Eve of a Hundred Midnights

by Bill Lascher

  In his letters to Annalee, Mel may have masked some of Chungking’s wartime circumstances to make the place sound irresistibly adventurous, but Annalee immediately discovered that she’d landed in a decrepit city, albeit one that in 1941 maintained a romantic atmosphere of wartime resilience. She said as much four decades later, recalling a time before rampant corruption had fully infected Kuomintang ranks:

  The Nationalists were living in mud and bamboo shacks. They were the most heroic, intelligent people. They were making do with nothing. Living conditions were terrible, the city was filled with rats, the food was dreadful, bomb craters everywhere. Everything was slimy, cold, wet, and mildewed. In the summer, the humidity was high and bugs flourished. There were spiders four inches across on the walls of your room. The press hostel had just been bombed. When they rebuilt it, it was just one story, built of bamboo and mud with whitewash on the outside and oiled paper for windows, a wooden floor. All the water had to be carried up from the Yangtze River in wooden buckets and we had one little tin basin of water a day to bathe in, that’s all. The rats chewed our boots and through the telephone wires at night. They ate our soap. But though it was most uncomfortable physically, it was absolutely inspiring mentally. It was a great year!

  The day after Annalee arrived, Mel brought her back down to the Yangtze, where they crossed to the south bank so Mel could take her to lunch at the Chungking Club. He even wangled cars to get her around town that day. She had it easy that first day, as he was honest enough to report in a letter that day to his parents. “So far she has only seen the good side of life here.” But Annalee’s first day wasn’t easy just because she didn’t have to walk everywhere or because she ate relatively posh food. Also getting her off to a good start was the fact that everyone Annalee met liked her, and not just Westerners.

  “Chinese all seem to like her very much and it looks like she will do fine,” Mel wrote that day. He added that Annalee seemed a lot like Shelley Mydans. Shelley, in turn, was very well liked by Mel’s Chinese friends, who agreed that she and Annalee were similar.

  After getting Annalee situated, Mel got her to work. Earlier, Luce had asked him to work up press releases and other publicity material that the publisher could use to promote United China Relief. Indeed, one of the reasons Annalee was hired was to keep Mel from being overburdened by this work. In any case, she was eager to get started, and her arrival coincided with a big publicity coup for the campaign.

  For three months, far to the west of Chungking, an expedition led by David Crockett Graham had been searching through Szechuan’s forests for a giant panda cub. That summer, thirty men equipped with dogs and nets scoured the forests along the edge of the Tibetan plain for a panda. They ended up finding two.

  The expedition had been orchestrated by United China Relief, which hoped to fly a panda on the Pan-Am Clipper and exhibit it to crowds on stops throughout the Pacific and North America, then finally bring it to the Bronx Zoo as a gift from Madame Chiang and H. H. Kung to the children of the United States.

  Throughout the twentieth century, both China’s Nationalist regime and its later Communist rulers employed a strategy known as “panda diplomacy.” The charismatic black-and-white bears became powerful tools for cultivating China’s image in other countries, and Madame Chiang realized that panda diplomacy could generate sympathy in the United States—and raise much-needed money for United China Relief.

  It had been Mel’s job to ensure that the expedition was formed in the first place. Then he had to manage the expedition’s publicity and make sure the panda was actually delivered. Once the panda was captured, Mel had to arrange Clipper flights and other logistical details, like hiring people to build a special cage for the bear. He even had to make sure that the panda received bamboo shoots native to Wenchuan, as Graham believed that one reason pandas had a high mortality rate in captivity was because of radical changes in their diets. Other risks included elevation changes and infection, and all of them were details to which Mel paid close attention. If the pandas died, he could have easily been made the fall guy. All of this had been a headache for Mel to deal with while he was also trying to report for Time and handle his broadcast duties.

  Immediately after Annalee arrived, Mel passed the panda job on to her. She wrote a script for the radio broadcast announcing the panda’s capture on the second night she was in Chungking so the news could be announced on XGOY first thing the following morning. Annalee’s script had to play up the difficulty of the panda’s care and champion Dr. Graham’s adventures to find the bear. Of course, writing the story came naturally to Annalee, and the news was a triumph for United China Relief.

  “From obscurity to overnight world fame—that’s the fate of the rare, half grown, giant panda just found near Wenchuan after a more than three month search,” Annalee’s script opened.

  But this publicity coup was far from the biggest event of the day, at least not for Mel and Annalee. The day was only going to get more exciting after the 6:30 A.M. broadcast, when the panda story was aired by XGOY.

  Time’s staff—especially Henry Luce—were impressed with Mel and his work, and now Luce wanted Mel to take the helm of Time’s Far East bureau. This opportunity promised a multi-tier pay raise, official status as a Time employee, and relocation to Manila.

  Until that point, cash-strapped Mel had officially been a stringer for the magazine, even though it consistently published his work through the summer. (Life had also used Mel’s work, especially his pictures of the air raid shelter catastrophe in June.) The new position meant a chance for stable employment, but it also meant he would be leaving China once again, sacrificing all the contacts he’d developed in Chungking. He would also have to leave Annalee behind in a war zone.

  But how could he say no? Finally, his career in journalism was taking off. Mel was all too aware of what a bumpy road he had traveled to the gates of Luce’s empire. Now inside, he had advanced quickly. It had hardly been a year since he quit XGOY. His arrest in Haiphong and travels through Indochina and Southeast Asia were still fresh in his memory. Only this past spring, Mel had pounded the pavement all over New York and Washington, D.C., desperately trying to find a job, any job, that would bring him back to Asia. He’d gambled against the United Press’s offer of work in Sacramento precisely because he thought he could find better work where the action was. And through all this he’d found Annalee and fallen in love with her, and she’d fallen in love with him, possibly because of the drive he’d shown.

  Now the new boss was showing so much faith in Mel’s reporting that he wanted him to be Time’s primary eyes and ears in Asia. What’s more, Mel would be the Far East bureau chief just as ongoing saber-rattling between the United States and Japan intensified. No one asked anymore whether war between the two Pacific powers was likely; instead, pundits debated when it would start. When the first shots flew, it would be Mel’s job to witness them on behalf of Luce’s publications, and Manila was likely to be at the center of the action.

  Even though taking this job meant leaving behind both Annalee and the city where Mel had built his career, Mel and Annalee nevertheless decided that he should accept Luce’s offer. Annalee, meanwhile, was in no hurry to leave Chungking so soon after arriving. Time would still need a stringer in Chungking, and Mel considered Annalee for the position, but she was too busy writing copy for XGOY’s Voice of China broadcasts and doing other work for United China Relief. She felt she had a job to do. Even though she didn’t have a contract, she wasn’t about to walk away from her responsibilities. So Mel offered the stringer job to the AP’s Jim Stewart, to whom he also offered his radio work with NBC.

  Annalee had transitioned easily into her job at United China Relief. Hollington Tong loved her and found her work invaluable. He was so impressed with her work that she was swiftly introduced to Madame Chiang.

  Both Madame Chiang and the Generalissimo himself welcomed Annalee warmly. She was certain that China’s powerful couple “did all they could” to
entertain her and make life in Chungking easy for her because of how fond they were of Mel. But in fact, as Mel later heard through the grapevine, it was Annalee herself who had impressed Madame Chiang. It was rare to make the kind of impression on Madame Chiang that Annalee did. Aside from being China’s first lady, Mayling was also a powerful, highly recognizable figure in her own right. Among other endeavors, she claimed much of the responsibility for the New Life Movement—a government-promoted cultural drive that sought to improve public life in China. Among the many “virtues” the New Life Movement prescribed for China was “We Will Not Smoke.” This message appeared on public signs throughout Chungking.

  The first time Annalee visited Madame Chiang’s house for lunch, her hostess sat down, lit a cigarette for herself, and offered another to Annalee. Having seen all over Chungking the stern admonitions from the New Life Movement not to smoke, Annalee refused. When Madame Chiang asked her why she’d refused, Annalee mentioned the signs.

  “Oh,” Madame Chiang replied. “That’s for the people.”

  Annalee took the incident in stride. In a sense, Mayling’s behavior wasn’t much different from the people Annalee had worked with at MGM.

  “She was no more arrogant than the movie moguls Annalee had known in Hollywood, and she grew rather fond of [Madame Chiang],” the author Nancy Caldwell Sorel wrote of the encounter. Soong Mayling was so impressed that she asked Annalee to be her speechwriter and handle her publicity.

  Annalee wasn’t eager for Mel to leave, but she relished her work. It gave her more than just a chance to write. She felt like she was doing work that mattered, and besides, she’d gone through so much to even be able to come to Chungking. On a visit to a “warphanage” outside of the city for children orphaned by the war, Annalee privately noted the wretched conditions these orphans faced. Still, she played and laughed with the children when she and Madame Chiang visited them. Later she would write about how little difference the warphanages seemed to be making for the children.

  In early October, as Mel was finishing his preparations to transfer to Manila, he and Annalee found themselves running late for a reception honoring a visiting missionary. Normally they would have walked there, but to pick up time, they hired two rickshaws to get them to the reception more quickly.

  As their drivers ran madly through Chungking’s steep streets, dodging crowds, rubble, and bomb-blast potholes, Mel yelled out above the clamor:

  “Say, will you marry me?”

  “What did you say?” she yelled back.

  “I said, ‘Will you marry me?’”

  Annalee said nothing.

  Mel kept asking, and Annalee still didn’t respond. Finally, they arrived at the event and joined the receiving line. After they’d found a spot to stand, in between other guests, Annalee turned, directed her attentive eyes at Mel, took a beat, and said just one word: “Yes.”

  Whatever chemistry may have existed when Mel and Annalee met in Los Angeles that spring, and despite their flourishing correspondence, Mel had kept his romantic interest close to his vest all summer. But as their letters continued and Annalee’s move to Chungking became a reality, it had been clear how anxious Mel was for her to join him. Later he’d claim that he hadn’t even been certain privately whether he was attracted to her, though that seems unlikely given that Annalee had ridden the train up to San Francisco with Mel to see him off. By now, in any event, it was clear that the fire Mel and Annalee had ignited in that Wilshire Boulevard bar where they brainstormed scripts had spread across the Pacific and climbed the hills between the Yangtze and Chialing.

  “I wasn’t sure about myself and about Ann and having made a mistake before, tried to profit by experience,” Mel wrote while he was on his way to Manila. “Hence I said nothing to anyone, Ann included. But after Ann was in Chungking a few days again I was sure of myself and now she is coming to Manila early in December and if fate doesn’t interfere I guess I’ll be married in Manila.”

  Mel told his mother and stepfather that they weren’t to circulate the contents of his letter. In fact, perhaps one of the most significant details of Mel and Annalee’s romance was how little they chronicled it before they were engaged. Given Mel’s frequent letters to his parents and friends like Teddy, and how candidly he admitted ambivalence about his work and his frustrations with XGOY’s operations and the complications of working for the Luce empire, Mel wasted precious little ink on his hopes for romance with Annalee. Was it just that his failed relationship with Shirlee had made him more cautious and he didn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up, least of all his own? Or did the matter-of-fact way he wrote when he did discuss Annalee mean he was secure in his prospects with her?

  “I don’t want you to think that I or Annalee was holding out on you in LA about our intentions,” Mel wrote to Elza and Manfred two weeks later. “Because I had not made up my mind at all or even mentioned anything about getting married to Annalee. I helped her to get out but did not encourage her very much. For which I have had my ears beaten down slightly. Only slightly and I shall rule with an iron hand henceforth. Maybe I shouldn’t have put this in writing.”

  Annalee hadn’t been any more open than Mel about the possibility of romance. After the engagement, she would insist that she didn’t come to China to marry Mel. But romance had been brewing, even if they’d thought it could wait until both had settled into their jobs. Then Mel and Annalee learned that Time was sending him to Manila.

  “It seemed altogether different when he was transferred the week after I got there, though,” Annalee said in a note to Mel’s parents. “This war is certainly complicating a lot of things!”

  Still, Annalee couldn’t come with Mel to Manila right away. She wanted to work at least a couple more months in Chungking because she needed the time to make an impact in the job she was doing for Madame Chiang. Aside from Annalee’s basic sense of professional loyalty, both she and Mel believed that the work she had started in Chungking could make a difference for China. She tentatively agreed to join Mel in Manila by December 10. They could wed as soon as she got there.

  Another factor was that leaving so soon after she had established herself could jeopardize the work she’d begun in Chungking. Given how hard it had been to get permission to go to China in the first place, not completing the work might make it even harder for her to get travel clearances in the future, let alone more work. Yes, Annalee had been swept up by her unexpected attraction to Mel, but it wasn’t because of him that she had left her cushy position at MGM. She had made a commitment to being in China and learning as much as possible about the country and its struggle to survive a draining war. She wasn’t the kind of woman who would abandon a professional commitment just because a man wanted to get married. Mel wouldn’t necessarily have wanted her to leave Chungking anyhow. He was attracted to her mind, her work ethic, and her passion for China.

  Still, both were thrilled at the prospect of marriage, and once they’d both told their parents, they told them to freely share news of the engagement widely. Mel even called Elza and Manfred from Manila, where easy access to a phone was a surreal experience for him. Mel also wired Teddy White and Time separately, as he did Earl Leaf, the Chinese News Service’s representative in New York. Annalee cabled her parents. She also wired the Meybergs to tell them how happy she was and to thank them for the congratulations they had wired to her. Mel was beside himself with gratitude, especially because Elza and Manfred had heartily endorsed the marriage.

  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.”