The Sunday Gentleman

by Irving Wallace

  After relinquishing his leadership of the Cause in 1954, Father Eric O’Brien moved into the Serra Retreat in Malibu, California, and there he dwells at present, devoting his peaceful, contemplative days to retreat work, such as giving time to lay Catholics, and to writing. His writing, of course, concerns his old friend, Junípero Serra. According to a recent issue of the Apostle of California, a quarterly bulletin that keeps all Serrans informed of the advances being made in the Cause for the Canonization of Junípero Serra:

  “The ascetical stature of the candidate presented for canonization is the most important consideration in the eyes of the Sacred Congregation of Rites. This particular aspect of Padre Junípero Serra has been the specialty of the Rev. Eric O’Brien, O.F.M. It is his intention to compose an ascetical ‘life’ of California’s Apostle. The friends of the Cause not only wish him every success in this distinctive endeavor, they pledge their prayers…”

  Meanwhile, the Cause goes marching on. The players change. The goal is the same. Not until four years after Father O’Brien had gone into his ocean-side retreat was there an official replacement named for him. In July of 1958, the Reverend Noel F. Moholy was appointed the new Vice-Postulator of the Cause. Father Moholy, a wiry, middle-aged native of San Francisco, was not a stranger to Junípero Serra. After being ordained a priest in 1941, Father Moholy taught languages and theology in California, did graduate work in Quebec, and then resumed teaching—but for five of those years he had collaborated with Father O’Brien. During the entire period that Father O’Brien had been in Rome, and for more than a year afterward. Father Moholy had served as his American administrator of the Serra Cause.

  Upon succeeding Father O’Brien as the main leader of the Cause, Father Moholy applied himself to promotion of sainthood for the California Apostle with as much vigor as his predecessor had shown. Working out of the Old Mission Santa Barbara—which he had helped restore and expand through his fund-raising campaigns—Father Moholy threw himself into writing, and appeared on radio and television, in a further effort to impress upon the Vatican and the world the Serra Cause.

  In 1961, Father Moholy took on as an aide the scholarly Father Florian Guest, sending him to Rome to continue the historical phase of the work. In Rome, Father Guest found that the next hurdle to be overcome was the requirement that all the basic Serra findings be translated into Italian. Father Guest accepted the challenge, but before he could proceed very far with the project, he fell ill. A little more than a year after entering Rome, the ailing Father Guest was forced to return to Los Angeles.

  Today, under the guidance of the new Vice-Postulator, Father Guest, who is attached to St. Joseph’s Church in Los Angeles, is slowly going ahead with the Italian translation of the voluminous Serra case.

  As Father Guest explained to me: “The historical work for the Serra Cause is to be completed in two volumes, both in Italian. The first is to contain a translation of all the most important documents bearing on the Cause, together with a critical introduction to them. The second is to include the historical proof that Junípero Serra practiced heroic virtue. When these two volumes are completed and approved, Serra’s Cause will have been canonically introduced. Partly because of the large number of Causes being considered by the Sacred Congregation of Rites, the work may be prolonged for several years. The Franciscan Order alone is promoting the Causes of 190 candidates for the honors of the altar.”

  Because of the competition from the large number of other candidates for sainthood, because six proved miracles are needed for Serra’s beatification and for his canonization, some supporters of the Cause believe that it may be another ten years before the California Apostle is presented for the final judgment in Rome.

  But the promoters of the Serra Cause have been trained in patience. They remind themselves that it took more than five hundred years for Joan of Arc to be made a saint. They know that it took forty years for Pope Pius X to be so recognized. Yet, most encouraging is the fact that Mother Elizabeth Seton—the remarkable New York-born Protestant convert to Catholicism, who bore her husband five children before she was widowed, and who died in Baltimore in 1821—required only twenty-three years to attain beatification, the almost certain prelude to canonization. Mother Seton’s Cause was introduced in 1940, and she was beatified and praised by Pope John XXIII in 1963.

  The Serrans know the odds they must overcome. Since the founding of the Church of St. Peter, the Vatican has raised perhaps twenty-five thousand of its own to sainthood. In the three and a half centuries since the Church began listing its saints, there have been fewer than three hundred who have been canonized. Despite these awesome odds, despite the fact that there are nearly 1,200 candidates, including five popes and thirteen cardinals, contending for sainthood in Rome at the moment, despite the fact that there are 190 of their own order among these candidates, the California Franciscans remain confident that Father Serra will ultimately be so honored.

  One hundred and eighty years have passed since Father Junípero Serra, that “useless servant of God,” as he characterized himself, died in Carmel, California. Only thirty years have passed since the Franciscan Order first undertook to prove that Father Junípero Serra was worthy of international veneration and prayer. Ten more years of effort seem little enough when weighed against the magnitude of the success in sight. Then, if the human race has survived, there will be time enough for those who are believers to enjoy the guidance and pray for the miracles they hope the vision of the lame, old, courageous padre, Mallorcan and Californian, with his hard-won halo, will provide. Amen.

  5

  Everybody’s Rover Boy

  One day in the year 1890, Miss Nellie Bly, of the New York World, came roaring into Brooklyn on a special train from San Francisco. In a successful effort to beat Phileas Fogg’s fictional 80 days around the world, Miss Bly, traveling with two handbags and flannel underwear, had circled the globe in 72 days, 6 hours, and 11 minutes. Immortality awaited her.

  Elsewhere that same year, another less-publicized globe-girdler made his start toward immortality. He was Mr. Burton Holmes, making his public debut with slides and anecdotes (“Through Europe With a Kodak”) before the Chicago Camera Club. Mr. Holmes, while less spectacular than his feminine rival, was destined, for that very reason, soon to dethrone her as America’s number-one traveler.

  Today, Miss Bly and Mr. Holmes have one thing in common: In the mass mind they are legendary vagabonds relegated to the dim and dusty past of the Iron Horse and the paddle-wheel steamer. But if Miss Bly, who shuffled off this mortal coil in 1922, is now only a part of our folklore, there are millions to testify that Mr. Burton Holmes, aged seventy-six, is still very much with us.

  Remembering that Mr. Holmes was an active contemporary of Miss Bly’s, that he was making a livelihood at traveling when William McKinley, John L. Sullivan, and Admiral Dewey ruled the United States, when Tony Pastor, Lily Langtry, and Lillian Russell ruled the amusement world, it is at once amazing and reassuring to pick up the daily newspapers of 1946 and find, sandwiched between advertisements of rash young men lecturing on “Inside Stalin” and “I Was Hitler’s Dentist,” calm announcements that tomorrow evening, Mr. Burton Holmes has something more to say about “Beautiful Bali.”

  Burton Holmes, a brisk, immaculate, chunky man with gray Vandyke beard, erect bearing, precise speech (“Folks are always mistaking me for Monty Woolley,” he says, not unhappily), is one of the seven wonders of the entertainment world. As Everyman’s tourist, Burton Holmes has crossed the Atlantic Ocean thirty times, the Pacific Ocean twenty times, and has gone completely around the world six times. He has spent fifty-five summers abroad, and recorded a half million feet of film of those summers. He was the first person to take motion picture cameras into Russia and Japan. He witnessed the regular decennial performance of the Passion Play at Oberammergau in 1890, and attended the first modern Olympics at Athens in 1896. He rode on the first Trans-Siberian train across Russia, and photographed the world’s firs
t airplane meet at Rheims.

  As the fruit of these travels, Burton Holmes has delivered approximately 8,000 illustrated lectures that have grossed, according to an estimate by Variety, five million dollars in fifty-three winters. Because he does not like to be called a lecturer—“I'm a performer,” he insists, “and I have performed on more legitimate stages than platforms”—he invented the word “travelogue” in London to describe his activity.

  His travelogues, regarded as a fifth season of the year in most communities, have won him such popularity that he holds the record for playing in the longest one-man run in American show business. In the five and a half decades past, Burton Holmes has successively met the hectic competition of big-time vaudeville, stage, silent pictures, radio, and talking pictures, and he has survived them all.

  At an age when most men have retired to slippered ease or are grounded by high blood pressure, Burton Holmes is more active and more popular than ever before. In the season just finished, which he started in San Francisco during September, 1945, and wound up in New York during April, 1946, Holmes appeared in 187 shows, a record number. He averaged six travelogues a week, spoke for two hours at each, and did 30 percent more box-office business than five years ago. Not once was a scheduled lecture postponed or canceled. In fact, he has missed only two in his life. In 1935, flying over the Dust Bowl, he suffered laryngitis and was forced to bypass two college dates. He has never canceled an appearance before a paid city audience. Seven years ago, when one of his elderly limbs was fractured in an automobile crack-up in Finland, there was a feeling that Burton Holmes might not make the rounds. When news of the accident was released, it was as if word had gone out that Santa Claus was about to cancel his winter schedule. But when the 1939 season dawned. Burton Holmes rolled on the stage in a wheelchair, and from his seat of pain (and for 129 consecutive appearances thereafter), he delivered his travel chat while 16-mm film shimmered on the screen beside him.

  Today, there is little likelihood that anything, except utter extinction, could keep Holmes from his waiting audiences. Even now, between seasons. Holmes is in training for his next series—150 illustrated lectures before groups in seventeen states.

  Before World War II, accompanied by Margaret Oliver, his wife of thirty-two years. Holmes would spend his breathing spells on summery excursions through the Far East or Europe. While aides captured scenery on celluloid, Holmes wrote accompanying lecture material in his notebooks. Months later, he would communicate his findings to his cult, at a maximum price of $1.50 per seat. With the outbreak of war, Holmes changed his pattern. He curtailed travel outside the Americas. This year, except for one journey to Las Vegas, Nevada, where he personally photographed cowboy cut-ups and shapely starlets at the annual Helldorado festival. Holmes has been allowing his assistants to do all his traveling for him.

  Recently, one crew, under cameraman Thayer Soule, who helped shoot the Battle of Tarawa for the Marines, brought Holmes a harvest of new film from Mexico. Another crew, after four months in Brazil last year, and two in its capital this year, returned to Holmes with magnificent movies. Meantime, other crews, under assignment from Holmes, are finishing films on Death Valley, the West Indies, and the Mississippi River.

  In a cottage behind his sprawling Hollywood hilltop home. Holmes is busy, day and night, sorting the incoming negative, cutting and editing it, and rewriting lectures that will accompany the footage this winter. He is too busy to plan his next trip. Moreover, he doesn’t feel that he should revisit Europe yet. “I wouldn’t mind seeing it,” he says, “but I don’t think my public would be interested. My people want a good time, they want escape, they want sweetness and light, beauty and charm. There’s too much rubble and misery over there now, and I’ll let those picture magazines and Fox Movietone newsreels show all that. I’ll wait until it’s tourist time again.”

  When he travels, he thinks he will visit three of the four accessible places on earth that he has not yet seen. One is Tahiti, which he barely missed a dozen times, and the other two are Iran and Iraq. The remaining country—that he has not seen, and has no wish to see, is primitive Afghanistan. Of all cities on earth, he would most like to revisit Kyoto, once capital of Japan. He still recalls that the first movies ever-made inside Japan were ones he made in Kyoto, in 1899. The other cities he desires to revisit are Venice and Rome. The only island for which he has any longing is Bali—“the one quaint spot on earth where you can really get away from it all.”

  In preparing future subjects, Holmes carefully studies the success of his past performances. Last season, his two most popular lectures in the East were “California” and “Adventures in Mexico.” The former grossed $5,100 in two Chicago shows; the latter jammed the St. Louis Civic Auditorium with thirty-five hundred potential señores and señoritas. Holmes will use these subjects again, with revisions, next season, and add some brand-new Latin American and United States topics. He will sidestep anything relating to war. He feels, for example, that anything dealing with the once exotic Pacific islands might have a questionable reception—“people will still remember those white crosses they saw in newsreels of Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima.”

  Every season presents its own obstacles, and the next will challenge Holmes with a new audience of travel-sated and disillusioned ex-GI’s. Many of these men, and their families, now know that a South Sea island paradise means mosquitoes and malaria and not Melville’s Fayaway and Loti’s Rarahu. They know Europe means mud and ruins and not romance.

  Nevertheless, Holmes is confident that he will win these people over.

  “The veterans of World War II will come to my travelogues just as their fathers did. After the First World War, I gave illustrated lectures on the sights of France, and the ex-doughboys enjoyed them immensely. But I suppose there’s no use comparing that war to this. The First World War was a minor dispute between gentlemen. In this one, the atrocities and miseries will be difficult to forget. I know I can’t give my Beautiful Italy lecture next season to men who know Italy only as a pigsty, but you see, in my heart Italy is forever beautiful, and I see things in Italy they can’t see, poor fellows. How could they?… Still, memory is frail, and one day these boys will forget and come to my lectures not to hoot but to relive the better moments and enjoy themselves.”

  While Burton Holmes prepares his forthcoming shows, his business manager, a slightly built dynamo named Walter Everest, works on next season’s bookings. Everest contacts organizations interested in sponsoring a lecture series, arranges dates and prices, and often leases auditoriums on his own. Everest concentrates on cities where Holmes is known to be popular, Standing Room Only cities like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles. On the other hand, he is cautious about the cities where Holmes has been unpopular in the past—Toledo, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Cincinnati. The one city Holmes now avoids entirely is Pomona, California, where, at a scheduled Saturday matinee, he found himself facing an almost empty house. The phenomenon of a good city or a poor city is inexplicable. In rare cases, there may be a reason for failure, and then Holmes will attempt to resolve it. When San Francisco was stone-deaf to Holmes, investigation showed that he had been competing with the annual opera season. Last year, he rented a theater the week before the opera began. He appeared eight times and made a handsome profit.

  Once Holmes takes to the road for his regular season, he is a perpetual-motion machine. Leaving his wife behind, he barnstorms with his manager, Everest, and a projectionist, whirling to Western dates in his Cadillac, making long hops by plane, following the heavier Eastern circuit by train. Holmes likes to amaze younger men with his activities during a typical week. If he speaks in Detroit on a Tuesday night, he will lecture in Chicago on Wednesday evening, in Milwaukee on Thursday, be back in Chicago for Friday evening and a Saturday matinee session, then go on to Kansas City on Sunday, St. Louis on Monday, and play a return engagement in Detroit on Tuesday.

  This relentless merry-go-round (with Saturday nights off to attend a n
ewsreel “and see what’s happening in the world”) invigorates Holmes, but grinds his colleagues to a frazzle. One morning last season, after weeks of trains and travel, Walter Everest was awakened by a porter at six. He rose groggily, sat swaying on the edge of his berth trying to pull on his shoes. He had the look of a man who had pushed through the Matto Grosso on foot. He glanced up sleepily, and there, across the aisle, was Holmes, fully dressed, looking natty and refreshed. Holmes smiled sympathetically. “I know, Walter,” he said, “this life is tiring. One day both of us ought to climb on some train and get away from it all.”

  In his years on the road, Holmes has come to know his audience thoroughly. He is firm in the belief that it is composed mostly of traveled persons who wish to savor the glamorous sights of the world again. Through Burton, they relive their own tours. Of the others, some regard a Holmes performance as a preview. They expect to travel; they want to know the choice sights for their future three-month jaunt to Ecuador. Some few, who consider themselves travel authorities, come to a Holmes lecture to point out gleefully the good things that he missed. “It makes them happy,” Holmes says cheerfully. Tomorrow’s audience, for the most, will be the same as the one that heard the Master exactly a year before. Generations of audiences inherit Holmes, one from the other.