by Bill Lascher
Melville Jacoby types by candlelight after the Chungking (Chongqing) Press Hostel was destroyed in an air raid. Carl Mydans/LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images.
July 7, 1941, marked the fourth anniversary of the war in China. The day before, while the reporters were still in Chengtu, the capital of Szechuan Province, Mel received a cable asking him to do an NBC broadcast to mark the occasion. It would pay $250. No planes were flying that day, however, and he had no other way to reach XGOY’s Chungking studios in time for the broadcast. Instead, Mel spent two days running around Chengtu getting equipment and arranging interviews with officials. He then stayed up all night writing a fifteen-minute script.
To make sure broadcasts would reach the United States at prime-time hours and without interference from Japanese attackers, Mel had to get to the studio by 6:00 A.M. But the studio staff overslept, and the one person who showed up was incompetent. The broadcast failed, and Mel lost the $250.
“The whole thing has me annoyed considerably in as much as it would have been excellent publicity for China, and I did go to a lot of work when I could have been doing other things,” Mel told his family.
On top of the censorship problems he and the other Press Hostel occupants had detailed in their letter of complaint earlier that summer, these logistical issues soured Mel on China. He began to realize it was no place to be a reporter.
“It is just too disheartening,” he said.
Even worse news awaited Mel in Chungking. A day before the anniversary, a Japanese bomb struck the Press Hostel. It was a direct hit, and little was left of the building. Still in Chengtu during the attack, Mel lost all of the possessions he had in China, save one shirt and the clothes he wore on his trip.
The entire Press Hostel was flattened. It was left “nothing but twisted sticks and scattered stones.”
Once Mel was back, he sat in the open air where his office had been. By the glow of candles pressed into empty wine bottles and teapots, he typed at a low-profile Hermes Baby typewriter, a tobacco pipe pressed in the corner of his mouth as he stared at the page in front of him. The collar of his wrinkled beige shirt exposed chest hair the same shade as the stubble on his face. It was still 102 degrees at night. Firelight glinted off the beads of sweat that rolled down his face, but he had to continue working. There were still dozens of pages of notes from the Lanchow trip to type up, not to mention three weeks’ worth of other work that had piled up while he was away.
As the summer progressed and the Japanese switched up their patterns for bombings, entire days were often spent wasted in shelters as alarm after alarm rang out. This made it particularly hard to get work done, especially because there was little time after ducking into dugouts to meet with government officials. Mel thus spent much of his time pooling his reports with the New York Times’s Till Durdin—with whom he also often ate at the home of Bertram Rappe, a Methodist missionary—because they could gather more news combined than they could individually.
“Collecting news is a big job now,” he wrote to his family in early August. “I’m working of course against a dozen first rate men here.”
However, Mel had Carl and Shelley on his side. They had been out when he wrote this letter. They returned just as he finished it, and Mel closed with a word of praise for his new friends and colleagues.
“I told you Carl and Shelley were good people—well, they just came back from a Russian Embassy dinner with their pockets full of chocolates for me,” Mel wrote, repeating his frequent lamentation that Chungking’s deprivations made chocolate a scarce commodity. “They knew I was crazy for some—sure good too.”
Unfortunately for Mel, it wasn’t clear how much longer he and Carl would actually be working together, and unfortunately for the Mydanses, the sweets were about all they could secure from the Russians. Mel still was only provisionally employed by Time, and Carl and Shelley wanted to return to Russia, where Carl had shot the Soviet Union’s 1940 war with Finland. But that night Shelley found out she wasn’t likely to get a visa.
“Poor Shelley is disappointed as hell . . . I hope her visa goes through,” Mel wrote.
Later that month, Mel told Teddy that the articles Time printed of his were looking more accurate than they had in some time. Clearly, this was Teddy’s doing. But Mel continued to worry that the publication was making unrealistic demands regarding the photographs he submitted. For example, many of the shots Mel took of the tragedy at the public air raid shelter resembled ones that Till Durdin and Mac Fisher had taken.
“Of course I will try for exclusive stuff, but even Carl agrees that is hard on spot news breaks here,” Mel wrote. “Damn near impossible. Thanks pal for sticking up for me. But I knew you would.”
Even with the Mydanses in his corner, as September approached Mel worried about his standing with Time.
“As you must know I feel damn insecure and am wondering just what will happen to me in September,” he told Teddy, asking for a frank note about his status. “Sure miss you Teddy. We all do, particularly when there are no speeches in little shambly cafes etc.”
Once September came, Mel did receive a commitment from Time. One evening that month he checked in from the Chungking Club with a letter to Teddy. In its closing, he handed off the thin rice paper sheet to Carl and Shelley Mydans.
The couple—still hoping to receive clearance to travel to the Soviet Union but feeling ever more doubtful—dashed off a paragraph to their Chungking friend, who was now working in the very New York offices where they had met and fallen in love.
“Say hello to everybody for us and don’t dislike New York too much for we shall all be back there with you one day,” they wrote.
As the summer drew to a close, Mel turned his attention back toward Annalee. They had been corresponding as she looked for a job that could bring her to China. Mel started to worry that she wouldn’t arrive in time to be of much use to United China Relief, which was beginning to wind up its fund-raising drive, and that she’d need some freelance work to pad the job. In his letters to Annalee, he’d told her how hard it was to get assignments, and he felt guilty about pressuring her. He knew she’d been hung up back home by her troubles getting a passport.
“However, I’m sure she will make out all right,” he said in a separate letter to his parents. “She should have come at the beginning of the summer. Not so late. But then, she couldn’t help that.”
Chapter 8
“HE TYPES ON THE DESK, AND I TYPE ON THE DRESSING TABLE”
I’m giving up this whole career,” Annalee said.
It was August 1941, and Annalee was having lunch with Sidney Skolsky, the Hollywood columnist who regularly dropped in on Annalee and other writers at MGM for studio dope he could use for his column.
This time she wanted to dish about herself: less than a year after her script for Andy Hardy Meets Debutante helped her break in at MGM, she was planning on leaving the studio and going to China. The revelation shocked Skolsky.
As self-assured as ever, Annalee looked at Skolsky and erased from his mind any suspicion he harbored that he’d misheard her.
“I’m going to China,” she repeated, telling him—as she’d told others—that she couldn’t ignore the mounting stories of starvation, suffering, and illness while she kept writing meaningless Hollywood movies.
“I’m very interested in their fight,” she continued. “I may have a story for you. If I do I’ll let you know.”
After Debutante, Annalee earned writing credits on Honky Tonk and Ziegfeld Girl, and that afternoon she was in the middle of her adaptation of a story for her fourth film, Tish. (She was also shepherding the screenplay she and Mel wrote together.) Skolsky was surprised to hear that Annalee would suddenly set aside MGM after she’d worked so hard to get a studio writing job, but in a later reflection, Skolsky realized that Annalee hadn’t actually given up on telling stories.
“The story of Annalee [Whitmore] is still being written and she is helping to write it,” Skolsky wrote. “
She knew what she was saying when she told me ‘I may have a story for you.’”
After Mel left San Francisco that April, he and Annalee continued to correspond. First they talked on the phone during his stopover in Hawaii. When he reached China, he wrote her about his Clipper journey, then about how Chungking had changed in the months since he’d been away. As the summer progressed, he described the work he picked up at Time. His letters entranced Annalee. She paid rapt attention to each tale he sent from China and read everything of his that was published. China was on fire, and Annalee wasn’t going to be satisfied sitting thousands of miles away, writing movies about teenage boys’ romantic follies.
What Annalee and Mel did not discuss as publicly was their own romance. Each of them was attracted to the other, sure, and they’d talked about the idea of having a relationship more serious than the few dates they’d gone on while Mel was in California. He had even half-jokingly invited her along when he left from San Francisco that April. Still, neither of them was comfortable with a commitment so soon after meeting.
“I admit we’d talked about it, but we both felt we had known each other too short a time to even begin deciding,” Annalee wrote to Mel’s parents.
Still, with that summer’s air raids worse than ever and Chungking’s infrastructure falling apart, Mel goaded Annalee about how it was too dangerous for her to come to Chungking.
“Chungking was no place for a woman,” he wrote her, knowing the comment would raise her ire. Then he scrawled a note at the bottom of the letter: “P.S. Hurry up.”
But the State Department continued to frustrate Annalee’s plans. In late May, her passport application was denied again, and her doubts that the trip would ever happen were renewed. She was, on the other hand, optimistic that the script she and Mel had written together in California would succeed. (Mel seemed to think that too was wishful thinking, but by the start of 1942 MGM would green-light the story.)
But then, in August 1941, leaning on Mel’s link to Luce and her own Hollywood connections, it looked like Annalee had a job secured: United China Relief wanted her to manage its press relations in Chungking. At Mel’s suggestion, Elza Meyberg invited Annalee to her house for dinner with Doc Stuart—the Ventura dentist who received all of Mel’s radio transmissions—Earl Leaf, and H. J. Timperley. By the time dinner was over, they’d sorted out the particulars of Annalee’s job at United China Relief. She just needed to wrap things up at MGM, which agreed to give her a one-year sabbatical.
On August 12, Annalee’s sabbatical began, and she set off on the MS Granville, a Norwegian-captained, Chinese-crewed freighter bound for Asia. Sailing from Los Angeles to Manila and then Hong Kong, she would spend much of the trip reading Richfield Reporter news summaries while relaxing on the ship’s deck so that when she arrived she would be as up to date as she could be about the war. She also assessed her fellow travelers, whom she described in detail to her screenwriting partner Tom Seller.
“Passengers are about evenly divided between missionaries and infidels,” Annalee determined. “I drew a missionary for a cabinmate, but she’s been fine.”
Indeed, the presence of the missionaries served Annalee well. One of the “most rampant” among them struck a deal with her: if she quit smoking, the missionary would teach her Chinese.
“It practically killed me for two days, but now I can say 58 sentences suitable for any occasion through my nose very professionally, and the Chinese crew actually understands,” Annalee bragged.
“It takes brains to learn shorthand in an hour and Chinese in a month,” Shelley Mydans later recalled of her friend. “But it takes more than brains to utilize these hastily acquired talents. It takes charm. And Annalee has a lot of that, too.”
By the end of the long trip, Annalee felt like the journey’s star.
“Maybe people are right about what the Orient does to you,” Annalee pondered. “There are so many nice men and so few women that between mirrors you feel like Hedy Lamarr. Haven’t powdered my nose since I got on the ship and I feel devastating, so you can tell the situation’s extreme.”
Aware Annalee was finally on her way to him, Mel wired friends of his in Manila and Hong Kong asking them to welcome Annalee when the Granville arrived in each city. Annalee’s stopover in Manila was four days long, so she had plenty of time to dance and eat lobster at the four-story, Art Deco Jai Alai stadium that she found “more fantastic than any MGM production,” as well as to accompany the Chinese consul to a reception for a Filipino university president. Annalee remarked that despite five miles of mined harbor in Manila, the Philippines didn’t seem nervous about the war.
“Last month’s jitters, after Japan moved into Indo-China, have all left, evidently,” she wrote.
Annalee reached Hong Kong on September 18. After a few days running errands for Mel and getting to know some contacts there, it was finally time for her to continue to Chungking. One couldn’t easily fly there, because Chungking was located deep in China’s interior, and Japan controlled China’s coastal cities and the airspace above them. So one had to slip past patrolling Japanese planes.
This meant flying out of Hong Kong early in the morning or late at night under cover of darkness. CNAC dispatched Royal Leonard—the same pilot who had flown the American air officers’ junket in June—to fly Annalee to the capital. Leonard, who had become a good friend of Mel’s over the summer, invited Annalee to sit up front in the CNAC plane’s copilot seat. Eager to show off to his young, attractive passenger, Leonard made an unscheduled landing on a rice paddy in Kweilin (Guilin) so Annalee could see the famous landscape there of steep, eroded limestone formations known as karst. The plane ended up stuck in the mud. Leonard and Annalee had to get locals to pull it out with water buffalo, and their trip was delayed several hours.
On the morning of September 23, Mel and his professor friend from the Press Hostel, Maurice “Uncle Mo” Votaw, got up early to meet Annalee at the Shanhuba airfield. When she didn’t show up, Mel was worried. He’d had no word of the delays. Anything could have happened. The plane could have crashed, or it might even have been shot down. But finally, a few hours later, Leonard’s DC-3 appeared and touched down on the gravel runway.
Once Annalee finally arrived, she, Mel, and Uncle Mo crossed back to central Chungking on a sampan. At the north bank of the Yangtze, they discovered that Mac Fisher and the Mydanses had all come down from the Press Hostel to greet Annalee.
Carl shot dozens of photos as the cheerful group stepped across the cobbles on the banks of the Yangtze toward Chungking’s cliffside stairs. All five reporters grinned unconsciously. Mel draped a slightly oversized dark suit jacket and an overcoat across his arm. The dark material contrasted with his friends’ light clothing. Shelley turned toward Mel, chatting, with a coat over her own arm. Mac, in a white shirt and khakis, and Mo, in white pants, a striped shirt rolled to his elbows, and a white jacket across his arm, each gripped cigarettes between their lips, holding them at almost identical angles as they listened to Annalee tell a story. Wearing tennis shoes, socks, and a knee-length beige dress, Annalee looked completely at ease with her new colleagues.
Two cameras were draped around Annalee’s neck, and she clutched a purse under her left arm. Apparently her promise to her missionary cabinmate hadn’t lasted: in her right hand she held a cigarette of her own. (She had more to give out; fresh Western cigarettes were precious commodities.) It was simultaneously clear that war wasn’t far off—Mel’s uncharacteristically loose-fitting suit gave away how little he was eating—and that these five friends felt instantly at home with one another.
Conditions in Chungking were unraveling. That summer’s air raids had been more punishing and indiscriminate than ever before. They had finally seemed to taper off at the end of August, but the day before Annalee was scheduled to arrive, Chungking heard its first air raid alert in a month. It turned out to be a false alarm, but it was enough to make people jittery again. Meanwhile, the Kuomintang’s censorship was incre
asing while access to government ministers, military officers, and other sources was disappearing. Inflation also ran rampant, and the cost of food was skyrocketing.
“Nobody eats those good crisp ducks now,” Mel told Teddy White in a September letter.
Much to Mel’s delight, though, Annalee had brought what seemed like an entire pharmacy along. CNAC typically restricted passengers to only twenty pounds of luggage, but Mel had arranged for her to bring excess baggage on his behalf so that she could pick up some things he needed in Hong Kong, especially after he lost all but two of his shirts in the Press Hostel bombing. Elza had also sent her off with gifts for Mel, so Annalee ended up packing very little for herself. Among the items Annalee brought were chewing gum, vitamins and calcium supplements, Band-Aids, and a nice pen. There was $25—precious U.S. dollars—that Elza sent as a belated birthday present. And Mel was grateful that Annalee had also picked up clean shirts, new socks and underwear, and even a suit for him in Hong Kong.
“Gee, it was just like Xmas and I got your nice letter and card, Mom,” Mel wrote. Annalee filled the rest of her duffel bag with one dress, paper and sheets for carbon copies, and anything else she thought she’d need for a year.
The Press Hostel reconstruction wasn’t quite done, so Mel brought Annalee to Chialing House, a residence financed by H. H. Kung. Named for the river whose confluence with the Yangtze shaped Chungking’s distinct geography, the three-story hotel—Chungking’s “best”—stood on a cliff on the north side of the peninsula.
“Best” was a relative term: Chialing House was also more or less Chungking’s only hotel. Its roof was full of holes from air raids. One of the few refrigerators that existed in Chungking at the time was in the Chialing’s kitchen, but it had stopped working that June, just in time for the city’s blistering summer. The hotel lacked running water except, one newspaper account joked, when it rained. Nevertheless, Mel spent the first few nights at the Chialing with Annalee. Then he brought her back to where he had been staying at Bertram Rappe’s mission compound while they waited for the Press Hostel to be reconstructed.