Duke of Deception

by Geoffrey Wolff

  Some of this backing and forthing was simple flight; some was restless, in the ever-diminishing hope that yonder life was better, or maybe easier. During my first twelve years my father spent fewer than six at home. We moved from here to there when he changed jobs, usually trading up. He was good at his work, and his work required demonstrable skills; like The Doctor, my father chose work that was difficult to fake. He was an aeronautical engineer, and became one at a time when engineering was a profession especially inhospitable to Jews.

  Of course by 1937 my father was no longer a Jew, in his or the world’s eyes. Irving Howe has written in World of Our Fathers that the thirties were a season for fast breaks and self-creations. That the people who came to maturity with my father longed to cut away from their families and from received conventions, and that this will to repudiate “can be seen as either an idea drawn from American tradition or Jewish heresy,” depending upon the beholder’s vantage. Moreover, “upon its sons and daughters the immigrant Jews branded marks of separateness while inciting dreams of universalism. They taught their children both to conquer the gentile world and to be conquered by it.”

  My father’s conquest was to be absolute. During the years of his education, science—and especially engineering—was boss. Marxists dreamt of political engineering, capitalists of consumer engineering, doctors of physical engineering. Breathing the air of technology, Duke yearned to by God finally do something: his history was made of fluff and filled with hot air; now he was drawn to motion, mass, metal, combustion, and—true to his spirit—flight, the conquest of natural law.

  But how could he become, merely by wanting to become, an engineer? The device was simple: an application blank and a brassy indifference to consequence. His first curriculum vitae gave him a diploma from Deerfield (later he reached further, to Groton or St. Paul’s) and a degree from Yale (the year omitted), Bachelor of Science, Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering. Yale not enough? Then add this, a Bachelor of Science degree from the Sorbonne, located as Duke said in “Paris, France” but—as he perhaps knew, perhaps did not—a school only of the humanities.

  The first manufacturer beguiled by my father’s educational dazzle was Northrup Aircraft Company. Rosemary and my father had crossed the country on his mother’s money, planning to visit a Loftus, an undertaker, in Denver. But the thought of watching Duke watch her kinsmen watch him was sufficient to overcome my mother’s exhaustion, and she insisted they press on west. They arrived in Los Angeles with ten dollars remaining in their poke, and they spent it, to the last penny, on dinner at the Brown Derby, before they knew where they’d sleep.

  “I was impractical myself,” my mother said.

  They found friends, Bob and Ruby Donovan, who took them into their house in the Hollywood Hills. Ruby had once been Duke’s girlfriend, and knew him well enough to be especially considerate to my pregnant mother. The four got along: they’d return empty soda bottles, and use the proceeds on a movie, or a few beers. But the Donovans’ hospitality was not long put to the test. The moment Duke presented his amazing bona fides to Northrup, he was hired. In 1937 the aircraft business was nothing like the slick aerospace industry of today. It was an enthusiast’s vocation, run out of garage-like hangars by executives less like software specialists than like grease monkeys. It is probable that no one at Northrup would take time to write Yale, less Deerfield or “Paris, France,” to authenticate a bright young man’s claims.

  So he was hired at forty dollars a week as a draftsman. Bob Donovan drove him to work because now Duke had no car. He had traded their new Ford as part payment for a used LaSalle, and the LaSalle for a Packard, which was repossessed. This was ever my father’s course, from something to something more to nothing. Still, my father and mother were happy, living in the small house in the hills, near the Donovans.

  Within a week Duke’s supervisor looked over his employee’s shoulder and saw that Yale and the Sorbonne had neglected to teach the engineer the language or symbols or methods of engineering. He told my father to find another patsy, by Friday. Then, in one of those starbursts of luck that sometimes lit my father’s life, Northrup’s engineers went on strike, and the company retained Duke to flesh out a skeleton staff. My father’s supervisor instructed him not to show his work to anyone, and advised him to get promoted fast so that he wouldn’t have to create engineering drawings, merely hire people who could. Then he promoted my father to such a position, because he liked him and saw that he was gifted, because my father was gifted, because his gifts were useful to Northrup. And so The Duke, a few months earlier fired from a job at Sikorsky to which he wore overalls, had become an aeronautical engineer.

  During the next fifteen years he was fired by companies fed up with his debts, or his arrogance, or his insubordination; he was never fired for incompetence. When I was born in November of 1937 my father left Northrup for Lockheed—hired away, his salary doubled. He was a project engineer on the experimental version of the P-38, a flashy twin-engined, twin-tailed fighter, the first American plane to shoot down a German. Duke could make people produce for him; he was impatient with conventional procedures, liked to take shortcuts. He was a useful bridge between thinkers and doers, and he liked especially to work with the odd, inward men who fabricated mock-ups and prototypes, model-builders and tinkerers not unlike The Doctor. Duke was liked by these people, who listened to his brainstorms and willingly followed the novel approaches that could be pioneered only by a man innocent of experience.

  Soon he rose again, moving to North American and the XP-51, giving the best performance of his life, as later in his life he, alas, knew. In 1940, before the Battle of Britain but after Dunkirk, the British Purchasing Commission sent pilots to America to develop a fighter to compete with Germany’s fastest, most maneuverable and best-armed. Working with Lend-Lease credit and under mortal urgency, British pilots applied their experience in the air against the Germans to rough out a fighter with an in-line engine (like those of the Spitfire and Hurricane, and unlike those of the American Thunderbolt and Corsair), and eight machine guns. A prototype of this advanced airplane was to fly, according to the contract with North American, one hundred and twenty days after the go-ahead, four months from the first doodle on a scratch pad till flight.

  North American rolled out the first plane three days ahead of schedule, in August of 1940, and my first memory is of sitting in its cockpit while pilots and mechanics and my mother and father cheered. During those four months of flat-out work my father was euphoric, and my mother was proud of him. His sufficiency was now beyond question, and the couple had money and friends. These were pilots and designers, not like my father’s Hartford friends. They were serious men, capable of courage, stamina, and command, and they treated my father as their equal.

  There was money enough to buy a house in Palos Verdes; it was comfortable and cool, with terra-cotta floors and a tile roof and a couple of palms in the patio and a long look downhill to the Pacific. My father had brought his mother to the house for a long visit, and a couple of RAF pilots also lived with us, and were wonderful friends to my father and mother, who remembers the men—two of whom would distinguish themselves in the Battle of Britain, one of whom would die above the English Channel—playing at mock dogfights with model planes, letting me make the engine noises.

  My father spoiled me. Every night after work he’d stop somewhere to buy me a trinket, and as soon as he drove up in the new twelve-cylinder Packard convertible I’d leave my mother and run to him, “Daddy! Daddy! Where’s my toy?” This troubled my mother, who thought my father was buying my love, and perhaps he was, but like everything between mothers, fathers, and sons, the case was not that simple.

  “You were lovable, I guess. When you were really little you were cute. Quick-tempered, of course. Angelic-looking in the Brooks Brothers Eton jacket. I used to get angry sometimes, and spank you. But I don’t remember serious problems.” My mother paused then, and said to herself, not to me: “Even when I nursed you
you seemed to judge me.”

  My mother was too much judged. Duke was sloppy in those days, dressing with studied carelessness in battered tennis shoes and cashmere jackets and rumpled linen or flannel trousers. But he was meticulous on my mother’s account, choosing her clothes and having her hair cut and arranged according to his taste. My mother, still the undiscovered starlet, inclined toward the cute flamboyance of a Betty Grable, while my father preferred the elegant simplicity of a Joan Bennett. That my father’s taste best suited my mother didn’t much matter; that he managed to hurt her mattered a great deal.

  “I didn’t have a lot of self-confidence to begin with, and what I had he took away. Not that he didn’t try to build me up; I’d say sometimes how inadequate I felt without an education, and he’d tell me I knew more than most women he had known. But when we were entertaining he’d check the table to see whether I’d set it right. He used to make me feel I wasn’t really very smart.”

  My mother suspected Duke of casual attentions to other women, beginning with an upstairs neighbor in Milford, days after their wedding; she was suspicious of his continuing affection for Ruby Donovan, a striking redhead, and didn’t always believe him when he called to say he’d have to work late at Northrup or Lockheed or North American. She was more annoyed than wounded by this, having no desire for my father.

  Of course, it is an insult to intelligence to be deceived, and my father’s infidelities angered her as deceptions. His more pathological deceptions troubled her less. About her husband’s Jewishness my mother says she “wanted to be fooled. I was dumb, dumb, dumb to pretend he wasn’t Jewish. I guess I accepted his view of himself.”

  The only thing Rosemary failed to play along with was my father’s promotion of her father to admiral, and the education he bestowed on the pismire, honoris causa, a degree from Annapolis. Among Mike Crosley and Jimmy Little (his RAF friends), and Bob Chilton, a North American test pilot—people who respected him—my father alluded seldom to Wolff history; he was sufficiently vitalized by his present. But even so, my mother recollects that “Duke had a way of implying much, without elaboration.”

  My father never dropped the pretense with my mother that he had gone to Yale. He would make oblique references to the Harvard game every November, as though he had a stake in its outcome. And at Palos Verdes he bought the first of several English bulldogs I grew up with. I guess he bought them to suggest his connection with Old Eli, and the dogs’ connection with Yale’s Handsome Dan. But he loved them, for all that, and cared for them and was stricken when they died, every one before his time, from the respiratory diseases that afflict dogs bred for unnaturally stunted, un-Jewish snouts.

  Once, driving with my mother near Santa Monica, my father was almost hit by a car that ran a stop-sign at an intersection. Duke piled out of the Packard to raise hell—he used justice fearsomely, like a roll of coins in his fist—and the other driver raised his hands in surrender. Seeing my father he grinned, and greeted him by name: “Art Wolff! Son of a bitch!” My father seemed to wish that he were not, seemed about to deny that he was, but the fellow pressed on: “We were at Penn together, remember?” My mother saw that this man was a Jew, beyond dispute. “Come on, Duke, we roomed next door, used to party together.” My father shook his hand. A couple of weeks later the man stopped by our house for a drink, but Rosemary never saw him again.

  Soon after this incident my mother grilled Duke about his trumpery résumés. At first he insisted he had transferred to Yale from Penn, and then to Penn from Yale, and then he refused to speak more of the matter. My mother decided for once to know one thing, for sure, about her husband. Duke’s mother was staying in Palos Verdes, helping to spoil me, and Rosemary asked her, bluntly: “Did Duke go to Yale?”

  “What did he tell you, dear?” my grandmother asked my mother.

  “That he went to Yale.”

  “Then I imagine he must have gone to Yale.”

  7

  A FEW days before Pearl Harbor my father flew to London by way of the Azores and neutral Lisbon, where he dropped a few hundred dollars of expense money betting against a Luftwaffe officer shooting craps at the Estoril Casino. His plane was shot at when it crossed France, and the night my father landed in England bombs fell on the East London docks, raising huge columns of fire into the searchlight-crossed sky. He was afraid, he confessed, but not enough afraid to want to be any place other than where he was.

  North American had given my father the title of Assistant Chief Designer, and the responsibility to work gremlins out of the RAF’s new Mustangs. He was installed in a four-room flat on Park Lane, a block from the Dorchester and overlooking Hyde Park. Officers of the American embassy had dubbed my father an Air Corps major, a common practice that protected him with military privileges under the Geneva Convention were England invaded and occupied. The honorary rank mattered to him, crucially, for the rest of his life.

  When Father left us in New York Mother drove the cream Packard with its red interior aimlessly around America, and settled finally into a California shorefront apartment at Hermosa Beach. Shortly after Pearl Harbor a midget Japanese sub had lobbed a few rounds at the Santa Barbara Biltmore, missing it but depressing waterfront rents. There were soldiers and heavy artillery pieces set beneath the boardwalk on the beach in front of our place, ready to blow away the Nips when they waded ashore, any minute now. The soldiers were friendly; they teased me and gave me candy and chevrons, which Mother sewed on my T-shirts. They flirted with her, innocent kid stuff, and Mother was friendly to them, and let the soldiers buy her a beer or a coke while I filled a beachside jukebox with their nickels, playing “Pistol-Packin’ Mama” and “Deep in the Heart of Texas” till I ran them out of coins.

  My father stayed fourteen months in London, until early 1943. Duke liked being part of those nights of Blitz and days of Churchill. He was proud that his father had been born in London, and in short order he found Mullins of Bond Street, a genealogical boutique where he bought a book bound in soft red calf, A History of the Name Ansell, tracing the family of his grandmother Sarah Ansell back to the Domesday Book, and from it he chose a coat of arms for the “Ansell Wolff” line.

  He liked British manners and the mumbly, marble-chewing accent of the upper class. He couldn’t get enough of understatement, the self-deprecation of the squadron leader who had just returned from his ninth flight of the day with his Spitfire shot full of holes and three ME-109S confirmed killed, Fox gave us rather of a chase, never mind, rum job for him.

  I wonder how much he tried to sneak past them. Americans, socially insecure, will believe anything. Hints about “Sent Pawl’s” and “Bones” register without challenge; I heard my father tell a Yale man that they were together in the same class at Yale, in the same entry of the same college, and the man was ashamed of his memory lapse rather than suspicious. The English work differently: Duke, is it? Duke of what, old man? Oh quite, I see, Duke of nothing then, rilly. At Eton were you? What years? Then you know Bamber Lushington? No? Then you weren’t at Eton, were you?

  If Arthur III stepped delicately through the minefields of British social complication, he ran amok with easy credit. Field boots from Lobb, lighters and pipes from Dunhill, tobacco from Fribourg & Treyer, a collapsible silver drinking cup from Garrard. Hawes & Curtis made his shirts, Huntsman his hacking jacket. Holland and Holland contributed a matched pair of guns, Foyle’s threw in a few first editions, and North American Aviation—advised that their Duke was blitzing Mayfair and Belgravia—brought my father home and fired him.

  When he came home in disgrace, with a steamer trunk filled with booty and no end of entertaining routines about life under the bombs, he tried at once to enlist in the Air Corps. Everything went against him: his eyes were weak, he stammered, he had a bad back, his teeth were unsatisfactory. The Navy wouldn’t have him either, but the Army said his teeth made the worst case against him, so he had all his uppers pulled, and after he got a plate Mother and I drove him to Fort Ord, where he
tried one last time to enlist, and was turned away. I remember his blank silence, and for the first time he frightened me. He drove us home to Hermosa Beach and disappeared into Mexico. Mother bailed him out of jail three days later in Tijuana. The charge was drunk and disorderly.

  He got a job soon enough with Rohr Aircraft. Jobs were easy then, and no one took time to meditate on the character of prospective employees; if men were sane, American, and exempt from military service, they were just fine.

  My parents bought a new-built tract house in Chula Vista as soon as Rohr signed Duke on. The house hadn’t been painted, the front lawn hadn’t been seeded, when he was offered a better job as chief engineer of a B-24 and B-29 modification center in Birmingham, Alabama. We had owned and lived in that little house less than three weeks when my father sold it, and our last night there my mother read me the fable of Pandora’s box, and I lay awake staring at my father’s locked steamer trunk.

  My father was paid more than a thousand a month in Birmingham, a lot of money then. The plant where he worked was run by an engineering firm called Bechtel, McCone and Parsons, and my father’s principal superiors were Ralph Parsons and John McCone, neither of whom approved of Duke’s character, both of whom recognized his energy and resourcefulness.