Drawn Out

LATER THAT YEAR, OUT OF the blue, I received an invitation to be an after-dinner speaker at a black-tie dinner that changed my life forever and for the better—I just didn’t know it yet.

In 1990 New Zealand celebrated its sesquicentenary. Foreign Affairs dispensed additional largesse to embassies and high commissions around the globe so that our one hundred and fiftieth birthday could be acknowledged in style. When my mate Dennis Grant, at the time a widely admired senior member of the Canberra Press Gallery—and I have this on no lesser authority than Dennis himself—heard that our high commissioner was contemplating some sort of bash with sawdust on the floor where a Kiwi-born NRL player would say a few words, one of which would be ‘Maaaaaate’, Denny felt morally obliged to intervene and suggested a glittering dinner at the National Press Club instead, with Sir Edmund Hillary to give the main speech. This implied a subsidiary role for another orator, and when that question arose Dennis was ready. He knew just the right man for the job.

I had no idea of Denny’s involvement when the formal invitation to be Ed’s warm-up act arrived. I thought it was entirely on my own merits, and that Australia was treating me with a respect and deference my own country had cruelly long denied me.

I had never met Hillary, and this made me giddy with excitement as well. When he strode purposefully into the Koru Lounge at Auckland International Airport he looked so like himself I barely recognised him. He had a physical presence and an aura that made him appear closer to seven foot than his six foot two. We sat next to each other on the plane and hardly exchanged a word. I scribbled speech notes frantically.

I lost him at the international arrivals hall. We had a connecting flight to Canberra leaving shortly from the domestic terminal on the opposite side of the aerodrome. Ed would just have to fend for himself. Lugging my big suitcase, I had a hell of a time getting there and arrived at the departure gate drenched in sweat just as they were about to close the doors. Ed was waiting for me, as cool as a cucumber. ‘I was getting a bit worried. They’ve been paging you.’

We talked a bit more on the flight but he didn’t really loosen up until the end of the evening when I bought him his first ever glass of Jameson’s Irish whiskey, which he took to instantly. It had been an enjoyable night.

In my speech I said that we had crossed the Tasman at 31,000 feet, just a little higher than Everest, and it was minus 50 degrees outside, just a little colder than Everest. Ed asked for a blanket and went outside and sat on the wing. He was as happy as a sand-boy the whole journey. The air hostesses had a hell of a job coaxing him back into the cabin. ‘Please, Sir Edmund. We have to land. We can’t keep circling like this …’

The audience, a mixture of Ockers and Kiwis, enjoyed my gentle mocking of the great man, and the great man enjoyed it even more.

‘I’ll have to lift my game.’ He beamed when I sat down. There was a steely glint in his pale blue-grey eyes. It suddenly struck me that he was deadly serious. He was 71 years old and still fiercely competitive. He disguised his ruthless streak well in his autumn years—he knew that at full force it wasn’t attractive and it had got him into bitter disputes with a number of climbing companions and fellow adventurers over the years. I caught whiffs of it again in later dealings with him. It worked to his advantage this night, though. He wasn’t going to be upstaged by a chubby, waddling, balding cartoonist and gave a tremendous speech, punctuated frequently by laughter, applause—and sharp, gasping intakes of breath when he recounted some of his close calls in the wild. It was a thrill discovering that hard-nosed cynical Australians held Ed in much the same affection and awe as Kiwis do.

I stayed that night with Dennis Grant and his wickedly droll wife, Robyn. Denny knew I had been working on a television drama about David Lange, who he was very close to when he worked in the Wellington Press Gallery, and he wanted to know what I thought of his idea for a movie. He proceeded to tell me about New Year’s Eve 1978, when he was a member of a television news crew in the SAFE Air Argosy night-time freight delivery run that filmed a close encounter with a UFO off the Kaikōura coast of the South Island. I was stunned when he recounted the extraordinary moment a strange ball of light buzzed their aircraft as they flew north—sweeping around them, under them, over them, drawing alongside them and whizzing away from them at what science-fiction fans would call warp speed.

‘I have no idea what it was,’ recalled Dennis dryly, ‘but it wasn’t a fucking squid boat as some experts suggest. Air Traffic Control radar tends not to record fishing boats dragging nets at twelve thousand feet. Nor does cockpit radar. And it wasn’t Venus. Our pilots were reasonably familiar with where Venus is positioned in the sky.’

When I asked him why he had never told me this before he responded simply that he kept the story to himself because he didn’t want people to think he was mad. His Channel 10 mate, the reporter who broke the story, Quentin Fogarty, was all but broken himself by the event and the media feeding frenzy that followed.

While Dennis diligently scribbled down copious notes on a yellow legal pad I gave him the full benefit of my vast knowledge of moviemaking, which at that point consisted solely of co-writing an animated feature film about a neurotic sheepdog. As a consequence, making movies was playing on my mind when I flew back to Sydney with Ed the next morning.

All the way through the international departures terminal he was besieged by autograph-hunters and people who wanted their picture taken with him. They were of every nationality and sometimes sign language bordering on charades was required. He consented without fuss. It looked exhausting.

He insisted on buying me lunch and took me to a discreetly tucked-away white-linen and silver-service restaurant that I never knew existed. We were totally at ease in each other’s company now, laughing and joking with each other. I was curious to know why a film had never been made about his exploits. He told me that he had been approached over the years by some big-name Hollywood types, but the right person hadn’t asked. I blurted out that I would love to do it. He had known me less than 24 hours. He replied evenly, ‘You are the right person.’

I was staggered, thrilled and terrified all at once. As is my wont in moments like these, I immediately applied the handbrake and provided him with an escape clause. I advised him to discuss it with his wife and family.

It was mid-December. We would talk again in the New Year, after he had given it more thought, and if he still felt the same way I would do everything in my power to make a movie worthy of his life.

Back in Wellington I scoured second-hand bookshops for everything I could find on or by Ed. He wrote his first, and in many ways his best, book, High Adventure, in longhand just months after the successful 1953 British expedition to Everest, when every lung-burning step of the ascent was still fresh and vivid. The writing is so visceral and so real, I read it that summer shivering under a blanket, fearful I might lose my fingers and toes to frostbite. It was blindingly obvious that, told well, it would make a stunning movie.

I had a book of my own out that Christmas, Private Parts. Ed was given a copy as a present and luckily for me he enjoyed it. The Hillarys had been holidaying in the South Island. I caught up with them at a motel on Peka Peka Beach on their road trip back to Auckland, meeting June Mulgrew, Lady Hillary, for the first time. She proved to be a beautiful, elegant, lively, strong-willed force of nature in her own right. Fortunately, we clicked as well. They had talked the movie idea through and they gave the project and my handling of it their full and unconditional blessing. My head reeled with giddy excitement and ached with the weight of responsibility at the same time.

For research purposes I needed to accompany them on their next trip to the Solukhumbu in Eastern Nepal and see for myself the 30 schools, half-dozen medical clinics, three airstrips, two hospitals and many bridges Sir Edmund’s Himalayan Trust had funded and built along the hill trail to Everest. I told my mate Mark Sainsbury, a reporter on Holmes, that he should come as well. Taking a leaf out of the Dennis Grant playbook, Mark played the age card—how much longer could the hero of Everest keep going? Could this be his last trip to his second home—the land he loved and the people he loved, the Sherpas, who worshipped like a god the man they called Burra Sahib? He laid it on shamelessly. TVNZ bought every wild exaggeration, all of which very nearly came to pass.

MEANWHILE, BACK IN FEILDING MY father’s heart was failing him again. He was so frail he had to move out of the tribal seat in Owen Street to Wimbledon Villa rest home in Manchester Street. When I heard from sister Sue that he had to be readmitted to Palmerston North Hospital for treatment I rang the cardiac ward several times to talk to him but I could never get through. He always seemed to be sleeping or was with a doctor or nurse and could not be disturbed.

One evening my youngest brother, Rob, rang. Rob is a very funny man and just about the nicest person on the planet. I asked him how he was.

I braced myself for bad news. ‘Is he OK? I can’t get through to him on the phone.’

Rob then quoted what my father said to him next: ‘“Egghead is trying to ring me. I’m refusing to take his calls. I want my death on his conscience!”’

I sighed. What had I ever done to warrant this? My father returned to Wimbledon Villa. When friends pushed his wheelchair around the block, to give him some fresh air and some sun on his face, he told them in his still-thick Ulster brogue that he was going home. If they could see the Wimbledon Villa looming up they smiled and said, ‘Yes, Tom, we’re nearly there …’ But that’s not what he meant.

I got on with my preparation for Nepal, going for long walks over the Wellington hills in my new tramping boots with a pack on my back, desperately trying to lose weight and get fit, my lower back still stabbing me intermittently with searing pain. Two physiotherapists giving me treatment said there was nothing more they could do. It was my age. I would have to live with some degree of chronic discomfort for the rest of my days.

As our mid-April departure day approached, every couple of mornings I woke to find coils of fax paper spilling out of my machine—updates on Sir Edmund’s already immaculate planning, hand-written in his neat copperplate. I started to feel like Ed and George Lowe on the eve of their departure to join the British expedition in 1953—except I would arrive in Nepal in a wide-bodied jet after just two days of travel. Travelling by Sunderland flying boat, passenger liner and steam train, it took them three weeks.

I landed at Kathmandu airport in a misty, dusty, gathering dusk. When I finally escaped the teeming madness of the international arrivals hall a deep, velvet blackness had descended over the city. There was barely any street lighting. En route to the Shangri-La Hotel, my dilapidated taxi had to circumnavigate sacred cows sleeping smugly in the centre of the streets. We rattled past open fires showering sparks, and past the turmeric glow of kerosene lamps in small pavement stalls. Ghostly figures on ancient bicycles wobbled in and out of a ground mist. It was magical, enchanting and deeply mysterious. I couldn’t wait to discover in the morning what sort of world I had flown into.

I awoke to the caw of large black crows on my balcony. Below me in the exquisite walled gardens of the Shangri-La a line of kneeling men in pristine white tunics and turbans cut the lawn with scissors. There was scent and incense floating in the still air.

I endeavoured to capture the intoxicating strangeness of those first days in an early draft of my screenplay, Higher Ground.

201 EXT. SWAYAMBHUNATH STUPA—DAWN

In a jumble of shrines overlooking a city draped in fog, monks chant, gongs sound and monkeys scramble over stone temple-dogs splattered with wax and red powder.

Far below, roosters crow and dogs yelp—

Beyond the shrouded, ramshackle city, jagged Himalayan peaks are backlit by the rising sun. It is the start of a new day in the fairy-tale mountain kingdom of Nepal.

Super the Title: Kathmandu—31 March 1975

202 EXT. KATHMANDU—EARLY MORNING

HILLARY, now in his fifties, walks with LOUISE, now in her forties, down a narrow alley already teeming with cyclists, monks and merchants.

Incense burns from countless small shrines. Baskets of brightly coloured fruits, vegetables and spice narrow the streets even further—

Mark Sainsbury, his nuggety cameraman Alan Sylvester and I spent four days in the Kathmandu valley acclimatising to altitude, sightseeing and meeting the rest of Ed’s expedition for drinks hosted by tiny, feisty, elderly Elizabeth Hawley, a Reuters correspondent who had never gone home. She was New Zealand’s honorary consul and the world’s foremost authority on Himalayan climbing expeditions. Her house was Somerset Maugham meets Casablanca—tiled floors, thick walls, arched doorways, lots of latticework, heavy furniture, revolving ceiling fans and a much-scolded servant wearing a topi hat serving hefty gins in crystal buckets.

The trekking party included Ed’s old chums, the towering Zeke O’Connor, a former gridiron player from Vancouver, and burly Larry Witherbee, a former Sears, Roebuck executive from Chicago, who ran the Canadian and US branches of the Himalayan Trust respectively, plus a cluster of wealthy donors from north and south of the border: multi-millionaire Alex Tilley, who invented the famous hat bearing his name; his attractive daughter, Alison, whose buxom breasts were always threatening to fall out of her blouse; slow-talking mega-vague, mega-millionaire Ted Lorimar, whose grandfather invented extruded aluminium furniture and tampons (don’t even think about joining those dots—you’ll go mad), and his wealth consultant, whose other major client was the Emir of Qatar (last I heard, this man was serving time in a US prison for fraud, where he is probably advising El Chapo); Barbara, a wealthy Canadian who had been successfully married several times and to dull the pain of yet another annulment was hurling herself into a rugged wilderness with enough creams, potions and painkillers in a belt around her waist to stock a small pharmacy, and two steps behind her a trusty Sherpa carrying a Fortnum & Mason-like hamper of exotic treats and delicacies that no intrepid explorer should be without; and Professor John Redpath, a professor of logical positivism and North America’s leading expert on the writings of Ayn Rand—pretty much what you’d find on any wet Sunday in any tramping hut in New Zealand.

Nepal was due to go to the polls. Kathmandu walls were festooned with strange political logos. Due to widespread illiteracy, a government committee allocated recognisable symbols and names to the numerous political parties. The bicycle party, the bullock party and the spectacles party were happy enough. The frog party and the toilet-brush party felt short-changed.

Professor Redpath asked Mark Sainsbury and me if there was any way he could possibly address the Nepalese people live on television on the evils of democratic socialism and wealth redistribution. Sadly, the people of the second poorest country on Earth were denied this treat, as the weather cleared in the Solukhumbu and we had to head for the hills.

The King of Nepal laid on two of his Super Puma helicopters for Ed. Since it was a religious holiday, sacrificial offerings needed to be made to the gods in order for us to fly. My heart sank when six bleating goats were brought forward, prayers were uttered and a chanting pujaree (priest) cut their throats one by one. Still spurting blood, the twitching carcases were dragged by the hind legs around the choppers, tracing out crimson concentric circles. I will never complain about an Air New Zealand safety video again.

We lifted off in a convoy heading southeast, clattering above paddy fields, soaring over glorious hilltop temples, and sweeping past terraced hillside after hillside, until the terrain became too steep and wild for cultivation. Heading up steep gorges with waterfalls cascading down towering rock faces, the chopper ahead of us was dwarfed by the immensity of the landscape into a child’s toy. A beaming Ed tapped me on my knee and pointed out the Everest massif standing head and shoulders above every other great peak on the horizon. Low sun turned the upper ramparts of Everest bronze. The taste of butterscotch filled my mouth.

Autograph-hunters surged around Ed when we landed at Lukla, the airport he had helped the locals construct in 1964, which is now named after him and Tenzing. With a short, narrow, sloping runway dropping away into a ravine at the lower end and running into a sheer mountain face at the upper end, there is no margin for pilot error and no coming back if engines falter or stall. You never know if you are going to make it. All you know for certain is the pilots have put down their cell phones, have taken their feet off the dashboard and are paying close attention. It is deemed by aviation experts to be one of the most dangerous airfields in the world. They get no argument from me.

Ed alighted as white as a sheet, his damp brow creased with discomfort, and moved urgently and distractedly through the throng. It had nothing to do with his runway.

We set off that afternoon at a leisurely pace up a winding trail through a wide ravine carved out by the raging Dudh Kosi river. We missed the rhododendrons in bloom, but glorious apple and apricot orchards were in full flower. Hens scratched in vegetable gardens. Smoke curled up from cosy Sherpa homes with timber-shingle roofs held down by stones. Above us, through forest, we caught glimpses of icy, fluted spires. It was breathtakingly beautiful.

I walked with June, behind Ed so she could keep an eye on him. He was breathing heavily. Mingma Tsering, his sirdar (head man), gripped the belt of Ed’s trousers tightly and hoisted him up every step. From the rear, in his voluminous, baggy grey corduroys, Ed resembled an old bull elephant.

THE SMALL HAMLET OF PHAKDING was in deep shadow and freezing cold when we arrived. Ed went straight to bed. His old climbing buddy from Everest, George Lowe, was there. George and I later became good friends—he thanked me tearfully for acknowledging his contribution to the conquest of Everest in the fortieth-anniversary documentary I made for UK’s Channel 4, but he was testy and difficult that night in Phakding, fed up I guess at meeting yet another bloody film crew and a writer obsessed with Hillary. He insisted on camera to Mark that Ed was the perfect man to conquer Everest, that he had used his fame to good ends and this fame would have been wasted on anyone else, but there was regret and a sadness lurking beneath the surface of his answers. He was the ‘nearly’ man and you could see he felt it keenly.

From all my research I am convinced that, on that particular mountain at that particular time, George was the second fittest climber after Ed—stronger even than Tenzing Norgay, who was still feeling the effects of the malaria he had caught the year before while climbing with the Swiss. But there was symmetry and poetry in having a man from the east and a man from the west stand on the world’s highest point together. Had it been a brutally unsentimental All Black selector reading out the names of the first assault team the list would have been:

E.P. Hillary, Auckland

W.G. Lowe, Hawke’s Bay

This is a big call, but I think I can legitimately make the claim. For View from the Top, my New Zealand Hillary documentary, I interviewed or spoke to all the surviving members who made it to the fortieth-anniversary celebrations in Nepal. I later interviewed on camera Charles Wylie, the expedition’s organising secretary, translator and stores master, in his sunny Sussex cottage. During the war he commanded a Gurkha company. On the wall there was an oil portrait of his Gurkha batman, who the Japanese beheaded in front of him as punishment when he was a prisoner of war. After the interview the scholarly, soft-spoken Charles shook my hand and said I knew more about the expedition than anyone he had ever met. The expedition leader, John Hunt, said much the same thing when I interviewed him in Lukla the year before. I was so buoyed by this affirmation I could have skipped up Everest in plimsolls and shorts at that moment.

George Lowe’s most immense contribution to the expedition was on the penultimate day. It was George who led, cutting all the steps up to Camp 9 on the Southeast Ridge. It was George who found the small, precarious ledge that Ed and Tenzing pitched their tent on. As photographs attest, he was still fresh and strong, taking off his oxygen mask and gloves to take photos. He asked Ed if there was room for another man in the summit assault team.

‘Sorry, George,’ said Ed. ‘I’ve done the sums. We don’t have enough oxygen.’

George returned to Camp 8 on the South Col with the English climber Alfred Gregory and the Sherpa Pasang. Gregory had a dreadful night, constipated and howling with pain at the end of George’s sleeping bag, straining to shit into a tin. He descended with Pasang the next morning, leaving George alone to wait for Ed and Tenzing’s return, or to come down alone if they failed to show up. For the best part of a full day he was the mountaineering equivalent of Michael Collins in the command module orbiting the moon on his own while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin descended to the dead, dusty surface in the lunar module.

Late in the afternoon George saw two specks roped together returning slowly. He made some soup, poured it into a Thermos flask and rushed up to meet them—before realising they were still at least an hour away. Spent from his efforts, he staggered back to his tent, relieved to know they were safe and well. When they got closer he walked up slowly carrying oxygen cylinders and the Thermos flask.

Everyone knows what Ed said to him: ‘Well, George, we knocked the bastard off.’ What is less well known is George’s equally laconic, and should be iconic, reply: ‘Thought you must have. Here, have a cup of soup.’

While Tenzing fell into an exhausted sleep in his tent, the two New Zealanders talked excitedly late into the night. Ed gave George some rocks that he had collected just below the summit.

‘You could have climbed it easy, George,’ Ed told his old friend, which was flattering but small comfort.

The George Lowe we met at Phakding was still extremely fit and supple. Mark and I carried emergency medicinal supplies of Baileys Irish Cream and Jameson’s with us, and after several glasses George relaxed and began reciting poetry. Then to demonstrate his fitness he tucked one leg, then the other, behind his neck in a yoga pose that I don’t recommend.

He was gone early next morning, no doubt racing over some high mountain pass while we struggled up the gorge towards Namche Bazaar. It was steep and hard, but Mark enlivened proceedings by sprinting ahead with Alan, setting up the sticks and pretending to do pieces to camera as June approached. ‘They call her the Bitch of the Snows … oh, hello June.’

If you arrive at the wrong time of the day the Namche hill is a killer even for fit climbers. Infra-red radiation reflecting off surrounding peaks turns it into a 2000-foot-high microwave oven. I was well cooked that first trip.

Near the top, Alison somehow found the energy to approach Mark and Alan with her idea about shooting an improvised romance movie starring herself and using Sherpas as extras. She accepted the concept still needed a little work. Mark foisted her onto me, telling her that I was a really famous film producer back in New Zealand and that she needed to pitch it to me. She bounded over full of enthusiasm, but, fighting for breath, I was in no condition to respond. Spotting a babbling mountain stream she decided she needed to wash her hair, and whipped off her white blouse and got down to her black bra—I think it was black; oxygen deprivation had leached all the colour out of my world at this point. She dashed forward and proceeded to plunge her head into the icy stream. It came out pretty quickly, followed seconds later by high-pitched yelping when she had recovered from the initial shock.