by Phil Keith
After eighteen hours, they reached the frontier at the French town of Hendaye. There was no immediate relief, however, because everyone was held at the International Bridge, where papers were checked. There were not, as of then, any German guards, which would have made it impossible for Bullard to proceed. The Spanish border guards, being Fascist, might have been problematic, but the amazing Bullard luck held yet again. Bullard recognized one of the Spanish officials as an old comrade from the Foreign Legion, Jacques de la Swaine. He was stationed at Hendaye as a customs inspector, and when he saw Bullard his face lit up with delight. He immediately pulled Bullard out of line and took him to a waterside café where they spent the afternoon dining and drinking and recalling old times.
In the early hours of the next morning, with the bridge still closed from the previous night, de la Swaine personally escorted Bullard across, into Spain, without incident. The two old comrades parted, but not before de la Swaine gave Bullard two more bottles of fine Spanish wine. After walking a short distance, he encountered a group of Americans waiting for the early morning bus to Bilbao and he decided to fall in with them. Despite the early hour, he popped open both bottles and passed them around. All were thirsty and not about to complain about early morning imbibing.
There was one exception, however. A Caucasian woman in the group was horrified to see her companions drinking from the same bottles as a “negro.” Bullard winked at her and said, “Only American microbes in here.”
The woman smiled nervously, asked for one of the bottles, took a big swig, and everyone laughed.
When it arrived, Bullard and his fellow refugees wearily boarded the bus for Bilbao. Several bumpy, stomach-churning hours later, they were greeted by representatives of the American Red Cross. Spain, at that time, was under the iron-fisted rule of General Francisco Franco. He was in sympathy with the Axis and friendly to Hitler’s government, but through a series of deft political and military maneuvers he was able to keep Spain neutral throughout World War II. This status allowed the US State Department to operate cautiously if not freely in Spain during the war. As the conflict began to ramp up, American diplomats and semigovernmental organizations, such as the Red Cross, were given at least tacit diplomatic immunity from potential Nazi depredations under orders direct from Franco. Spain became a vital lifeline for United States citizens fleeing the chaos. Ironically, many Jews, American and otherwise, were finding refuge and unrestricted passage to the United States from a nation with a Fascist leader.
Bullard, along with his new coterie of companions, were put up in Red Cross–sponsored hotels in Bilbao, where they could remain until transportation stateside could be arranged. On July 4, 1940, the Red Cross held an Independence Day party in the Grand Ballroom of the Hotel Carlton, one of Bilbao’s oldest and swankiest hotels. It was a welcome and glorious affair for the many ex-pats still waiting to go stateside. Bullard, with his vast nightclub experience, volunteered to manage the bar and all liquor aspects of the fete.
All went well until about halfway through the planned hours for the dance, when a group of swaggering, obviously drunken Spanish and German officers crashed the party. They insisted on cutting in on the dancing American couples and spouting about their “superiority.” It didn’t take long for a fistfight to erupt, which began to escalate into a full-fledged brawl. The local police were called and got the situation under control quickly. The unwanted German and Spanish servicemen were escorted from the hotel. What is particularly remarkable about this incident was that the usually hotheaded Eugene Bullard calmly stood behind the bar protecting the bottles of champagne instead of uncorking his fists.
Five days later, the next group of refugees, including Bullard, were called up for exfiltration. They boarded a train in Bilbao for further transport to Lisbon, Portugal. Like Spain, Portugal managed to remain neutral in the war, although under extreme pressure: both sides would have loved military bases in the strategic Azores. On the Spain-Portugal border, Bullard faced one more obstacle.
All through the ordeal of the past several weeks he had managed to keep a beret atop his head. This was not a sentimental or sartorial gesture: the beret had one hundred thousand francs hidden in it.2 At the border, Spanish customs officials were confiscating currency. When his turn came, Bullard was ordered to remove his clothes. As he did so, he engaged the inspector in a lively discussion about boxing and his career in the ring many years earlier. The distracted inspector never thought to tell Bullard to take off his beret.
On July 12, the chartered steamer S.S. Manhattan, with US Navy Commander G. V. Richardson as captain, set sail from Lisbon, bound for New York City, with 798 American citizens and other mixed nationalities, all wanting to “go home.”
Six days later, Eugene Bullard stood at the rail as the Manhattan glided by Ellis Island. “I can never forget how thrilled I was at the sight of the Statue of Liberty,” he later reflected. “I wonder if she ever looked so beautiful to any shipload of Americans as she did that day.” He was definitely hoping that the country he had fled almost three decades earlier would welcome him home.
The “burst of brightness from Miss Liberty’s torch was quickly clouded,” he added, because Bullard could not consider himself truly home until he was reunited with his daughters...if they were still alive. He had heard nothing from them—or Kitty Terrier—since that crowded hour when he had shouldered his pack and gone off to once again fight the Germans.
* * *
1 Though in his mid-70s and more than eligible to retire, Waterman would stay at his post in Bordeaux for another year, helping Americans escape from the Nazis and the soon-to-be Vichy Government.
2 Worth about $2,200 US 1940 dollars.
ACT VI
The Pioneer
23
CAN YOU REALLY GO HOME AGAIN?
What Eugene Bullard, hero of France, feared most about returning to the land of his birth hit him as soon as he walked off the gangway of the S.S. Manhattan.
Jack S. Spector, former commander of American Legion Post 1 in Paris, had been placed in charge of seeing to the immediate needs of all American war veterans—especially Post 1 members—who were being repatriated. If an old soldier didn’t have a room to stay in, hotel arrangements were made, and paid for, at least initially. If the veteran had no money, a small stipend to get him on his feet was provided. If there was no family to greet him, there would be a welcome from a former friend or acquaintance in the Post. This was to be provided for all members—except one, apparently, who happened to be the only black veteran who stepped off the boat that day. Spector’s excuse? Eugene Bullard “wasn’t on his list.”
The embarrassed Spector—who, ironically, had been teaching “Americanism” to the children of Post 1 members in Paris before the city fell—managed to pull a few dollars out of his own pocket to give Bullard “food money.” Another, better-heeled voyager, Sedley Peck, who had flown briefly for the American Air Service in 1917-18, produced a small wad of cash amounting to about $50. Sharp-eyed readers might ask, “But wait! Didn’t Bullard have one hundred thousand francs sewn into his beret?” He did, indeed, but by the time he landed in New York, the “old” French franc under the new Vichy government, was worthless.
Luckily for him, at Dr. Sparks’s request, he had been carrying with him a suitcase belonging to a friend of Sparks from Paris. He was asked to deliver the suitcase to the friend’s New York City apartment, which he did, and the compensation was a key to the place and the offer to spend a few nights there until he could arrange his own accommodations. That’s exactly what Bullard did, landing at 1829 Seventh Avenue in Manhattan.
It had to have been a massive cultural shock for him. Even with the generosity of Spector and Peck, Bullard began his stay in New York with about the same amount of money as he had been given upon arriving in Scotland as a stowaway on the German freighter some twenty-eight years ago. He was also much older, under t
errible physical stress with his cracked vertebrae, and covered in scars from two wars. He had spoken more French than English during the past two-plus decades and he was truly more French in dress, manners, and thinking than he was American.
Less than two years earlier, he had been drinking champagne every night, carrying rolls of French francs in his pocket, dining with the elite of French society, mixing with many of the most illustrious names in art, literature, music, and politics, and driving his own flashy sports car around the Parisian environs. That had been a life full of “wine, women, and song,” and then, on a New York pier, he was reduced to accepting enough money to buy a few meals and rent a room that he could afford.
Added to all this was the emotional anxiety Bullard harbored over the fate of his children. Since leaving Paris, he had heard nothing from them, or from Kitty Terrier. Were they still alive? Were they in Nazi custody? “Guests” of the Gestapo? All in all, it was quite a comedown from his previous circumstances and it had taken a terrific emotional, mental and physical toll.
Being Eugene James Bullard, however, he would not “break.” All he knew—all he had ever known—was that when you got knocked down, you picked yourself up again and moved on. That is what he set out to do that sweltering July day in 1940. As his old pal Ernest Hemingway had written, “The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.”
* * *
The first few months in America were extremely tough. To make ends meet, Bullard took odd jobs, mostly obtained from wartime acquaintances. He cleaned apartments, ran errands, and waited tables at parties. Whatever money was left after paying for his room and food went to medical expenses, as he tried hard to rehabilitate his back so he could take on more strenuous—and better paying—work. All the while he was waging a constant campaign to locate his daughters and get them to safety in America.
One of the countless friends he had made in Paris was William C. Bullitt. Born into a wealthy Philadelphia family in 1891, Bullitt was raised in society circles, attended Yale, and after graduating in 1913, went to Harvard Law School. He dropped out the next year, however, after his father’s sudden death. Turning to journalism, he became a successful European correspondent for a number of years and in 1926 he published a popular novel lampooning Philadelphia society. He worked on Woodrow Wilson’s staff during the period when the Versailles Treaty was being drafted, but fell out with Wilson on Soviet relations: Bullitt was very much in favor of closer relations with Soviet Russia, while Wilson was not. Bullitt had another good friend who was on the rise, however: Franklin D. Roosevelt. When Roosevelt became president he made Bullitt the first ambassador to the Soviet Union, a post Bullitt held from 1933-1936.
Once he got up-close-and-personal with Soviet leadership, and witnessed its brutality and perfidy, his opinion was totally reversed. By the end of his tenure, he had turned completely against the Soviet way and became, in fact, a passionate anti-Communist for the rest of his life.
Bullitt’s next posting was as ambassador to France. An ardent Francophile who spoke the language fluently, he had a wine cellar stocked with eighteen thousand bottles of fine French wine. He seemed the perfect choice for ambassador. His closeness to FDR also endeared him to the leaders of France who were desperate to court closer ties to the United States in case of war. Bullitt, in fact, in September of 1938, gave a speech in Paris that seemed to imply that the United States would immediately come to the aid of France should she be attacked or if the Germans took control of Czechoslovakia. Roosevelt was aghast and quick to send a denial to Paris. It was the beginning of cracks in the relationship between Roosevelt and his ambassador to France.
Bullitt, who had already been married twice, but a bachelor in the 1930s, had become acquainted with Eugene Bullard via L’Escadrille and did not mind living it up and having a grand old time in the club-crawling years before World War II. When the war broke out, Bullitt refused to quit his post in Paris, which made him a bit of a folk hero among American ex-pats. It did nothing but anger President Roosevelt, however, who wanted Bullitt to leave Paris and move with the Free French government to London. Bullitt was the only allied ambassador still at his post in Paris when the Nazis came marching in. He finally left on direct orders from Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Bullitt came home and went to work as an assistant to Hull, a personal friend of long standing.
It was to Bullitt that Bullard turned in the autumn of 1940, traveling to Washington, DC, for a personal audience with his old pal. Today, it strains the bounds of credulity to think that a private citizen could call up and get an appointment with a prominent former ambassador who is also a chieftain in the State Department. American government has become vast and layered, full of gatekeepers and intermediaries, so much so that even a simple sit-down with your local congressperson requires a herculean effort, in many cases. These were still the days, in late 1940, though, before the global explosion that would vault the United States into its world leadership role, when government was still personal—especially if you “knew someone” or if you had “old friends” who labored in the halls of power. Thus it was that Eugene Bullard, French American citizen, could pick up the phone and quickly arrange a meeting with ex-Ambassador William Bullitt, his old drinking buddy, on a matter of grave personal priority.
Bullard asked if strings could be pulled, and Bullitt did just that. His contacts in the new Vichy government were still good, and after a friend called a friend, in Paris, Bullard’s daughters were swiftly located. Miraculously, they were still living with and under the protection of Kitty Terrier.
In January of 1941, a stressed, exhausted, and worried Eugene Bullard received a telegram from none other than Secretary Hull himself. He indicated that Jacqueline and Lolita were then under American protection and that papers were being prepared to allow them to leave France. The State Department would advance the funds necessary for their transport—but the government would have to be repaid.
Bullard was overjoyed. But how to pay back the government? He turned to another old friend, Austen B. Crehore, who was at the time president of the Lafayette Flying Corps Association, headquartered in New York City. Crehore had, in the early days of the Great War, tried to sign on with both the army and navy flying services but had been rejected because he was totally deaf in one ear. Not to be deterred, he booked passage on a steamer and sailed to France where he signed on directly with the French Air Service which cared only if you could fly and shoot straight and not if you could hear the sounds of the German planes shooting back. He acquitted himself superbly, downing at least three enemy aircraft and earning two Croix de Guerre. During one of his successful air engagements he was nearly doubled over in pain from appendicitis but had refused to go to the hospital until he finished his mission.
Crehore put out the word to the members of the association and within no time at all, sixteen of Bullard’s former flying pals, including Crehore and Ted Parsons, had raised enough money to pay for all the expenses of getting Lolita and Jacqueline to America. Crehore, who lived in New Jersey, even drove to Harlem to pick up Bullard and took him to Pier F in Jersey City where, on February 3, 1941, the girls arrived safely on the S.S. Exeter. They had taken nearly the same route as their father the previous year: Paris to Bordeaux, then Biarritz, Hendaye, and finally Lisbon where they boarded the Exeter. One has to wonder, as the girls passed through Biarritz, if they gave any thought to their mother.
The reunion between father and children was joyous. Neither girl spoke a word of English, however, so as soon as they were all settled in Bullard’s small Spanish Harlem apartment, lessons began. The girls were a great help to their industrious but ailing father. They busied themselves with the necessities and housecleaning while also restarting their education in this strange and complicated land.
* * *
As Bullard had anxiously awaited news of his children, he had found a job, through the Flying Corps alumni. He was hired as
a security guard at the US Army base in Brooklyn. It was about the best he could come up with, given that he was relearning English and had not enhanced his formal education at all since finishing the second grade in Columbus, Georgia. Unfortunately, there were few jobs for jazz drummers, and owning a club in New York was far beyond his means.
He earned the sum of $40 per week as a security guard. That was barely enough to keep him in food and rent money; adding the support of two teenage girls would make it impossible. He had heard, through his army contacts, that better jobs were open for longshoremen with the navy on Staten Island. He had been a longshoreman once, long ago, in Liverpool, so he elected to give it a try. He recognized that his fractured back might make it both painful and difficult to do that type of work; plus, his age was against him. However, the $100 per week that was being offered was just too good to pass up, so off he went, on the Staten Island Ferry, to apply. He would get the job, but only after a very curious experience that involved a shoving match, a knockdown, and an FBI agent.
As the ferry docked on Staten Island, the crowd surged forward to get off the boat. A white man shoved Bullard aside. He, of course, shoved back. The white guy whirled around and shouted, “You black bastard!” That was all it took for Bullard’s hair-trigger temper to take over. He uncorked a right hook which flattened the man to the deck. An ugly, murmuring crowd started to form around the only black man on the boat.
As the man Bullard had coldcocked got up, and the others moved toward him, a voice rang out: “Stop! Get back!”
