Speed Kings

by Andy Bull

  “America,” Billy thought to himself as he walked up to the bow. “What a swell country. So law-abiding!” His thoughts turned again to Godfrey Dewey. “I never knew such human beings existed on this civilized earth,” he wrote in his diary that night. “I insist it is over-civilization that has taught humans to be so damned crooked.” And, ah, well, imagine caring. Billy and Jack were on their way now, and all that was well behind them, back beyond San Francisco.

  They were sailing on a ship named the Monowai—“the ugly duckling,” her crew called her. There were twenty-five passengers, made up, in Billy’s words, of “pansies, would-be-businessmen, nondescripts, and two very ugly girls.” He was putting all his thoughts down on a typewriter, a decrepit old thing he’d picked up in San Francisco. He thought that a regular supply of letters would go some way toward assuaging his parent’s worries about his whereabouts. Or, as he put it in a letter to his sister, Peggy, “the only reason I bought the damn thing was to enable me to write a little more balls for the family.” He spent so much time at it that he was suffering “from writer’s cramp and sore nuts.” He was actually trying to write a little poetry. His first efforts had proved to be . . . well, they hadn’t worked out quite as he had hoped:

  The din of America behind

  The dreams of youth ahead

  And drivel in between

  NEW TITLE—Two Boys Set Out

  Twas close of day,

  The fog, dull, damp, cold,

  Came rolling slowly down the bay

  A ship enveloped in its fold.

  Twas dawn next day,

  Hot sun, trade winds, the sea a sapphire blue,

  The course Sou’west by South, to islands far away.

  Could it be, their dreams came true?

  Billy, Jack pointed out after he had read it though, was a man with many talents. Poetry wasn’t one of them. That was one career he could cross off the list.

  His father, of course, wanted him to come to work at the bank under Clarence Dillon. But Billy wasn’t sure that bank work was quite his speed. He’d sold this trip to his father on the grounds that it would give him a little time to make up his mind about what he wanted to do with his life. Some of those “would-be businessmen” on board had twigged that Billy was looking for openings. One of them tried to persuade him to invest in a “new system of teaching piano by training the ear,” the theory being, Billy explained, “that the ear is the mechanical outlet to the soul in music.” The man was planning to open a series of music schools and “guaranteed that with two lessons a week for six months anyone with any ear at all will be able to play music moderately well.” Another huckster tried to convince him that the Kenyan coffee trade was the thing. Billy passed on both. The only idea that had stuck with him so far was the silly one he’d had when the Monowai was sailing past the American fleet outside San Francisco. “Passed a lot of battleships of the American Atlantic Fleet today, out here for battle-practice,” he wrote that night. “Great sight—always makes me want to join the airforce just so I could drop bombs on ’em.”

  On March 26, they made their first stop in Tahiti. They landed in Papeete, which Billy had imagined as a land of blue seas and skies, with white beaches sprinkled with coconut palms, but found it to actually be a “tawdry, ramshackle, dirty sea-port.” It was all black cinder streets and matchbox buildings, filled with men who “would rob their grandmothers’ pants,” and women who would “sleep with Vincent Astor one night and the third engineer on the cargo boat the next.” The worst by far, he thought, were the expatriates, who could be found gathered around at one of the town’s three hangouts. There was Tony’s Cabaret, “which boasts an old and tinny piano”; Quinn’s bar, “the toughest spot this side of Barcelona and woe betide the fellow who tries stealing the stoker’s gal”; and the Tahiti Yacht Club, “the meeting place of the town’s elite, and a more annoying spot I can’t imagine.”

  So Billy and Jack didn’t linger there long. Driven on by Billy’s “weakness,” as he called it, “for doing things and going places nobody else had gone,” they headed down the coast to Punaauia, country rather more like the images they’d had in their heads before they arrived. They rented a house on a stretch of white beach backing onto the mountains and in front of a lagoon sealed off by a coral reef, with a gap just big enough for a canoe to pass through. They spent their days diving for fish, which terrified Billy in a way bobsledding had never done. “In the water one can go on indefinitely thinking about all the things that can hurt one,” he wrote. “I was swimming inside the reef a few days ago and I dove to about 15 feet when a scurry of small fish came out from behind the coral about 20 feet away. I started to swim under water in their direction, harpoon clutched firmly, when suddenly a ‘small’ swordfish about 8ft long came out in pursuit. I took one jump from the bottom of the ocean and landed in the boat.”

  Other times they were off exploring the interior, hunting boar with local guides. It was there, up in the hill country, that Billy found the peace he had been looking for. In a camp, with a belly full of fish and shrimp they’d just fetched from a river, “the boys got together and had a little chorus around the fire. The moon, nearly full, was just coming over the Arohena mountains, and the last purple glows of the sunset lit the western skies; the stars seemed to grow brighter and brighter by the minute; the stream rattled along on its journey down the valley and the three coconut palms stood like sentinels on a nearby hilltop, outlined against the sky. And the boys seemed to be inspired by it all because their songs blended so perfectly with this marvelous scene. I thought then of how much those poor old fools, who labored their lives away worrying about New York Central dropping two points, were missing.”

  He was happy here, among the “pure-spirited Tahitians,” and besotted with the women. “Their eyes! Great big long lashes that look as though they had been painted on a piece of china. They can say more with their eyes than any race I have ever come across . . . Now cross, now fascinating, now quizzical, now hurt, now amorous, now happy, now tearful. Yes, the Tahitian eyes are a thing that one seldom forgets, and the same is true of their skin. Like the most marvelous silk, it’s so smooth one is scared to touch it for fear of scratching it.”

  These observations were drawn from intimate experience, though in his letters home he cloaked in generalizations the details of his affair. But Billy’s sister found a photo tucked into the back of his diary with the words “Billy’s Tahitian girl” scribbled across the back. They met, he said, in the most peculiar way. “If a girl takes a liking to some man at a party where they happen to be singing, she will stand up and command attention and then start singing an ode to the man’s sexual organs! It is an old Tahitian custom and the man doesn’t feel the slightest bit embarrassed. How natural and how unspoilt by all the plots and intrigues that it takes to win a European girl!”

  Soon, they were living together in his shack on the beach. Billy was bewitched. “In the presence of strangers the girls, especially, are inclined to be very introspective and will remain absolutely silent for some days. It takes a great deal of patience and forbearance to draw them out, but when they feel at ease they are always giggling and happy and can talk far more intelligently at the same time than many white girls. Likewise they are extremely clever in their treatment of men. They make him feel he is entirely their lord and master, and of course by doing so they usually get away with nothing short of murder. For what man on earth is not a sucker to a woman’s flattery, especially if she is good-looking!”

  They stayed three months, longer than they had planned. Billy made it a habit to move on before he grew too attached. “I hate to be sorry to leave a place or person.” He broke the rule for her, and for Tahiti. “Never,” he wrote, “was departure so painful. As we sailed away, and the last rays of the sun made a kaleidoscope of colors over the island, and then the lights began to twinkle all along the coast from Arué to Papieri. I made a solemn vow
, to nobody in particular, that some day I should return. And then suddenly the whole beach on which our house stood, and from which we had taken a tearful farewell a few hours before, was lit up by colossal bonfires, the flames leaping high into the air. Our neighbors, the inhabitants of Punaauia who had made us love that place so much were signaling us a last farewell. Gradually, the light faded away in the distance and all was darkness.”

  Jack was sure that they would find the cure for Billy’s broken heart in the Cook Islands. No such luck. “We made a complete tour of the island,” Billy wrote, “and didn’t see a single pretty girl.” At first, he thought that it was just bad luck. Especially when he was told that the island’s most “exquisite” women would be at a big dance that same night. “I arrived on the scene of the party, shoes polished and full of hope, but the minute I entered the room my ardor was thoroughly soaked. If I had tried my best to collect all the ugliest female undergraduates of Newnham and Girton, I could not have done better.”

  From there they traveled to New Zealand, then on to Australia, where Jack insisted that they get back to more civilized pursuits, and they spent their time at a club in Rose Bay, playing golf and tennis. Billy, too, was soon back in his old ways. “I was constantly impressed by the extraordinary beauty and healthy good-looks of the girls,” he wrote. “Their dress is a little loud and eccentric—the Australians call it ‘individual’—but then as most of life is spent in bathing suits, it really doesn’t matter.” They went on up around the coast to Brisbane, traveling on a tired old ship with a permanent list to port, the SS Marella. She carried a cargo of “ministers, miners, and dyspeptics,” who spent their evenings arguing about the Aboriginal question. Billy was minded to agree with the missionary who argued that “the whites were inclined greatly to underestimate the Aboriginals’ intelligence” and who “claimed they are a race who have been and still are grossly mistreated and misunderstood.”

  Darwin on Australia’s northern coast was “conspicuous only owing to its state of decaying uselessness,” so they were happy to reach, at last, the Dutch East Indies, where they spent their time and money gambling on horses, on kite fights, and in casinos, “where the Chinese foregather with anyone else who can stand a good skimming.” Billy saw one Chinese businessman lose “five sugar refineries, six beautiful new cars, and about $100,000 in cash on one poker hand.” Which was a little fast, even for him. In Bali, he was back on the “beautiful women” again, these ones “working in the sugar refineries, so damn good looking I nearly fell into a vat myself.” He especially admired their eyes. “They not only have beautiful eyes, but they also have the art of using them. For what good is a magnificent pair of eyes if they are not properly manipulated?”

  They had to cut out of Manila quick sharp when, in a story Billy kept from his diary but shared with his friends, he became, as one of his pals put it, “involved with a lady whose husband was an oriental diplomat.” The husband had been recalled to his home country but “very quickly heard about Billy and the affair with his wife and sent some countrymen to pay him a visit. Subsequently, Billy and Jack decided it was in Billy’s best interest to depart Manila sooner than planned.”

  They fetched up in Hong Kong. By now, Billy’s travel trunk weighed around four hundred pounds. He’d stuffed it full of presents for his family and friends: vases for Peggy from a shop in Canton; a sacred idol for his father, “full of stories, magic and poison, which I am sure he won’t appreciate”; a diamond ring that “really looked worth a million in the suppressed light of the pawn shop” and which he’d imagined “selling to Cartiers at a thousand percent profit”—which had turned out, of course, once seen in the light of day, to be quite worthless. He also had a duffel bag stuffed with gifts, so many of them he was still handing them out a year later.

  Billy’s letters home also dwelled on his other great preoccupation, politics. The League of Nations had just published the Lytton report, an investigation into the causes of the recent Japanese invasion of Manchuria. “It has caused much of a stir, as everyone seems to feel the absolute futility of it,” Billy wrote in a letter to Peggy. He returned again to one of his favorite topics—the ineptitude of American politicians. “Christ they make me sick . . . They are the goddamnest fools I have ever seen. They sit back for a century with their goddamn [isolationist] Monroe doctrine and let the rest of the world make suckers out of them and then they jump in all of a sudden at the only spot where it is entirely contrary to their interests.” Japan, Billy thought, “is entirely run on American capital,” and so it was in the United States’ best interest to let Japan have Manchuria. Instead, they were siding with the Chinese. Peggy was convinced that Billy was planning a career in politics. Certainly he had a passion for it. “He cared far more about ideas and ideals than money,” she said. “And he had a keen sense of what he thought was the ‘right’ thing to do.”

  At that time in his life, though, Billy had other ideas. In fact, later that very same day he had the idea. “Must stop now,” he signed off his letter. “I am going to play golf in the Amateur Championship of China with Douglas Fairbanks, who is arriving out here in a couple of days, what a laugh! So long Snooks, Bill.”

  Fairbanks, an old family friend from St. Moritz, had just been featured in Howard Hawks’s The Dawn Patrol and Warner Bros.’ smash gangster flick Little Caesar. His star had never burned brighter. He hadn’t come to Shanghai just to play golf. He was planning an ambitious new film project, “a colorful history of China from Confucius to the present day.” Fairbanks figured his picture could be an international epic. It never happened. But while he was in the city, he spent plenty of time shooting the breeze with his old friends from St. Moritz. And that was when it dawned on Billy. Where was the one place a young, handsome man like him could go to make a lot of money and have a little fun? He was amazed he hadn’t thought of it sooner.

  Screenland Magazine, May 1934

  WHEN GILDED YOUTH

  GOES CELLULOID!

  And here is another American “Golden Spoon” youth, with the irresistible urge to do something with motion pictures! He is William Fiske, 3rd, the son of an American banker in Paris who was brought up abroad with the idea of following his father’s footsteps in business. Instead he has decided to desert the counting room to count for something in the movies!

  They called it Seven Seas Productions. Billy was the president. He’d earned the job since he’d sunk most of his money into the company. He was its public face too. The idea, as the smitten interviewer from Screenland explained, was to “make pictures with Garbo players in authentic settings.” They planned to travel “all over the world in interesting spots, with a small unit of Hollywood players, technicians, directors, and supplemented by native casts.” It was all inspired by Billy’s time in Tahiti. He explained “quietly, but with bright eyes” that “in every country there are tales and superstitions based on fabulous characters that have at some time lived there. There are heroic figures living today in difficult and remote countries, doing great things unheard of in civilized centers.” At the same time, he admitted, they would be open to the idea of a movie made “on the spot in Monte Carlo,” since that would be “authentic” too.

  In the end, they decided that their first picture would be set in Hawaii. A writer named Jim Bodrero was hawking a script about a romance set on the sugar plantations out there. Better yet, because Bodrero’s grandparents owned one of those same plantations, he could help them fix up the locations. And that was what mattered to Billy. He wanted to make an authentic movie, one shot on location, not in a studio.

  White Heat, as it was eventually titled, is the story of a young socialite named Lucille who marries William, the foreman on her father’s Hawaiian sugar plantation. William is really in love with his housekeeper, Leilani, but he can’t be with her because she’s a native. Cooped up all alone in the house, Lucille starts to go gaga. When her former fiancé, Chandler, arrives for a visit, she suc
cumbs to his advances. William finds out and is furious. Then, in the grand set-piece finish, Lucille, utterly potty by this point, sets fire to the crops and runs off with Chandler. William falls from his horse trying to fight the fire, but, just as he’s about to be consumed, Leilani arrives to rescue him. All the extramarital love stuff was an old Hollywood theme. But an interracial affair was a new one.

  They hired Lois Weber as director, a cheap and inspired choice. Weber had been Hollywood’s first great female director, but she hadn’t made a movie since The Angel of Broadway, for Cecil B. DeMille back in 1927. Only six years ago, but it was also in the silent era and a bomb besides.

  Mona Maris, who was Argentine and spoke English with an utterly unintelligible accent, played the Hawaiian housekeeper. They had David Newell, a young up-and-comer, as the lead man. Hardie Albright, an old vaudeville ham, was Chandler. For Lucille, Billy wanted Virginia Cherrill, the pretty blonde twentysomething who had played the blind flower girl in Charlie Chaplin’s hit City Lights. And he got her, even though she was contracted to Twentieth Century Fox.

  Cherrill came with baggage. Chaplin, another old friend of the Fiskes from St. Moritz, warned Billy that he had fired her from City Lights because she had walked off the set to get her hair done. Worse still, she had a wildly possessive fiancé, who hated the idea of her being away working with Billy in Hawaii for however many months. The fiancé’s name? Cary Grant. At the time, Grant was at a particularly low ebb. He’d just finished work on what he described as “a grotesque version of Alice in Wonderland,” in which he’d played the mock turtle.