That Summer at Boomerang

by Phil Jarratt

  Having telegrammed home for a loan from her father, Isabel finally made it to New York, where she combined babysitting duties with volunteer work for the Red Cross, knitting sweaters for American soldiers. Through the Red Cross she learned that Duke’s aquatic tour had concluded just a few weeks before her arrival, but no-one knew where he had gone, other than an unconfirmed report that he had planned to enlist in the navy.

  Isabel Letham and a friend, Bilgola Beach, 1917. Photo from the Letham Collection, Warringah Library Local Studies.

  On 11 November 1918, Isabel danced in Times Square with hundreds of thousands of revellers to celebrate the armistice, finishing a joyous night at a tango club in Greenwich Village. She stayed on with her former headmistress until after the Christmas holidays, then struck out for California. In a letter to Mike Jay in February 1919, Isabel had alluded to working in ‘animal pictures’, but there is no evidence that her Hollywood dream ever materialised. We know that she roomed with three other girls around her age in Hollywood and later Santa Monica, ‘getting the nonsense knocked out of me’ while working menial jobs as a cleaner or messenger and barely making ends meet. Eventually she took a short course in hairdressing and was soon making six dollars a week.

  While it wasn’t the glamorous lifestyle she had hoped for, Isabel managed to spend at least part of the summer swimming and surfing at Santa Monica and Venice, where her skill on the surfboard brought her to the attention of representatives of the Wrigley company, which had just built a casino on Catalina Island. Although there was no surf in front of the harbourfront casino, it was perfect for aquaplaning, and Isabel, who had recently been described in a glowing feature article in the Los Angeles Record as ‘a young Diana of the waves, known in Australia and the mid-Pacific isles as the greatest of all women stunt swimmers’, was hired to perform an exhibition as part of a Fourth of July celebration.

  But still her Annette Kellerman moment did not happen. Hollywood did not come knocking on the door of her three-dollars-a-week flat. Homesick, disillusioned and broke, she used the fact that her father was ailing as an excuse to herself to go home in 1921, but soon found that the quiet life at Freshwater was not what she was craving. She felt she still had unfinished business in America—and even held hopes that she would be reunited with Duke—so after William Letham’s death in 1923 she returned to California. This time, however, she had a more realistic plan.

  Basing herself in San Francisco, she took a part-time job while she did the rounds of schools and colleges, hoping to parlay her Kambala experience into a swimming instructor’s position. After several rejections, she managed to charm her way into an interview with the newly appointed dean of the University of California, Walter Morris Hart, and walked out with the job of assistant to the director of natation. Her new career had begun.

  While Isabel settled into campus life at Berkeley, Duke was also settling into a new life in California, and during the summer of 1923, as he made a swimming comeback after a two-year lay-off, they were finally reunited when he travelled to San Francisco to swim in a tournament at the Sutro Baths. They met after a training swim on the day before the meet and sat on a park bench at Land’s End and watched Seal Rocks appear and disappear in the fog. He offered her tickets to watch him swim, but she had lessons that day and had to decline. While Isabel never elaborated on this meeting in later life, it was clear that a lot of water had passed under both swimmers in eight years.

  Isabel’s work at UC Berkeley, and later with the San Francisco Playground Commission, culminated in her being offered the plum job of swimming instructor at the prestigious and glamorous Women’s City Club of San Francisco, a vast building opposite the St Francis Hotel where in the second-floor baths she refined the swimming techniques of the city’s most influential women. Photos from Isabel’s albums of the period show her enjoying the sporting life at fishing and hunting lodges with groups of immaculately attired women. One sultry portrait of a beautiful woman of about her own age is signed: ‘To you dear Isabell [sic], with love, Daphne.’

  It was clear that at some point during the 1920s, the flirtatious young thing who had made men friends everywhere she went had evolved into a career woman who enjoyed the company of like-minded independent women.

  In 1929 Isabel was seriously injured when she fell down an open manhole in downtown San Francisco. She took a sabbatical and returned to Sydney to recuperate, and never went back to California. At home she was initially regarded as a celebrity, with society photographer Monte Luke shooting a stunning portrait of her for The Bulletin, while the Sunday News quoted her views on the latest Los Angeles fashions, such as the backless bathing suit and the fad for going without stockings.

  Eventually, however, the press lost interest and Isabel retreated into suburban anonymity, teaching swimming and later synchronised swimming and water ballet, while caring for her mother at the family home in Freshwater until Jeannie’s death in November 1954. She never married.

  Duke was to return twice to Freshwater, the first time following the Melbourne Olympics of 1956 when, accompanied by his wife, Nadine, he was reunited with Claude and Isabel at the Freshwater Surf Club. Duke took his old board out for a few waves and then joined Claude on the beach for photos to commemorate Claude’s donation of the board to the club’s museum. But where was Isabel? Not wanting to pose in a swimsuit, she remained on the concourse. When Duke spotted her, he called to the photographer, ‘The last time I saw her, she was streamlined!’

  In 1963 Duke visited again to launch a book about surfing and present the awards at the Australian Invitational Surfing Championships at Bondi. Claude accompanied Isabel to the launch at the Sydney Tattersalls Club, and afterwards they were able to catch up over a private dinner. That was the last time Isabel saw Duke.

  ‘He was still this beautiful, beautiful man with such a charming manner,’ she told interviewer Roslyn Cahill in 1986. ‘He was the greatest asset the Hawaiian Islands ever had.’

  In the last years of her life, Isabel became a mentor of women’s surfing in Australia, largely through the influence of C.J. ‘Snow’ McAlister, the naughty boy on the tram at Manly in 1914 who had gone on to become a multiple Australian surfing champion. With her lively sense of humour and stories about the pioneer years, she helped inspire the first wave of Australian women’s professional surfing champions, including Manly girls Pam Burridge and Layne Beachley.

  Although she suffered from debilitating health problems at various points in her life, Isabel continued to shoot the surf on occasion well into her sixties. In 1978 she was made a life member and patron of the Australian Women’s Board Riders Association and a trophy was named in her honour. In 1993 she was inducted into the Australian Surfing Hall of Fame.

  In 1986 journalist Geraldine Doogue interviewed Isabel and asked why she had never married. ‘Not for want of opportunities, I assure you,’ was the feisty reply. ‘There were three men in my life. I would have liked a composite of all three but I never found him.’

  Isabel died at Freshwater on 11 March 1995, aged 95. According to her wishes, her ashes were scattered off Manly and Freshwater beaches by the young surfers she had so inspired.

  Isabel with Snow McAlister, 1987. From the Letham Collection, Warringah Library Local Studies.

  Duke

  After his return from Australia and New Zealand in April 1915, Duke’s main concern was his preparation for the San Francisco Exposition in the summer, particularly so after the inevitable cancellation of the 1916 Berlin Olympics. In times of such confusion, all he could focus on was the next event, but with his opportunity to defend his Olympic title gone, he struggled to think where his career would go next. He won everything he contested in San Francisco, but it meant very little to him.

  Most of 1916 was spent touring the US mainland, swimming record times and keeping his face in front of the public, without really knowing why. When he returned to Hawaii after the s
ummer season, Duke resumed a relationship with a girlfriend from the previous summer, Marion ‘Babe’ Dowsett, and at her invitation moved to the Dowsett ranch on the ‘Big Island’ of Hawaii for as long as he wanted to stay. Duke became a paniolo, or Hawaiian cowboy, herding cattle and branding steers with the best of the boys. But the buckskin dream came to a sudden halt when news of Duke Halapu’s death reached him in August 1917. Halapu had never really recovered his spirit after being shunted out of the police force two years earlier, and was now dead of an apparent heart attack at just 48 years of age. It didn’t make any sense to Duke, who was mourning his father.

  Then, just a couple of months after Halapu’s passing, the Kahanamokus were rocked again with the death of Queen Lili’uokalani, the last of the Hawaiian monarchs. Few Hawaiians grieved as much as the Kahanamokus and the Paoas, whose lives had been intertwined with the queen and her family for generations. Duke represented both families as a pallbearer at the royal funeral.

  Since Halapu had no life insurance, Duke had to start odd-jobbing on the Honolulu wharves again to keep the family fed. Despairing of ever getting ahead that way, he began talking about joining the military now that America had entered the war. Enlistment went on hold, however, when he was approached just before Christmas to help the war effort in another way. The American Red Cross and the Young Men’s Christian Association had joined forces to fund a travelling water show, presenting a series of fundraisers across America. They asked Duke to be its leader.

  Invigorated by the challenge ahead, Duke took his board down to Waikiki for a celebratory surf and found the biggest swell in living memory pounding the distant coral reefs. With a couple of friends from the Outrigger Canoe Club (Duke had finally bowed to pressure and joined) he paddled out beyond Castles and caught a monstrous wave that took him more than a mile across the bay to the beach at Canoes. Duke would always recall this as the best wave he had ever caught at Waikiki, and the beach boys who witnessed it never tired of ‘talking story’ about it.

  The Red Cross team consisted of Honolulu locals Harold ‘Stubby’ Kruger and Clarence Lane, with Owen Merrick, a former sports editor of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, as manager, and Clair Tait from Portland as trainer. Tait was also an excellent diver who performed a comic sequence in the show. Billed as the ‘Hawaiian swimming exhibition’, the tour played to packed houses in New York, but Duke was alarmed to find that the mainland press was reporting the results as though they were from official meets rather than fundraising shows. With so many of America’s leading swimmers away at the war, Duke began to fear that people would see this as opportunism on his part.

  The perception of the tour got even worse when the New York Times accused the swimmers of ‘padding’ their 950-dollar expense account on a sweep through the Mid-West, and being in violation of the amateur code. Stung by this, Duke announced that he would enlist in the Naval Aviation Service.

  Duke surfs Waikiki, c. 1920s. Photo from the Jarratt Collection.

  Duke was completely exhausted when the tour finished, having swum up to three races a night, five or six times a week for four months while crisscrossing the country by train. He made his way to Washington DC to enlist, but fell ill soon after checking into the YMCA. The Spanish influenza epidemic that had already killed hundreds of thousands in Europe was now sweeping across America, and Duke was its latest victim. He had told no-one of his specific enlistment plan, so he lay alone in his bed at the YMCA, his health deteriorating by the day.

  How Duke came to be saved from the fate that had befallen so many is a bizarre story told to Duke’s biographer, Joe Brennan, by an elderly woman and never verified by any other source. An old girlfriend of Duke’s, Bernyece Smith, happened to be in Washington on a visit with a Hawaiian delegation to their political representative, Prince Kuhio. In the prince’s office she saw a camera that she recognised as Duke’s and asked if he was in town. After checking dozens of hotels, she finally tracked him down at the YMCA and found him gravely ill with double pneumonia. She got him out of his dank, musty room at the Y and into a warm, sunny bedroom at a friend’s house and began nursing him back to health. Within a matter of weeks he was strong enough to handle a long train journey, and Bernyece travelled with him as far as Salt Lake City where she put him on another train for San Francisco to catch a boat home.

  While Isabel celebrated the end of the war in Times Square, Duke heard the news via telegraph while the Shinyo Maru headed towards Honolulu.

  In 1919 the International Olympic Committee announced that the next Olympic Games would be held in Antwerp, Belgium, the following year. Still recovering from influenza, Duke felt he at last had a goal in sight, despite the fact that there were several new kids on the block challenging for his world records. More than one commentator wrote him off as a medal prospect, but when the US team was announced, 29-year-old Duke Kahanamoku was its undoubted star, leader of the twelve-strong Hawaiian contingent.

  With just twenty months to prepare for the Games in a war-ravaged country, Antwerp was always going to be tough, but the Americans found out just how tough before they even got there. The Hawaiians travelled to Antwerp, along with most other members of the US team, on the Princess Matoika, a rusted-out former troopship. Conditions on board were appalling, but Duke and a few of his Hawaiian teammates kept up morale with nightly singalongs in which Duke played his ukulele. The Hawaiians also had a portable gramophone and a bunch of dance records, but the party atmosphere did not compensate for the hardships, and Duke joined other team members in protesting in writing to the American Olympic Committee, citing ‘sleeping either in an ill-smelling hold, overrun with rats, and without sufficient ventilation, or on hard decks in rain; eating food originally good but served improperly due to overcrowded condition of the galley; poor sanitary conditions,’ as well as the apparent theft of items which should have been ‘properly guarded’.

  When they arrived in Antwerp, swimming manager Dad Center and his team discovered that their events were to be held in a cold, polluted, fenced-off canal that in medieval times had been part of the city moat. While the swimmers fell victim to hypothermia if they trained too hard, the water polo authorities decided to reduce playing time by half to protect the players.

  None of this seemed to worry Duke, who successfully defended his 100-metre title and broke his own world record, despite having to win the final twice after a protest from the Australian, Bill Herald. Duke then went on to anchor the four-by-200-metre relay team in its gold-medal and Olympic-record performance, before turning out with the water polo team, which finished in fourth place.

  After the Games the American swimmers toured Europe and then crossed America from New York to San Francisco, giving exhibitions. Eight years after Duke’s Stockholm triumph, the adulation had reached new heights. He was mobbed wherever he went. Encouraged by his friend, breaststroker Oscar Henning, Duke began to think again about how he might turn his fame into much-needed cash. As the Great War began to recede into history, America was becoming the land of opportunity for sportsmen and entertainers, and the sky was the limit for those rare specimens who were both. Henning mapped out a plan for Duke to become the next big thing in Hollywood’s booming silent-film industry, his selling point being that where other athletic stars could do their own stunts on land (notably Tom Mix and baseballer Ty Cobb), only he could do them in the water.

  If Duke needed convincing it came when he had to cancel out of another Australia and New Zealand tour in January 1921 with Ludy Langer and Pua Kealoha after suffering a relapse of influenza. Weak with the sickness for months, he began to wonder if he would ever have the stamina to set swimming records again, and elected to sign with Henning and go to Hollywood. But while there was considerable interest in hiring Duke to play minor roles as a dark-skinned exotic (black manservant, African chief, Red Indian warrior, it didn’t really matter), the leading roles that Henning had promised never eventuated. A biopic of King Kamehameha the
Great, filmed in Hawaii with Duke in the lead role, was announced in the press but never made.

  One of the stumbling blocks in the way of Duke’s career may have been his continuing status as an amateur. The AAU rules had changed somewhat since 1918, when his status had been threatened while he toured for the Red Cross. Now, the AAU decreed, he could act in the movies but he could not swim in them. So much for Henning’s point of difference. Duke made more than 30 movies in almost a decade in Hollywood, and he was never seen swimming in any of them, although he was seen riding his surfboard at Waikiki in his friend Douglas Fairbanks Sr’s 1931 documentary, Around the World in 80 Minutes.

  By the 1930s surfing had become the number one tourist attraction in Duke’s Waikiki. Photo courtesy Outrigger Canoe Club.

  Although he would turn 34 during the Paris Olympics—ancient for a sprint swimmer—Duke was determined to defend his hundred-metres title in 1924. He had just begun light training again when an eighteen-year-old kid named Johnny Weissmuller broke Duke’s world record for the distance in a 20-yard tank in Chicago. This would be the first of 67 world records Weissmuller would break in an extraordinary career, before going to Hollywood to star as ‘Tarzan’, but at the time Duke thought little of it. The sportswriters had been writing him off for years, penning his obituary as a swimmer every time a new talent emerged. So far he had seen off Ludy Langer, John Kelii, Pua Kealoha and Norman Ross, and this kid would go the same way. Even his own brothers were coming after him now, with teenager Sam Kahanamoku swimming some fast times.

  When they finally met for the first time on the Olympic blocks in Paris, Weissmuller found himself wedged between Duke and Sam. Duke had to reassure him that it would be a fair race. ‘All I want to see is three American flags on the podium,’ he said. Duke got his wish, but it was Weissmuller standing on the top block, with Duke second, Sam third. It was the end of Duke’s era of absolute dominance.