by Paul Little
Potential buyers of the set—costing €28,800 plus VAT—were also offered ‘access to an inspiring lecture by Peter Hillary and Jamling Tenzing Norgay in March 2011 in Maastricht, the Netherlands’.
CHAPTER 19
ED OF STATE
Ed was as iconic as a New Zealander can get, and never more so than when he was making self-deprecating fun of his iconic status.
‘He hated being called an icon,’ says Alexa Johnston. ‘ “What is this?” he would say. “It doesn’t mean anything.” One day I went around and June told me Ed had said that morning, “I don’t want to get out of bed.” She had pulled the duvet off and he said, “You can’t do that to me—I’m an icon.” ’ ‘He ticked all the boxes in terms of the New Zealand psyche,’ says Graeme Dingle. ‘Big, rugged-looking, apparently humble, not given to talking a lot, no talking about the deeds, being accessible to people.’
The ingenuity. The can-do attitude. The stoicism. The humble origins that gave egalitarian credibility. But he was also the anti-Kiwi who only got where he did by possessing a lot of qualities that New Zealanders lack and in some cases reject—ambitious, a ruthless competitor, an active citizen, happy to give others the benefit of his opinion on matters of public interest. These are other countries’ virtues, not New Zealand’s.
With his stature came an immunity to criticism, which his son and daughter sometimes struggled with. New Zealand needed Ed to be perfect—and insisted he was, even though Ed himself was forthright about his failings in print and in interviews. He was equally candid about his strengths.
‘There is a need in society [for] figures [that] can’t be criticised,’ says Sarah. ‘It makes them feel reassured that there is someone they can believe in or that will do the right thing.’
Sarah and Peter say that even with complete strangers who had never met Ed, any differing view they might have of their father was not allowed to prevail. Everyone made the Ed Hillary they needed, and there was no shifting the image.
‘He was a complicated person,’ says Peter. ‘It’s a good thing we illuminate and uplift some ideals. People come up to me all the time and they tell me what the facts are for them about Ed Hillary. There is no point me saying “No, that’s not right,” because that’s what it is for them.’
Tom Scott’s youthful experience of the legend was no doubt typical of the experience of many thousands of young people in the 1960s: ‘Ed’s story meant more to me than any other, growing up in New Zealand,’ says Scott. ‘I remember reading a School Friend magazine that my sister used to get from England and it said, “New Zealand is a mountainous country with fast flowing rivers. The boys play rugby and the girls join marching teams and a New Zealander, Hillary, climbed Mt Everest.” I read this in our house in Feilding and thought [. . .] it sounded like the dullest place on earth. And the one thing that made it special at all—the one and only thing . . . Ed was our point of difference. Something magical and heroic and historic had been done by a New Zealander. He was hugely important to us.’
Ed’s continuing successes over decades played a large part in making New Zealanders feel they wanted to belong to their country. If it could produce someone like him, maybe it had something going for it.
Fifty years later, after Ed’s death, the same sentiment was being expressed in online tributes from ordinary people moved to post comments: ‘A New Zealander that all New Zealanders identified with and a New Zealander that all of the world had heard of. A man from a different era when there were still truly dangerous and wonderful adventures to be had,’ said one. ‘Sir Edmund Hillary, a great man, a hero, a historic figure, a Kiwi,’ echoed another. ‘I have shared with my students the accomplishments of this man from a small, but strong nation. As I tell them to reach for their dreams, and strive for greatness, his name is always very prevalent in those conversations. He is, and will continue to be, one of the greatest examples of the human spirit.’
‘I have a memory of him talking about what he’d been doing in Nepal,’ says Alexa Johnston, ‘and I remember thinking how lucky we were to have a national hero who was also a good person, hadn’t just made a lot of money for himself. He had done exciting things; but he had that core belief that it is worthwhile, if you’ve got a chance to do something to make other people’s lives better, you might as well do it.’
Ed seems to have been genuinely unaware of the magnitude of his celebrity. He once spoke at a dinner at Waikato University attended by a group of retired Americans. Afterwards June mentioned to Ed that some of the men were in tears. ‘What did I say?’ asked Ed, concerned that he may have inadvertently upset them. ‘He didn’t realise,’ says Johnston, ‘that these men were overwhelmed with emotion at speaking to this man they had worshipped all their lives.’
Some hoped a little of Ed’s glamour might rub off on them by association. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was famously caught out when she hinted that she had been named after Ed. It’s possible her parents had heard of the beekeeper before 1947, when she was born; but not likely.
People often wondered how Ed handled fame. In fact, he adapted it to suit his needs. ‘I think that he made a deliberate decision in 1953 when he was knighted straight after the expedition,’ says Dingle, ‘that that was the end of his normal life. He would essentially be a servant of people and he would accept the glory, the glamour; but it came with a huge price. Even in his eighties he was attending functions almost every day and night. There is no way that, if someone wanted a life of their own, they could do that. I think he was bemused by it. My sense is that the realisation of how famous he was grew as he got older.’
He never expected rewards, and so he never lost a little boy’s sense of wonder at the good things that came his way as a byproduct of fame.
Dick Blum is a wealthy American who met Ed when Blum was trekking in Nepal in the 1970s. As a result, Blum founded the American Himalayan Foundation. ‘It gives huge amounts of money for things like restoring frescoes in Tibetan monasteries and literacy programs for street kids,’ says Johnston. When Johnston knew Blum’s 60th birthday was coming up, she asked Ed if he was going. ‘Alexa, do you know what?’ said Ed. ‘I can’t believe this. Dick said there’s three people he wants at his birthday—Jimmy Carter, the Dalai Lama and me.’
‘And he burst out laughing.’
Ed also never failed to honour a commitment once it was made, no matter who was offering an alternative. He was invited to lunch with the Queen to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Everest climb, but declined because he had agreed to be in Nepal on that day. However, he was available the following day for a memorial service.
‘The good thing is,’ he said, according to Johnston, ‘Dick has offered to fly me from Kathmandu to London. He’s got a Lear jet. I’ve never been in a Lear jet—they’ve got beds and everything.’
He had an innocent’s attitude to money, which was once a very New Zealand virtue. Peter Hillary told the story at Ed’s funeral of how his father had been rung and invited to do an ad for a breakfast cereal. There was just one problem—Ed didn’t like that particular brand of cereal. The agency said that didn’t matter—all he needed to do was say the words and get the money. ‘Unfortunately, it matters to me,’ said Ed.
Of all the honours he received, the most singular was his selection to be the face on the New Zealand five-dollar note. Customarily, living people are not depicted on currency, because of the remote possibility they may—no matter how respected or apparently virtuous—subsequently do something to tarnish their reputations. This was never going to happen with Ed.
In 1953 New Zealand was, as Scott noted, just developing its own identity, and Ed’s career played a part in that development. Acting Prime Minister Keith Holyoake, announcing the success on Everest, sounds uncertain as to what country he belongs to: ‘I’m able to announce that a news flash has just come through advising us that the New Zealander Hillary has succeeded in conquering Mt Everest. [. . .] Hillary has indeed mounted to the top of the world—and h
e has put the British race and New Zealand there with him.’
Ed, on his first visit to England, noted that he felt, as many New Zealanders did in those years, right at ‘Home’. But he didn’t feel that way for long, and he soon became keenly aware of the differences between the two countries. He told Johnston a story about walking along a street in London and being yelled at by someone from a passing car, ‘Good on you, Ed. You’ve done very well for your country.’ Back in New Zealand he encountered someone who said ‘Good on you, Ed. You’ve done very well for yourself.’
But Ed didn’t do nearly as well for himself as he might have. His lack of interest in material comforts and possessions was a big part of the legend. He certainly made money from his fame, but not nearly as much as he could have if he had knuckled down and taken every promotional opportunity that came his way.
Ed was often described as an ordinary human being, and New Zealand is one of the few countries that rates being ordinary as a cardinal virtue. He was, of course, anything but. He was down-to-earth, which is not the same thing at all. Yet he had some of the trappings of ordinariness, such as keeping his listing in the phone book.
Hilary remembers calls from America in the middle of the night; the caller oblivious to the fact of a time difference between their country and Remuera Road. ‘Kids would ring up asking for contributions to their school projects. Ed, when he was there, would talk to them.’
He was accessible to a degree that verged on the brink of self-harm. ‘He used to have a page for his diary in his pocket,’ says Johnston. ‘I was there looking through things at the kitchen table. The phone rang and it was somebody coming to New Zealand and they wanted to bring something for him to sign. They’d always say: “I bet you don’t get this very often. I’m only here for a few days.” It was happening all the time, of course. He’d get out his diary and say, “Yeah there’s a gap at 10.30 on that day. You can come then.” ’
People often brought five-dollar notes to the house for Ed to sign. The bearers were always ushered in, despite June’s frequent protestations: ‘You don’t have to bring them in, Ed.’
‘Oh, I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t leave them at the front door.’
One national archetype he didn’t embody was that of the man alone. He was a very sociable being. As we have seen, mountaineering is a strange mixture of solitary and group activity. All Ed’s favourite things involved large groups of people. When Ed invited you to a party, you turned up, says Graeme Dingle. ‘Sometimes we would plan expeditions, but it was more a spur of the moment thing. If we decided we were going to do something, we would just do it; and if we had an opinion about something he didn’t agree with, he wouldn’t take any notice anyway. But usually we would just have parties at the house and everyone would have a great time. There would never be arguments, but there would be heated discussions with people.’
That sociable host is in sharp contrast to the lonely boy taking the long train ride to Auckland Grammar. Lonely people often develop a very gregarious persona. Over his life, Ed developed from being a boy who did things on his own, to being a young man who could meld comfortably into a group of mountain climbers, to being someone who was at home addressing large crowds, to finally being everyone’s friend with his name in the phone book so that people could always contact him.
He shaped his celebrity to suit his values, rather than compromising his values to deal with celebrity. Johnston says the representatives from National Geographic—which helped sponsor the Auckland Museum show—who travelled to New Zealand were stunned to learn they would be visiting the hero in his own home. And further stunned to find no staff or hangers-on—just Johnston, June and Ed.
‘Maybe that’s impossible to achieve for famous people now,’ says Johnston, ‘but he did, and I think you just have to decide that’s the kind of life you want to have.’
‘It was what he chose,’ echoes Dingle. ‘The curious thing is that he almost treated total strangers like he would treat his friends and family. There was no distinction, and that brutal honesty was quite evident with his friends and family too.’
Ed never lost the egalitarian spirit that had been bred into him as a child. ‘I never thought Ed was ordinary,’ says Tom Scott. ‘But he didn’t expect special treatment. He was as friendly to a stranger as he would have been to a king. [. . .] He didn’t have two Ed Hillarys—a persona for the commoner and one for the king. He was the same with everyone.’
Peter Hillary thinks there was a difference between the private and public Ed Hillary, and that there is nothing exceptional in that: ‘I think what Walt Whitman wrote—“We are multitudes”—that’s the case of every single person, and with Ed Hillary too. You have got the person on stage; you have the person who is reading their book in the evening, being themselves in their own time.’
‘You’ve got the person who is confident and the person with doubts,’ says Sarah. ‘I think emotionally he was a bit fragile. That’s probably where our mother provided an incredibly important strength in his life.’
Will there ever be another Ed? Graeme Dingle doesn’t think so. ‘We say Ed is the greatest New Zealander ever. Look at [Maori leader] Sir Apirana Ngata—he made a huge difference to the whole country. He probably made a far greater contribution to New Zealand than Ed Hillary ever did, but we forget about those people. In 50 years, ask young people what they think of Ed Hillary. They will have no idea who he was. Just someone who climbed a mountain somewhere.’
New Zealanders also needed to think of Ed as humble and self-effacing. He was no braggart; but he was very well aware of his achievements: ‘Dad would be self-effacing and he would be humble,’ says Peter, ‘but that doesn’t mean you’re not as driven as the most driven A-type CEOs that we more typically talk about. I was asked to speak at the Wharton School of Business in Pennsylvania. They were talking about leaders and expeditionary leaders—in particular Scott, Shackleton, Amundsen and Ed Hillary. I was talking about this apparently quite humble side—it is very well known of that type of leader who is an incredibly ruthless and driven leader. Dad’s CV doesn’t speak of a person who just wandered along and tripped over and said “Oh I got to Mt Everest,” and then tripped over and said “Oh I got to the South Pole,” tripped over and said, “Blow me, I have got 42 schools—how did that happen?” ’
He was also atypical of his countrymen in his willingness to laugh at himself. Tom Scott and Mark Sainsbury became such good friends with Ed at least in part because they made fun of him. ‘For most of his life, people were reasonably servile and treated him as this sort of demi-god,’ recalls Sainsbury, who, on the other hand, used to tease the great man with: ‘Oh Ed—this guy’s climbed Everest six times, and you’ve done it once and lived off it forever.’ Sainsbury recalls: ‘He quite liked that.’ He was enormously amused when Sainsbury, in a mock interview, put it to him that the first thing he did atop Everest was roll Mallory out of the way.
‘In the early Himalayan years, he was closest to those who could make him laugh,’ says Norm Hardie. ‘The clowns. They were Lowe, Mulgrew, then Wilson . . . These men could imitate the questioners who annoyed Ed, or even copy Ed himself.’
Graeme Dingle’s sense of humour appears to have been not quite so in tune with Ed’s. ‘I was just mischievous and played pranks on him. The first night we went camping, we were walking into the Everest area and we were sitting by a campfire. There were a whole lot of Sherpas sitting around the campfire. I thought this looks like a beautiful picture, so I set my camera on the tripod and take a picture of all the faces shining in the firelight. I wanted some smiles so I said to Mike Gill. “Hey, what can I say to make them laugh?” ’
Gill told Dingle what to say—the local equivalent of ‘my penis won’t rest’. The women laughed and Dingle got a happy picture, but Ed was not so amused. A certain reticence in such matters is also in tune with one side of the New Zealand personality.
Ed’s old-fashioned courtliness popped up frequently. When Alexa Johnston as
ked him to sign her personal copy of An Extraordinary Life he asked, ‘Do you mind if I put “Affectionately”?’
Alongside the Himalayan Trust work Ed leaves a legacy, both domestic and global, of inspiration. It’s a role he’s filled every day since 29 May 1953.
Kevin Biggar, whose polar and transatlantic projects Ed supported, had been inspired by Ed’s ‘ordinariness’, describing it as having ‘a really profound effect. You want someone like him to have a third lung or supersize heart. Then you realise the only difference between him and me is that he’s done these things.’
That Ed was so obviously mortal put young admirers in a catch–22 situation. If someone ordinary can do amazing things so can you. If you can do amazing things, then you have no excuse not to.
If Ed Hillary hadn’t existed, New Zealand would have had to invent him. For the tiny, isolated, sparsely populated country to have a figure of global stature living at home was a source of pride, if not amazement, and contributed enormously to national self-esteem. There was no other candidate with the right mix of qualities. He reflected everything the country wanted to believe about itself. In some cases, as we have seen, those beliefs were accurate. In others, they were not.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BOOKS
Climbing the Pole: Edmund Hillary and the Trans-Antarctic Expedition 1955–1958, John Thomson, The Erskine Press, 2010
Edmund Hillary: The Life of a Legend, Pat Booth, Moa Beckett, 1993
First Across the Roof of the World, Graeme Dingle and Peter Hillary, Hodder & Stoughton, 1982
From the Ocean to the Sky, Edmund Hillary, Hodder & Stoughton, 1979