The Huntress

by Alice Arlen

  There were three of them who made the trip: Alicia, Josephine, and once again Libby Chase. A French steamship was supposed to take them from New York, with several stops en route across the Mediterranean, then through the Suez Canal to Bombay. But when they reached Marseilles, Alicia persuaded her companions to disembark the plodding Richelieu and trust their luck to the new KLM air service, which promised speedy transportation “to Mesopotamia and the Orient.” The airplane was a three-engine Fokker, with two young Dutch pilots, an onboard mechanic, a radioman, and room for six passengers (although the three women were the only ones this time). In the notebook she kept of the trip, Alicia described “the unbelievable din of the engines, the cramped quarters…but then we crossed just above the waves of the Med, flying low up the coast of North Africa, little villages, settlements, mostly endless brown sands….“ The pilots let her have the controls for a spell, then when they realized how accomplished she was they cheerfully dozed and let her, as well as Josephine (another licensed pilot), fly the plane for much of each day. Tripoli, Cairo, Baghdad. Each night they’d land around sundown, try to wangle landing permits in different languages, hunt for a place to stay. There were dust storms as they crossed the Sinai, so they put down on the sand, found a Lebanese guesthouse, waited for the skies to clear. It took them ten days to reach Karachi, not much faster than by boat, another day to Jodhpur, where Major Tempersley was waiting to meet them, in shorts and pith helmet, with one of the maharaja’s Rolls-Royces for the passengers and a Bentley for their bags.

  Alicia pigsticking in Baroda, India, 1932.

  Sadly, there turned out to be a problem right away. For while the maharaja of Jodhpur, Oxford educated, pro-British, ostentatiously swanky (with his cars, jewels, hundreds of servants, acres of marble in his several palaces) was outwardly hospitable to the American travelers, he held decided views on women and their place in the scheme of things. Notably they had no place in the ancient ritual-sport of pigsticking. As a great concession to his military adviser, the major, he might allow the American women to observe a pigstick from a proper distance, adhering to the proper protocols. But for a woman to take part in one was out of the question. Besides, why should a woman want to? Thus no sooner arrived at Jodhpur than, disappointed, they left for Delhi, with Tempersley as an escort. But at the Delhi Horse Show, in a sea of British faces, several familiar from her days with the Quorn Hunt, Alicia was introduced to another maharaja, this one of Baroda: in Alicia’s words, “white-haired but formidable, progressive, fiercely anti-British.” He also took an immediate liking to Alicia, with her American pluck and sporting ambition, and on the spot invited the trio to the kingdom of Baroda for some gender-inclusive pigsticking.

  HRH Pratap Singh Gaekwar, son of the maharaja of Baroda, with four wild boars at his feet, deceased.

  Earlier in New York, before she left, when Alicia tried to explain the challenges of pigsticking to her friends, there were few who took it seriously. For one thing the name of the thing seemed to get in the way, though of course the word, “pigsticking,” was part of that deliberately offhand, play-it-down vocabulary of English sporting life. The fact is the pigs were not so much pigs as wild boars, some as massive as four hundred pounds, fast, fierce, and dangerous, with tusks that could tear apart a sizable animal; and the sticks were ten-foot wooden poles with spears at the end of them, held by a rider on horseback in the manner of a lance. Also, pigsticking could be rough and local, or it could be fancy. At the maharaja of Baroda’s tourney, as he liked to call it, there was an impressive venue, almost a settlement, of large and variously colored silk tents, where guests were housed and entertained the night before with music, dancers, the inevitable ten-course dinner. Next morning, and for three days afterward, the pigstickers rode out in groups of five, spears at the ready, and took their place facing a thickly wooded barrier of brush. The pigs (or boars) were inside the brush; on the far side were beaters with tin cans, trying to drive the animals forward; behind the pigstickers was open ground and possible freedom for the pigs.

  As Alicia wrote of her experience: “You’re mounted on this cavalry [sic] level horse, one you’ve never seen before, nor he you. From somewhere out of sight, sounds this unearthly din, as the beaters start through the brush, yelling, beating tin cans…then, when this great tusker breaks cover, you’re told to wait, not moving, till he is well away, but when you do start after him pray your mount is sure-footed because you go full-out over ditches, rocks, fallen timber, over everything.” And: “It is by far the hardest sport I ever tried. If you’re after a pig and you’re almost ready to spear him at a dead run, he always jumps or swerves. You can only stick him when he’s on your right side and a little in front, otherwise it’s too dangerous.” And: “Today I was with three good lads and Josephine. The first pig gave us a corking run and the captain of our team speared him. But when the pig ran into some undergrowth, with me after him, he came out suddenly and charged the captain’s horse, crashing the horse and hurting the rider rather badly.”

  Alicia and Josephine (behind her); much heat, little shade, many hunting-camp standabouts, looking for tigers in all the wrong places.

  All things considered, the maharaja’s pigstick was considered a great success; with an invisible wave of the royal hand the colorful silk tents vanished, the clanging of the tin cans ceased. Then, too, Major Tempersley reappeared, migrating between maharajas, and at the usual evening banquet the question of a tiger hunt was raised. Such things might be arranged, murmured the white-haired old maharaja, and arranged they were: not overnight of course, since hunting permissions on a vast tiger preserve in a neighboring state needed to be obtained, but soon enough; and with their gear packed, with rifles and all manner of equipment on loan from the kindly maharaja, off they went. “We were a party of about twenty,” Alicia wrote. “Major T, plus a fellow to scout for tigers, plus we three, plus fifteen or so porters and beaters to lug in all the stuff and tend the camp.” The neighboring state, it turned out, was not so near but a long, endless day of rail travel south on an ancient, narrow-gauge train; then off in the middle of nowhere, where they waited long hours beside the tracks, sitting on jerry cans in the amazing heat, for what would turn out to be a caravan of bullock carts, plus one broken-down old truck, to take them and their supplies the rest of the way. Again Alicia: “Our hunting camp was in a clearing surrounded by thick woods. Dust was everywhere and the heat was constant, despite heavy rains that poured daily out of the gunmetal sky. Black flies appeared in daytime, mosquitoes at night, which seemed to chew their way through the netting.” At first the women slept beside the campfire, but then a rabid jackal got into camp and attacked several of the bearers. “The next day was spent building machants, or raised platforms, and from then on, when we slept, which wasn’t much or often, we slept a dozen feet above the ground.”

  Alicia with the leopard she shot.

  All in all they were in tiger camp for six weeks, two of which were constant thudding rain. Once the wet skies lifted, however, they moved out into the woods, where Alicia finally spotted a large tiger, took her shot, but missed. It turned out this would be her last glimpse of a tiger, though they stayed for weeks more, going out day after day with the guide and beaters. All of them by then were sick in turn with fevers and dysentery, despite the maharaja’s quinine. Finally, late one afternoon Josephine spotted a full-grown male Bengal tiger moving through the brush, brought it down with one shot. Next day, a half mile from camp, coming back from another unsuccessful foray, Alicia saw a leopard moving forward in the trees, took a shot, and got her kill. It wasn’t as substantial, as royal, a prize as Josephine’s tiger, which the undemonstrative major admitted was “most impressive,” but by then it was time to leave; and it perhaps says something of Alicia’s almost helpless competitiveness that thirty years later, near the end of her life, she acknowledged that she still hadn’t fully reconciled herself to the fact of Josephine having got the tiger.

  · 27 ·

  BACK
IN NEW YORK, in the grays and blacks of the Great Depression, the exotic and extravagant colors of India must have seemed out of place, anachronistic. Moreover, Liberty had been sold by the Tribune Company at a substantial loss, and with new owners and a new format it was no longer a market for Alicia’s intrepid-girl-adventure journalism; her notes and notebooks of pigsticking and tiger hunting in maharajaland were stuffed into a file folder and stayed there, out of sight if not entirely out of mind. She became friends with Neysa McMein, by all accounts an interesting “new woman,” a gifted illustrator and independent spirit; also with Heywood Broun and his wife, both journalists, strongly Left-leaning; all three of them members of the Algonquin Round Table group of smart, talky men and women “in the arts,” who were defining the 1930s media dynamic of Manhattan. And of course she was still married to Joe Brooks. How not to be? Joe Brooks wasn’t smart and talky, at least not in the way of the Algonquin wits; he told stories, jokes, some of them pretty good, but still they were those kind of stories, jokes, what people called “smoking-room humor”; and he wasn’t at all leftist, he wasn’t political, he would say. But the Algonquin intellectuals on West Forty-Fourth Street were happy to make room for Joe, as were the Racquet Club Republicans on Park Avenue and Fifty-Third Street. Everybody loved Joe Brooks, the former All-American; loved him too well to tell him to skip the last few rounds of drinks, loved him too well to refuse him a place at the backgammon and poker tables, which were less and less his friends.

  And what of the third, perhaps one might call him the “shadow” element in the marriage: Joseph Patterson, Poppa, “Captain Patterson,” as Joe Brooks, a fellow soldier, called him, and as Patterson himself liked to be called, sometimes just “Captain.” The truth was that while the 1930s were unfolding unpropitiously for many people—for Joe Brooks, for example, and millions of others—for Joe Patterson the decade had begun with much promise. The former experimental farmer and experimental socialist, the “Renegade Heir” who’d once campaigned for Eugene Debs, had placed a couple of bets that more than proved out. First, back in the 1920s, he’d launched the Daily News, at the time decried and ridiculed by the journalistic establishment as well as by most upright people (many called it “the housemaid’s daily” and much worse, saying they wouldn’t let it into their homes), which was even now, despite the Depression, continuing to mint money for its parent, the Chicago Tribune, while providing an ample share for its editor. Then, in 1932 he’d placed a nervy bet on Franklin Roosevelt, bet with his own money, too, also with his paper’s editorials, and as a result he was a rare newspaper proprietor welcomed into FDR’s circle, maybe not into his closest circle, but close enough to get “Dear Joe” letters from the president from time to time, and enjoy a measured access to The White House.

  As Mrs. Joseph Brooks, Alicia felt in a chronic state of being yanked about, whipsawed, as the saying went, in her complicated relationship with her father. Although she tried not to think about the details, she could never be entirely unaware of the extent to which he sustained her marriage, kept it and them afloat with financial help, both the kind you could see and couldn’t see. Joe was always a good sport about “your father’s help,” she knew it pained him to admit it, but how could it be otherwise? On her side she was aware that money things were strangely muddled; it pained her too that Joe—so sure, so smart, and even wise in everything to do with all the outdoor stuff that once seemed to matter so much—couldn’t seem to get any traction in the everyday world, couldn’t pay for the food, the rent, the cook and maid who worked for them, his secretary, her allowance. At the same time she knew she rather liked it, not entirely of course, not always, but mostly she rather liked it that her allowance came from Poppa. She even rather liked it when her father sent her one of his memos, no longer hand-scrawled but typed by Miss Josephson, suggesting this career opportunity, that person to look up, and so on. She rarely followed up because she knew the suggestions wouldn’t work, but she liked the connection; she knew he was thinking of her. She liked it too, and did follow up, when the Daily News book editor sent her a book to review; she handed in her reviews promptly, received praise from the editor, knew her father was somehow in the loop. What she really didn’t like, couldn’t stand in fact, was the whole Mary King business. It wasn’t that she felt much for her mother; her mother was a hard person to attach your feelings to; besides, she knew it was her mother’s obduracy that was still making a divorce impossible. But she just hated Mary King, the Catholic woman who had got her hooks into Poppa; she even hated little Jimmy, which she knew was wrong and made her feel bad, but still she hated him. And what made it all worse was that she knew she didn’t have to see Mary King, she was a grown-up, a married lady, who could do what she wanted. But if she and Joe wished to rent a house for the summer out on Sands Point, Long Island, as they did, then they needed to make a pilgrimage up to Ossining, mind their manners with Mrs. King, be nice to little Jimmy, and hope to get, if not her father’s blessing, at least his fiscal go-ahead in return.

  Alicia Brooks, Sands Point, Long Island, where she and her husband, Joe Brooks, were living in 1934.

  · 28 ·

  BY THE MID-1930S some things had changed, some things not. What hadn’t changed, at least not for the better, were Joe Brooks’s prospects; his slice of the life insurance business, which had never been large, had become ever more marginal. As a result he was spending even less time in his office and more time in a sad sequence of hotel rooms, apartments, all the assorted venues for private card games (especially poker) some lasting several days, none of which ever made him any more than briefly richer.

  But if her husband was falling behind the times, giving every appearance of a man who had outrun his moment, Alicia Brooks was finally beginning to take a few, albeit tentative, strides forward into the conscious life of the period. She spent more time with Neysa McMein, long days in her sunny downtown studio, working together on a variety of graphic projects, in the process absorbing the political life of the Village. She did interview pieces for the Daily News, articles for Herbert Swope’s New York World. And not exactly out of nowhere, because he’d been there all the time, though mostly there in a distant, check-writing (or check-approving) sort of way, her father began to reappear in her life, at least from time to time, and as the Poppa she so fondly remembered; the two of them no longer dirty dogs—he was too consequential for that—but all the same her good buddy. Who knows why then? Who knows what he meant by the new camaraderie, if anything? They’d go to the movies some afternoons. She’d meet him for drinks at Jack and Charlie’s on Fifty-Second Street. He never said much of anything about serious subjects, the way her downtown friends were always talking about “the world.” But just being there with him made her feel good. And so, one day, when he asked her if she thought her husband could spare her for a little overseas traveling, she figured he knew the answer, didn’t really have to ask.

  —

  WITH HIS TWENTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER, Alicia, as his main sidekick and traveling companion (though with Josephine and Joe Brooks tagging along on the periphery) Joe Patterson took ship for England on July 2, 1935, on one of the big new Cunarders that now docked at Southampton, much closer to London than the familiar more northerly Liverpool. The Pattersons spent the better part of one week at the newly refurbished Savoy Hotel beside the Thames, though for most of their stay they were in the energetic, officious hands of Lord Beaverbrook, Joe Patterson’s new British friend.

  If Joe Patterson was an important publisher on his side of the Atlantic, Sir Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, was an even bigger one on the other side of the ocean; a Canadian who had risen to political power in the war as a cabinet minister and close colleague of Winston Churchill, now from his position as publisher of London’s Daily Express (whose two-million circulation was the largest of any newspaper in England) he had become a maker and breaker of politicians and a force to be reckoned with in the seat of empire. Short, opinionated, immensely rich, Beaverbrook had been
the model for Evelyn Waugh’s Lord Copper, the unpredictable, tyrannical overlord of the Daily Beast. He was also a prototype of the modern publisher with “big ideas,” his latest being an editorial proposal, lately evolved into a personal crusade, advocating what he termed “a splendid isolation” of Great Britain and its far-flung empire from the inevitable war which he, Churchill, and the mostly disregarded British anti-fascists feared was brewing on the Continent. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Patterson had been developing his own somewhat similar geopolitical ideas, motivated by his still-raw memories of the devastating carnage of the Great War, with its origins, as he saw it, in the inept and often devious policies of the European powers; and hoping to prevent the possibility of his countrymen being drawn into a second transatlantic conflagration, caused by weak leadership on the part of the same European powers, he had published that spring a sequence of editorials in the Daily News, which Beaverbrook had enthusiastically reprinted as a pamphlet titled “From Across the Atlantic” and distributed throughout England in a press run of several million copies.