Eve of a Hundred Midnights

by Bill Lascher

  Elza Jacoby had a nervous breakdown following her husband’s death. The Sterns swooped in and brought Elza back to their home at Hollywood and Vine, where together they cared for her and Mel. For the next four years, Elza’s parents, siblings, and household staff helped raise the boy. Elza eventually recovered from her depression, strengthened in part by converting to Christian Science.

  “As young as [Mel] was, he seemed to sense how very much a young mother needed him,” Elza later told the writer John Hersey.

  When Mel was six years old, Elza purchased a house in L.A.’s Benedict Canyon, where she tried to care for Mel on her own. Elza was attentive, and her son was dutiful, possibly too much so.

  “My chief difficulty was to get him to go outside and play, so long as there was as much as a wastebasket to empty inside,” she recalled, perhaps with a bit of motherly embellishment.

  Mel’s frequent visits to his grandparents’ home while he was growing up let him observe Hollywood’s early days. Despite the bustle around him, Mel seemed happiest in the Sterns’ swimming pool. Elza always fretted about his long dives beneath the pool’s surface. But Mel appealed to her newfound religion, insisting that “God’s under that water too. He’ll show me how to come up again.”

  Melville Jacoby and Elza Stern Meyberg. Photo courtesy Peggy Stern Cole.

  A few years after her first husband’s death, Elza fell in love with Manfred Meyberg, another member of Los Angeles’s tight-knit Jewish community. He had worked his way up from office boy to president at Germain’s Seed and Plant Company, one of the era’s largest agricultural supply companies.

  On March 8, 1922, the year Manfred bought a controlling stake in Germain’s, he and Elza wed. The marriage lightened Elza’s spirits as well as Mel’s. Though Mel welcomed “Uncle Manfred” into his life, he still spent enough time at his grandparents’ home that their youngest son, Eugene, considered Mel—ten years his junior—more akin to a younger brother than a nephew.

  If Mel felt smothered by Elza, he didn’t make such feelings known. Still, Elza sent Mel away to summer camp when he was eight years old, in part to help put some distance between them.

  “I still remember the expression on that little fellow’s face, when I drove away and left him with all those strangers,” she wrote nearly two decades later. “When he saw I was beginning to weaken, he said ‘you promised me you wouldn’t cry,’ and I didn’t—nor have I the many times in the past six years, when I have bid him goodbye—only because Melville has helped to make me a stronger woman.”

  Despite his father’s early death, Mel had a happy childhood full of typical boyhood passions. He was a lifelong stamp collector, or philatelist, who would search for new designs throughout his journeys around the world. Mel’s “boy” Elmer, a black and white Australian shepherd, meant so much to him that he sometimes sent postcards home addressed to the dog from his many travels; over the years lovers and friends would know to ask after Elmer, having either heard about or met the dog.

  Mel also started writing early, beginning with small pieces that appeared in Hollywood’s Selma Avenue Elementary School’s weekly paper. After transferring to Hawthorne School in sixth grade, he became a sports editor. By the time he was a junior at Beverly Hills High—where he was an honor society member—Mel was the school paper’s business manager and, later, its news editor.

  A fan of camping and being outdoors, Mel also grew up when much of the Los Angeles area was still undeveloped and blanketed with sagebrush, oaks, and poppies. He had ample space to freely explore the wild hills and canyons surrounding Beverly Hills and Hollywood, collect Native American artifacts, and attend summertime concerts at the Hollywood Bowl.

  He often refused the box seats offered to his well-connected family and chose instead to climb the outdoor amphitheater’s stairs to its highest row. There, lying on a bench and staring at the night sky, he would lose himself in the stars and the music.

  This wistful streak reflected in Mel’s stargazing nights grew into a restlessness as he got older. He recognized as much as anyone his need for direction. Despite the relative comfort of his childhood, Mel was eager to succeed through his own efforts. Nevertheless, Mel wooed dates, impressed employers, made friends, and developed sources with charisma augmented by a dry sense of humor, handsome features, and a slim but athletic body sculpted by years of swimming and recreational boxing. At six-two, Mel was certainly tall. A hirsute man descended from Central European Jews, he had fair skin with dark hair and eyes, traits that later prompted a newspaper in China to describe him as “a rugged dark featured young American.” Quick to flash his amused, closed-lip smile, he had a habit of absentmindedly stroking his cheek as he thought.

  “Mel was tall, dark, and slim, alternately boyish and then mature beyond his [years],” another of his contemporaries wrote.

  After high school, Mel went to Stanford University. There he signed up with the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) and even learned to fly. He also joined Stanford’s water polo team and made varsity by the end of his sophomore year.

  “I’m nuts about water polo, and I can’t wait to get into the pools,” he told his parents, undeterred by the black eyes, cut lips, and bruises he also frequently acquired through the sport.

  Two more friends of Mel’s came with him to Stanford from Beverly Hills: J. Franklin “Frank” Mynderse and Winton “Whimp” Ralph Close. The trio were inseparable, and the friendships garnered Mel a nickname from Whimp that would fit his entire life: Tony Tramp, “because he always wanted to go someplace.”

  In one citizenship class during his second semester at Stanford, Mel wrote a paper he titled “My Private Utopia.” This “harmony”-themed society seemed to draw from the same idealism that helped shape Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. Mel’s utopian vision featured a heavily managed economy, treasured scientific and industrial innovation, and insisted that beauty be “embodied in factories as well as homes.” (In what must have been a nod to his stepfather’s seed business and his mother’s prizewinning yards, it even called for a home with a garden for everyone.)

  This vision prioritized travel as a societal value and inextricably linked the economy to environmental preservation. Mel, who had taken several childhood trips through the country’s young national park system, envisioned protecting nature as society’s paramount cultural goal. Film, dance, and fashion were necessary for happiness, Mel wrote, but “they would [lose] their appeal if natural beauty should suddenly vanish.”

  Toward the conclusion of the paper, Mel seemed to return from some kind of mental vacation as he acknowledged that “ambitions, greed, fear, and drudgery” were realities that had to be addressed. Still, he had presented a beautiful dream.

  Wrote his professor upon returning the assignment: “Don’t you ever come clear down, will you?”

  Though Mel easily made new friends at Stanford, he complained about the difficulty of fitting in with Stanford’s fraternities and “eating clubs.”

  “Well, I’ve started being left out,” he reported a month into his studies. “Mr. Wadsworth, bev. high, sent recommendations to his fraternity here for all Beverly kids except Mel. I guess he didn’t mention me because I don’t hold my nose right. I am going to try out for the Stanford Daily staff tomorrow.”

  It was the next day that Mel began to find a place for himself. He joined fifty other “tryouts” vying for work at the Stanford Daily and made the cut as a reporter (though it was demanding and time-consuming work, especially alongside his water polo commitments). Around the time Mel tried out for the paper, a sophomore named Annalee Whitmore was a copy editor; she was a class ahead of Mel, and the pair rarely interacted.

  In 1936, when Melville Jacoby entered his twenties, his life permanently pivoted, beginning with a family crisis.

  At the beginning of the year, Elza and Manfred Meyberg were expecting their first child. But on the morning of January 20, Elza felt that something was wrong. Manfred rushed her across Los Angeles to
Good Samaritan Hospital. Elza went into labor and gave birth to a daughter, Marilyn. But Marilyn never had a chance, and twelve hours after birth, she died. It was ten days before Elza’s birthday. She and Manfred never had another child.

  Elza, Manfred, and Mel were understandably devastated, but as summer approached Mel had exciting news: he had won a scholarship to study abroad, through a new student exchange program between the United States and China. Instead of returning to Stanford the next school year (when he would have been appointed an Army second lieutenant through his ROTC work), Mel would continue his studies at Lingnan University, a missionary school in Canton (Guangzhou), a southern port city on the Pearl River (Xi Jiang) Delta.

  This student exchange program was part of the Pacific Area Exchange, which a Hawaiian-born student named Frank Wilson began after independently enrolling in Lingnan three years earlier. By 1936, thirty-two students—mostly selected from the Ivy League and other elite American universities—had been invited to participate after intensive interviews, letters of recommendation, and an essay contest. They joined a Lingnan student body comprising primarily children from China’s wealthiest families, as well as a number of American-born students of Chinese descent, who generally looked down upon their counterparts whose families hadn’t left Asia.

  Before school started, many members of the Pacific Area Exchange’s 1936–1937 class traveled to China together by way of Japan. Mel didn’t join them. Perhaps hoping to transform their lingering grief about losing baby Marilyn into positive energy, Mel’s mother and stepfather offered to send him on a once-in-a-lifetime grand tour of the globe and readily funded the adventure. With their assistance, Mel bought a $500 around-the-world ticket that covered a berth on a boat from New York to London and on to Paris. It also paid for lodging in each city, and stays in Holland, Switzerland, and Italy. Included as well was space on another ship. That vessel crossed the Mediterranean, stopped in Malta, sailed through the Suez Canal to Yemen, and proceeded through India, Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka), and Singapore. Finally, Mel continued to Hong Kong and Canton. Additional expenses along the way totaled $600.

  A Stanford friend—a fellow Angeleno and Daily hand named John Kline—joined Mel for the journey. They crossed the Atlantic on a steamer packed with 600 other students, most from schools such as Duke, Harvard, Smith, and Princeton. Mel, who usually took pride in how he dressed, felt uncomfortable around the Easterners.

  “I feel like a tramp in my finest duds,” he admitted.

  Mel was happy to check off castles, museums, cathedrals, and other standard tourist landmarks, but he also took note of a world becoming unsettled: shipyards operating at all hours building warships in England, German agents trying to recruit Nazis on street corners in Switzerland, and swarms of Fascist police and military all over the Italian streets. While Mel witnessed these scenes, fighting was breaking out between Spain’s leftist Republican government and the right-wing nationalists led by Francisco Franco.

  “Affairs in Europe are in an awful tangle,” wrote Mel, who also encountered groups of refugees driven out by the Spanish Civil War on his journey. “It will be impossible to put off another war with all the arming & animosities now brewing.”

  Mel was not optimistic about the prospects for world peace.

  “Yes sir, they are all waiting for the explosion over here,” he added.

  As Mel’s voyage progressed from Europe through the Middle East and on to East Asia, he clamored for opportunities to experience local culture, the less touristy the better. These experiences included watching a Malaysian wedding, visiting a Zoroastrian Tower of Silence where vultures fed on corpses, and seeing moonlight filter through cocoa palms in Singapore.

  “The people I guess made it nice for us, but the tropics and Orient get a hold on you,” he wrote on the second-to-last leg of his trip. “Really, as much as I would like to be home, something is already anchored out here. It’s just plain fascinating, that’s all.”

  Finally, Mel arrived in Canton right on his twentieth birthday: September 11, 1936. At Lingnan, he and the other American students—twenty-three men and nine women—were required to live with Chinese roommates (each woman in the program had two roommates) and eat at least one meal per day in the university’s dining halls.

  Lingnan University in Canton (Guangzhou), China, in 1936. Photo courtesy Peggy Stern Cole.

  Beyond the pastoral island that housed Lingnan was a noisy harbor. A few months into his year at the school, Mel sat in an open dorm room window, listening to silence fall over the nearby port. He began a letter to his mother and stepfather:

  The clatter of wooden shoes and the high pitched jabber of foreign voices has finally ceased. Even the village drums have quit their mighty rattle—in a word, it is now exactly one a.m. and the most glorious Oriental moon imaginable is rising. Its light makes visible the aged salt junks and square rigged whalers on the sluggish river. All this I can see from the window as I sit and write you tonight.

  Canton was one of the five “treaty ports” at which Western governments carved out essentially sovereign “extraterritorial” settlements from Chinese territory. It was a cauldron of political ferment in the early twentieth century. Here Sun Yat-sen—considered by Communists and Nationalists alike the father of modern China—began his revolutionary work. But Lingnan, accessible only by boat from Canton, was largely isolated from the surrounding turmoil.

  Still, Lingnan’s campus—with its palm-shaded brick dorms and vines creeping across walkways—was not hermetic. With the river’s mouth just beyond campus, Mel could see waters packed with subsistence fishers, crowded sampans steered by large wooden rudders, cargo boats, and all manner of other craft. Countless thousands of destitute people, known as “those born on the waters” (Sui Seung Yan) and considered ethnically distinct from China’s Han majority, worked and survived on the river. In the letter Mel wrote that night while sitting in his dorm window, he noted that local residents made the equivalent of only about 31 U.S. cents each to spend on food every month.

  “The river people, a distinct tribe, have a hard life,” he wrote. “I’ve noticed how hard they work. Women row, and children start before they can walk and few have slept on land.”

  Not all of Mel’s letters contemplated social issues. Some dripped with privileged Western arrogance about the squalid conditions in China. Others glowed with wide-eyed wonder at the places he saw and even a touch of compassion for the people he met. Some brimmed with warm love for his family. Others bristled with the kind of filial griping that parents have endured through the ages.

  The epistolary Melville Jacoby was at different moments a know-it-all, a brash adventurer, an insecure student, a casual—even aloof—lad, and a charming flirt who frequently wrote about this or that date he had arranged.

  Mel also wrote frequently about the friendships he was developing at Lingnan. He quickly bonded with his Chinese roommate, Chan Ka Yik, and Chan’s best friend, Ching Ta-Min (who went by the Westernized name George Ching), who lived across the hall with a Harvard student named Hugh Deane.

  “I tried to take them to see Chinese things,” George later recalled. “Things that they don’t have [in America].”

  One day, for example, George took Mel and some other American students for an exotic dinner.

  “The first course was snake soup,” George remembered. “I tried it first, and said, ‘Ah, very delicious,’ so I convinced them to try it.”

  Two or three of the exchange students still refused. George insisted.

  “Try a little bit,” he said. “You come to China, I want to show you something that’s good.”

  The Americans brought the soup to their lips hesitantly. As they took tiny sips, looks of surprised pleasure washed across their faces.

  “They finished the whole thing, and later they ordered two more,” George said.

  Mel wasn’t quite as enthusiastic when he wrote home about the meal.

  “Roommate and a Chinese friend took me
in last night for a snake dinner,” Mel wrote. “Considered a real delicacy and is very costly over here. Suffered through five courses of the reptile and felt the effects last night. Some food, snakes.”

  In addition to this kind of culinary adventure, George and Ka Yik were able to expose their American roommates and friends to Chinese experiences that might otherwise have been inaccessible. Both young men came from influential families. Until shortly before the semester started, George’s father had been the mayor of Canton. George had been born in Berkeley, California, while his father studied at the University of California.

  Ka Yik’s father was a wealthy landowner. His brother was a high-ranking military officer who advised Pai Chung-hsi (Bai Chongxi). A onetime rival of China’s Nationalist leader, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi), Pai became one of the Generalissimo’s key strategists. In the southwestern province of Kwangsi (Guangxi), Ka Yik’s family owned vast tracts of agricultural property that his father administered from a sprawling home just east of Jintian* village.

  With their Chinese roommates as guides, Mel and a handful of other Americans shared many adventures in and around Canton. Through a complicated series of trades and purchases involving a camera, a chair, bicycles, a blanket, and a subscription to Time, Mel obtained a year-old motorcycle that he hoped would help him explore farther afield. He hoped to see the China beyond Lingnan’s cloistered campus. Meanwhile, as the school year progressed he started paying more and more attention to the saber-rattling between China and Japan, the shake-ups in China’s fragile national government, and other increasingly chaotic political and international events. Other students, among them Hugh Deane, also took notice.

  “For most of the American students at Lingnan, the experience was a superficial adventure,” Deane wrote after describing how some of Lingnan’s Chinese students wanted Chiang’s Kuomintang (Guomindang) Party to focus less on Communists and more on Japan, which had occupied Manchuria in 1931 and continued to threaten other parts of northern China. “We shopped for ivory and jade, visited Macao [Macau] for a bit of sin, and monasteries in the Kwantung [Guangdong] mountains for climbing and an exotic change. We accepted the misery around us, bargained with rickshaw pullers whose life expectancy was five years. But a few were caught up by the struggle going on in China, tried to understand it, and became involved in one way or another.”