THIRTEEN
AGAINST ALL ODDS
Aloha was, first and foremost, a performer. Her memoirs, like the lectures and interviews she gave, were crafted to present her experience of the world as she would have liked it and as she felt it would be most entertaining and agreeable to others. Aloha was an early “queen of spin.”
By writing that Walter wanted her but that he also needed passion, Aloha acknowledges that Walter was sleeping around. Certainly, there could not have been any public display of romantic affection between them (especially since they were supposedly brother and sister), but in light of the sexual references contained in Aloha’s surviving handwritten journals, as well as her jealousies of Joannie, Olga, and others, and the voluminous anecdotes of Walter’s sexual appetites, it’s unfathomable that they maintained a platonic chastity for the duration of their international travels.
Documents obtained through the US FOIA show that from the moment the Wanderwell Expedition arrived at San Francisco, field offices of the Bureau of Investigation in Jacksonville, Detroit, Kansas City, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Chicago, Oklahoma City, Denver, El Paso, Omaha, Phoenix, Butte, San Francisco, and Los Angeles had been co-operating to determine if Walter could be successfully charged under the Mann Act. One letter, from the Los Angeles Bureau of Investigation, was addressed to the Department of Justice in Washington, DC, on April 3, 1925, and states, “Wanderwell has just returned from Florida where he went to arrange the final matters in connection with the divorce from his wife, and that he intends to marry victim (Aloha) as soon as legal technicalities can be removed.”1
Walter’s proposal to Aloha almost certainly did not occur after his return from Florida, but before it.
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On the sunny afternoon of Tuesday, April 7, Walter and Aloha drove to Riverside, California, where they were married at the home of Justice of the Peace H.D. Briggs. “The elated Justice of the Peace and his prim wife warmly congratulated, spontaneously bussed [kissed] and showered good wishes. She gave me a precious bouquet from her own garden: white fragrant tuberoses to carry away to dinner.”2 Aloha and Walter were free of the federal booby trap. Legally married, they could travel together without fear of arrest for immoral behaviour or for being the wrong age.
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In Aloha’s later reminiscences, her marriage merited hardly a page. Considerably more space was devoted to the United Artists film studio, where Aloha finally met her idols Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. In 1925 Pickford was the biggest female film star in the world and, as co-founder of United Artists, was the single most powerful woman in Hollywood. Even her eighteen-acre studio lot was the stuff of legend. Located on the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Formosa Avenue in Hollywood, the facility wowed visitors with its sets and stages, including a castle façade, a ranch house, New York tenements, and a pirate ship.
Surviving photographs show Aloha standing with Pickford and Fairbanks in front of the new Unit No IV. Aloha is wearing her standard Wanderwell uniform (minus the shoulder strap) while Mary is dressed in a tightly checked dress with a sombrero, a bandana around her neck, and what appears to be a sheriff’s star pinned to her chest — one of the costumes for her film Little Annie Rooney, which would be released in October 1925.
For Aloha, meeting her childhood heroine was a mesmerizing experience, and one that helped her own self-esteem — especially since the invitation had come unsolicited. Her name was known to Hollywood’s elite, and that could only help her on the road to success.
Aloha with Douglas Fairbanks at United Artists studio, Hollywood, 1925.
Aloha would later marvel that Mary Pickford hardly reached her shoulder, even with her hat on. In the photographs the two women look roughly the same age, perhaps in their early twenties. In fact, Pickford was thirty-three, while Aloha was still just eighteen.
Pickford’s husband, Douglas Fairbanks Sr., was fascinated by the Wanderwell project; he was itching to get off the studio lot and actually see the world. However, he had little time for far-off adventures. In addition to co-founding United Artists with Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and D.W. Griffith, he also co-founded the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. As its first president, he introduced the idea of presenting awards for achievements of distinctive merit in film — the Academy Awards. If Pickford was America’s sweetheart, Fairbanks was the undisputed king of Hollywood. Aloha describes him as capering around like a goofy adolescent with a surfeit of energy. Walter filmed the couple and Aloha christening Unit No IV “Miss Los Angeles,” after which “with a flourish, swashbuckler Fairbanks, arm raised, wafted No IV on its goodwill travels, for the camera.”3
By 1931 Fairbanks was filming travelogues of his own in locations scattered around the globe, eventually releasing a film called Around the World In 80 Minutes with Douglas Fairbanks, an echo of the slogan painted on the side of every Wanderwell car: Around the World with Walter Wanderwell. Fairbanks visited numerous places, including Hawaii, Japan, Hong Kong, China, the Philippines, Cambodia, Thailand, and India. He also went on fishing holidays to Vancouver Island, where he visited the Hall family property near Qualicum Beach. Aloha’s daughter would later recall summer days spent swimming with Fairbanks. According to Jeffrey Vance, Fairbanks’s biographer, it was the travel bug that led Pickford and Fairbanks to divorce — at least indirectly.4 Away for long periods, he eventually fell into the arms of Lady Sylvia Ashley, a betrayal Pickford could not forgive, although she claimed that it was the mental anguish of continued separation that prompted the divorce.
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The Wanderwell show played April 27 to May 1, packing crowds into the Philharmonic Auditorium’s three thousand seats. It was the largest house since Madrid and Berlin, and the first with a thirty-piece orchestra. But Aloha was not intimidated. She had “eighteen years of impudence ready to tell how it was done . . . . Our epic looked great on the huge screen. (My) voice carried well, over the fine orchestra. Friends swarmed about with congrat-ulations. It was one for the book — a hit run on our hands.”5
The Los Angeles Times review was less effusive, describing the photography as “rather poor” and declaring, “One could wish that at least one glimpse of the Old World scenes had appeared without the two small Wanderwell cars being firmly planted in the fore part of the picture, and the Wanderwell party crossing and re-crossing in front of the lens obscuring the cathedrals, rivers, towers and lovely old landmarks with almost irritating frequency.” The same article did, however, admit that “the scenes, the people[,] the views in general are of a sort not seen before. The passages of a Spanish bullfight at Madrid are the most remarkable of their kind ever filmed. At times the cameraman must have been within a few feet of the bull, in constant danger, while taking views of the matadors, the preadors [sic] and the enraged animal. The Wanderwell pictures without a doubt are splendid in their unusual glimpses of native life, native sports and famous landmarks.”6
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April 1925 had been a busy month. Aloha had met several of her movie idols, was arrested (twice), married her employer, played the largest venue on the west coast of North America, and had gotten pregnant. She was not, however, ready to slow down. Their run at the Philharmonic Auditorium had been a success, but it had hardly catapulted Aloha to worldwide fame. The best course of action, then, was action. Walter and Aloha prepared to head east towards Detroit, confident they could now cross state lines without fear of arrest. A new crew was hired, including a nurse and travelling secretary named Dolly Reynolds and a fellow named Eric Owen — both of whom would play important roles in the coming months and years. Owen was a tall, slender man with light brown hair and large blue eyes, and he had recently finished his studies in criminology at UC Berkeley. He was quiet by nature but not afraid to negotiate with sponsors or authorities. Owen was put in charge of securing bookings, advertising, and sponsorship contracts, thus allowing Aloha to concentrate on lectures and interviews, and Walter to develop his ideas for the international police and WAWEC.
Dolly Reynolds was English and had worked in Los Angeles as a nurse and nanny before signing on to the expedition. Small, buxom, and brunette, she liked to laugh and, like Aloha, was known to enjoy the occasional tipple. According to Aloha, Dolly had come to the United States via Canada’s Salvation Army immigrant service. Like Owen, she took over some of the expedition’s chores, tending to correspondence, helping to keep the crew’s communal gear in order, cooking where needed, and most importantly, tending to Aloha’s needs as her pregnancy progressed.
The newly expanded crew struck out north for Bakersfield in early May, and it was with wistfulness that Aloha left Los Angeles. She would later make special mention of actors Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Sr., the writer-producer Chuck Roberts, Art Goebel (and his mother), Gloria Swanson, and the superstar evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson (yet another Canadian).
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The road was as ragged and rough as anything they’d encountered in China or India. Aloha took the wheel of Unit No III over the Sierra Nevada mountains and through Donner Pass, which in 1913 had become part of the Lincoln Highway. The pass’s elevation made it notoriously dangerous, and the extreme altitude (over 7,000 feet) was hard on Aloha. It took several days of tooth-chipping travel over barely existing roads to make Reno. The cars had begun breaking down, including the brand new Miss Los Angeles (Unit No IV) that had bearing trouble.
After Reno, the roads were little better and the expedition lost the trail several times, once so completely that they had to make camp amid the rocks. Aloha was excused from pitching the canvas and sat on a boulder, sipping water from a canteen, watching the sun set and marvelling at a landscape teeming with wildlife. “There were rabbits everywhere — thousands!”7
In larger towns, the expedition stopped to sell pamphlets and postcards and to book theatres. Sales were especially good in Austin, Eureka, and Ely, where audiences were thrilled to see scenes of far-off lands. Somewhere along the way, the expedition added two new crew members: a “buxom” young woman called Steine and a man named Murphy.8
With the Nevada border behind them, they motored east along the jagged road to Salt Lake City. The road was monotonous in this part of the country, and as had happened in India, they looked forward to each new town with an almost licentious fervour. But sometimes the road made its own fun. Not long after entering Utah, some truckers had warned them that crews were tearing up the road through the Great Salt Lake Desert, rendering it impassable for long stretches. Their best bet was to take a wide detour north. It would add ten days to their trip, but at least they would get through. Naturally, Walter and Aloha ignored them. Late one afternoon, hot winds swept up storm clouds from the east. There were ferocious claps of thunder and lightning, but even before the rain had begun pinging the hot metal cars, the expedition discovered what the truckers had meant. “Under our own steam, pushing, towing each other, we, up to our knees in goo, reached the point of lunacy where humour and curses sotto voce got together.”9 Despite the cars’ high clearance and lack of fenders, they were repeatedly stuck in the soft muck, forcing them to jettison all excess weight. Each woman drove one car while the men travelled by foot, carrying as much gear as they could lift. After some hours of this, and just as the rain picked up speed, they were cheered by the sight of grey tents and smoke in the distance. The cars were abandoned where they sat.
They spent the night in the workers’ camp, the women in a makeshift storage shed while the men bivouacked under a tarp, listening to the sighs and snorts of nearby horses. At dawn they gathered for a real camp breakfast: oatmeal, slab bacon, chops, potatoes, pie, and endless mugs of coffee. By 7:00 a.m. the burly highway workers, charmed by Steine and Aloha, had hauled the cars from the muck and towed them a mile east to where the road had already been completed. With bellies full and a blue sky promising a fair travelling day, the expedition members climbed back into their cars. In vehicles with the same horsepower as today’s ride-on mowers, they had made it through the most difficult stretch of their journey across the United States.
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At Salt Lake City the expedition added three new crew members (only one, Ayouf Gabriel, was recorded by his full name, the others listed simply as Lewis and Wagner, all male) and commissioned the construction of yet another car, Unit No V, dubbed Miss Salt Lake City. Between lectures, Walter spent hours perfecting his plans for the Work Around the World Educational Club, which he now saw as the lynchpin of his travelling empire.
In 1925 it seemed everyone had been bitten by the travel bug. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of travellers attempting wild globe-girdling feats. Some travelled the world with only their guitar, others rode bicycles (including tandem ones) or milk trucks. One couple from South Africa attempted to circle the globe pushing wheelbarrows.10 To Walter, these people didn’t represent competition but rather evidence of an unmet demand: people wanted to see and to experience the world, and the Wanderwell Expedition, through WAWEC, could provide a means and strategy to do it. It would be, he said, a university on wheels. It would also provide an ongoing revenue stream for Aloha and for him. To Walter, WAWEC was a franchise.
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The expedition crossed into Wyoming, making good time despite frequent stops to address mechanical troubles. Aloha was soon in love with the state’s spacious skies and amber waves of grain. It helped too, that Wyoming welcomed the expedition with open arms and a sincere curiosity — the kind of welcome they had hoped for in California. When they stopped in small towns, like Green River, they easily filled the local theatre.
We would give one show; two reels: Portugal-Spain, Paris and French battle fields. Word spread quickly. Basques, Portuguese sheepmen and wranglers, war veterans, women with children — [a] lovely audience entranced to the point of proverbial pin-drop, followed by wild whoops when the lights went up. Then ten-gallon hats in hand, [they] crowded near afterwards, shy and polite, asking about my accent. Ha! Thought I had lost it.11
Before arriving in Denver, they had struck a promotional agreement with the rather plain-sounding Brown Palace Hotel and were shocked to discover how luxurious it was. “Its granite façades towered ten stories. With hearty greetings by co-owner Charles Boettcher, we were led into an astounding foyer encircled by balconied galleries at every floor, skyward to the glass dome.”12
The highlight of their trip to Denver, however, was the visit to the post office, where Aloha found a stack of letters waiting, including one from Margaret who — despite announcements to the contrary — was still in Nice. Overflowing with good wishes, she asked for details about the Miami River properties. Did they include a house? Had they purchased a yacht? There were no questions about the pregnancy. Questions of house and home would have been top of Margaret’s mind. Money from the sale of the Qualicum properties was fast running out, and unless new funds miraculously appeared, she really would have to leave Nice.
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In Kansas City the expedition was pushed from the headlines by the recent victory of William Jennings Bryan in the so-called Scopes monkey trial. Aloha took little trouble to hide her opinions. “Still believing that Creation was a fait accompli in seven days, Adam and Eve were set on this planet at maturity, [Jennings] just won his case in Tennessee . . . . The whole country has been aroused.”13 And they were soon to experience this narrow-mindedness first-hand when a representative of the Kansas Motion Picture Censor Board demanded changes to several sequences of the Wanderwell films: “ten in the bullfight at Bilbao, two of shy little Bedouin boys with healthy naked bodies. She [the film censor] was not amused by a similar sequence where a veiled Bombay girl carrying her baby brother stood in front of the lens, plainly exhibited was his stiff little penis bound in jewellery.”14
Much to Aloha’s amazement, her husband kept his cool and even apologized to the censor before explaining that these scenes depicted old cultures who “have learned tolerance” and that he was unable to edit his films “just for Kansas.” The remaining engagements were cancelled, the canisters sealed, and the crew relocated, ten minutes across the river to Kansas City, Missouri, where they promptly booked several more shows. While Aloha lectured — and now dealt with morning sickness and diarrhoea — Walter and the crew assembled yet another car, this time buying parts through newspaper advertisements. In keeping with tradition, Unit No VI was christened Miss Kansas City.
Aloha, well into her second trimester, was at the wheel of No III when she recognized a change in the geography and heaved a sigh. At the mud flats near Chesterfield, Missouri, the roads disintegrated into one long trough of mud. One after another, cars slid into ditches or spun sideways and had to be righted by manpower. “So hellish one could cry. Every step into the mud and out fished up more weight . . . you couldn’t lift a leg, arms were gumbo to the elbows.” Tempers flared, especially when Mac accidentally toppled Lewis into the mud. Outraged, Lewis was about to throw a punch at Mac when Steine pushed her way past them, “missing the blow but opportunely toppling the pair. We all took a breather to laugh in our agonies.”15
But the crew’s perseverance was rewarded in St. Louis, where crowds clamoured to see the cars, watch the films, and buy souvenirs. “Money money everywhere.” It was as refreshing as a glass of cold water. With responsive crowds and Detroit looming just ahead, “the excitement, for us, built up hourly. We could see we were in for a good bit of popular hero worship — the thing of the day! Reaching Detroit would be such a thrill!”16 Once again, Aloha had driven her dreams on to the next town. Except this time, that town was called Motor City.
