by Bill Lascher
Annalee wasn’t alone in this predicament. Around the same time, the State Department prevented Peggy Durdin from returning to Chungking, even though her husband, Till Durdin, had been allowed to travel to Shanghai for the New York Times. The promise of freelance publication—or apparently a studio contract—wasn’t sufficient for consular officials. Without a job or a proper sponsor in China, Annalee was stuck on the MGM lot.
But that didn’t stall her interest in Chungking.
Annalee had one asset in addition to her work ethic and intelligence: her alma mater. As she discussed her frustrations with Seller and other fellow Stanford graduates, word quickly spread among the school’s alumni community. At roughly the same time, Mel was on his way back to the United States from his eventful year reporting in Shanghai, Chungking, and French Indochina. The Haiphong incident had made headlines, and Annalee noticed them because she recognized Mel’s name in the stories of his arrest.
Annalee’s family had moved to Los Angeles around the time she started working at MGM. Living in Los Angeles’s Miracle Mile neighborhood, her brother Jim made friends with a number of Mel’s younger cousins, many of whom lived in nearby Hancock Park. In school he and Mel’s cousin Peggy even attended the same “Opportunity Room” class. All these people knew about Mel’s passion for China and the adventures he’d been having there, as he’d kept his family regularly apprised of his exploits. Jim Whitmore passed this information on to Annalee.
In truth, although Mel’s name was familiar, it didn’t generate much more than passing recognition for Annalee. He was an entire class year behind her, and they ran in different circles. Even at the Daily—where he started as a cub reporter when she was already on the editorial staff—they only occasionally interacted.
But Mel’s adventures in Asia intrigued Annalee. Besides the arrest in Haiphong, Annalee learned about Mel’s work in China, his travels around the region, and his encounters with powerful figures in the country. If nothing else, Mel was committed to his craft and knew how to form influential connections.
Annalee soon learned that Mel and John Rice were close. She also knew John from the Daily, so she reached out to him to see if she could get an introduction. Mel sympathized when John told him about Annalee’s difficulties getting permission from the U.S. government to travel to China. But he was also aware from his own experience in China that she would have a much easier time getting cleared to travel to the country if she had a concrete job to do there, not just one assignment. He wasn’t even certain yet whether he’d be able to return himself. In any case, over the year Mel had been in China, he’d built up a deep network of contacts. Before he recommended any of them to Annalee, he wanted to get a better sense of her interest.
When John and Mel returned to John’s apartment from their outing in the city, they called Annalee up. An instant rapport formed. On the phone, Mel promised Annalee that he’d make a few requests on her behalf. He was headed to the East Coast, so it would be some time before he was back in Los Angeles, but they made plans to meet for a drink and reacquaint themselves when he returned to town.
Before Mel could do much for Annalee, however, he would also have to figure out his own future. With no chance to rekindle his romance with Shirlee, and despite his closeness with his mother and stepfather, he did not feel anchored to California. Sure, he was probably feeling withdrawal symptoms from the adrenaline rush of war reporting, but he wasn’t driven only by adventure-seeking instincts. Home was comfortable, but perhaps too comfortable. It was well past time Mel got serious about his life and his career.
Chapter 6
“I’LL BE CAREFUL”
In 1941 a massive news operation whose publisher had deep ties to and passion for China, the nation’s first broadcasting network, and the American arm of the Chinese News Service operation all had headquarters at New York’s Rockefeller Center. A few dozen blocks east, at 150 Fifth Avenue, Lingnan University’s board of trustees shared space with other Christian missionary schools and China aid organizations. New York was also one of two bases for the Institute for Pacific Relations (the other was in Hawaii), whose members had helped Mel find his footing as a journalist in China.
As a result of its concentration of wealth and media, New York City was an influential base for students of Sino-American relations, possibly even more important than Pacific-facing San Francisco or powerful Washington, D.C. In the spring of 1941, the city was about to add a multimillion-dollar fund-raising drive and relief operation to the list of China-focused endeavors it housed.
That spring, while Mel settled back into life in the United States, a panoply of powerful figures who would drive much of the next decade of U.S.-Chinese relations gathered in New York. They were summoned by Henry R. Luce, the tremendously influential publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines. Luce’s parents were Presbyterian missionaries in China, and he had been born in the Chinese city of Chefoo (Yantai). Like so many other “mishkids,” Luce spent the rest of his life enamored with China, and by 1941 he had begun aggressively advocating for American intervention in the country’s war with Japan. Luce believed that a successful relief effort on China’s behalf could help the United States win a battle for American civilization itself that couldn’t be won solely through the use of force. Gaining the trust and confidence of China’s hundreds of millions of people, Luce argued, should be a paramount goal.
“For they are the largest body of human beings whose friendship we can either gain or lose,” Luce said in a speech that March. The United States, Luce argued, only had a few months to either gain or lose China’s trust. “And we can gain or lose it not only by the wise use of our military or economic power but we can gain it perhaps even more surely by the art and practice of friendship.”
Luce’s speech outlined the interventionist philosophy behind the $5 million United China Relief fund-raising drive, which brought numerous humanitarian organizations together under one banner of American-Sino assistance. Begun on February 7, 1941, it aimed to bolster the beleaguered Chinese nation, particularly people in so-called free China, the portion of the country under the influence of Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang Party. While it was obvious that United China Relief’s aid wouldn’t support Wang Ching-wei’s Reorganized National Government of China—the Nanking-based puppet government that collaborated with Japan—it also wasn’t intended to benefit Chiang’s nominal allies in Yenan, the Communists. Ostensibly set up to benefit all Chinese people regardless of politics, the United China Relief drive would most benefit the Kuomintang.
B. A. Garside, a Presbyterian missionary who led the Associated Boards for Christian Colleges of China, was United China Relief’s executive director, though Luce provided the organization’s momentum. In Chefoo, Garside had been a friend of Luce’s father. Together, Garside and the younger Luce gathered a committee of thirteen heavy hitters to lead United China Relief’s campaign committee.
Aside from Luce, the committee included the recently defeated Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie; the oil fortune heir, philanthropist, and internationalist John D. Rockefeller III (it was Rockefeller who’d staked the International House at UC Berkeley that inspired Mel’s drive for a similar facility at Stanford); the novelist and Nobelist Pearl Buck, whose The Good Earth assessed pre-revolutionary Chinese village life; the presidential offspring and cousin and former Philippines governor-general Theodore Roosevelt Jr.; the Hollywood producer David O. Selznick; University of California president Robert G. Sproul; James G. Blaine, president of the Fidelity Trust Company, a Republican Party financier, and the grandson of a legendary former Speaker of the House; Eugene E. Barnett, head of the YMCA; New York Trust Company president Artemus L. Gates; William C. Bullitt, a former ambassador to the Soviet Union and France who had briefly served as the appointed mayor of Paris (Bullitt also worked as managing editor at the Famous Players–Lasky Corporation seven years after the start of its fruitful work at Mel’s grandfather’s barn); Studebaker president Pa
ul G. Hoffman; and Thomas W. Lamont, a partner at J. P. Morgan who’d both helped negotiate the Treaty of Versailles and loaned $100 million to Benito Mussolini’s regime.
Though the body was heavily weighted toward Republican Party figures, its three-member national advisory committee was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt. The president’s wife was joined in her advisory role by Buck and Mrs. James E. Hughes. Most had previous personal or business ties to China. Given both Luce’s and Selznick’s involvement, participation in the organization was also an opportunity to burnish their public image.
All of this developed as Mel returned to the United States. He finally arrived in New York as United China Relief made its final preparations for “China Week,” a series of dinners and other events that would celebrate the campaign’s formal kickoff. Mel had last visited New York in the summer of 1936, just as he began his around-the-world trip to Lingnan. Now it almost seemed like the city—bustling with China-related events and activities—had donned a familiar costume to make Mel feel welcome.
But China Week was still almost a month away; until then, Mel had to keep up with the hectic schedule he’d arranged for himself. Regardless of his good timing with United China Relief, his goal was practical. New York was the heart of U.S. media, and he needed a job.
Mel adopted a strategy similar to the one he’d used in Shanghai. He hobnobbed with reporters, crashed news conferences, ate lunch at the Overseas Press Club (where he became a member), and met as many editors in New York as he could. He reasoned that one of them might be able to send him back to China.
First on Mel’s list of meetings was Earl Leaf. The eccentric former journalist who’d helped locate the ham radio operator and dentist Doc Stuart was the Kuomintang’s key propagandist in the United States. It was through Leaf’s contacts that Hollington Tong had found Mel, and the two had been in touch frequently while Mel was at XGOY. Leaf offered Mel a well-paying job opening a propaganda office on the West Coast, but Mel wasn’t interested.
However, Leaf also found Mel a literary agent, Nancy Parker, and an agent to handle his photography, Paul Guillumette. Guillumette immediately tried to sell Mel’s many photos of Indochina and Chungking. Meanwhile, Mel was excited that Parker also represented Madame Chiang and Carl Crow—the author of 400 Million Customers—and he went straight from their meeting back to the Algonquin Hotel to type up summaries of possible stories that she might be able to place or help him develop further.
“Yesterday they were quite hopeful about me, but you never know what Monday will bring,” Mel wrote after meeting the agents.
Mel also reconnected with Hallett Abend, the art-dealing New York Times correspondent who had helped Mel find his footing in Shanghai. The two had a lengthy discussion about working together. Abend would return to his position as the Times’s Far East Bureau head, and Mel would work with him, possibly covering Singapore and Burma.
“If something like that happened it would be the best spot in the Orient,” Mel wrote. “But I’m hoping and he sounded optimistic.”
Hallett Abend asked Mel to come with him to Washington, D.C., to meet his government sources. Abend went first, and Mel followed a few days later, about a week after he had arrived in New York.
Before he left for the capital, Mel had lunch with John Hersey. Hersey was Time’s Far East editor and the man who had hired Teddy White to work for the magazine. Teddy had suggested that the two meet. Hersey spoke highly of Teddy. He didn’t have a job available for Mel, but he was willing to have Mel contribute occasionally, as he had done for the San Francisco Chronicle the year before. As Mel left for Washington, he wondered whether he just might be able to make the offer from Time work if he combined it with other possibilities about which he was waiting to hear.
While in D.C., Mel met with officials from the State Department and had a long talk with General Robert Richardson, the newly appointed head of the army’s public relations bureau. The visit gave Mel a chance to catch up with the now-married Harry Caulfield and two other friends from Lingnan, Ed Meisenhelder and Eugene Johnson. Now that all three worked with the government, Mel had even more sources he could plumb.
Interestingly, Mel also spent considerable time debriefing intelligence sections at both the Department of War and the Department of the Navy about Indochina and China. There is no apparent indication that he had been involved in any clandestine activity; rather, it seems likely that Mel was simply sharing his understanding of the dynamics on the ground in Asia. His depth of knowledge about Chungking and the Kuomintang was obvious, and his notes from his time in Indochina included day-by-day time lines of developments involving the colony and Japan, demographic and economic breakdowns of the various players in Southeast Asia, and background profiles of Japanese and French diplomats and military officers. The navy intelligence officials had a tentative commission for Mel if he returned to Asia, but he didn’t want to make any decisions just yet.
He wasn’t ruling anything out either. While Mel wanted work as a journalist, he knew that he’d probably have to join the military once war broke out. Making sure that he had opportunities with navy intelligence or other commands—he also said he’d volunteer for the U.S. Army Air Corps immediately—was one way he could avoid service as a conscript. Still, he hoped that if he was a foreign correspondent on assignment, he could get an exemption from the draft and avoid the issue entirely. Whatever happened, it looked like the United States wasn’t going to stay out of the war much longer.
“Everyone in Washington knows that we are in the war,” Mel wrote shortly after the visit to Washington.
Mel returned to New York the following Tuesday night. Abend insisted that he still had an opportunity for Mel, but as much as Mel wanted to work for the New York Times, he was getting impatient waiting for further word. So he did what he’d always done: he arranged as many meetings as he could with newspapers, magazines, and radio networks.
Meanwhile, Mel’s new agents were earning their commissions. Click magazine paid Mel $250 for twenty pictures he took of air raids in Chungking and a brief article, and it was interested in more work if he returned to China. Asia magazine asked Mel for a 2,500-word piece about the Indochina crisis for publication that May. The New Republic also asked for a story, but that one never panned out.
Returning to China was Mel’s priority, but he didn’t lack options in the United States either. Mel was surprised to discover that he wasn’t getting many bites from the United Press. John Morris, the syndicate’s Far East manager, and Dick Wilson, its Manila bureau chief, had both cabled the United Press’s main office on his behalf and suggested that he be sent back to China or elsewhere in the region. The managers in New York didn’t want to commit to anything, however, until something changed in the current stalemate between the United States and Japan.
They did, however, offer Mel a position in Sacramento editing cables coming in from the Far East. This offer promised more authority and more stability. It was tantalizing, and if Mel had wanted to grow up, this might have been the best way for him to do so. Sacramento certainly wasn’t Chungking, but the opportunity was the first offer of full-time employment that Mel had ever received, and with his knowledge of China, he would be able to help address the problem he’d raised in his thesis—uninformed stateside cable editors—not to mention the problems he’d had with how his own stories from Indochina had been edited.
Mel still hadn’t heard back from Abend about the New York Times, so he decided to take matters into his own hands. He decided not to take a job in the United States because if he did, he could just be quickly pulled into the army.
“Not so bad,” he said, “but I still want to cash in on the last two years [of experience in China].”
Unwilling to keep waiting, Mel decided to act on another offer. NBC wanted him to work as a radio stringer in Chungking. The network would pay him $50 per three-minute segment. That alone wouldn’t be enough to live on, especially because his workload would be inconsistent, though there
was a chance, if he did well, that his reports would become part of NBC’s regular news roundups. Still, he could always write and sell photos on top of the radio work.
“If I am going to make any real money out of the trip, it will roll in from pictures and articles, which I am trying to line up,” Mel wrote. “Means walking the pavements all day besides doing all this other work. Personal contact. All is personal contact.”
Fortunately, Mel had another offer. In January, Hollington Tong had written Mel assuring him that if he came back, as Tong hoped he would, he would try to smooth out some of the working conditions at XGOY that had pushed Mel out of the station. Now, in New York, Earl Leaf and H. J. Timperley, the former Manchester Guardian journalist recently hired as Tong’s primary foreign advisor, offered Mel a job in Chungking as an advisor at XGOY, where he would be transmitting his NBC broadcasts anyhow. They would also pay him a $100-per-month salary and provide a car for him to get from the Press Hostel to the radio station’s underground studio. Finally, Mel wouldn’t need to take a ship all the way to China: the government was willing to buy a plane ticket for Mel on board the famous Pan-Am Clipper from San Francisco.
Even with a salary from XGOY this time, it wouldn’t be enough to live on. Fortunately, Hersey’s offer to contribute to Time still stood. But at the last minute, the lesser-known Newsweek approached Mel with an offer to be its Far Eastern correspondent. Mel accepted. He’d be a stringer for the Time competitor, sending a few stories every week for a minimum of $20, and more if they published any of his stories.
