Thrilling Cities

by Ian Fleming

  For a European, the main disadvantage of the place is the high-pressure tourist atmosphere and the uniformity of the tourist and retired population – the men either bulging or scrawny, the women unshapely, blue-rinsed, rimless-glassed, and all with those tight, rather petulant mouths of the pensioned American. If they were dressed in fashions seemly to their age-group, these elderly hordes would fade into the background; but, to me, there is something infinitely depressing in thousands of sixty-eight-year-olds in Hawaiian or any other fancy dress – the men with aloha shirts and slacks or, worse, knee-length shorts; the women in over-decorated straw hats and ghastly Mother Hubbards known as ‘muumuus’, or other hideous confections described in the shops as ‘holokus’, ‘flounced holomuus’ or, for the cocktail hour, ‘sheath tea-timers’. On the beach, as I was later to observe, these elderly ghouls looked even worse without their muumuus – huge, blue-veined, dimpled thighs, scrawny necks and sagging bosoms garlanded with leis, their broken – down, spavined spouses trailing behind carrying the coconut mats, the sun oil, the bath robes and the Wall Street Journal. And, alas, in this and in other similar resorts, there are so few young people to relieve the eye and restore one’s faith in the human race. The young people cannot afford the fare or the cost of these resorts. If I were a Sheraton or a Hilton, I would reserve a proportion of my hotel space for young and attractive people and put them up for next to nothing, both to gladden the eye of the more hideous customers and perhaps to shame them into dressing their age.

  Having had breakfast and thought these harsh thoughts, I decided to get some of the bile out of my system on a surf board. By now the whole sea in front of me, to about half a mile out where the waves began to gather, was crowded with flying figures and, though I had never tried the sport before, the guidebook I had purchased at the airport said that if I could swim and ride a bicycle I could learn to surf. ‘South Sea Scotty’ Guletz, who wrote the guide, was, in my case, mistaken.

  I hired a beautiful pale-blue board. It was the Malibu model, made of balsa wood and coated with fibreglass. It cost one dollar per hour. The board is about ten feet long and weighs thirty-five pounds. I found that even to lie on it and paddle with both hands out towards the distant starting point was no mean feat, and I was several times capsized by the waves before I even got to the fringe of the riders. (I later discovered that the beach-boy should not have hired me a surf board without having some assurance that I could handle it, particularly since the son of an American admiral from Pearl Harbor had been killed the week before in a welter of crashing boards capsized by a particularly gigantic wave.) However, knowing nothing of this, I paddled on through the speeding experts who bore down on me with every wave, and in due course I was the requisite half-mile from the shore. I lay for a while and admired the beautiful distant hills and the whizzing sunburnt nymphets flying laughing by, Venuses on the half-shell, pursued by sleekly fat Hawaiian beach-boys, and tried to keep out of the way of their hurtling boards.

  This surf-riding elite, composed of local shop-girls and boys from the town who seem to have nothing else to do from dawn till dusk but ride the waves, reminded me of those other superior beings you admire from afar at other resorts – the aristocracy of ski-teachers, golf and tennis pros and the like, whom the tourist sucks up to and the women tourists pay for lessons and dance with in the night-clubs where, in their own element, they can get on equal terms with the gods. Here, ‘On the beach at Waikiki’, they were just like those other elites all over the world, getting by on those years of practising some modest expertise, carefree and apparently far removed from the stresses and strains of the common herd, and all, perhaps, with that sad ambition to marry a rich tourist.

  These were sour thoughts from the envious mind of a duffer. After watching, for the hundredth time, men pick up girls on their shoulders and carry them effortlessly towards the shore while others pirouetted on their boards and others whizzed in balancing on one leg, I made several attempts to emulate the novice’s art of just covering a hundred yards on the stomach. But, after suffering many bruises and being several times half-drowned, I paddled back ignominiously towards the shore and just had enough strength left to heave the thirty-five pounds of balsa wood up the golden sand to its garage.

  The world had shaken gently to herald my arrival in Japan and now, to greet me in the West, it erupted with equal gentility. Kilauea, on Hawaii Island, is the most active volcano in the world. That morning it erupted violently, firing a flaming column of lava a thousand feet into the sky – the highest lava-toss it has ever achieved. It maintained this fiery fountain throughout my visit, having previously remained semi-dormant since 1868. At lunch-time that day, over a ‘Paradise Slenderama Salad’, an eye-witness urged me to fight my way on to one of the many planes of Aloha Airlines that were taking tourists to see the sight. ‘It makes the Fourth of July look like a lighted match,’ said my informant. ‘You’d better go quick.’ I said of course I would. I didn’t. I was tired of aeroplanes, and this terrestrial blow-off seemed to me an aspect of the private life of the globe into which it would be ‘bad joss’ to pry.

  Instead, as a holiday from the sight of my fellow creatures in muumuus and aloha shirts, and rejecting the Sheraton Hotel’s invitation to complimentary hula and cha-cha lessons, a flower-arrangement class, and an open duplicate bridge tournament, I went to the Honolulu Zoo. I like zoos and I think this is the prettiest I have ever seen. It wanders all over the Kapiolani Park below Diamond Head and is surrounded by a thick, twelve-foot-high hedge of syringa in bloom – an excellent deodorizer of zoos. Here there were cassowaries, emus, a fine Gibbon ape hurtling round its cage as if desperately trying to run away from its shadow, an angelic Diana monkey sitting on its hands, a young black leopard with soft and beautiful golden eyes, brown and white pandas no bigger than large cats, formidable Great Black Cockatoos and a unique cageful of Birds of Paradise. All these were a rest to the eyes, not excluding the Great Green Iguana, and I stayed there till dusk. Outside the gates, the evening paper posters were saying: ‘Oahu Barmaid Claims Rape.’ I was back in the world again!

  My hotel had been invaded by six hundred prize-winning staff members of the General Electric Company. They wore leis and sat attentively at long tables under the giant banyan tree in the patio of the Moana, listening enraptured to a Hawaiian guitar ‘combo’ accompanying a Hawaiian songbird in a grass skirt. In my youth, to the exasperation of my family, I had had a weakness for the Hawaiian guitar and I played records of the Royal Hawaiian Serenaders when I should have been out of doors killing something. I even went so far as to have lessons with the instrument from an Italian woman in Chelsea. Listening now to the boinging and moaning, I appreciated my family’s exasperation. Now the plaintive music sounded like the sort of background stuff that accompanies ‘The Teenage Monster from Outer Space’ or the dream sequences in films about lunatics and drunkards, and I would have howled like a dog between gulps of my Old-Fashioned had it not been for the earthy voice of the Sheraton Hotel coming at frequent intervals over the loud-speaker system: ‘On the beach at Waikiki – when you belonged to me.’ ‘Mr Fratinelli, please. Telephone call for Mr Fratinelli.’ ‘I have a call for Mrs Finkleberg. Mrs Finkleberg, please.’ The guitars whoinged and zinged like a badly sprung mattress. I slunk to my room.

  From a long list of local restaurants, readers of my books will understand that I immediately settled on ‘M.’s Smoke House’. M., if I may be allowed the digression, is my fictional head of the Secret Service. How like the cunning old rascal, I thought! Here he is, quietly salting away Secret Service funds to build up a nice hard-currency nest-egg to supplement his pension. I took a taxi down town and asked the driver about the place. ‘Real good eats,’ he said appreciatively. ‘You want to go to the mezzanine – place they call the Cheerio Room. Best steak and lobster in town.’

  ‘But who is this chap, M?’

  The driver shook his head doubtfully. ‘Don’t rightly know. Never seen him.’

 
It fitted perfectly! Sly old devil! There was probably some American cut-out who acted as the front. But, alas, it was the week-end, and M.’s place, cunningly situated between the Chamber of Commerce and the Bank of Hawaii, was closed. Regretfully I retired to the Sorrento Spaghetti House (in America, when in doubt, I always go to an Italian restaurant) and consumed spaghetti Bolognese with garlic, and a bottle of ‘domestic’ Chianti.

  Back in my hotel bedroom, I looked out at the sea which lay like gunmetal under a crescent moon. One or two night surfriders were still at it on the darkened creaming waves. Far below me, on the moon-burnt beach, an elderly woman, probably a General Electric cashier, was holding up her muumuu while the small waves washed her feet. She looked forlorn and unloved in this place of the eternal honeymoon. The next day, probably, she would be back in Seattle, Iowa, New Orleans. Now, in the path of the moon and with the gay flambeaux and the crooning guitars behind her, she was having her last paddle. She seemed to represent the tragedy of all ended holidays. I drew the jalousies and went to bed.

  Going round the world too quickly is like attending a series of dinner parties and leaving with the soup. Beneath the surface, Hawaii is ruled by the five great sugar and pineapple families (Hawaii produces seventy-five per cent of all the world’s pineapple), and queen of this benevolent syndicate is one powerful old lady. I had a letter of introduction to this lady and I would dearly have liked to explore where-power-resides in this very prosperous fiftieth State of America. Instead, I drove to the other side of the island and had lunch with the informative British Consul and his family, and then had to catch my plane for Los Angeles. Without many regrets. The Hawaiian Islands are, as I have said, of great beauty and, since Captain Cook discovered them, we should have clung on to them as the ‘Sandwich Islands’, which Captain Cook named after the Earl of Sandwich. But we had presumably not enough people for these small and distant territories and America (shame on her!) annexed Hawaii some sixty years ago. Now Henry Kaiser (he of the Liberty Ships) is in the process of re-annexing them from America for tourist development. The result is that while the outer islands are still comparatively unspoilt, the main island of Oahu, containing Honolulu and Pearl Harbor, is just another reservation for the pensioners and the ‘alimoners’.

  These factors made it all the more reassuring to get back into the gracious arms of Japan Air Lines, whom I had once again (who will blame an airline for one burned-out bearing?) chosen to carry me farther and who, after a good night’s rest (but I do urge J.A.L. not to give one an omelette stuffed with mushrooms and chopped onions for breakfast), deposited me shortly after dawn at the thunderous airport of ‘The Angels’.

  And now for the full solar-plexus blow of the West!

  INCIDENTAL INTELLIGENCE

  Hawaiian legends say that clever MENEHUNES inhabited these islands before the Polynesians arrived, about 900 years ago, and that these wise ‘little folk’, or pixies, still live in isolated valleys and hidden forests. They came out to work when needed. We have chosen MOKI the MENEHUNE to be your guide in Hawaii, for who could better qualify?

  There are a few ancient grass huts here and there which old Islanders cling to, along with old legends and traditions – but for modem humans, here are a few elegant substitutes for the old grass shack:

  The Royal Hawaiian Hotel, Moana, Surfrider, Biltmore, Edge-water, Princess Kaiulani, Reef, Breakers, Hawaiiana, Hawaiian Village, Halekulani, The Palms.

  All these hotels are at Waikiki, all of them are either right on the beach or so near that a few steps take you to those articles you came for – sand for lolling and the sea for swimming! Their prices range from $6 to $16 for single rates, and from $7.50 to $28 for a double, European plan. The Royal Hawaiian’s rates are on the American plan, so they are between $32 and $50 a day, double.

  Smaller hotels? Certainly! Here are a few around the Waikiki area: Coconut Grove, Aina-Luana, Coco Palms, Hale Kai, The Islander, King’s Surf, Hotel Kaimana, The Kahili, Leialoha Hotel, Lewers Apartment-Hotel, Pau Lani, Royal Grove, Waikiki Studio Apartments, Comstock, Hotel Pacific Polynesia, with rates from $4.50 to $12.50 per day, double, or weekly rates from $30 to $50.

  Of course hotels are not limited to Waikiki. You can stay at the Alexander Young Hotel in down-town Honolulu, or the Thailiana Hotel near the town of Kailua across the Pali. There is Cullen’s Ranch at Hauula, too, if you want a view of lush open spaces.

  To Dine Wondrously

  What sort of food do you like? Chinese, Korean, sea food? Japanese, American, broiled? Hawaiian, Italian, French-fried? Natural fruit-of-the-land such as menehune eat?

  Name your gastronomical delight – we’ll show you where to find it! All the Waikiki Hotels have panoramic dining-rooms, panoramic from up-above looking down, or from the beachfront looking out. If you notice the food at all with all this soul-filling nectar around you, you’ll find it delicious.

  Then, we’d give you a gentle shove in the direction of Fisherman’s Wharf for delicacies of the sea; Canlis’s Broiler where you throw your glasses to the winds, so you can’t read the prices but can see enough to relish the juice-oozing thick broiled steaks; The Gourmet with its Parisian atmosphere and fancy menu.

  Then to Trader Vic’s for that South Seas dash; Queen’s Surf for dining on wave-washed moonlit nights – if there’s a dram of romance in your soul; The Tropics, both at Waikiki and off the Ala Moana, for melting broiled meats; Waikiki Sands for the most reasonable and varied salad bar in town; Wagon Wheel for fair-priced American fare; Waikiki Lau Yee Chai and Wo Fat’s down town for the acme in Oriental dishes; the Korean Kitchen for you-know-what.

  There’s M.’s Ranch House in Aina Haina and M.’s Smoke House down town for charcoal specialities; Rocco’s Farmhouse for Italian food; Ciro’s and Alexander Young Hotel’s Hob Nob in downtown for American food, and Chez Michel’s near Wahiawa give you ragout and crepes suzette – très magnifique!

  In default of a private eye such as Dick Hughes for the Orient, and despite the painful quaintness of the style, I can do no better than to quote these brief extracts from the comprehensive Hawaiian Guidebook for Visitors by Scotty Guletz (South Sea Scotty).

  It accepts no advertising, which is a recommendation, and can be bought anywhere in Hawaii for one dollar.

  5

  LOS ANGELES AND LAS VEGAS

  THE YELLOW CAB driver was smoking a big cigar at eight o’clock that morning. He didn’t want to talk. Neither did I. I sat and glumly watched the procession of gas stations and hot-dog stands on the hour’s drive to the Beverly Hills Hotel which is still, despite the modern attractions of the Beverly Hilton, the friendliest hotel in Hollywood. I noted the ‘Squeeze Inn. Steaks!’ the ‘Golf! Stop and Sock!!!’, a driving range, and the ‘Sunset Pest Control’ hard by the famous Sunset Boulevard. Also, via a detour, I renewed my acquaintance with America’s Waugh Memorial, the cemetery immortalized in The Loved One – and then to yet one more hotel bedroom, the basket of fruit in cellophane from the manager, and the din of the telephone.

  As all foreign authors know, Hollywood likes to have first bite at anyone who is ‘new’ and even moderately successful, and at twelve-thirty I was having lunch in the Brown Derby with a producer who wanted to make a fortune out of me in exchange for a glass of water and a crust of bread. I was treated to the whole smart rag-bag of show-biz pressure-talk in between Eggs Benedict and those eighty per cent proof dry martinis that anaesthetize the uvula. ‘We gotta see which way the cookie crumbles, Iarn.’ (There are only first names in Hollywood.) ‘Now don’t get me wrong, you got a good property there. Don’t throw it away for peanuts. As we say, “If you want to throw snow on a stove, don’t bellyache if it melts.”’ ‘Let’s play this by ear, Iarn.’ ‘Of course you want to make money. Who doesn’t? But they say around here: “A Jew worries how much money he’s going to lose, an Englishman how much he’ll make, and the American how much you’ll make.” Now, at our studios, we want everybody to make money. How would it be if …’ And so it went
on, a mixture of hollow bonhomie combined with ultra sharp horse-trading.

  In due course, I fought my way out of the place and went far down town to visit my old friend, Captain James Hamilton, Head of Intelligence of the Los Angeles Police Department. Since I was last there five years ago, the Police Department has been torn down and rebuilt in marble, but Captain Hamilton has constructed for himself a replica of his former office, a grey box with no ornament but a heroin pedlar’s pair of scales and a new acquisition – a map of Sicily. This seemed a curious decoration for a police chief’s office and I asked him about it. He produced a large plan which looked rather like those charts of an atom being split. The inter-connected circles contained Italian surnames. ‘I’m really going after the Mafia,’ explained Hamilton. ‘We keep on having trouble from them. A man, an Italian, gets bumped off for no reason at all. Two years later, it appears he was one of the killers of another Italian in Chicago and, in the mobese for murder, he “had to be hit” for some reason of Mafia politics. Things like that keep on cropping up. I’m going to go on plotting these Mafia families and then, after somebody’s uncle has somebody’s cousin bumped off, I’ll have something to start a case on.’

  I had always thought that the power of the Mafia in America had been ridiculously exaggerated by writers and reporters, but when, a year or so before this, the New York police had rounded up the big Mafia conference at Apalachin, I had been inclined to change my views, and Captain Hamilton’s serious approach to the problem made me think once again.