing.”

  There is a detachment to her sporadic political observations. When Hitler threatened Czechoslovakia, Gertie, hunting in Iran at the time, couldn’t “imagine war being declared over something so hopelessly small and pathetic as Czecho.”

  “I do hope the U.S. is able to keep out of it somehow. (I doubt it though),” she said, noting that Hitler would probably have to be stopped before his power got too great.

  Gertie, unlike most Americans, had seen Nazi Germany firsthand. In early August 1936—just as the Summer Olympics began in Berlin under the führer’s gaze—she and Sidney landed in Bremerhaven after an Atlantic crossing that was as calm as “a mill pond.” Their ultimate destination was Hungary, where they planned to shoot partridge. “With German efficiency, we went from the gangplank into our Plymouth convertible.” They passed through customs without opening a bag, and drove south to Düsseldorf. Over the next two days, they continued on through Frankfurt, Wiesbaden, Heidelberg, and Nuremberg—shopping, eating, and sightseeing—before crossing into Austria.

  The most remarkable aspect of Gertie’s journal of traveling through Germany is the lack of any reference to the Nazis. Granted, the regime hid some of the visible signs of its extremism during the Olympic Games. The fascists were on their best behavior with the influx of foreigners: signs banning Jews from public places were temporarily taken down, and party thugs were ordered not to harass Jews in public.

  Gertie’s diaries and letters contain occasional flashes of her own anti-Semitism. In one instance, after getting a ride from Washington to Middleburg, Virginia, from Larry Lowman, a vice president of CBS before the war and chief of communications at the OSS, and his wife, Eleanor Barry Lowman, a former Harper’s Bazaar editor, Gertie wrote to her husband, “Larry is sweet. Very nice, very amusing and I like him. He is smart as a whip and has an important job in our outfit. Barry is alright though certainly nothing special to be admired…He is not cheap. She is. You know how I hate jews so that is quite a statement from me calling a jew alright.” Lowman and Gertie became friendly in Washington, but time with the OSS’s eclectic mix of characters didn’t change her private attitudes. Discussing where they might live after the war, Gertie told Sidney that “I feel the future and the new horizons are going to be out [west]…I think the east coast is too crowded, too full of jews and too confined.”