by Paul Theroux
But the old-fangled appearance of the town is not an illusion, and not a fake. With the simple sepia look of an old photograph, it is a living breathing remnant of old Hawaii – a plantation town of the sort that flourished all over the islands before the Second World War, and before mass tourism. Almost every building in Lanai City looks as though it could be dated 1935. Remaining true to their past, conservative by nature, the Lanaians never saw much point in modernizing, and anyway the company owned most of the houses. Lanaians with money bought expensive, sturdy vehicles – the only conspicuous sign of material wealth is a person’s pick-up, and the island is a fourwheeler’s dream.
The $300 million that Castle & Cooke has invested in the island is not immediately obvious. The excellent high school is at one side of town, the new housing at the other side. In Lanaian terms the luxury hotels and the golf courses are remote and hidden – as they should be. It would be a shame if the pleasant homely character of the place changed, and Eighth Street was turned into a shopping mall. It could still happen – nothing is more expensive than preserving the past – but so far it looks as though the owner has found a way of rejuvenating the island without spoiling it.
26
The Big Island: Paddling in the State of Grace
I was nervous about asking how much Orchid Bungalow, my luxury dwelling by the sea, was going to cost me – it was said to be the most expensive, the most sumptuous in Hawaii, and that was saying a great deal, because already I had felt Hawaii to be the most orchidaceous place on earth.
Still, I risked the question when I saw Ms L’Eplattenier, the bungalow manager.
“It’s two thousand five hundred dollars a day,” she said, flinging back the drapes to show me my swimming-pool.
I must have winced, because she turned back to me and smiled.
“That includes continental breakfast,” she added.
This was the Kohala Coast, just north of Kealakekua Bay, where Captain Cook was clubbed to death in February 1779. It is impossible to travel in the Pacific, even for a short time, and not develop an admiration for this hero of navigation and discovery, who was – amazingly, for a great captain – a thoroughly good man.
Having sailed from Niihau some nine months before to look for the Northwest Passage – a sea-route to the Atlantic – Cook had been resting in Hawaiian waters after finding only dangerous ice and mountainous shores” His two ships had returned to Hawaii, but this time to Maui, and Cook bitterly logged the fact that the pox they had left in Kauai and Niihau had reached this island. They sailed on to the island of Hawaii and made contact. The islanders were harder to read than any Cook had met before – their behavior threw him. The Hawaiians still seriously wondered whether this was the god Lono, on his floating island.
What followed was a chaotic interaction, a clash of cultures, with blundering on both sides which made violence almost inevitable. Was this haole really Lono? Were these sailors dangerous? Cook met the aged King Kalaniopu’u, who treated him as an equal. Meanwhile William Bligh and others were making charts, collecting artifacts, sketching pictures of landscapes and ceremonies. But the pilferage by islanders – their passion for pieces of iron undiminished – was unceasing. There were random desecrations and casual cruelty by Cook’s men. The ships were besieged for iron, and the islanders even devised ways for winkling nails out of the ships’ timbers.
This situation continued for just under four months and then at last, with the theft of his best cutter – an important boat to the expedition – Cook was so exasperated he went ashore to take the King hostage until the vessel was returned. The King was at first friendly. There was a conversation. But a misunderstanding arose, and soon panic. The islanders became menacing – Cook’s frightened men fired their muskets. A thousand islanders had gathered on the beach. Many of them began to throw stones. Cook was struck by stones, and then clubbed and held under water, and stabbed, and drowned.
“Justifiable homicide,” Mark Twain snarls in the Big Island chapter of Roughing It – he felt that Cook had been ungrateful and belligerent, that he had asked for it by pretending to be Lono. But poor Cook had died in an almost meaningless scuffle, an incoherent event, an accident of panic and riot. It was an unacceptable way for a hero to go, and yet human and horrible, a bit of bad timing, just the sort of end you predict for yourself. And though the conflict was later patched up, the next day some islanders dressed themselves in the breeches and shirts of the men they had killed and went to the beach and showed their buttocks to the seamen, mooning being a traditional Polynesian way of taunting an enemy.
The beach at Kealakekua Bay is still strewn with stones, the right size and shape to use as weapons.
Beyond the bay, and above it, is a lava field – great browny-black cinders and clinkers the size of boulders, called a’a – as far as the eye can see, interrupted by the occasional grove of palms or stretch of meadow. Because of that landscape there has not been much building here. There are three large resort developments, but they are self-contained, like small green islands, isolated on the coast at the end of the lava flows. On this leeward side, it hardly rains (ten inches of rain a year) – it is a great sloping desert of black volcanic rock, the Kaniku Lava Flow on the west coast of the Big Island.
Orchid Bungalow was one of four luxury bungalows at the Mauna Lani Resort, and because a golf tournament was in progress, my neighbors were Arnold Palmer (in Plumeria), Lee Trevino (in Hibiscus) and Gary Player (in Bird of Paradise). Jack Nicklaus had just moved out of Orchid. Golfers were the only people swinging clubs on this coast these days.
“A strange thing happens to our guests in the bungalows,” the resident manager of Mauna Lani told me. “They get what we call ‘bungalow fever’ – they check in and eat all their meals in them. They use their twenty-four-hour butler service. They give parties, they have cookouts. They don’t leave. And when it comes time to check out they don’t really want to go.”
The current record for staying in one of these $2,500-a-night bungalows is held by the actor Dustin Hoffman, who checked in and did not emerge until twenty-eight days later.
The sun was shining on the snow-capped crater of Mauna Loa the day I checked into Orchid Bungalow, and almost the first thing I saw from the veranda (or lanai) was an enormous humpback whale, which breached and slapped its tail throughout the afternoon.
That night I was invited to a party at the hotel – something to do with the golf tournament. The moonlit Pacific lay just beyond the rawbar, where Bryant Gumbel stood, beaming expansively. The president of Rolex, lifting a grilled prawn to his lips, displayed his wristwatch, a Rolex El Presidente – he had handed out at least one that day to a successful golfer. I was in conversation with a man wearing an ugly shirt.
“I’ve got a twin-engine jet with a Harley Davidson on board. I can go anywhere in the world. Where should I go? Don’t say Yerp. I hate Yerp.”
“Know where his money comes from?” someone said to me later. “He’s a multimillionaire. His father invented the supermarket shopping cart.”
“It’s like inventing the spoon,” I said. “Or the can-opener.”
“Charo and Sylvester Stallone have houses in Kauai,” someone else was saying. “She was married to Xavier Cugat. We used to see Willie Nelson jogging on Oahu.”
“If you understand Japanese banks you understand Japanese investment in Honolulu. People just off the plane were getting mortgages of between two and five percent, and they could borrow up to 120 per cent of the purchase price.”
“The Japanese love Disney memorabilia – Mickey Mouse, especially. But they’re also into quality. Hermès opened a store in Honolulu strictly for the Japanese market. We’re talking silk shirts at thirteen hundred dollars a pop.”
“They used to pee in the sink,” a hotelier was reminiscing, smiling at the memory. “This was only ten or fifteen years ago, in a good hotel – well-to-do guests. They stood on the toilet seat to do a number two. I guess they were used to poor sanitation in the
ir country. They stretched out on the lobby seats and had naps. They walked in the public rooms in their pajamas – kimonos, whatever. We had to print notices. ‘Please do not pee in the sink.’”
Across the lawn, Japanese tycoons looking deceptively child-like were clustered around Arnold Palmer – his name was impossibly difficult for them to pronounce. They had flown in from Tokyo for the tournament, and here they were proferring their caps and visors for him to sign, which he did without a protest.
One of those Japanese gentlemen moved into Plumeria Bungalow after Arnold Palmer had moved out. Each day a stretch limousine drew up to the front door and the family – father, mother, four children – disappeared inside and, hidden by its black windows, were whisked away. But they were soon back in the bungalow garden, sniffing flowers and thrashing in the pool.
A sort of bungalow fever afflicted the golfers. Gary Player wanted co bring the butler with him to South Africa, and he was so taken by the bungalow’s design that he asked the management for a copy of the architect’s plans. One of the other golfers – Nicklaus, I was told – also insisted on a copy of the floor plan. And all of them said they would be back, as soon as possible: the luxury had not been exaggerated, nor had the daily rate put them off. Or did they get it free? Some of them were walking billboards. Lee Trevino had a contract to wear a hat advertising a Japanese make of car – and he never took the hat off. A prominent golfer like Trevino could get half a million dollars to wear one of those hats. They wore patches on their shirts. They had big visible logos on their golf-bags. They would have called themselves sportsmen, but some of them were merely glorified sandwich boards.
Gillian, the woman who had told me the price of the bungalows and added memorably, That includes continental breakfast, stopped in at Orchid Bungalow to make sure I was comfortable.
“I am very comfortable,” I said.
The bungalow had two enormous bedrooms, each with its own spa area – steam bath, whirlpool bath, orchid garden; a central lounge area was about half the size of a basketball court, with a cathedral ceiling, and the entertainment center in the southwest corner of the lounge was supplied with a television, VCR, tape deck and CD player.
I could have added, I often sleep in a tent.
This bungalow had recently figured in an episode of the popular television show, “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” she said. She pointed out how the tables and some of the furniture had been cut from solid blocks of Italian marble, that the carpets had been loomed in England using the designer’s marble-matching pattern of burgundy and gray. Had I noticed the bar – seventeen full bottles of liquor? She wondered whether I had any questions about the pool, which was exclusively mine, as was the outdoor jacuzzi nearby.
“We put out some CDs we thought you might like,” she said.
Kenny Rogers, Fleetwood Mac, Eric Clapton, Cher. Never mind. I had a whole catalogue to choose from.
“The chef will be over shortly to take your instructions for lunch and dinner,” she said, and she vanished.
That was something I was to take for granted – the sudden apparition of a butler or a maid, setting out fruit juice or caviar, skimming the pool, bearing flowers or fruit. It was all accomplished without a sound, as though these people trembled a few inches above the floor. Any request I made was carried out instantly, gracefully and without any pomposity – no Jeeves nonsense, but rather speed and a smile, from Richard, my personal pool attendant, to Orrin my butler, who served the meals and opened the champagne.
Each morning before I did anything else I strolled from the bedroom to the lounge and opened the sliders to the lanai, walked around the pool to the edge of my domain, where a fishpond, my own fishpond, with appropriately big fish circulating in it, separated me from the beach. There were coconut palms leaning over the sand, and the lagoon at the edge of the bay was greener than the sea. The beach was mine, the whole Pacific was mine, all the happy isles of Oceania; and so was this luxury bungalow. But wasn’t my chef a trifle overdue? When I saw a human being on the beach I became slightly miffed and pouted in my luxury bungalow, wondering whether I should summon my security guard, until I remembered that in Hawaii the beaches are for everyone.
The momentary sense of violation at seeing another person on the beach, the glimpse of Friday’s footprint, in a manner of speaking, helped me to understand how quickly I became habituated to this billionaire’s life. Hey, I could get used to this! people say, when something unexpectedly pleasant comes their way. They are telling the truth. To rephrase Tolstoy, All luxury is the same, but misery for each person is miserable in its own way. And it is the easiest thing in the world to become corrupted by the good life. Once you have flown first-class in an airline an economy seat is intolerable: after you have tasted luxury you are changed, and there is no cure for it. Pain does not create a long-lasting memory, but the memory of luxury exerts itself for ever. That is wonderful, the memory of happiness being so strong, but I can imagine circumstances when it might become a curse. It could be a crueller punishment than torture – giving a person a taste of heaven, creating a habit, and then whisking the victim away to suffer without it.
The hitch at Orchid Bungalow was that the day was not long enough. I wanted to read, lie in the sun, exercise, swim, sit in the jacuzzi, eat lengthy sumptuous meals, drink champagne and listen to music all at once. I discovered that some of these activities could be combined. Now I understood why many multimillionaires – Axel Springer and Somerset Maugham were but two – received annual injections of longevity potions. The science of life-extension is funded by a large number of very wealthy individuals, who have the most selfish motives. There is something about the pure effortless pleasure of being hoggishly, sluttishly rich that must make you want to live longer.
The fact that the sun was shining on me out of a cloudless sky in what was by any reckoning one of the most beautiful places in the world only enhanced what was already wonderful. It is hard to improve on bliss, but Orchid Bungalow proved that it was possible. The only way I could imagine myself happier, more comfortable or contented, was to have someone else to share that bliss with.
“What if I wanted to have a dinner party?” I asked the chef, Piet Wigmans, when he came to take my order one day. “Say six people.”
“Anything you like,” he said. He suggested the food we might have – the various local fish, tuna and opakapaka (snapper), shrimp from Oahu, crabs and so forth. There were also Maine lobsters, New Zealand mussels, Chilean asparagus, fresh avocados and passion fruit – and he was a master chef; he had run great kitchens in San Francisco and Dorado Beach. (“How did you make out in Puerto Rico?” I asked. He replied, “Fine. I have a whip.”)
I chose spicy Dungeness crab soup, followed by spinach salad with avocados. The main course would be sautéed opakapaka with citrus sauce and stir-fried baby asparagus and snowpears and garlic potatoes. For dessert, chocolate Grand Marnier soufflé. As soon as any chief mentions baby vegetables you know you’re into three figures.
“And now shall we discuss the wines?” Chef Piet asked.
We settled on the wines – four altogether – and then feeling slightly weary from all these decisions I reinvigorated myself with a swim and a little nap on my sunny lanai.
The guests, my new Hawaiian friends, were delightful – intelligent and shining with health and accomplishment, all of them residents of this little paradise and suitably impressed with my bungaloid version of Xanadu.
One of the guests was the distinguished trial lawyer George Davis, still brilliant and active at the age of eighty-three, looking a bit like Robert Frost. At one stage in the dinner he recalled the last night he spent with his doomed client Caryl Chessman, which was Chessman’s last night on earth, in 1960. Chessman had not killed anyone. He had been convicted of being involved in a bungled kidnapping – he had protested his innocence in a famous and eloquent book, which had been utterly convincing. The crime was not serious by today’s standards, and even if he had comm
itted the crime today he would not have been executed for it – it was no longer a capital offense.
That night Chessman said goodbye to his attorney. His parting words were, “George, you’re shaking hands with a dead man.” A few hours later he was gassed.
After dinner, when I was alone, I walked outside. The pool was glowing, the palms rattling, the moonlight lay liquefied on the Pacific. I sat under a jeweled sky having difficulty imagining what Death Row must be like. I took out my pocket calculator and began tapping away – peep, peep, peep. Ah, yes. At $2,500 a day, it would cost me $32 million to live in Orchid Bungalow until the year 2015, when I would be eighty-three years old.
It had only taken two days for this luxury to affect me, but it did so profoundly. It was a shock to my system that in a very short time transformed me, as luxury will – like a drug. It was wonderful being supine and semi-comatose in the sunshine, but it was also a bit like being a zoo animal – wallowing in the sort of captivating comfort that I felt would numb me and then make me fat and crazy. On the other hand, I wasn’t terribly worried: at these prices there wasn’t an earthly chance of this luxury lasting much longer.
I resisted it a little. I became reclusive and abstemious. I began living in a corner of the bungalow and working hard to break the day into three distinct parts – morning (tea and writing), afternoon (light lunch, swimming, then poaching myself into exhaustion in the hot tub), and evening which was built around one of Chef Piet’s dinners, an elaborately choreographed event, no matter what was on the menu – usually a hundred dollars’ worth of sealife so deliciously prepared that I stopped asking the butler for the Tabasco sauce.
The sun shone unceasingly upon the sea, and the hump-back – my daily whale – bucked and slapped just offshore. I was living in all this Hawaiian splendor, and yet I was also a spectator to it, enclosed by a bungalow so protective it was like a complicated organism, feeding me, cooling me, lulling me to sleep with maternal caresses. It was an existence just about summed up in the expression “splendid isolation.”