Chapter One Why Not Go? A "Young-Man-Going-Somewhere" was the way the old-timers at the Chicago Daily News described overeager cub reporters like John Gunther. In 1924, a couple of years out of the University of Chicago, John was dashing between bank robberies, fires, gangster shoot-outs, and Rotary club luncheons. Those were the sorts of stories the lowest guy on the totem pole got assigned at the city's main afternoon paper, but John had already set his sights much higher: he wanted a job at the Daily News's bureau in London. He was fed up with America, its hypocrisy, philistinism, and cant: the Prohibition that didn't really prohibit, the moral regeneration spearheaded by charlatans like the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, the corruption and graft bubbling up under the veneer of postwar "normalcy." But the postwar disillusionment that had settled over much of American youth was only part of what was ailing John. For more than two years--two fruitless, unavailing years--he'd been trailing around after Helen Hahn, a local belle. He made small talk with her father, ate dinners with her family, sent her letters and books when he was away. John was constant but Helen, a blond stunner, was fickle. Mostly she liked to string him along, touching his arm while they talked, her big blue eyes gazing into his. He'd paid for one of her abortions though the kid definitely wasn't his, which even at the time struck him as the sort of thing only a chump would do. He knew he had to flee. The arrival of the British writer Rebecca West in Chicago in November 1923 was a beacon from the sophisticated Old World beckoning to the New. West was Britain's most notorious modern woman, a novelist, journalist, and feminist who had just wrenched herself free from an affair with the writer H. G. Wells, immensely famous, twenty-six years her senior, and married. When John and Rebecca met one evening at the University of Chicago, she was a well-seasoned thirty; he a decidedly tender twenty-two. She was on her first American lecture tour, addressing audiences on such racy subjects as polygamy. There wasn't a man living who could gratify four or five women, Rebecca had insisted: "There are many men who cannot make even one woman happy." For years Rebecca had been eager to see America, but when she arrived in New York she wasn't all that impressed. "This whole place strikes me as a greedy children's party," she wrote her sister, appalled by the relentless getting and spending. Chicago was different. In its swagger and newness, it wasn't like any place she had ever seen. From her room at the Drake Hotel, she marveled at the never-ending lake, its gray-green wintry water tugged by millions of waves. The skyscrapers looked like enormous gasoline cans, stolid but lacking in grace. A wholly new shopping street, Michigan Avenue, had been whipped up as swiftly as a Hollywood set. Between the business district and the miles upon miles of identical brick houses rising raw out of the prairie wobbled an elevated railway north, south, and west. And the people, with their curious addiction to introspection and self-analysis. It was a Midwestern quality, Rebecca thought: this touching eagerness to take one on a tour of their inner lives. Such a creature was John Gunther. Rebecca nicknamed the young man "John Silence" because he never stopped talking during the weeks she spent in Chicago. John had the "vitality of seven cart-horses," she later wrote. A "Gothic angel--tall and slender and golden-haired." That was, she added, until he discovered European cooking. She'd later introduce him to her friends in London by saying: "This is John Gunther who comes from Chicago in fact he is Chicago, he is a moral imbecile but a darling." It was all her doing, Rebecca always said, that John finally left his hometown. She didn't know whether he had any talent at all, but he'd be better off, she told him, if he ceased writing those atrocious short stories and novels and caught a steamer to Europe. Maybe he could earn his living as a foreign correspondent. She thought he was a little in love with her. John's bosses refused his entreaties to go to London. He was much too green to be entrusted with a position abroad, his editor informed him. He decided to quit his job and leave anyway; the $150 he'd saved would go further in Europe. He had a clutch of letters of introduction from powerful literary agents and publishers to writers such as Rafael Sabatini and Aldous Huxley. Rebecca had promised to show him the town. He booked his passage on the White Star Line's SS Olympic, departing New York for Southampton in October 1924. It was a lucky break that the Prince of Wales was on the same boat, returning home to England from his six-week tour of North America. Now John had a story to sell. With a $100 advance from the United Press, he traded up from steerage to a first-class cabin, a necessary luxury to track the prince's activities. The palace's humorless courtiers tried to quarantine His Majesty--"like a Hindu virgin or a case of leprosy," reported John. The prince needed guarding both from the reporters on board and from ambitious Long Island dowagers with unmarried daughters. Nevertheless, John found plenty to send the UP. Who was that magnificent girl swathed in furs, who sat alone in the Parisian restaurant the first two nights and was seen with the prince every night thereafter? (John knew: it was a married American newspaperwoman, who caught the prince's fancy and reported their conversations to John every night.) The whole ship was abuzz, he wrote, with rumors that the prince might renounce his right to the throne. (As indeed, twelve years later, he did for Wallis Simpson.) If there was nothing in the rumor, John noted, the prince's courtier wouldn't have bothered to issue an official denial. John's story ricocheted through the American and British papers. John was running away from Helen, but still, he saw every sight through her eyes. How she would have laughed at the dress of the Britishers on board. "Mauve spats, taupe knickers wide enough to drive a Ford through, dinky caps, rugs for capes, monocles . . ." There was the ancient duke who promenaded on deck in his rose-colored bedroom slippers, another who appeared in sparkly purple bow ties. Too bad she wasn't there to stroll with him through the Olympic's vast acres of floating grandeur. Did Helen realize that there were palm gardens and swimming pools and tennis courts on the ship? He'd asked the one pretty girl on board to dance. The girl's family had country houses on Long Island and Rolls-Royces, too; her hair was marcelled and jet-black, her eyes wide-set, and she let him talk and talk. In those years, the 1920s, hundreds of thousands of Americans set off from the New World's docks to live for a spell on the Continent. The trip from New York to Southampton was a swift five or six days by liner, short enough to return home if a parent became ill or the home office required managing, and with the money you saved over in Europe, where the living was cheap, you could afford plenty of return journeys. American entrepreneurs settled on the Right Bank in Paris, hoping to hook the French on imported sweet corn or shredded wheat biscuits or elastane corsets. American engineers struck out for the brand-new industrial cities proliferating in the Soviet steppes; they'd show Stalin's workers how to build harvesters and steel foundries. In Europe's leading cabarets, the music was jazz, and American performers taught the king of Spain and the Aga Khan the latest dance steps. There were American bankers who trumpeted Wall Street's ever-buoyant securities and American heiresses who husband-hunted among Europe's titled but hard-up nobility. Everywhere there were American dentists who retailed New World methods for polishing and straightening teeth. The writers who went to Europe, though, had a different purpose in mind. They'd sell the experience of the Continent--the condoms advertised in every druggist, the sewage stink of Naples, the Tanqueray cocktail, the long creamy sticks of French bread, the azure waters of the Riviera, the anti-colonial politics, the charred battlefields of Belgium--back to an America that was scandalously isolated, moralized, and teetotaling because of Holy Rollers, and raised on canned food and the Bible. John had gone to Europe because of Helen and maybe because of Rebecca and definitely because of his family. For those reasons, and because he wanted to write. Excerpted from Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War by Deborah Cohen All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
