FOUR
IN LEAGUE WITH NATIONS
My dear Aloha!
This is certainly the best lesson I have ever received in my life. Instead of getting Publicity [sic] for the League of Nations, I got you in a nice “Mess.” But I hope that your mother will understand and let you travel with me. I am still weak from the dreadful experience, but am getting better. That is the reason my writing is so bad. Please come as soon as possible, I certainly need you and you will be remunerated a thousand fold.
Nevermind [sic] about writing if you got enough money on hand to get on a train and come here. I didn’t know how much you were to me until I had to be shown. You know what I said: “We are all from Missouri!”1 Now don’t worry because I don’t worry either, as my conscience is clear and Jesus Christ is my guiding example in everything I do. Now Au revoir! Come soon.
Your Captain Wanderwell2
Walter was putting the Geneva “misadventure” behind him. Aloha’s relief was channelled into several days of intense activity. She met with local press Le Petit Niçois and L’Eclaireur de Nice to announce Wanderwell’s recovery, ran errands for her mother, sat for portraits in her Wanderwell uniform, and renewed her passport with her professional name so it read “Idris A. Hall Wanderwell.”3 Amidst the hubbub, however, she still managed to creep to town each day to “see a man about a dog” — twenties slang for having a drink. The captain had firm ideas about health and fitness, so if she wanted to indulge a few vices, this would be her last chance for a while.
*
Aloha boarded the early morning express for Lyon on January 21, but the train arrived an hour late and she missed her connecting train to Geneva. She had to take a hotel room, skip supper, and make due with just a cup of black coffee at sunrise — “a thing I dislike immensely”4 — as her funds were low. A further mix-up sent her to Chambéry, where she spent her last pennies on a ticket to Culoz and an afternoon connection to Switzerland.
It was Monday evening before she reached Geneva and the captain was not at the station to greet her, having expected her the day before. Annoyed and exhausted, Aloha was eventually met by a hotel porter who’d been placed on lookout by the captain. Hurriedly grasping her luggage, he explained that Cap had gone uptown on business after spending most of Sunday and all morning waiting for trains from Lyon. It was not the reunion Aloha had imagined. “Nor was he to be found at the hotel, so I took my old room, unpacked and tidied and presently his lordship put in an appearance.”5
Her attitude changed once the captain arrived. Although he was now using a walking stick, just seeing him well again, full of his old vitality and raring to resume the roving routine, set her mind at ease.
Cap shared my glee being on the road again; a lot of Peter Pan in him. When excited he crowed — every inch of him radiated exaltation. . . . Let’s race! Let’s go! US here we come! So, like Wendy, I too soared.6
They went for a quick supper and then a walk to watch the lights of Geneva shimmer on the waters of the nearby lake.
Cap rehearsed [sic] his days in the Asile of which he remembered every instant, painful as it was (to me). I listened, answered questions till it came my turn to give an account of my two weeks’ absence.7
*
For a while, everything seemed normal again. Aloha worked on her usual expedition tasks: post office, journalists, pictures, printers, and correspondence. But the captain was soon back to his favourite topic. His international flag concept had, he said, been received by the League of Nations as “a good idea, and nothing more.” Now he envisioned colour postcards of the olive flag design that they could sell at the shows and in the streets. It would generate publicity and give the Wanderwell Expedition a deeper sense of purpose.
Aloha sighed, “This idea of course entails a thousand jobs, and also a prolongation, I am very sorry to say, of our stay in Geneva, a town of which I have a perfect horror. Still, what would you I ask? I’m on the staff . . . boy I’m on the staff.”8
Her mood improved when an afternoon visit to the post office produced a cheque for £52 — about $4,000 today and a fantastic sum in 1923 — from the Macintosh Tyre Co., in payment for the advertisement they’d placed on Unit No II and carried for thirteen weeks. She spent the next week organizing theatre engagements, writing newspaper articles, and lobbying sponsors. Walter, meanwhile, worked on convincing officials at the League of Nations to meet with him. After endless queries, he was granted a meeting with the director of the Information Section at the League of Nations. The captain’s agenda was still how an international police might control arms. For Aloha, the League was just another obstacle on her path to worldwide adventures. “They are such slow-minded people that it may be necessary to stay here for donkey’s ages before they hand us a final answer.”9
Aloha may have had no use for the League of Nations, but she was impressed by their facilities, housed in the Hotel National, a majestic five-storey, 225-room building overlooking Lake Geneva.10 As they arrived, a young Englishman greeted the captain and Aloha. He showed them to a row of oak chairs, thickly upholstered in red velvet. Their contact, Mr. Arthur Switzer, was in a meeting that had run overtime but could meet with Mr. Wanderwell at 4:00 p.m., in an hour.
Aloha sat in one of the chairs as Cap paced. She was content to soak up the atmosphere and make notes in her journal. The building was awe-inspiring, filled with great doors, innumerable corridors, massive furnishings and intricate tapestries more suited to a palace than a warehouse for bureaucrats. What caught her eye most of all, however, had nothing to do with the building.
The chief attraction being the lady secretaries. Blondes, brunettes, bobbed and otherwise, tall gaunt sticks, fat chubby dumplings, tall gracefully wispy glossy haired maidens that glide swiftly out of sight . . . black, bob haired Parisians, damsels floating along seeming very proud of their “contracts,” and enumerous [sic] others.
And, much to her satisfaction, it was clear the admiration was mutual.
I for the moment am the centre of attraction [sic], or at least my fair curls and riding breeches. One girl has passed at least a dozen times in the last hour (we are waiting) always with the same sheet of paper. Less fearless ones keep peeping through the curtained glass doors.
When Cap finally left for his meeting with Mr. Switzer, Aloha continued her diverting amusements.
I’m all alone. A very nice looking English boy passes for the third time then finally returns with a couple of illustrated London newsies! Yes he is English, but for devilment I thank him in French.11
*
In the days that followed Walter’s meeting, Aloha booked a one-week engagement at the Royal Biograph. The negotiated rates were much lower than usual, but “I urged Cap to accept it. For one thing it would clear expenses . . . and secondly it gave him a chance to think of autre choses que the League of Nations.”12 As if colluding from afar, a letter arrived from a former Wanderwell girl, Mollie Bryan, and included some clippings from English newspapers that featured articles about the “suddenly insane” Captain Wanderwell and the calamitous end of his Round the World attempt. “What a rag!!!” screamed Aloha in her journal. The story spurred the captain to not only agree to the engagement at the Royal Biograph but also to an interview with a reporter at the Tribune de Genève that very afternoon. Aloha was thrilled. This was her chance to get the expedition back on track.
The Royal Biograph, with a seating capacity of four hundred, was designed as a cinema (rather than a converted theatre, which many venues were at the time), so there was no stage. To lecture, Aloha stood on a table and towered over the first rows, closer than she’d ever been to her audience. Rather than feeling intimidated, however, the strange arrangement set her alight.
The evening show was one of, if not my very best, the place was simply crowded. A few naughty young boys in the front started hooting and whistling, to see, I guess, how much I could stand. But oh! boy I love it. The more noise they make the better I like it and presently I cracked so many jokes that they cheered every time.13
Her assured performance did not go unnoticed. Aloha was later to write that Walter finally saw she had something special. She handled the hecklers, she knew how to improvise, but most of all she exuded confidence. She had swagger that he could build on. He wrote a letter to the prefect of police, requesting a permit for a .25 Decker automatic pistol. It wasn’t the first time a Wanderwell girl had used a gun as part of her stage persona. One of the English articles about the captain’s accident concluded with a description of Helen Raeburn, the Texan divorcée, who had earlier been part of the expedition and had “startled London during her passage through by walking about in a leather jerkin, a bandolier of cartridges, breeches, a racing helmet, goggles and big gun.”14
Following an interview with two police inspectors (Walter and Aloha were questioned separately), a permit was granted. The next day a female journalist interviewed Aloha, asking for her life story alongside the usual inquiries about the Million Dollar Wager and the curious olive flag they flew. When they were done, the reporter told Aloha that she was “the first woman I have ever seen look so femininely elegant in such a masculine costume. I notice you are carrying a revolver accompanied by a bouquet of violets, a contrast such as I have never before seen. I congratulate you.”15
Aloha’s manner of dress would hardly raise an eyebrow today, but in 1923 her “masculine costume” was still considered cross-dressing. (Coco Chanel would not introduce fashionable pants for women until 1925 and Marlene Dietrich’s signature film, The Blue Angel, would not appear until 1930.) A beautiful young woman cavorting in men’s clothing aroused the attention of men and women alike. As for Walter, he liked the look of girls in pants, and anything that generated attention was good for sales.
*
A telegram from the Macintosh Tyre Co. in Manchester, England, arrived on February 1, instructing Wanderwell:
CALL ON MONTEL RAMBLA CATALUNA 100 BARCELONA
— MACINTOSH
Aloha was ecstatic. The message meant escape from Geneva and signalled Macintosh’s intention to continue the sponsorship agreement they had begun several months earlier. “This telegram is the best news we have received for donkey’s years; it decided Cap to go to Spain after all. If it does nothing else, it will take him away from politics and all the mess of this part of Europe.”16
*
Unit No II soared through the cold, mountainous countryside. The French border came and went without difficulty (the Swiss guards were so excited by the expedition’s arrival they forgot to check passports). With no theatres to book and no interviews to give, they could stay at hotels of their choosing or stroll into restaurants without a thought for appearance, covered in mud an inch thick. This was the carefree adventure Aloha had signed up for.
Eventually, they responded to Macintosh.
WILL TIME ARRIVAL BARCELONA FEBRUARY SIXTEEN.
— WANDERWELL
They had eight days to cover 500 miles, a leisurely pace even in a time of dirt roads and infrequent gasoline depots. Walter said he thought Aloha would enjoy Spain, but he’d love to show her Florida, especially the bit of property he owned in Miami. He hoped to build a house there one day. “I’m game,” she recounted in her diary. Encouraged, he described how he planned to get there. “We’ll put the car on a sailing ship and work our way from Japan to San Francisco . . . Take three month[s].”17 It all sounded wonderful.
They made it as far as Pézenas, France, before the spark plugs started giving them trouble. “From then on, every few miles Cap had to get out and get under to fix his little machine.”18 Their progress was further impeded by poor roads and the pre-Lent Carnival celebrations happening in every town.
When they finally crossed into Spain, Aloha and Cap revelled in the hot summery air and the freedom of driving along the windy roadway with their jackets stowed, shirts open at the neck, and sleeves rolled up. They made it as far as Calella, a small town of about five thousand people, 175 miles from Béziers and only 34 miles from Barcelona. They spent their first night in Spain at “what the natives respectfully call a hotel.” To Aloha it looked more like a farmhouse. The portly proprietress eyed the couple with scepticism.
The first question she demanded before giving us rooms was “Are you German?” to which Cap (gave) an emphatic “No” and whilst he was still wondering as to her motive she popped out with “Are you a married man?” “Yes” (with pride). The way in which all was said was so screamingly funny I could have shrieked with laughter but waited until the maid showed us upstairs, then we gave vent to our mirth, whilst taking off a little of the day’s dust.19
On Friday, February 16, they made a “glorious little run down the coast of Spain” to the long-dreamed-of Barcelona. Aloha was at the wheel, electric with excitement and marvelling at the sparkling port, crowded with sailing ships and ringing with bustle. At the Hôtel d’España Aloha spoke “to the manager who immediately gave us rooms on condition that we made . . . 50 ft. of film20 of the Hôtel.” Aloha was discovering that the promise of film footage could melt almost any resistance.
While Aloha charmed hotel managers, she in turn was charmed by the Spanish girls.
Heaps of pretty señoritas, with the most beautiful black hair you ever set eyes on, not to mention snappy brown eyes and that curve of the lip! Oh! Boyo! Cap is lost in admiration.21
*
Within days, the Wanderwells had convinced the Lord Mayor of Barcelona “to come out of the city hall and sign his autograph on Wanderwell II.” The ceremony was filmed and sold the next day to form part of a Gaumont Graphic newsreel. Overnight, newspapers were eager to cover their story. The Spanish press coverage gave rise to several of the myths that would follow them around the world — the foremost being that Walter and Aloha were brother and sister.
“Grin and bear it,” said Cap. “There’s nothing we can do. Explanations will only confuse them. We’ll straighten things out once we get out of Spain.” The Greeks had a word for it: Ti en onomati — What’s in a name?22
Aloha secured a week-long showing at the Teatro Novedades, a 2,500-seat theatre. The booking was wildly optimistic since they still had no Spanish speaker to assist with the narration.
When the hour of their first performance arrived, they still had no translator and the theatre and surrounding streets were jammed. The crowds were so thick that Aloha couldn’t get through and the show began almost fifteen minutes late. Finally, the stage lights came up and the manager introduced “Captain Wanderwell, his sister Miss Wanderwell and Company.” As the film and orchestra started, Aloha left the stage to wait for the five-minute intermission when they could sell their cards, assuming any of the audience remained. Then, to everyone’s surprise, Cap began guiding the film in a competent Spanish, accompanied by the orchestra’s vividly humorous sound effects.
His few essential Spanish Catalan and Mexican terms led to humorous wordplay. His timing marvellous, his brisk fun-poking tickled the effervescent Barcelonese. He recalled his first day, ordering a stack of three buttered tortillas — correct words for Mexico, but here (he received) three layers of omelettes covered in lard. The light-hearted effort was re-warded. At intermission, souvenir folders sold like wildfire.
At the end of each performance, lights down, we drove the car, headlights flaring, on stage, a spot flooding the Catalan flag. We saluted while the full orchestra played a patriotic Catalan hymn. The 2,500 (strong) audience raised the roof! Contributions for pamphlets and requests for autographs so overwhelming — later I could hardly use a pen.23
It was a master course in showmanship. This was success beyond anything Aloha had imagined. They were selling as many as a thousand postcards and folders at each show, all by donation, generating so much money that Aloha had to sew her pocket buttons on with wire.24 To brighten the mood still further, they met an English cinematographer who had been travelling around Spain for a year. George Armstrong was a tough-looking man of medium build, a strong chin, slightly protruding ears, and close-set eyes. He went by the title Lieutenant Armstrong after his rank in the British Army. When he told Wanderwell how he’d almost joined an Ernest Shackleton Expedition, the captain was sold.25 Aloha was equally impressed, writing that the lieutenant “knows nearly all the countries round about plus their languages. Of course he loves the vagabond life and wanted to join us.” Then they received word from a Spanish-speaking girl in Geneva that she could join the crew on Monday, February 26. “I must say we are living in the lap of luxury,” Aloha wrote, but also added, “I wonder how long it will last.”
It was a good question, and one the captain had been considering too. He understood that their success in Barcelona was a short-blooming flower and that the road ahead would be tough. He wanted Aloha to be prepared and began lecturing her on the need for discipline, exercise, a vegetarian diet, reading, cold showers, and spiritual awareness. “Simplicity ensures happiness,” he told her. “Eliminate trivia, study the Buddhist line, learn a calm channel.” He assured her that “reliable standards would carry [her] through when things [got] off key.”26
At sixteen, Aloha was not so interested in the wisdom of her elders. She was fast becoming a major draw to the expedition screenings, and the captain worried that when luxury vanished and the money got scarce, she might bolt. As further insurance, he asked her to help improvise film stories on the road. Pretty pictures are fine, he said, but it’s the stories that get people excited.
Suddenly, Aloha was eager to leave Barcelona and begin work on the “Adventure Film,” as they came to call it. The captain was impatient too, but for different reasons. Newspapers had been awash with news of an archaeological discovery in Egypt. On February 16, 1923, the same day the Wanderwell Expedition had arrived in Barcelona, British archaeologist Howard Carter had opened a sealed wall in the Egyptian Valley of the Kings. Inside, he found a burial chamber complete with the three thousand-year-old sarcophagus of King Tutankhamen and more gold than anyone could have imagined.27
Egypt was not the only possibility, however. Across the water to the south, Spain was waging a war against indigenous Berber tribes in Spanish Morocco. The so-called Rif War was claiming tens of thousands of lives on both sides of the conflict, with a little-known general named Francisco Franco helping to command the Spanish Foreign Legion. Many Morocco-bound soldiers left from the port in Barcelona. “My heart ached for the weeping women dockside,” Aloha would later write. “I wondered if the Rif would be as glutted with blood in ’23 as Ypres was in ’17. The press gave only heroic accounts.”28 News of the conflict set the captain thinking about the League of Nations again. Footage of the carnage might convince people that an international peacekeeping force was needed. When Aloha asked him if they would actually see fighting first-hand, he replied, “It’s an idea. [We could] cross at Gibraltar to Ceuta. . . . A lot of action to film, then [we could] work our way east to Egypt,” but he quickly added, “I’ve got to see Bilbao and A Coruña again and you’ve got to see it with me. There we’ll add Portugal to the record.”
So long as this man held the keys to such an adventurous life, to Aloha’s shot at wealth and possibly even fame, she would be his pupil, his factotum, his whatever. Under his guidance, she believed she could face anything.
*
The evening of February 26 found Aloha and the captain at the Estació de França, where the expedition’s new recruit had finally arrived. Aloha rode to the station on Cap’s newly purchased Indian motorcycle, just in time to see him “aiding a frail sweet-faced girl into the Hôtel car. I heard her voice, speaking in English with the delicate accent that comes only from a French education.” The interpreter, named Fate (possibly a variation on Faith), was a diminutive, dark-haired girl with large eyes, strong cheekbones and a small, restrained smile. “We became friends immediately and all my fears of scrapping with her vanished.”29
The next day Aloha took Fate around Barcelona. Together they assembled a uniform and discussed expedition duties. On their last evening in Barcelona, the crew found there was not enough room for all of them plus gear in one tiny car. “All you need is your breeches,” announced the captain, which he later revised to, “all you need is your bathing suits.”30
In Tarragona, Aloha and Fate arranged for two rooms in the best hotel in town but had no luck booking theatres. Finally, Cap approached a cinema manager and offered to show one of the expedition’s reels for free. The manager agreed, allowing Cap to sell cards while the girls lectured, Aloha in French and Fate translating into Spanish. Fate’s first lecture was predictably awful, the crowd merciless. When the reel ended, Cap rose from his seat and made an impromptu speech using his pastiche of Cuban/Mexican Spanish, “which produced a roof raising hullabaloo” and ensured that cards sold by the boxful.31
*
Towns were soon blending into each other. At Castellón de la Plana, about 175 miles south of Barcelona, Aloha and Fate booked the “best ciné” and enjoyed the attentions of the local boys who cried, “¡Qué Monas! Pero están armados!!” (What pretties, but they’re armed!). The town itself was rudimentary, but what it lacked in modern convenience, it made up for with sumptuous food. “The table is literally covered [with hors d’oeuvres]. Then soup, fish, vegetables, meat . . . at least six or seven dishes. Then dessert: nuts, biscuits, pudding and fruit.” The crew ate like starving prisoners, but when it came to Spanish wine, which Aloha found delicious, the captain refused to try any, leaving their hosts perplexed. Later, he chugged a pitcher of cold water, much to the matron’s alarm. She told him it was dangerous because “many deaths in Spain were caused by typhoid germs in the water.” The captain simply smiled. “I have,” he said, “drunk water so dirty that it might have been anything, so don’t worry about me anymore.”32
*
At Valencia, Cap announced he was taking a “holiday” because of his leg, which had been giving him trouble. In his absence, Aloha would be in charge. “He has given me some money and with that I am to get to Madrid and make money to keep the crew going; it’s a sort of test for me.” His announcement came with little warning; he packed his bag and left the next afternoon by motorcycle for Cádiz, 480 miles west. That same afternoon Aloha lectured at the Bataclan theatre and performed her Aloha dance “with great success.” By the time she returned to her hotel room that evening, though, she was exhausted, alone, and less than confident.
I feel suddenly years older, and look it. I suppose it is the fact that so much responsibility now weighs on my young shoulders. I am all in but the bed is literally covered with litter an’ evr’y thing that must be sorted so that I know just where I stand with this business and an hour later when all the baggage is packed, I crawl into my bed, just a tired, weary child.33
*
Walter Wanderwell was not the man he claimed to be. Aloha knew this. For all the ink in newspapers, magazines, postcards, and brochures, not to mention the films, his name was not really Walter Wanderwell, he was not really American, he was not really divorced, and he was certainly not related to Aloha. His Million Dollar Wager was, for the most part, a publicity stunt, and the expedition was not really sponsored by Ford.34 Walter Wanderwell’s real story was much stranger and a good deal more alarming than anyone travelling with him might have guessed.
