by Bill Lascher
“There was so many things Mel wanted to do when he got back that New York was almost a nightmare, on account of trying to do them all,” Annalee wrote Elza in a letter from New York, listing her appointments with literary agents, editors, publishers, aid organizations, and government agencies to whom she exhaustively described the conditions in China and the Philippines that Mel would have wanted to share with the public.
She also spent hours with Time staff, telling them “everything he wanted to tell them in luncheon after luncheon and dinner after dinner. Sometimes answering questions until after midnight—I’d wanted to stay just two days but it took ten.”
Before Annalee’s arrival, Time’s leadership had insisted that the Pacific story wasn’t a priority, but she persuaded the Luces otherwise.
“They were amazed to find out just how serious things really are; the next few issues will sound different, I know,” Annalee said in a letter, explaining that Henry and Clare Boothe Luce had thought that the most newsworthy front of the war for Time and Life to focus on was the Russian one.
Annalee was overwhelmed by the activity in New York, but she nevertheless insisted on one thing: reiterating the message she’d begun to send that past fall, when she was working for United China Relief. Indeed, she told a United Press reporter, she “wanted an 18 hour day job right in the middle of the war, preferably China.”
Likewise, Annalee’s top priority was completing “This Is Our Battle,” the book Mel had started and she planned to finish. In New York, she met with Mel’s agent, Nancy Parker, and Time’s David Hulburd gave Annalee all of the dispatches, research notes, and communications Mel had sent the magazine. Combined with her photographic memory and close relationship to Elza, she had a great deal of material to draw upon. She wanted to finish it just as fast as she could.
“It meant a tremendous lot to Mel,” Annalee wrote to Elza from New York. “It was more important than anything in the world to him, except coming home and being with you again.”
Annalee wanted desperately to see Elza, and she planned to go to Los Angeles after completing her engagements in New York, even before she saw her own family in Bethesda. She also was nearing the end of her hiatus from MGM. Her contract stipulated that anything she produced while working for MGM would be its intellectual property; if she didn’t complete the book before August 15, it might become the studio’s property.
“And it seems almost impossible to finish it by August 15,” Annalee admitted.
Happily, Elza invited Annalee to stay at her home in Bel Air once she was back in California. Annalee accepted the invitation and stayed with the Meybergs for two months while she settled matters at the studio. She instantly felt like she was part of the Meybergs’ family. Everything about Elza’s house felt familiar to Annalee, thanks to all the long conversations she’d had about it with Mel at Liloan and elsewhere in the Philippines.
“Every time things were terribly bad we’d talk about your garden and the terrace and iced drinks as just the nicest place in the world to be,” Annalee told Elza.
Elza and Manfred even brought Annalee along on a family trip to Lake Arrowhead, in the San Bernardino Mountains outside of Los Angeles. Staying with Mel’s mother helped Annalee feel a sense of normalcy she hadn’t felt since before Mel died.
“I felt like a human for the very first time with you,” Annalee told Elza.
When she wasn’t working on Mel’s book, she was helping Elza organize and notate his papers, news clippings, and other materials. Or she was brushing Elmer, Mel’s dog, an activity she found soothing. She also realized that she didn’t want to return to MGM. She was still grieving for Mel, and there was unfinished work in China.
In Los Angeles, Annalee picked up an assignment from Douglas Airview—a monthly magazine published by the public relations division of the Douglas Aircraft Company—to write about what she had experienced and observed in the Philippines. Titled “Ours Is Full of Holes,” the article featured a handful of Mel’s photographs from the reporters’ escape. Perhaps it was being free of military censors, or no longer having to worry about Time’s in-house editors overediting her copy, or writing about something Douglas could readily endorse—the great need for planes in the Pacific—but Annalee’s story seemed far more cutting than much of what Mel had been able to publish about the Philippines.
Annalee left Elza’s house at the end of the summer. She cried for hours on the brutal train journey back to Washington, D.C. As the train crept across the United States, Annalee slept until 4:00 P.M. each day, waking only to eat, read the paper, eat again, work on her book, cry, and drift back to sleep. Arriving two hours late for a Chicago layover, she went to see a movie after dealing with baggage problems. She couldn’t have been unluckier. After the problems at the train station, she “spent an hour in a movie that turned out to be Clark Gable as a war correspondent in Bataan.”*
Once she was back in Bethesda, Annalee continued to struggle with Mel’s book, especially the portions that dealt with his time in Indochina. She knew this was one of the most important pieces of the story Mel was trying to tell, yet it was also the hardest part for her to write. There was just so much there. He’d kept reams of information-packed, narrow-spaced, typewritten notes full of vivid descriptions that were sometimes so incredibly dense that Annalee got lost in their excruciating detail.
“I’ve never read anything like them,” Annalee said.
She had thought she could complete this portion of the book quickly, but she spent whole days making little progress. Meanwhile, she drifted more deeply into a depression that seemed to affect her writing.
“I write as if I were under ether, and when I read it the next day it sounds as if I were,” she told Elza.
Sleeping for hours and hours, watching the days pass quickly because she was awake so briefly, Annalee started letters and never finished them. Over time, however, perhaps in the long, cathartic act of spending weeks on one letter to Elza, she began to recover, as she had first begun to do at Elza’s house.
“I hope you don’t think that I love you or miss you any the less, or am any less grateful for all the different kinds of wonderful things you did,” Annalee stressed to Elza in that letter. “You haven’t any idea how much you helped; I felt like a human being for the very first time with you.”
As bad as the year 1942 had already been for Annalee, even worse news came in the fall. On a Friday morning in October, shortly after Annalee had returned from Los Angeles, her father, Leland Whitmore, was driving a carpool to the office when he suddenly felt unwell, pulled to the curb, and collapsed. He died almost immediately afterward. In six short months, both of the men Annalee loved were ripped from her life.
Leland’s death paralyzed Annalee, and she stopped working on “This Is Our Battle.” For some time, she didn’t pick up a pen for any reason. Tom Seller, Annalee’s writing partner at MGM, saw her a month after her father’s death and tried to talk her into working on the book again. Seller imagined that writing or another project might keep her from fixating on all the tragedy, but he wasn’t able to convince her to return to it.
“She seems fine on the surface, but I fear that her tragedy is affecting her more deeply than any of us realize,” Seller reflected. “It’s as though, with Mel gone, she has no incentive to go on to other things.”
Still, Annalee kept one eye on the many events transpiring in Asia. As early as that first summer she was back, she had begun advocating on United China Relief’s behalf again. Eventually, she and Robert Barnett—an Institute of Pacific Relations fellow who had just returned from a trip to Chungking for United China Relief—paired up for fund-raising events that publicized the plight of China’s “warphanages.” She also arranged for the writing and photos that she and Mel had produced from Bataan and Corregidor to be used as source material for the 1943 Veronica Lake film So Proudly We Hail.
A year later, U.S. and Japanese officials agreed to a prisoner exchange supervised by the Red Cross. Among
those set for release from Japanese captivity were Carl and Shelley Mydans. They finally arrived back in the United States aboard the SS Gripsholm in December 1943.
Two years after the noise of New Year’s Eve at the Bay View Hotel in Manila, Carl and Shelley, though finally returned to the United States, headed into 1944 apart. For Carl, that New Year’s Eve was as quiet and lonely as the end of 1941 had been chaotic and surrounded by friends. Shelley was headed home to California to see her mother, and after numerous engagements in the city, Carl found that the familiar Time-Life Building felt like the closest thing to home.
On the afternoon of December 31, 1943, Carl settled into the library of the magazines’ back issues and source material. Two years after he last saw Mel, he pulled everything his friend had produced during those frantic months following the fall of Manila. Unpublished dispatches. Cables. Articles. Photographs. Especially his photographs. Carl paged through the last months of Mel’s life all afternoon.
Across the country, Shelley walked up the front steps of her mother’s home on Alvarado Street in Palo Alto, the house where lovesick Stanford kids, their landlord’s daughter singing at the top of her lungs, and a grad student writing his thesis on coverage of the war in China once shared a roof.
This was where Carl and Shelley first met that sly-smiling kid from Los Angeles who wanted to know everything about photography. For the first time since Mel’s death, Shelley had returned here. At the same time, her husband was 3,000 miles away closing the year and the adventure in the quiet of the place that had brought them all together, absorbing Mel’s words, his images, and his memory.
Shortly after Leland Whitmore’s death, Annalee and her mother Anne left Bethesda and bought what Shelley Mydans once described as a “rambling” house in Larchmont, a bedroom community just north of New York City. Anne worked at Pearl Buck’s East-West Association, and through her Annalee was able to stay connected to China.
While Annalee reassembled the pieces of her life on the East Coast, the pieces of a California family’s lives were scattered by the paranoia following the attacks on Pearl Harbor. After the war’s outbreak, in early February 1942, U.S. officials had rounded up and imprisoned more than 100,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry, known as nisei. Among the interned were a twenty-two-year-old medical student named Luie Shinno, his wife Ruth, his parents, and several siblings. Shinno, who was studying at the University of California at Berkeley, was months away from becoming a doctor and Ruth was pregnant. After first being held at a racetrack in Santa Anita, California, the Shinnos were transferred to an internment camp in Jerome, Arkansas. Their daughter, Norma, was born in January 1943.
That fall, because Shinno had studied in medicine, he was paroled from Camp Jerome to work as an orderly at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. Ruth Shinno came along four months later, though she had to leave her baby behind with Luie’s parents at Camp Jerome. Ruth met Pearl Buck in New York, and Buck hired her to be her bookkeeper. Through Buck, Ruth and Luie also met Annalee.
Annalee persuaded her mother to let Luie and Ruth stay in an apartment above their garage in Larchmont. Eventually Luie’s parents were able to come with Norma as well, as were Luie’s sister and other relatives. For the next four years, eight members of the Shinno family ultimately lived in the Whitmores’ tiny Larchmont apartment. (Instead of resuming his career in medicine after the ordeal, Luie Shinno became an engineer.)
Annalee had no reason to want anything to do with the Japanese. Unlike most people in the mainland United States, she’d seen directly what the war did to her countrymen and to those in her adopted homes of China and the Philippines. She knew intimately how the Japanese had hounded her love. She knew that Mel had been forced to carry weapons in Indochina after his arrest. She knew of the suspicions he endured when he was still a young man traveling in Asia. The Japanese attacks on the United States immediately disrupted Annalee’s marriage, and the events that followed led to Mel’s premature death.
But she understood that the actions of the Japanese empire that ravaged her life had nothing to do with the Japanese Americans whose own lives were forever altered by the conflict and by the U.S. internment policy. “She would really have every reason to really hate the Japanese,” Anne Fadiman said. Still, as many wrongs wrought by Japan as Annalee had witnessed during the war, she felt that the internment policy was unfair. Her gesture was extraordinary, given her history, and the Shinnos would be tremendously grateful to her for the rest of their lives.
Two years before his death, Mel wrote that foreigners who left Chungking inevitably returned. By 1943, Annalee had finally shaken off her depression and returned to the fold at Time Inc., writing Pacific and Asia war news for a radio program called Time Views the News. She was also speaking on behalf of the East-West Association and otherwise plugging back into Asian affairs.
Teddy White had convinced Henry Luce to offer Annalee a correspondent’s job so she could return to Chungking, and in 1944 they both traveled there as Time reporters. But they almost immediately discovered that the city was falling apart.
“Inflation had increased so that no one could afford to be honest any more, and all our old idealistic friends from 1941 had to do rather unsavory things in order to stay alive and feed their children,” Annalee recalled in 1982. As Annalee and Teddy reported on these “unsavory things,” they witnessed how rapidly Chungking was decaying and corruption was spreading among China’s leaders.
However, the stories Annalee and Teddy wrote weren’t the ones that ended up appearing on Time’s pages. Whittaker Chambers, Time’s notoriously anti-Communist editor, had solidified power in the magazine’s newsroom. A former Communist himself, Chambers warped, hacked, and distorted every report Annalee and Teddy sent from China. They pushed back, but Henry Luce continued to side with Chambers. Luce visited China in late 1945. After a rancorous meeting with Annalee during the trip, she quit.
“After all this censorship,” Anne Fadiman said of her mother, “she felt the story wasn’t getting through. She was really furious at Luce.”
Though Luce pushed Annalee out of the Time Inc. fold, she and Teddy soon had enough for a book about then-contemporary China. Together they wrote the nonfiction best-seller Thunder Out of China, which was released in 1946. Published while World War II’s wounds were still raw, Thunder Out of China shook an establishment trying to make sense of a postwar world that barely had time to take a breath before half a century of Cold War tensions began. Thunder Out of China was not a political book. It was the product of the expertise of three reporters (counting the contribution from Mel’s notes) on China.
Nevertheless, the book was radioactive. Because he had supported the Kuomintang for so long, Henry Luce interpreted any critique of Chiang Kai-shek, however reasoned, as a betrayal. The publisher felt that Teddy was too biased in his reporting on the Generalissimo, but Teddy knew what was actually happening on the ground in Chungking. His influence at Time had already been greatly diminished. After Thunder was published, Luce forced Teddy to accept whatever job he was given at the magazine or resign. That July Teddy chose the latter.
In December 1949, three years after Thunder’s publication and two months after the Communists declared the People’s Republic of China and assumed control of the mainland, the Kuomintang withdrew to Taiwan. In 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy launched his congressional witch hunts, scouring the State Department, Hollywood, and the U.S. intelligentsia for the people who he and his anti-Communist allies believed “lost” China. The silence that followed the “red scare” destroyed a generation of intellectuals who understood China. This was the generation that Chilton Bush and his colleagues had once hoped to cultivate, the generation that included Melville Jacoby and students like him.
Some early hints of Time’s editorial distortions had been clear to Mel. In the summer of 1941, he had been fortunate to have Teddy’s assistance at least. For some time, Mel could count on his friend as the backstop he needed to make sure his dispatches were
not distorted. Nevertheless, errors began to emerge, especially after the United States entered the war and Teddy left New York to report from India and the Pacific Theater.
One need only compare Mel’s dispatches with what appeared on the printed pages of Time and Life to know that his concerns were valid. For instance, in the photo essay “Philippine Epic,” the introductory text features the pumped-up patriotism and racial generalizations typical of the era—and was not written by Mel.
“It was more than destiny that in the whole sad panorama of white men’s bitter failure in the Far East, the only men who did not fail were Americans, whose stake in the Far East was new and small,” read one of many such lines.
Mel was proud to have his reporting featured in these publications but at the same time had legitimate concerns about their accuracy. In addition, many of his dispatches never saw publication, and the letters he received from New York revealed the editorial direction in which the publication wanted to go.
In 1947 Teddy became an editor at The New Republic. Shortly into his stint at the magazine, Teddy wrote Elza to thank her for a gift. A year after the release of Thunder Out of China, he was modest about the book’s success, which he said exceeded his expectations. Still, he wanted to give Elza a special leather-bound copy of the book in addition to the original copy he and Annalee had sent.
“Somehow, I feel there is a part of you and yours woven through the whole spirit of the book,” White told Elza.
After Thunder’s release, the gossip columnist Walter Winchell incorrectly reported that Teddy had proposed to Annalee. Annalee and Teddy had very briefly thought about a romance, but it never became anything. It was more about connecting with Mel. Their brief romantic experiment evaporated quickly, but the pair remained warm, caring friends. In 1947, soon after he was back in the United States, Teddy married Nancy Bean—a former Time librarian.