Complete Works of Ian Fleming, page 300
These were sour thoughts from the envious mind of a duffer. After watching, for the hundredth time, men pick up girls on their shoulders and carry them effortlessly towards the shore while others pirouetted on their boards and others whizzed in balancing on one leg, I made several attempts to emulate the novice’s art of just covering a hundred yards on the stomach. But, after suffering many bruises and being several times half-drowned, I paddled back ignominiously towards the shore and just had enough strength left to heave the thirty-five pounds of balsa wood up the golden sand to its garage.
The world had shaken gently to herald my arrival in Japan and now, to greet me in the West, it erupted with equal gentility.
Kilauea, on Hawaii Island, is the most active volcano in the world. That morning it erupted violently, firing a flaming column of lava a thousand feet into the sky — the highest lava-toss it has ever achieved. It maintained this fiery fountain throughout my visit, having previously remained semi-dormant since 1868. At lunch-time that day, over a ‘Paradise Slenderama Salad’, an eyewitness urged me to fight my way on to one of the many planes of Aloha Airlines that were taking tourists to see the sight. ‘It makes the Fourth of July look like a lighted match,’ said my informant. ‘You’d better go quick.’ I said of course I would. I didn’t. I was tired of aeroplanes, and this terrestrial blow-off seemed to me an aspect of the private life of the globe into which it would be ‘bad joss’ to pry.
Instead, as a holiday from the sight of my fellow creatures in muumuus and aloha shirts, and rejecting the Sheraton Hotel’s invitation to complimentary hula and cha-cha lessons, a flower-arrangement class, and an open duplicate bridge tournament, I went to the Honolulu Zoo. I like zoos and I think this is the prettiest I have ever seen. It wanders all over the Kapiolani Park below Diamond Head and is surrounded by a thick, twelve-foot-high hedge of syringa in bloom — an excellent deodorizer of zoos. Here there were cassowaries, emus, a fine Gibbon ape hurtling round its cage as if desperately trying to run away from its shadow, an angelic Diana monkey sitting on its hands, a young black leopard with soft and beautiful golden eyes, brown and white pandas no bigger than large cats, formidable Great Black Cockatoos and a unique cageful of Birds of Paradise. All these were a rest to the eyes, not excluding the Great Green Iguana, and I stayed there till dusk. Outside the gates, the evening paper posters were saying: ‘Oahu Barmaid Claims Rape.’ I was back in the world again!
My hotel had been invaded by six hundred prize-winning staff members of the General Electric Company. They wore leis and sat attentively at long tables under the giant banyan tree in the patio of the Moana, listening enraptured to a Hawaiian guitar ‘combo’ accompanying a Hawaiian song-bird in a grass skirt. In my youth, to the exasperation of my family, I had had a weakness for the Hawaiian guitar and I played records of the Royal Hawaiian Serenaders when I should have been out of doors killing something. I even went so far as to have lessons with the instrument from an Italian woman in Chelsea. Listening now to the boinging and moaning, I appreciated my family’s exasperation. Now the plaintive music sounded like the sort of background stuff that accompanies ‘The Teenage Monster from Outer Space’ or the dream sequences in films about lunatics and drunkards, and I would have howled like a dog between gulps of my Old-Fashioned had it not been for the earthy voice of the Sheraton Hotel coming at frequent intervals over the loudspeaker system: ‘On the beach at Waikiki — when you belonged to me.’ ‘Mr Fratinelli, please. Telephone call for Mr Fratinelli.’ ‘I have a call for Mrs Finkleberg. Mrs Finkleberg, please.’ The guitars whoinged and zinged like a badly sprung mattress. I slunk to my room.
From a long list of local restaurants, readers of my books will understand that I immediately settled on ‘M.’s Smoke House’. M., if I may be allowed the digression, is my fictional head of the Secret Service. How like the cunning old rascal, I thought! Here he is, quietly salting away Secret Service funds to build up a nice hard-currency nest-egg to supplement his pension. I took a taxi down town and asked the driver about the place. ‘Real good eats,’ he said appreciatively. ‘You want to go to the mezzanine — place they call the Cheerio Room. Best steak and lobster in town.’
‘But who is this chap, M.?’
The driver shook his head doubtfully, ‘Don’t rightly know. Never seen him.’
It fitted perfectly! Sly old devil! There was probably some American cutout who acted as the front. But, alas, it was the week-end, and M.’s place, cunningly situated between the Chamber of Commerce and the Bank of Hawaii, was closed. Regretfully I retired to the Sorrento Spaghetti House (in America, when in doubt, I always go to an Italian restaurant) and consumed spaghetti Bolognese with garlic, and a bottle of ‘domestic’ Chianti.
Back in my hotel bedroom, I looked out at the sea which lay like gunmetal under a crescent moon. One or two night surf-riders were still at it on the darkened creaming waves. Far below me, on the moon-burnt beach, an elderly woman, probably a General Electric cashier, was holding up her muumuu while the small waves washed her feet. She looked forlorn and unloved in this place of the eternal honeymoon. The next day, probably, she would be back in Seattle, Iowa, New Orleans. Now, in the path of the moon and with the gay flambeaux and the crooning guitars behind her, she was having her last paddle. She seemed to represent the tragedy of all ended holidays. I drew the jalousies and went to bed.
Going round the world too quickly is like attending a series of dinner parties and leaving with the soup. Beneath the surface, Hawaii is ruled by the five great sugar and pineapple families (Hawaii produces seventy-five per cent of all the world’s pineapple), and queen of this benevolent syndicate is one powerful old lady. I had a letter of introduction to this lady and I would dearly have liked to explore where-power-resides in this very prosperous fiftieth State of America. Instead, I drove to the other side of the island and had lunch with the informative British Consul and his family, and then had to catch my plane for Los Angeles. Without many regrets. The Hawaiian Islands are, as I have said, of great beauty and, since Captain Cook discovered them, we should have clung on to them as the ‘Sandwich Islands’, which Captain Cook named after the Earl of Sandwich. But we had presumably not enough people for these small and distant territories and America (shame on her!) annexed Hawaii some sixty years ago. Now Henry Kaiser (he of the Liberty Ships) is in the process of re-annexing them from America for tourist development. The result is that while the outer islands are still comparatively unspoilt, the main island of Oahu, containing Honolulu and Pearl Harbor, is just another reservation for the pensioners and the ‘alimoners’.
These factors made it all the more reassuring to get back into the gracious arms of Japan Air Lines, whom I had once again (who will blame an airline for one burned-out bearing?) chosen to carry me farther and who, after a good night’s rest (but I do urge J.A.L. not to give one an omelette stuffed with mushrooms and chopped onions for breakfast), deposited me shortly after dawn at the thunderous airport of ‘The Angels’.
And now for the full solar-plexus blow of the West!
* * *
INCIDENTAL INTELLIGENCE
Hawaiian legends say that clever MENEHUNES inhabited these islands before the Polynesians arrived, about 900 years ago, and that these wise ‘little folk’, or pixies, still live in isolated valleys and hidden forests. They came out to work when needed. We have chosen MOKI the MENEHUNE to be your guide in Hawaii, for who could better qualify?
There are a few ancient grass huts here and there which old Islanders cling to, along with old legends and traditions — but for modern humans, here are a few elegant substitutes for the old grass shack:
The Royal Hawaiian Hotel, Moana, Surfrider, Biltmore, Edgewater, Princess Kaiulani, Reef, Breakers, Hawaiiana, Hawaiian Village, Halekulani, The Palms.
All these hotels are at Waikiki, all of them are either right on the beach or so near that a few steps take you to those articles you came for — sand for lolling and the sea for swimming! Their prices range from $6 to $16 for single rates, and from $7.50 to $28 for a double, European plan. The Royal Hawaiian’s rates are on the American plan, so they are between $32 and $50 a day, double.
Smaller hotels? Certainly! Here are a few around the Waikiki area:
Coconut Grove, Aina-Luana, Coco Palms, Hale Kai, The Islander, King’s Surf, Hotel Kaimana, The Kahili, Leialoha Hotel, Lewers Apartment-Hotel, Pau Lani, Royal Grove, Waikiki Studio Apartments, Comstock, Hotel Pacific Polynesia, with rates from $4.50 to $12.50 per day, double, or weekly rates from $30 to $50.
Of course hotels are not limited to Waikiki. You can stay at the Alexander Young Hotel in down-town Honolulu, or the Thailiana Hotel near the town of Kailua across the Pali. There is Cullen’s Ranch at Hauula, too, if you want a view of lush open spaces.
TO DINE WONDROUSLY
What sort of food do you like? Chinese, Korean, sea food? Japanese, American, broiled? Hawaiian, Italian, French-fried? Natural fruit-of-the-land such as menehune eat?
Name your gastronomical delight — we’ll show you where to find it! All the Waikiki Hotels have panoramic dining-rooms, panoramic from up-above looking down, or from the beach-front looking out. If you notice the food at all with all this soul-filling nectar around you, you’ll find it delicious.
Then, we’d give you a gentle shove in the direction of Fisherman’s Wharf for delicacies of the sea; Canlis’s Broiler where you throw your glasses to the winds, so you can’t read the prices but can see enough to relish the juice-oozing thick broiled steaks; The Gourmet with its Parisian atmosphere and fancy menu.
Then to Trader Vic’s for that South Seas dash; Queen’s Surf for dining on wave-washed moonlit nights — if there’s a dram of romance in your soul; The Tropics, both at Waikiki and off the Ala Moana, for melting broiled meats; Waikiki Sands for the most reasonable and varied salad bar in town; Wagon Wheel for fair-priced American fare; Waikiki Lau Yee Chai and Wo Fat’s down town for the acme in Oriental dishes; the Korean Kitchen for you-know-what.
There’s M.’s Ranch House in Aina Haina and M.’s Smoke House down town for charcoal specialities; Rocco’s Farmhouse for Italian food; Giro’s and Alexander Young Hotel’s Hob Nob in downtown for American food, and Chez Michel’s near Wahiawa give you ragout and crêpes suzette — très magnifique!
In default of a private eye such as Dick Hughes for the Orient, and despite the painful quaintness of the style, I can do no better than to quote these brief extracts from the comprehensive Hawaiian Guidebook for Visitors by Scotty Guletz (South Sea Scotty).
It accepts no advertising, which is a recommendation, and can be bought anywhere in Hawaii for one dollar.
V. Los Angeles and Las Vegas
The Yellow Cab driver was smoking a big cigar at eight o’clock that morning. He didn’t want to talk. Neither did I. I sat and glumly watched the procession of gas stations and hot-dog stands on the hour’s drive to the Beverly Hills Hotel which is still, despite the modern attractions of the Beverly Hilton, the friendliest hotel in Hollywood. I noted the ‘Squeeze Inn. Steaks!’ the ‘Golf! Stop and Sock!!!’, a driving range, and the ‘Sunset Pest Control’ hard by the famous Sunset Boulevard. Also, via a detour, I renewed my acquaintance with America’s Waugh Memorial, the cemetery immortalized in The Loved One — and then to yet one more hotel bedroom, the basket of fruit in cellophane from the manager, and the din of the telephone.
As all foreign authors know, Hollywood likes to have first bite at anyone who is ‘new’ and even moderately successful, and at twelve-thirty I was having lunch in the Brown Derby with a producer who wanted to make a fortune out of me in exchange for a glass of water and a crust of bread. I was treated to the whole smart rag-bag of show-biz pressure-talk in between Eggs Benedict and those eighty per cent proof dry martinis that anaesthetize the uvula. ‘We gotta see which way the cookie crumbles, Iarn.’ (There are only first names in Hollywood.) ‘Now don’t get me wrong, you got a good property there. Don’t throw it away for peanuts. As we say, “If you want to throw snow on a stove, don’t bellyache if it melts.”’ ‘Let’s play this by ear, Iarn.’ ‘Of course you want to make money. Who doesn’t? But they say around here: “A Jew worries how much money he’s going to lose, an Englishman how much he’ll make, and the American how much you’ll make.” Now, at our studios, we want everybody to make money. How would it be if...’ And so it went on, a mixture of hollow bonhomie combined with ultra sharp horse-trading.
In due course, I fought my way out of the place and went far down town to visit my old friend, Captain James Hamilton, Head of Intelligence of the Los Angeles Police Department. Since I was last there five years ago, the Police Department has been torn down and rebuilt in marble, but Captain Hamilton has constructed for himself a replica of his former office, a grey box with no ornament but a heroin pedlar’s pair of scales and a new acquisition — a map of Sicily. This seemed a curious decoration for a police chief’s office and I asked him about it. He produced a large plan which looked rather like those charts of an atom being split. The inter-connected circles contained Italian surnames. ‘I’m really going after the Mafia,’ explained Hamilton. ‘We keep on having trouble from them. A man, an Italian, gets bumped off for no reason at all. Two years later, it appears he was one of the killers of another Italian in Chicago and, in the mobese for murder, he “had to be hit” for some reason of Mafia politics. Things like that keep on cropping up. I’m going to go on plotting these Mafia families and then, after somebody’s uncle has somebody’s cousin bumped off, I’ll have something to start a case on.’
I had always thought that the power of the Mafia in America had been ridiculously exaggerated by writers and reporters, but when, a year or so before this, the New York police had rounded up the big Mafia conference at Appalchin I had been inclined to change my views, and Captain Hamilton’s serious approach to the problem made me think once again.
This solid bit of police intelligence work in progress is typical of Hamilton. He is a powerfully built, good-looking man of Scottish ancestry, aged about fifty-five, and he has held his post in the second biggest Police Department in America for some ten years. He has often been used by Erie Stanley Gardner as a source of police material and also by the late Raymond Chandler. Dragnet was written around the Los Angeles Police force, and Hamilton provided much of the material and vetted all the scripts. When I had last visited him, five years before, he was finishing an operation to rid Los Angeles of big out-of-town gangsters who were trying to muscle in on the territory. He had told me that the Los Angeles police were capable of looking after local crime, but what they feared were hook-ups with Chicago and New York mobs which would make his task infinitely more difficult. So he put his territory out of bounds to the rest of the American crime syndicates. The way he did it was to have one or two innocent-looking plain-clothes men posted at the airport and the railroad station. (No self-respecting gangster would travel across America by motor car.) These detectives were armed with concealed cameras in a book, an overnight bag, or some such innocent object. On the arrival of a plane or train, they watched the passengers and took photographs of any suspected or known criminal. Once identified, the man would be followed to his hotel or apartment building. From then on he would be ‘leaned upon’. The process of ‘leaning on’ an undesirable is extraordinarily effective. Whenever Mr X left his room, he would find two plain-clothes detectives walking at either side of him at his elbow. If he went into a drugstore for breakfast, the men would sit on either side of him and order the same breakfast as he did. If he took a cab, the detectives would follow and, when he got out, range themselves again alongside him. The same thing would happen at lunch and dinner. Not a word would be spoken and the man would not be molested. After as little as twenty-four hours of this treatment, added to the certainty that his telephone was being tapped, the gangster would have had enough of it and leave town.
But now, Hamilton explained to me, things were not so easy. The mob was back in Los Angeles, but this time in the labour protection racket. He opened the drawer in front of him and passed over a hundred-dollar bill. ‘That was stuffed in one of my men’s pockets yesterday by this guy.’ He had the police card on his desk. Attached to it was the usual harsh police photograph. It showed a glowering man with an Italian name. He had a string of convictions for carrying arms, violence and manslaughter, but his latest description was ‘labour organizer’. ‘It’s the same old story all over the country, but without the sub-machine guns’, explained Hamilton. ‘Protection, extortion, sabotaged machinery, a fire in your factory. All under the cloak of the labour unions. And, of course, the dues are collected by men like that’-s-he pointed to the photograph— ‘and after they’ve had their cut the rest goes to the big union bosses who send their kids to Columbia and Vassar. They’ve put away the pineapples and choppers. Nowadays, crime’s gone respectable.’
‘Los Angeles has become a Mecca for the dregs of civilization.’ Who said that? Not Mr Khrushchev, who was given a most unfriendly welcome by the town. Those are the words of the Chief of Los Angeles Police, W. H. Parker, faced with an annual increase in crime which is positively staggering, with burglary, grand larceny and rape, for instance, over one hundred and fifty per cent up over the 1950 rate. Crime, says the Chief of Police, has increased six times as fast as the total population of Los Angeles city and twice as fast as all business activity in Southern California. But the worst of it, said Hamilton, was narcotics, and the increase in juvenile crime by around fifty per cent. Of the latter, the forthright Chief of Police has written:
