by James Brady
“When she got that contract from Simon & Schuster for her first book, I sent a letter offering my services. I read PW each week, y’know. That’s the trade magazine Publishers Weekly,” she explained to me, assuming Alix would already know. I nodded my thanks and she went on:
“Hannah called and asked for samples and references and to make a long story short, she hired me to take dictation and then cleantype the manuscript. She could type herself, she said, but wasn’t that fast and found the process boring. It was how I made my living. I enjoy typing.
“I learned a lot about her that first book. I’d go over there to her apartment, I still had a place in Manhattan then, too, and we’d work together a couple of hours. Hannah would pace up and down, gripping a sheaf of papers, notes, torn-out newspaper clips, articles from magazines, pages ripped from books, and she’d rustle through them and dictate to me nonstop, and fast. Barked it out at me and I got it down. I never knew if what I was taking down were Hannah’s own words and ideas or pure plagiarism. I couldn’t tell until later. After she finished dictating she’d stuff the papers into my hand.
“‘Here,’ she’d say, ‘if you can’t spell something I said or didn’t quite get it all down, everything’s in here. My source material. You work it out. Bring me the cleantyped pages when you come back.’ And that’s just what I’d do.
“But when I’d get back to my place and sort out my shorthand and her bits and pieces, it was clear she was stealing right and left. There were articles from House Beautiful and Better Homes and Architectural Digest and the autobiography of Billy Baldwin and a Time cover story about Sister Parish or tearsheets from Vogue and the Times and articles on Jackie Kennedy’s influence on White House décor or how Giverny was furnished and the gardens at I Tatti …
“A grab bag of stolen goods. But when I went back that first time and handed over the cleantyped pages, I said, trying to be subtle, ‘I assume you’ll be crediting your sources in footnotes. Or will you do it in the body copy as you go along?’ Well, she just exploded.
“‘There’s very little new under the sun, Ms. Thrall, and contemporary women are already too pressed for time, balancing family and career, to be slowed down with a lot of academic posturing. I’m not writing a Ph.D. dissertation here; I’m helping busy American women improve their quality of life and I refuse to harass them further. It is callous and wicked of you even to suggest adding footnotes to their other burdens!’”
Rose Thrall put the water glass on her head and swallowed off whatever was left in it and reached for the bottle on the table at her elbow and gave herself another refill. Again, no ice, no water. It was astonishing to see. I wondered how long she could do this. As if she’d seen the puzzlement in my face she said, quite reasonably, “I have every vice but one, Mr. Stowe. A fifth of rye a day being among them. I don’t smoke, can’t abide the noxious weed. As to having a glass, my physician lectures me about it, goes on and on, but I say to him, ‘Doctor, how many of your patients my age sleep a full night through night after night as I do? And have a full set of teeth as well?’”
“My,” Alix said, “that is impressive.”
“Exactly what my doctor said. You put the screws to those fellows, they eventually tell you the truth and stop trying to cram a lot of pricey prescriptions down your throat. Socialized medicine, it’s coming eventually. Despite Hillary Clinton’s bungling.”
That first book was The Taste Machine and it was an overnight phenomenon.
When it came out, Rose Thrall remembered, there were plenty of hostile reviews alleging plagiarism, but Hannah had no patience with them. “The book was selling like hotcakes and Hannah was doing the talk shows and signing two hundred fifty copies an hour in Barnes and Noble’s window—and to hell! Women right across the country were lining up to buy it, paying twenty bucks for their cram course in good taste, and glad to pay the freight. Couple of months later Hannah called me:
“‘Rose, I’m going to do another book. Do you want the job?’ Well, of course I did. I’d give her a little trouble once in a while about the stealing, doing it for her own good. ‘Hannah,’ I’d say, ‘just change the adjectives around a bit so it won’t be verbatim.’ Sometimes she would, more often she wouldn’t. Depended on her mood. She’d tell me to mind my own business, or that she’d think about it. Whichever, I got it all down in Gregg shorthand and had it back a day or so later cleantyped.
“‘Rose,’ she’d say, ‘you’re a wonder. There never has been a stenographer like you.’ I agreed on that, you can be sure, I was in the Guinness Book by now, wasn’t I? But after a time I felt sufficiently at ease with her that I said, ‘You know, Hannah, there’s a word I much prefer to ‘stenographer.’ Amanuensis. Means the same thing; just sounds classier.’
“Hannah laughed. Said she’d heard the word a couple times but frankly didn’t know what it meant. Started calling me ‘Rose Thrall, The Demon Amanuensis.’ And we’d both laugh.…”
Didn’t sound much like “sturm und drang” to me. More like a couple of women who worked together and got along. Then Rose got to where it was heading:
“I did every single one of those books with her. Got paid fairly, treated pretty well, and it was the work I did. Her books hit the best-seller lists, each of them, and each time, just as regularly, people would bitch and moan about how she’d lifted their stuff from this article or that book. And of course they were right. Hannah didn’t write; she cribbed. And from the best sources. Smart, she was, never stole anything second-rate or marginal.
“By now I’d sold my apartment in Manhattan and was living out here. Hannah was twenty miles away and I had other authors I worked for that had places in the Hamptons, and I was computer literate and so really could live about anywhere and make a living. So when I saw in PW that Random House signed up Hannah for a million or more to do an autobiography, a serious one, not just some puff job, I sent her a note. No response. So I called.
“‘No,’ she told me, ‘this time I’m doing the book myself. I won’t need your help. This book is too personal to work through with hired hands. It’s a book I’m going to do personally. I don’t want any second opinions, don’t want any leaks.’ That was all, cold as that. Well, I don’t have to tell you I drink a little. And I kind of blew up, especially that line about ‘leaks,’ that crack about ‘hired hands.’ I said, ‘For chrissakes, Hannah, when did I leak any time during all those books I typed up where you stole everything but the title from someone else?’
“Guess I shouldn’t have said that. She hung up and a week or so later a lawyer came ‘round. Sullivan and Cromwell sent him all the way out from Manhattan. Handed me a legal paper and a check. If I signed the paper, I got the check.”
By now the poodle was plopped on her lap, asleep. She refreshed her glass and Alix asked, “What was the paper?”
“A confidentiality agreement. No interviews about Hannah, no statements to the press, written or verbal, nothing about her past books or our professional relationship, no this and no that. She was buying my silence.
“I told the Sullivan and Cromwell gentleman I was sorry but I wouldn’t sign. He then suggested I might he letting myself in for trouble and I blew up, told him to go to hell, tossed the check back at him—and it was a good-sized check, money I could have used—and he got out.
“That was the last contact I ever had with Hannah. A bribe and a muzzle. We did every book together but this one, she didn’t need me.…” She took a sip and said, “Ah, to hell. I had a good run with her. Sorry she’s dead. No one deserves to die like that. Not even Hannah.”
She looked at me. “They find out yet who did it?”
I shook my head.
“And you never did any work on the new book or know anything about it?”
“Not a thing. Hannah didn’t trust me. She as much as said that. Discarded me like an old pencil stub you toss away when it’s done its job. A casual sort of cruelty, not as much calculated as off-handed, but cruel nonetheless.
&nbs
p; “Damn her!”
* * *
As we drove back east, Alix said, “Think she might have done it?”
“Possible.”
“I don’t think so. I liked her. So did Mignonne.”
“I said it’s possible, that’s all. Just because you and a dog like someone doesn’t mean they can’t commit murder. And don’t forget one other thing.”
“What’s that?” Alix asked.
“She wears gloves.”
NINETEEN
A few skeletons lying about, frozen inside their orange climbing suits …
Early in June when I was just starting work on the book, I’d subscribed to just about every on-line service they had on the Internet on grounds I’d be out here all summer without easy access to anything but the local library and the little Book Hampton store next to the movie theater. So whatever faults my terrorism book may have, don’t blame research.
No longer now was it Bosnian Serbs or the frenzies of Algerian zealots that tugged at curiosity but whatever it was that happened on Mount Everest. It nagged at me that Hannah’s and Pam’s hatred (too strong a word?) stemmed from their attempt at scaling the world’s tallest mountain. Until then, if not friends, they’d been neighbors and fellow members on various East Hampton committees for the usual good causes. Then came Everest. People had died up there, caught by a blizzard above the eight-thousand-meter elevation. Both Pam and Hannah had limped away on frozen feet and suffered other damage. None of it enduring. Why then had they not forged an even closer bond, having survived such a harrowing adventure? For both these powerful, successful women, Everest must have been a defining moment, one of their rare defeats, yet from which they had both walked away, survivors, tough and resilient. Pam, the only one I could ask, was curt, dismissive, as if merely to talk about an Everest she’d painfully shared with Hannah was demeaning. It was to the computer and the on-line services that I now turned for answers, trolling the Net.
It was some story.
There were two expeditions on the mountain at the same time in early May that year. Not really competing; Everest supplies sufficient competition all by itself. Pam Phythian and Hannah were in the same group headed by a celebrated Seattle guide named Wales. The other team was headed up by a New Zealander, Vorstman, another Himalayan “star.” Except for one frightening flash snowstorm between camps two and three and the usual small accidents and bouts of altitude sickness, things went reasonably well as far up as camp four at 26,000 feet, from which the final sprint to the summit, 2,900 vertical feet higher, would be made up and back in a single day.
In a riveting passage I found on the Net, writer Peter Wilkinson described camp four. “A depressing, rock-strewn lunar wasteland even in the best weather. The spot is also an eerie garbage dump: besides strips of shredded tents, discarded bright yellow, green, and red oxygen tanks, spent batteries, empty raisin boxes, and Powerbar wrappers, there is a skeleton or two lying about on the loose shale, still zipped into down suits—grim reminders of the price a moody Everest can exact: 143 lives in 43 years, most of them in this vicinity.”
The Vorstman group had the lead and reached the summit about noon, took the traditional photos, exchanged high fives, and started back down. But between the glorious summit, at this hour still brilliantly sunny, and camp four with its seedy, town-dump appearance, the victorious group split up. One of the successful summiteers had fallen ill, down with cramp and unable to walk, and he and Vorstman’s right-hand man stayed behind until the sick man could resume the descent. No point in the others coming to a halt as well; they were low on oxygen already with very little margin for error.
It was at this juncture that Wales’s people, including Hannah and Pam, a party of ten in all, on their way up, passed some of Vorstman’s group coming down. The two teams met on the Southeast Ridge, a narrow and treacherous rib of rock generously glazed with ice and drifting snow. By now the wind was coming up and a thin cloud began to mask the afternoon’s sunlight. What with the narrowness of the route, the handshakes and congratulations and good wishes exchanged and photos taken, maybe a half hour was lost. Wales, an amiable fellow, wasn’t a driver, as Vorstman was known to be. His clients had paid on average $65,000 for their month’s adventure and Wales believed in letting them enjoy themselves. Usually, Everest summiteers observed a two P.M. cutoff; if they haven’t reached the top by that hour, they give up and start back down. It was after three when the first pair of Wales’s climbers got to the top. The others were still on their way up, the weather was deteriorating, the oxygen was running out, and neither Pam nor Hannah Cutting had gotten past the Hillary Step. so-called, at 28,800 feet, with hundreds of feet yet to be climbed. It was at this point that even the casual Wales concluded that enough was enough.
“We’re going down,” he shouted to the six climbers who hadn’t yet made the top, Hannah and Pam among them. Considering the headstrong egos involved, it was a wonder Wales didn’t get an argument. But he didn’t. Not then. That came later.
There was another logjam at the Hillary Step. One of Wales’s group had begun vomiting and had to stop while Vorstman’s right-hand man and his sick client were still there huddling pathetically out of the wind while trying to recover sufficiently to resume the descent, And now it began to snow. Not just a fall of snow but a fierce, wind-driven blizzard. And nothing went right after that. Although the accounts vary, depending on the source (and some of those sources were clearly ill or disoriented or panicked or oxygen-starved), what you got through the Internet was that the parties, both the Wales group and what was left up there of the Vorstman bunch, began to break up. Out of fatigue or illness or panic they just fell apart. Several climbers flatly refused to resume the descent along the knife-edged Southeast Ridge in a gale and heavy snow. At least one became hysterical and cried out, “Just leave me alone. I want to die.” Guides cursed out clients as “gutless” and shouted, “If you can’t walk, then fucking crawl!”
A few hundred feet above them two men, one sick and unable to move, the other a guide who refused to leave him, sheltering in a makeshift snow cave, made final calls by cell phone to their families and fell into a sleep from which they would never wake. They were the first to die; they were not the last.
Two more were lost on the knife edge of the Southeast Ridge, roped together as they had to be in these conditions. Whether both fell or only one, who then pulled the other, no one knew. Neither body was ever found. On one side of the ridge there was a dropoff of 4,800 vertical feet; on the other, 10,000. By five-thirty, even at these heights, darkness began to fall. The storm kept up. Wind chill was estimated at sixty degrees below zero Fahrenheit. The lead guide could not find the rope earlier fixed by the Sherpas. That was a visibility problem. Or maybe the Sherpas hadn’t put in the ropes as they’d been told to do. Maybe the Sherpas had shirked their duty. Now the cursing of both guides and clients focused on the native Sherpas, much of it undeserved. By full night the survivors had reached the South Col where there was deep snow into which they could burrow and within which they might last through the night. Almost everyone was now suffering frostbite and out of oxygen, gasping and bent near-double to ease cramp. Camp four was only a few hundred feet lower down but in what direction? If they continued to stumble downhill in the dark they might pass the tents by a few yards and die of exposure and exhaustion. So they bivouacked in the South Col, all except those still missing above and two more who insisted in going on toward what they thought was camp four. Where was Wales? He’d gone off scouting for missing members of the party.
As for Pam Phythian and Hannah Cutting, they were teamed on a three-man rope with the best of the Sherpas, Ang Thwat. Ang had taken the lead as they set off down the knife edge of the Northeast Ridge with Pam, more experienced than Hannah second and Hannah third at rope’s end. Moving slowly down, Ang measuring every step, and in almost zero visibility, so strong the wind, so heavy the fall of snow, they were a tenth of the way down, a fifth, half the way down to the Col and i
ts primitive shelter.
And then, for reasons the Internet did not explain and probably didn’t know, Ang slipped and disappeared with a single cry off to the side of the knife-edge. Pam, closest to him, found herself being pulled along by his weight. Behind her, Hannah instinctively and correctly threw herself prone on the other side of the narrow ridge as counterbalance to the weight of the fallen Ang and the sliding Pam. And it was there they hung, in deadly equilibrium, until the rope, having frayed or been flawed, suddenly and dramatically snapped! parting between Ang and Pam. Fatal for him, fortunate for her. And for Hannah, too. Both women now scrambled back atop the ridgeline. Ang was gone; they would survive.
A rescue party had started out when the weather began to break, climbing from camp three through four and on up to the Col. Only one member of the group was able to get that far without bivouacking for the night. He found Wales’s party. But not Wales. He passed around his oxygen and headed down again, promising to be back in the morning. By which time the storm would be over.
He was as good as his word. So too the others. By noon a colonel of the Nepalese army successfully landed a chopper on the Col and began to take people off, one at a time. Harsh words were exchanged, people pushed and shoved for advantage at the head of the line, an actual fist fight took place. The chopper came back again and again until all the survivors were at base camp far down at the foot of the mountain.
Eight were dead.
The tantalizing thing about all this? In the accounts carried by various on-line services, no one ascribed blame. They’d climbed the mountain, the weather had gone sour, people died, others survived. No one’s fault, just rotten luck. But what of that fist fight in the Col when the chopper began its heroic shuttling of people to safety? No one mentioned that again. No one even noted that to have a fight of any sort, at least two persons are required. No one was to blame for that, either, even when it required at least two people to take up hostilities. Who was it who fought? I wondered. No word on that, either.
