After Everest

by Paul Little

  Back home, the Auckland Star was ready to go to press with fulsome front-page hosannas to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The monarch was quickly relegated to the back of the paper so that room could be found for a much more important piece of local news.

  Before he had even left Nepal, Ed had an encounter with the press that he found extremely distasteful. An Indian reporter, claiming to be acting on behalf of an English newspaper, offered him a large sum for an exclusive story. (The large sum was £8,000 in Nothing Venture, Nothing Win but had grown to £10,000 by the time of View from the Summit.) How, Ed asked, did the reporter think Ed would feel if he did such a thing when there was an agreement in place (with the London Times) covering the whole expedition?

  In a piece of sophistry that would have done any of his 21st-century equivalents proud, the reporter said the people he was acting for had felt the size of the sum would have been sufficient balm for Ed’s feelings. Ed raised a fist—he describes himself as still capable of violence in those days—and the journalist scuttled away.

  While in England on the way home, Ed stayed with his sister June in Norwich. ‘It was quite a disruption in our family,’ recalls June’s daughter Hilary. We had a lot of paparazzi after him. He had to sleep at our neighbours’ down the road, which we could get to without people seeing, going across the back fences.’

  And it wasn’t just Ed who was affected. Back home, Auckland Star journalist Pat Booth was the first to bring the news of the ascent to Ed’s parents, Percy and Gertrude. In some ways ahead of his time, before he knocked on the front door, the canny Booth primed his photographer to snap at the crucial point.

  It was Gertrude who answered. When told the news, her face lit up in an open-mouthed, wide-eyed, unrepeatable combination of shock, joy and relief. And the moment was captured in a photo that ran in the paper the next day. Although low on dignity, it could not be beaten for emotion and impact.

  Percy was livid—he was one of those people who still regarded private lives as private. The day the picture ran, Booth returned to do a follow-up interview. ‘And I was ordered off the property by Percy. “That was a disgusting photograph of my wife that you published,” he told us. So we got the photographer to take a new photo and we were allowed to stay.’

  When Ed came back, Booth went out to the house and knocked on the door again. Percy opened it. Booth recalls the conversation:

  ‘Could I have a talk to Ed?’

  ‘Sir Edmund is in bed.’

  ‘That would make a great picture.’

  ‘It would be disgusting to take a picture of a knight of the realm in bed.’

  Finally, Booth says, ‘I heard this voice from upstairs. “Oh for God’s sake, let him up, Dad.” ’ And the Star got its photo of Sir Edmund Hillary in his striped pyjamas having a lie-in and reading his mail. ‘He was a total novice with the press at that point,’ Booth comments now. When the reporter later turned up unannounced on Ed and Louise’s wedding day and Percy tried to throw him out yet again, Booth accepted it was a fair cop and went quietly.

  In general, though, when it came to the media, Ed obliged. Perhaps it was unfortunate for him that he didn’t realise at the start that he could have said no to the media. Instead he established a policy of access that he was more or less stuck with for the rest of his life.

  One of the more remarkable records of those early days is a National Film Unit short called Hillary Returns, in which the conquering hero is hailed in his hometown. It begins with Ed and George’s triumphant return to Auckland on a Sunderland flying boat, met by a crowd of thousands at Mechanics Bay. Already some romantically contrived fictions were being spun around Ed. This, the narrator tells us, is not a civic welcome but ‘a truly spontaneous greeting’ by admirers and friends: ‘All the excuse they needed was they were fellow New Zealanders.’

  It’s hard to believe the greeting was all that spontaneous, what with a public address system for Ed to use and a National Film Unit crew on hand to record it.

  It is notable in this footage that Ed’s voice does not have its characteristic booming quality—this must have developed later. The film ends with an on-camera interview, which would surprise no one. What is surprising is the choice of interviewer—Ed’s brother, Rex. No two brothers, unless their relationship was thoroughly dysfunctional—and Ed and Rex’s wasn’t—ever had a conversation like this. The two stand outdoors dressed in suits, with their hands firmly planted in their pockets.

  ‘What do you consider were the highlights of your trip to Everest?’ asks Rex.

  ‘I suppose the main highlights were the actual bits on the mountain itself,’ replies Ed. ‘The ice fall perhaps—[was] the most interesting thing . . . some of the bits of ice hanging overhead made a rather keen impression on us. And for me especially the last summit effort from the south col to the top. The effort I’ll remember for some time.’

  ‘What about that rock step—that was fairly steep wasn’t it?’

  ‘It wasn’t too bad. I was a bit worried about it at first and thought that we wouldn’t get up it, but fortunately there was a crack between the ice and the rock. I was able to get into this and wriggle my way up it.’

  ‘I believe George Lowe did a very fine job.’

  ‘Yes, George did extremely well. He did a jolly good job on the Lhotse face, which ranges from about 22 to 25,000 feet . . .’

  ‘Now, after climbing Everest, what are your impressions of the New Zealand mountains?’

  ‘Well I still think the New Zealand mountains are extremely fine ones. In fact we have wonderful mountains here. They have so much snow and ice on them that they are wonderful training for the Himalayas. The weather here is so bad that we have to be extremely careful with our climbing. [. . .] In the New Zealand alps you have to use very sound judgement and a considerable amount of care in our very difficult conditions.’

  What is remarkable is how many of Ed’s media trademarks are already in place—the gentle downplaying of achievement, while leaving the audience in no doubt of that achievement; the sincere allocation of other credit where it is due; and, of course, the conclusion with words of praise for home. The last is not especially Hillary-esque; no New Zealander would dare do otherwise.

  Ed learnt a lot about handling the media on the Everest party’s lecture tour of the UK. During this he found time to provide a foreword to the Auckland Star’s serialisation of John Hunt’s book The Ascent of Everest. In a covering letter to Pat Booth—by now a de facto Hillary editor-at-large—he said that he had learnt overseas that ‘New Zealand journalists are much more pleasant to deal with than the overseas press vultures’.

  Ed’s view of his persona was consistent and often repeated: ‘The press and the public have created an image of Ed Hillary, hero and explorer, which simply doesn’t exist. They’ve painted a picture of me as a heroic type, full of enormous courage, tremendous strength, undying enthusiasm and all the rest of it. But it’s all really just a story that’s been written up in the newspapers.’

  He is right, but it might be more accurate to say that the image he describes is half a portrait. It omits the foibles and frailties that Ed knew make a whole man.

  Ed also seemed to know from the start how to have his photo taken. Judging from many that have appeared in various media over the years, he spent a lot of time gazing up at distant mountaintops. And if there was so much as a mound anywhere near where he was being photographed, Ed would have to ascend it. In a fascinating account of Ed’s trip to the Pole the year before he died, which appeared in the Christchurch Press, John Henzell described what happened when he went to take a photo of the 87-year-old: ‘his eyes met mine and suddenly narrowed, his jaw firmed and any frailty that had previously been apparent disappeared in an instant’.

  Not every photo of Ed told the whole story however. At least one well-known shot, though not a fiction, misrepresents what was happening. In Louise Hillary’s Keep Calm If You Can, there is a photo of Ed and Ron Hayes with a magnificent bull m
oose that Ed has shot in Alaska. It’s a standard triumphant hunter composition, in which Ed stands proud and smiling, his hand resting on the beast’s antler, which is half a body length.

  In his first volume of autobiography, Nothing Venture, Nothing Win, Ed says his reaction to the killing had been one of ‘shame and disgust’. He knew how to handle a gun—he had spent a season back home as a young man shooting deer to make some money—but he was not a hunter at heart. His inner sense of fairness could not accept a contest between a firearm and a wild animal. But for the requirements of the photo, he was able to summon up a classic victory grin.

  Ed’s first book, High Adventure, appeared in 1955. There followed books on the Barun Valley expedition, the Trans-Antarctic Expedition, the attempt on Makalu and the building of Khumjung School.

  Nothing Venture, Nothing Win appeared in 1975. It was a thorough retelling in serviceable prose of each of the stories that had had their own books; and it detailed—with more frankness than might have been expected by anyone who didn’t know him—the vicissitudes of his childhood.

  ‘Ed kept a tight rein on his story,’ says TV journalist Mark Sainsbury, who got to know him in the last 20 years of his life. ‘I think he was conscious of what his legacy meant and how it could be used.’

  Ed’s own writing didn’t quite do his narrative skills justice. ‘When he sat down and wrote,’ says Tom Scott, ‘it was a job and he did it. He was a good planner of expeditions: you sit down, it has to be done. He adopted the same approach with a book. He’d work out the structure and bang it out. But he didn’t write like a raconteur. Even with his speeches he had a plan and would achieve it. It wasn’t a case of “off the cuff and drop in a few bon mots”. Yet if you were around at his place and having a few drinks and casual conversation he would be great. He was funny.’

  Naturally, with exploits and a character as conspicuous as Ed’s, stories sometimes took on a life of their own. A French newspaper once reported that Louise was going to climb Everest with an all-woman team, ‘to prove she is as good as her husband’. Following his success at the Pole, Ed was nominated by the Baltimore Sun to be the first man sent to the moon. He would no doubt have been up for it, but instead he had to settle for meeting the man who did get the job. As a final example of spin, it’s hard to beat the headline on the announcement of Ed’s death on the website Cryptomundo, devoted to Sasquatch, the Loch Ness Monster and the like: ‘Yeti hunter Sir Edmund Hillary dies’.

  It wasn’t just Ed himself who had to learn how to deal with the media. Much of Peter, Sarah and Belinda’s early years were caught on film, and not just on 8-millimetre home movies to be watched with family: chunks of their childhood were witnessed by TV audiences around the world.

  Louise refers frequently to the media presence in Keep Calm If You Can, her account of the family’s year spent based in Chicago with a 70-day sortie into the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. ‘Someone told me once Ed was a bit stupid and his wife wrote his books,’ says Scott. ‘Then you go and read his books and you read her books and you go, “Oh, no.” ’ Louise seems to have been a more natural writer than Ed, able to wring anecdotes as easily from humdrum domestic details as from adventures in Alaska.

  A constant theme in Keep Calm was the price of fame and, in particular, media intrusion, to which Louise seemed more sensitive than her husband—perhaps because she had three children to protect. She was to learn that when you have a sponsor—in this case, both the National Forest Service and Sears Roebuck—you still have to pay for what you get, albeit not in cash. When she found out that Sears would be filming the Alaskan holiday, she was horrified. ‘I think it is only natural that the wife of a well-known husband should try to hide her identity,’ she wrote; and she explained why, when she was on one occasion mistaken for a New Englander at a campground, she was happy. She was also happy to gather her brood and decamp when reporters found Ed and started throwing questions at him.

  Soon, the children had ‘become very allergic to photographers and at the first sight of them would start acting like convicts, covering their faces with their hands. [. . .] We resolve that the less the children saw of the Press, the better it would be for them and from here on Father had to hold the fort and answer all the questions while Mum and the kids crept off somewhere.’

  Almost inevitably, however, like a pride of lions being stalked for a nature documentary, the Hillarys became accustomed to having their observers around and almost forgot they were there.

  Ed’s life and adventures continued to be a subject of fascination—and ratings for TV networks—for the rest of his life. In the early 1970s he worked with director Roger Donaldson on The Adventure World of Sir Edmund Hillary, a series in which he and other stalwarts such as his son, Peter, and Graeme Dingle would dream up hair-raising escapades and carry them out on film with great aplomb.

  In 1986 there was less aplomb when Ed was the focus of an episode of This is Your Life, a popular program in its day, in which the subject was ambushed unawares for a live TV retrospective in which figures from their past were given the opportunity to reminisce nostalgically about them. The supporting cast that had been organised for Ed’s show included luminaries such as David Lange and Rajiv Gandhi. The key to the show’s success was to take the victim by surprise, which in Ed’s case proved to be more difficult than for most.

  The show was to be filmed at Auckland’s Sheraton Hotel, and diplomat Ken Richardson was employed as decoy. ‘My job was to get Ed without any knowledge to the hotel,’ says Richardson. ‘I told him I thought it was an interview about his position as high commissioner in India. He had been interviewed many times at press conferences by dozens of journalists, so he was relatively relaxed. We went to the hotel room where the make-up girl made him up. I was told at four minutes past eight, after the adverts, that the host, Bob Parker, would come in, open his book and say “Ed Hillary, this is your life—follow me.” ’

  But for once, Ed was not comfortable and he said to Richardson: ‘Look I have had interviews before and people tell me what they are about. The producer or director would tell me what they expected. Where are they?’

  ‘I don’t know. I am not the organiser.’

  Minutes ticked by and an unpleasant silence reigned.

  ‘He was quite angry,’ recalls Richardson. ‘I saw this stern side of him, which comes out in his biography.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Ken, what the hell is happening? What time is this man coming?’

  ‘I think this is just about India . . . I think.’

  ‘I don’t have it at my fingertips, the trade between New Zealand and India. If they ask me that, what am I going to say? I will look stupid. It can’t be about Everest—there’s been a lot done about that. They could ask me about what I do day by day.’ He complained that it wasn’t fair.

  Eventually, Parker appeared and Ed was, if not appeased, at least apprised of what was going on. And so the show played itself out.

  ‘That side of him was a new thing,’ says Richardson. ‘He wasn’t shouting at me, but he was just mouthing away. No one wants to look stupid.’

  A few years later in 1991 Ed was the subject of stories spread across three episodes of the nightly Holmes show. His friend, cartoonist and writer Tom Scott, was travelling to Nepal with Ed and suggested reporter Mark Sainsbury go along too, to do a story. Ed, of course, saw this as an opportunity not so much to appear on TV as to raise awareness of the work of the Himalayan Trust.

  The show’s origins were somewhat macabre, and Tom Scott gets the credit, as Sainsbury explains: ‘[Scott] said, “You should do something for the Holmes show. He could drop dead any minute. Someone needs to get this stuff.” ’

  The irony was that Ed nearly did drop dead while doing the show.

  Sainsbury was as blunt as Scott when he pitched the idea to his bosses, who approved it. At that point he went to the library to see what old footage there was; and he realised that ‘every ten years or so someone like me had done exactly the sa
me thing’.

  Ed was, as always, accommodating; he never seemed to find a TV crew intrusive. Sainsbury soon recognised that the relationship was mutual: ‘He knew the value that the media would give in terms of doing his stuff, so he went along with it.’

  Ed (and June, too) appreciated Sainsbury’s humour and lack of deference. Ed also knew exactly what the media required. Sainsbury was most impressed by his ability, at over 70, to find new angles on subjects that he had talked about, in some cases, hundreds of times over the years. The producer had initially been worried about coming up with something fresh and new, but Ed always seemed to have a nugget in reserve that no one had heard before.

  But then Ed developed a bad case of altitude sickness during a visit to Nepal—his old foe. ‘That was terrifying, having pitched this thing on the basis he might die . . .’ says Sainsbury. ‘I remember the doctor saying he was taking in as much oxygen as if he was at the top of Everest.’ With June waiting anxiously alongside her husband, they tried to get a helicopter to take the whole crew to Kathmandu. As Sainsbury narrates, ‘By evening the weather had deteriorated and so had Sir Edmund. The Kiwis maintained a vigil in his room, desperately rebuilding the oxygen equipment from the local Hillary Hospital to keep him going. In the worst of the weather Mingma Tsering, Hillary’s loyal Sherpa friend, led a party out in search of more oxygen as remaining supplies fell perilously low. By first light he was back, just in time.’ Eventually the helicopter got through and Ed quickly recovered at a lower altitude.

  Sainsbury became known as the key Ed contact. For the world media, who didn’t understand how New Zealand works, this could have some amusing sidelights: ‘Although his phone number was still in the phone book, I used to get calls from CNN: “We would like to get in touch with Sir Edmund Hillary. Can you help?” “Have you looked in the phone book?” ’