by Bill Lascher
“I took it instead of Time because I thought there might be more future,” Mel wrote.
While Mel planned his return to China, Henry Luce and the unlikely cabal of powerful public figures behind United China Relief were getting ready for “China Week,” a star-studded rollout of their fund-raising campaign. Using the threat of war and instability to gather support for the campaign, this extravaganza of public relations events and festivities throughout New York City would highlight various aspects of Chinese culture as seen through American eyes. The carefully orchestrated events would include galas, dinners, and lectures drawing audiences of celebrities, philanthropists, and politicians.
China Week also launched triumphalist newsreels that would run in theaters nationwide throughout the summer. These films spread the celebration across the United States through blaring title sequences, dramatic narration, and images of the fighting in China. All of it highlighted the heroism of China’s Nationalist armies while ignoring the Communist forces also fighting Japan.
Other China Weeks followed. Asking his constituents to “turn their thoughts to the needs of the Chinese people,” the mayor of Baltimore proclaimed one for the week of March 2–9, three weeks before New York’s. In May, New York governor Herbert Lehman declared a statewide China Week with platitudes about supporting democracy but included few official events. Other regions in the United States and Canada followed with similar celebrations, and the concept was repeated in New York the following year. By the end of 1942, United China Relief had raised about $4.8 million, just under its $5 million fund-raising goal.
After Mel agreed to return to his old job at XGOY, he soon learned that one of his responsibilities would be assisting United China Relief. Chiang Kai-shek wanted Wendell Willkie, who’d just lost the presidential election to President Roosevelt, to visit China. Mel was given a free ticket to the kickoff dinner and asked to pass along the Generalissimo’s invitation to Willkie.
“So I’m a little shot doing big things,” Mel wrote, and he didn’t sound terribly pleased with himself. “A fine business this whole thing. I am disgusted at some people. Particularly some of the advisors to the Chinese government. What a racket they are running. And now I’m helping them too!”
But doing big things also gave Mel an enjoyable night out. As it happened, many people Mel knew from Chungking and Shanghai had shown up for the dinner. Even Randall Gould was there, as were two other writers Mel had befriended in China: Ed Snow and Evans Carlson. And Mel had a glamorous date, one of the most famous Chinese women in America at the time: Lee Ya-Ching.
“She is very pretty and fell out of her plane once for a publicity stunt,” Mel wrote. This was an understatement. Lee was a daredevil aviatrix who was arguably the most famous Chinese pilot, male or female. In 1935 she had parachuted into the San Francisco Bay after a training emergency, earning her membership in a select club of fliers known as the Caterpillar Club. But she was famous for more than that incident.
“In the decade before World War II, if you had asked anyone in China to name just one pilot, the answer you probably would have gotten would have been Lee Ya-Ching,” wrote Rebecca Maksel in Air and Space magazine. The evening with Lee was just a dinner date for Mel, and part of his new association with United China Relief, but he enjoyed having such accomplished company. Indeed, while he was in New York, Mel wrote Teddy White a letter insisting that after his experience with Shirlee, he had no immediate interest in romance.
“Said Shirlee and I are on the best of terms and all that,” Mel said. “But I am not going to get a wife now or for a long time. I am coming back across the Pacific. I hope before you get home.”
Mel enjoyed the dinner, though he wasn’t impressed by Willkie—or his own too-tight rented tux. That night Henry Luce also made a speech. He implored donors to support the Chinese cause.
“For [the Chinese] are the largest body of human beings whose friendship we can either gain or lose,” Luce told the well-heeled diners at the Waldorf. “We can lose or gain their friendship in the next few months.”
Playing a card commonly used in pro-China rhetoric, Luce lamented how year after year the United States continued to sell arms and matériel to Japan even as Japanese atrocities against the Chinese mounted. Nevertheless, he insisted, China continued to have faith in the commitment of the United States.
“The Chinese people are interested in our power politics,” he declared, leading to his speech’s climax. “They are interested in our diplomatic maneuvers. They are interested in our military and naval strategy. But they are interested in something far, far more than all that. They are interested in us, the American people, in what kind of people we are.”
Shortly after the China Week dinner, Mel returned to Washington, D.C. Now that he had work commitments, he needed a passport. He also needed to postpone the military draft again.
On March 11, just as Mel was leaving Washington after his previous visit, President Roosevelt had signed the Lend-Lease Act, which authorized billions of dollars of aid to the Allied powers, including China, and dramatically shifted the momentum of U.S. foreign relations. Back in the capital, Mel discovered, to his delight, that the State Department now saw his presence in China as an asset.
“State Department is exceptionally pleased about my going out and promises every cooperation,” Mel wrote from Washington’s Wardman Park Hotel. Shortly after the Department of State delivered its blessing, some of the connections Mel had made in other government departments also offered to help him out. “They feel it is definitely a part of our national defense program. I can’t go into details. I have a connection in the Navy Department you will be proud to hear about—I think. If it works out.”
Mel’s excitement over his return to China became difficult to contain, but he was also eager for another meeting, this one in Los Angeles: his drink with Annalee Whitmore. Speaking over the phone while he was in San Francisco, they had agreed to meet at a bar on Wilshire Boulevard, which was just a short walk from Annalee’s parents’ home near the La Brea Tar Pits.
On that first night, the two spent hours at the bar discussing China. By the time the night was through, they’d even begun brainstorming an idea for a movie about the conflict in Asia. After their meeting, Annalee began pursuing leads on agents who might be able to sell a treatment, though Mel, who’d grown up surrounded by Hollywood, was skeptical that the film would ever become something more than a wonderful idea.
Neither expected romantic chemistry when they finally met for cocktails. Mel was only recently out of his relationship with Shirlee Austerland, and Annalee was too focused on her work to think about romance; nevertheless, the meeting crackled with an intellectual energy so powerful that it precipitated intense physical and emotional chemistry. They quickly grew close, at least intellectually.
At Stanford, Mel had been too quiet to interest Annalee. Even though she was just four months older than Mel, she was a year ahead of him in school, and they had rarely spoken, in part because Mel was in China attending Lingnan during Annalee’s senior year. Now Mel’s confidence shone.
When Mel described China to Annalee, he spoke with such passion that it caught her by surprise. He’d experienced how many air raids and remained levelheaded throughout? He’d risked his life and freedom how many times to cover the belligerence against Indochina? He’d extended his work in Asia how many months, despite a worried family and an impatient girlfriend? Who was this man who made his work the center of his life? And what was it about this place, this faraway place called Chungking, that made him want to go back so soon despite its discomforts, its deprivations, its dangers, and its incredible distance from home? Whatever it was, she wanted to find out for herself. And though she wouldn’t immediately admit it, even to herself, Annalee soon realized that she wanted to see Mel again too. She’d broken off relationships with past partners because they hadn’t stimulated her mind. Now here was a man who seemed to enjoy discussing the world with Annalee as much as she did with
him.
Mel had known Annalee was interested in China before they met, and he quickly recognized the grip the country had on her imagination. Her independence and her interest in what was unfolding in Asia played a major role in his willingness to help her get to Asia to see the war for herself.
That night, an electrical current seemed to flow between Mel and Annalee. It was unlike any connection Mel had felt before. He’d dated in the past, and he didn’t have a hard time talking to women. During his last semester at Lingnan, Mel had even toyed with the idea of marrying Marie Leîtao, his girlfriend in Macau, but that had been little more than a youthful lark.
Then there was Shirlee, whose affection for Mel cooled as he stayed in Asia for so long, despite what he thought was his love for her. At first Mel was lost, but he quickly realized that his reporting in China and Indochina had given him the opportunity he’d long awaited to define himself and pursue exactly the work he wanted. As high a priority as Mel had put on romance, it was clear that Shirlee would only play second fiddle to his work.
Annalee brought something entirely different to the table. She was an equal. She was fully herself, neither a woman who felt she had to prove herself and her capabilities to the men around her nor a precious flower to be protected from those men. She cut through the bullshit. More importantly, she respected Mel and now found him attractive because of, not in spite of, his commitment to his career.
Before Mel left, he invited her to a United China Relief meeting. Then he drove up the coast from L.A. to Ventura, the small town where Dr. Charles Stuart received all of XGOY’s broadcasts. Stuart had volunteered to organize the relief effort’s chapter in his city, and Mel was eager to meet him in person. He brought Annalee along for the trip, so she was able to make her own introductions as well.
Annalee was capable of finding work on her own, but she also sought out Mel’s advice. It had been made abundantly clear to Mel in New York that United China Relief would need a great deal of help. In early April, United China Relief publicity director Otis P. Swift had even written Mel’s draft board in San Francisco on the organization’s letterhead, urging its members to postpone drafting Mel because the committee was “anxious” to see him return to China.
“He is in close touch with the problems in [East Asia],” Swift wrote. “We feel that he will be most valuable in helping to coordinate American relief activities and to insure that they meet the actual needs of the Chinese people.”
Aware of how invested United China Relief was in his return to China, and of the efforts that Leaf, Timperley, and the Kuomintang propaganda arm they represented were taking to convince him to return to his broadcasting role at XGOY, Mel knew he could parlay their assistance into an opportunity for Annalee. The afternoon he had lunch with John Hersey in New York he’d asked the Time hand to invite Annalee to dinner the next time he was in L.A.
Other Hollywood players were beginning to take note of China’s crisis. In 1937 MGM successfully adapted Pearl Buck’s China-focused The Good Earth. Now Buck was one of United China Relief’s initial leadership committee members, as was David O. Selznick, the former MGM studio head.
Though Mel had worked his connections to help Annalee, her own work in Hollywood impressed the power brokers. Word soon reached Selznick that a young scriptwriter at MGM wanted to immerse herself in the Asian situation and was asking around about relief efforts. Selznick knew that a skilled writer in China could energize the massive aid push that United China Relief wanted to organize. Perhaps this young, Stanford-educated woman was just the person to help.
Meanwhile, Annalee and Mel were growing so close so quickly that by the time Mel’s departure neared, she came along on the Southern Pacific train he took up to San Francisco. The entire way they worked on their movie script.
“I have a hunch that it may sell, too,” Mel said. “I guess I have more confidence in Annalee’s work than my own.”
At this point, Mel had his routine down in San Francisco. He had a great deal of business to conduct in a short period of time—appointments at wire service offices, visits to contacts in Chinatown, phone calls to editors in New York—but Annalee was happy to come along for his April 21 departure. The visits also gave her a chance to meet some of the United China Relief contacts Mel knew. She even met George Ching’s brother, Teddy, who came to see Mel off on the American President Lines’ SS President Taft. When that cool, dry afternoon he was scheduled to depart finally arrived, Teddy Ching wasn’t the only one who was there to say good-bye. Annalee came too, and it was all Mel could do not to take her with him.
“Boat sailed at noon and I almost had Annalee talked into coming along.”
Around the same time Mel set sail from San Francisco, Henry Luce landed at Burbank Airport, just north of Hollywood, fresh off the victory of the Lend-Lease Bill’s signing and the launch of United China Relief. The publisher was about to begin a much-anticipated trip to China.
But before Luce continued north, he was driven to a brick colonial house perched above Benedict and Coldwater Canyons in the Hollywood Hills. It was Selznick’s home—the producer had convened the Hollywood elite for another prong of the United China Relief rollout. Though a far more intimate affair than the dinner at the Waldorf in New York, the gathering collected the men who called the tune for the era’s media. Its guest list was packed with Hollywood’s most powerful producers.
Aware of himself as a man born in “old China,” Luce spoke to the assembled moguls of Chungking and “new China,” a place of “frightful and heartrending hardship” whose “story of unconquerable faith and fortitude” was one with which Americans were insufficiently familiar.
“It is partly because news, like the sun, travels from East to West,” Luce said, appealing to his audience members’ sense of themselves as culturally influential. “Hitherto the most notable exception to this rule has been the news of Hollywood. You people are, as you well know, big news—you are the principal traffic on the westbound course of news.”
Luce believed that the story of China’s “heroism” in standing on its own against Japan was a story that his audience’s grandchildren would consider one of the greatest in history, one for the moguls to “rend as if our very lives depended on it—our lives and the happiness of our children’s children.” He was convinced that “by the year 2000 magnificent picture dramas will be derived from the episodes of this struggle.”
Nineteen-forty-one was the pivot. It was in that year, Luce insisted, that he and his peers were “determining that those future dramas shall spell out the triumph of the human spirit.”
Before he left for China to see for himself where the drama now stood, Luce pulled aside one of the dinner’s guests, Walt Disney. Disney was a natural fit for one of United China Relief’s fund-raising efforts, the Campaign for Young China. The animator agreed to lead this campaign. Before he left, Luce sent a special message to a secretary at his New York office making sure she had noted Disney’s commitment.
Henry Luce knew the dinner’s attendees wanted their influence to continue west across the Pacific, but to sustain America’s attention to the crisis in China, his relief organization would need for news of China’s plight to travel back east across the ocean. United China Relief would need more than money. It would need a story to tell, and it would need people to tell that story, people who knew China and had connections and access there.
Mel Jacoby and his new friend, Annalee, were such people.
While Luce made the final preparations for his trip to China, Mel was sailing aboard the SS President Taft in first class—China’s publicity bureau was paying for the journey—across the Pacific. Not even three months after he returned from his dangerous tour of Indochina, Mel was going back to Asia. He couldn’t believe he was traveling again.
“Thanks for everything at home—still doesn’t seem I’m headed back to China, guess it will take a bombing to wake me up,” Mel wrote to his mother.
Mel would take the Taft to Honolulu
. From there, he would fly across the Pacific on the American Clipper, one of the enormous flying boats owned by Juan Trippe’s Pan-American Airways. The airline’s Clipper routes were luxurious journeys that cut weeks-long ocean crossings into affairs of a few days. (Though Mel flew on a plane called the American Clipper, his trip followed the route known by the same name as its sister plane, the China Clipper.)
Both Click and Newsweek had assigned Mel to cover his trip aboard the glamorous Clipper. Before he could, Mel had to clear his reporting plans with U.S. naval intelligence officers in Honolulu, who set constraints on what he could cover. So Mel got in touch with some of his navy connections in Washington, and they wired their counterparts in Honolulu to ask them to help Mel out.
“Friends are a great institution,” Mel wrote.
Even before the security concerns, Mel was annoyed that he had been bumped from the San Francisco-to-Honolulu leg of the trip. Then he learned that there would be further inconveniences. His departure from Hawaii was delayed for two days, and he’d now be flying out with some of the same high-profile passengers who’d bumped him in the first place. Mel quickly discovered that among those passengers was Henry Luce, as well as the publisher’s wife, Clare Boothe Luce, a playwright and future congresswoman who often contributed to Life.
“Not so good for the Click story,” Mel wrote. “I’m afraid to have a rival publisher’s face in the pics.”
Mel was more than annoyed. He was angry that he had been kicked off the passenger list at the last minute for the San Francisco-to-Honolulu leg of the journey and that people like the Luces could so easily get permission to leave the United States when others couldn’t. Despite his frustration, Mel remained professional enough to save his gripes for a letter home. He knew that his friend Teddy White worked for Luce, that Time had offered him stringer work in China, and that John Hersey was going to dine with Annalee to discuss a position for her with United China Relief.
