Larry acknowledges her with a subtly lascivious grin, then unfolds his script, a single white sheet of paper. He thanks Po Chung, Lifoifoi, Waechter, and his government partners in Danao International Holdings, as well as his partners in Dalat Resort Incorporated, the local joint venture, to muted applause. Next, he claims that he has been an investor in Vietnam only since the embargo was lifted—just a few weeks earlier. It’s an obvious and gratuitous lie that generates chuckles around me; it can only be meant for the State Department spies in the audience, if there are any, or in case the videotape ends up in their hands someday. With that caveat out of the way, Hillblom observes that this is an extraordinary day—the first fruits of the first partnership between an American and the communist Vietnamese since the war. A pause to acknowledge history in the making but more so, perhaps, to acknowledge how stupid those decades of embargo were to begin with. There is more polite applause as the translator converts his remarks to the native tongue.
Finished—and mercifully brief—Hillblom grins as the translator completes her work. He bows slightly to more applause and then steps into the audience, the camera following from a respectable distance. Amid his mercenaries, a cadre of pasty expats with thinning hair, Hillblom seems out of place. He is rail thin, gangly, neither young nor old, while they have grown up and out, and are attached to women and even children. Larry is still Larry-with-the-scraggly-beard—though there is something far more measured, far more mature, and far less awkward about him than in the past. When he mingles with a group of Vietnamese, he becomes suddenly tall and white, though there is an unmistakable Asian-ness to his features—especially the perpetually squinting eyes that have always appeared too narrow for a Caucasian.
Cut to the golf course across the lake, a little later. Surrounded by smiling young girls in ao dai, Hillblom slices a red ribbon with a pair of scissors, revealing a quaint clubhouse. The girls giggle and Hillblom hams it up a little for the cameras. He seems utterly relaxed now, as though this may be one of the happiest days of his life. The video then cuts to the first hole of the golf course, where he ditches his blazer and wanders in circles for several moments until someone hands him a driver and a ball. He sinks a tee into the earth, hits a drive out of frame, and beams. Enthusiastic applause as he walks out of frame. Then the television fizzles into snow.
“How much does Mr. Toan want for the videotape?” I ask the interpreter sitting next to me—a young man wearing the round, metallic-rimmed glasses that I sported in high school.
“One moment, please.” He consults the man next to him—a middle-aged Vietnamese with an eager face—before returning a sales pitch: “Mr. Toan has hundreds of photographs of Mr. Larry, too, including the famous one of his lady friend holding Mr. Larry’s baby. He gave that photo to Mr. Larry himself but he didn’t want it.”
“How much for everything, then?”
“Mr. Toan is aware that Disney recently paid a million dollars for some film footage that they used in a movie.”
“You want a million dollars?” I say incredulously.
Mr. Toan frowns. “You can make an offer,” the interpreter says.
“I need to talk to my publisher first,” is my lame reply—lame because I know that my publisher, any publisher, would laugh at the notion of paying anything for a short videotape and a bunch of photos of a man that most Americans have never heard of. Why I cannot bring myself to tell Mr. Toan this right now, I have no idea. Maybe because I am a terrible negotiator, or maybe because I do not want him to know that his great bird was something far less in his own country: a prophet without honor, a disgraced man, brief fodder for tabloid news shows and glossy magazines.
Over the next several weeks, I will exchange a few e-mails with Mr. Toan via his interpreter; we will not agree on terms for the video or the photographs, my starting offer being in the very low four figures. The morning spent at his office will be tossed into the vast memory pile of hundreds of encounters that seemed promising at one time but ultimately proved useless, except as evidence that Larry Hillblom was eluding me as he had eluded everyone else in his life.
“Larry was wherever he was at the time,” one of Hillblom’s friends explains over the phone one day, as though my effort to create a unified portrait of the man was doomed from the start. There is no collage, only fragments, which all lead up to May 21, 1995—the day that Hillblom would hop into the front seat of his seaplane and escape forever. A friend, poring over my first attempt at a manuscript, suggests that I should title my book The ADD Billionaire. Fair enough, but the feeling that I have missed something nags constantly.
Not long after, hunched over my desk in Los Angeles, I open a letter postmarked Ho Chi Minh City. The sender is a Mr. Toan. His English is broken but the portrait he paints of Hillblom’s last year is not. Toan reveals that Hillblom came to Vietnam in early 1990 and one year later founded Danao* International Holdings, Ltd., with Po Chung in order to circumvent the embargo. Toan explains how they hired a Chinese-Canadian businessman named Wong to oversee the development, and how Wong discovered the parcel of land beside the Saigon river, which had been former president Vo Van Kiet’s “pleasure house” before the evacuation in 1975—the site where Riverside Apartments was ultimately built. Toan describes how the “pleasure house” soon became known as “Larry’s house,” as he lived and worked there, rising at five thirty in the morning to a breakfast of coffee, bread, egg whites, canned fish seasoned with red pepper sauce, and carrot juice. Toan relates Hillblom’s optimism after the plane crash and how the surgery had not diminished his taste for girls, then describes how he kept the names and numbers of the girls that Larry liked—often waitresses he met while dining alone—in a black book, so that when Hillblom wanted one, he could simply point and Toan would arrange for that girl to come over for the night. When Hillblom traveled to Dalat, Toan explains, there were usually some “girls” following him—girls with whom he would have sex after work.
Finally, Toan reveals how Hillblom met Nguyen Thi Be, the woman in the famous photograph. In May 1995, he tells me, the month that the Palace Hotel opened, a Ms. Tuyet mistakenly drove six girls from Phan Thiet and Phan Rang to Dalat after receiving Toan’s order of four girls for four guests. So after Hillblom and his guests had paired up, there were two girls left over. Ms. Be, Toan writes, was among the two leftovers, which created an awkward several minutes until Hillblom called out from his bedroom: “I’ll take her!” Toan says that they had never met before and that by the time Hillblom’s death was announced a few days later, Thi Be was long gone.
It is Thi Be’s photo and her story that have captivated the Vietnamese press for years now, but the final paragraph of Toan’s letter is what will resonate in my head for months to come as I wrestle with the implications of Hillblom’s life and, even more so, his death:
Mr. Larry’s life was very strange. His life was very active, but simple and kind-hearted. He loved to be with poor people. I admire Mr. Larry so much and I will remember him forever. The period of time I spent beside Mr. Larry has become a precious time in my life.
Sincerely,
Mr. Toan
Part III
Probate
It is my intention to give the residue of my estate to a charitable trust which will entitle my estate to a charitable deduction under Internal Revenue Code Section 2055 and my Executor is directed to take whatever steps are necessary to ensure this result and to carry out the charitable intention set forth within.
It is my request that substantially all of the funds applied shall be for Medical Research and that the Board of Managers show particular attention to and benefit the research programs conducted by the University of California.
—From the Last Will and Testament of Larry Lee Hillblom, d. 1982
Thirty-Four
His Majesty
On a moist, sun-drenched morning in December 1871, the only survivor of the shipwrecked merchant ship Belvidere was discovered unconscious atop the reef of Nif Island by a Yapese
medicine man.
He was David Dean O’Keefe, age forty, an American of Irish descent. O’Keefe’s biographer would describe him as a man’s man, the hero of a child’s adventure book made real: “six feet four inches tall, with carrot-red hair that protruded in thick curls from beneath his gold-braided captain’s cap and grew down his cheeks in heavy burnsides.” He was a captain, though not of the doomed ship that had brought him to Micronesia. O’Keefe had boarded Belvidere to escape murder charges in his hometown of Savannah, Georgia. In his haste, O’Keefe had unwittingly traded a wife, a young daughter, a career, and a charming seaside home for exile on one of Micronesia’s most primitive islands. He arrived badly injured and destitute.
The Yap Islands, which are 650 miles north-northeast of Saipan and comprise the third largest state within the Federated States of Micronesia, were then administered by a single, perpetually frustrated German, who ultimately allowed O’Keefe to stay. But as a white man and an American, O’Keefe was an interloper twice over in Micronesia. His presence inspired suspicion among the islanders and disdain from the European colonists who considered the islands theirs, even if they had no idea what to do with them. Yet O’Keefe soon married a beautiful islander, then started both a family and a successful business. And, within a decade, O’Keefe would accomplish a feat that no other colonist had: coronation. He would become His Majesty O’Keefe, king of Yap, with every island and every tribe in the archipelago swearing its loyalty to him in exchange for protection. O’Keefe negotiated the first pact of free association in Micronesia, an arrangement that left the islands to the natives while leaving the seas to the colonists. (So indifferent were the Micronesians to foreign affairs that one chief kept a stack of flags in his hut; whenever a warship sailed into the bay, he would raise the matching flag.) The islanders’ respect for O’Keefe’s negotiating skills was such that he became their de facto appellate judge, resolving their disputes based upon a quasi-American legal code of his own invention.
O’Keefe made a fortune trading the islands’ bounteous sea slugs and copra—a fortune that was kept by his nominee and business partner, a Hong Kong dentist met by chance who had provided his first ship in exchange for a percentage of future profits. But it was the role of banker that solidified O’Keefe’s power. With the help of modern tools unavailable to the islanders, he mined huge rounded stones called pil that served as their currency in greater quantities than the islanders thought possible and brought them home in the massive hull of his ship. (The stones had previously been transported, one at a time, in canoes that often sank.) Instead of giving them away, O’Keefe kept the pil at his mansion, allowing the removal of a stone only after his subjects had filled the belly of one of his ships—Micronesia’s first pawnshop.
The German administrator tried to emulate O’Keefe’s success, but he could never figure out how O’Keefe cajoled the islanders to work so hard for so little. The man soon lost patience and returned to Bavaria. Another, more ambitious, administrator sailed in, with the same result. The Europeans simply could not grasp that the pil was less important than O’Keefe himself, that his willingness to think and live like the islanders rather than patronize them—or subjugate them, for that matter—had ultimately given him carte blanche to manipulate them. Rather than concede defeat and lower his monarch’s flag, however, the new administrator lobbied his superiors to make O’Keefe an outlaw. How else to explain his success?
O’Keefe disappeared ten years after he had arrived, presumably lost at sea after sailing into a storm in order to escape arrest by the German navy—though neither the wreckage of his ship nor his body was ever found. He was then the wealthiest man in Micronesia and, according to a bevy of women scattered around the Western Pacific who soon came forward claiming to have borne O’Keefe’s heirs, one of the most prolific. Although he had left behind a will that left most of his fortune to his island wife, American lawyers representing his original family descended on Yap to claim his estate for themselves and begin the daunting task of cataloging his far-flung assets—a task made far more difficult when O’Keefe’s enigmatic Hong Kong business partner declined to cooperate with the family or the probate court. With no independent means of establishing O’Keefe’s interests, the court was forced to accept what the Hong Kong dentist told them and negotiate a compromise among O’Keefe’s legal wife and the island women and children.
In bars from Majuro to Hong Kong, O’Keefe’s friends recalled how the king had first cheated death when Belvidere crashed on Nif’s reef. They spread the (true) rumor that the German navy had dispatched a ship to arrest O’Keefe for tax evasion shortly before his disappearance. After a few whiskeys, most would insist that the king had not perished in the open sea after all; he was enjoying retirement nestled beneath a coconut palm on one of Micronesia’s two thousand islands, indulged by topless native girls and safely beyond reach of the German navy.
In the 1950s, the decade that Larry Hillblom became a teenager, Warner Bros adapted Lawrence Klingman’s biography of O’Keefe into a film starring Burt Lancaster as the sailor-turned-monarch and Joan Rice as his islander wife, Dalabo. The quickly forgotten film was never shown in Kingsburg and no one can tell me whether or not Larry saw the film elsewhere. But, in the following decades, Hillblom’s life would emulate that of David Dean O’Keefe to a remarkable degree. So would his death.
Thirty-Five
Panic
The morning of Monday, May 22, 1995, Saipan awoke from an uneasy sleep to confront the unthinkable: Larry was gone. Not off-island or unreachable, but gone. The day before, at around 6:30, he had called Josephine from his seaplane and told her to drive to the airport to pick him up. He was over Anatahan, a small island roughly eighty miles northeast of Saipan. Josephine had driven the sporty Toyota MR2 that Larry had given her to the Pacific Aviation hangar but he hadn’t shown. Several hours later she called Mike Dotts. He contacted the islands’ Emergency Management Office, as well as Joseph Waechter and Peter Donnici, both of whom were in San Francisco. But at that hour, the Western North Pacific Ocean would have been as foreboding and as opaque as a black hole. If the ocean had swallowed up Hillblom’s little airplane, they would have to wait until morning to find out.
The CNMI’s two search and rescue boats left at dawn, followed by a succession of fishing and pleasure boats, including the governor’s, until a small armada was headed toward Anatahan. A helicopter was dispatched to the search area, as was a coast guard cutter from Guam. The Emergency Management Office rented a private plane, which traced Hillblom’s flight path to Pagan and back, and chartered six private boats that afternoon. A command post was set up at the Smiley Cove Marina just north of the Hyatt Regency Hotel. Technically, the operation was under the command of EMO director Robert Guerrero, a stocky, no-nonsense Gulf War veteran, but the governor kept a close watch over him. And Hillblom’s friends set up their own command center at Peter Donnici’s office in downtown San Francisco; they requested assistance from the navy and the air force, both of which had major bases on Guam.
At Coffee Care, the Little Ginza café where many of the island’s attorneys and politicians began their day, news of Hillblom’s disappearance dominated the early-morning rush. “It was a difficult time for pretty much the whole island,” Mike Dotts remembers. “Everybody was trying to find where the plane was. It was panic.” By 9:00 a.m., gas station attendants were briefing those who had somehow managed to avoid both their televisions and cell phones that morning. It was the beginning of the workweek, but for anyone who knew Larry—which was nearly everyone on the island—it felt like an ending.
Updates were painfully slow to arrive. Even with the help of drift patterns that pinpointed where the wreckage—if it existed—would have traveled given the ocean currents, Hillblom’s search party would have to comb an area of hundreds of square miles for something not much bigger than a large dolphin. That no SOS had been broadcast meant that they could not be quite sure where the airplane had gone down. Given the area’s huge
swells, and its numerous sharks, the chances of Hillblom’s surviving had evaporated overnight. So difficult was it thought to survive in the Western North Pacific that the EMO’s operating procedures called for searches to be called off after just three days. But if anyone could have survived, Hillblom’s friends told themselves, it would be Larry.
The next day, the crew of a fishing boat pulled two bodies from the ocean—one islander and one Caucasian. A local news camera videotaped the bodies as they arrived at the marina. After they were transported to the hospital morgue, rumors swirled that Hillblom’s body had been positively identified. But when Josephine arrived the following morning, she told the doctors that she knew it wasn’t Larry. The body was too large, for one thing. And there was a “Bob” tattoo on one of the shoulders. The man they’d recovered was Robert Long, Larry’s pilot.
At four that afternoon, the helicopter spotted something bobbing in the swells not far from where Long had been found floating. A cameraman in the passenger seat recorded the object on a video camera. From above, it resembled a white piece of flotsam, but the shape was hard to discern. The only hint that this might be a human body was the mob of large fish that encircled it. The pilot radioed the command center, which declined to send a boat to the location. Darkness was falling too quickly, the pilot was told; apparently, out of the dozen or so boats trolling the area, none was close enough to reach the object by dusk.
In the coming months and years, whether or not the object was actually Hillblom would be the subject of much debate, because when the helicopter returned to the area the following morning, it was gone. “By that time,” Dotts theorizes, “the body had sunk again, and that’s why the body was not recovered.” But then he pauses. “Another reason Larry’s body was not found,” he continues, “is that Larry was very thin and hence not a lot of fat on his body, so that’s one more reason why his body sunk as opposed to the other bodies that came to the surface.”
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