Adventures of a Young Man in Wartime Tahiti

A friend spoke recently of a trip to the South Pacific to visit Marlon Brando on the actor’s small island near Tahiti--a name that stirred memories.

I haven’t been to that Elysium in nearly half a century. The last time had been in June, 1941, and I was 19.

Earlier, aboard the Matson liner Mariposa, I borrowed a book written by Englishman George Calderon. He summarized his 1906 Tahiti adventure by listing the fact that Europeans and Americans had introduced coffee, oxen, goats, mice, fleas and Christianity, and that caused a modification in the native life style.

Had I come too late, no longer availed to taste of Tahiti’s untainted climate, customs and pleasures? Not at all.

Less than a day out of Tahiti, my father introduced himself to a passenger who had long ago traveled to Tahiti seeking privacy from the madding crowd. He was James Norman Hall, who, with Charles Nordhoff, formed the “Great Collaboration” that produced the epic “Bounty” trilogy. He told my father that he was ill and was returning home to die. (Hall would live another 10 years.)

The following day I rose before dawn to watch the neighbor island of Moorea come into focus.

By 9 a.m., Tahiti’s pilot had deftly squeezed the hulking Mariposa through narrows of the outer reef and past the tiny island of Motu Ota in the center of Matavia Bay. Motu Ota had been a concentration camp in the early days of World War II, when Tahiti was bitterly split between De Gaullists and Vichyites.

When the island’s majority finally went for De Gaulle, a place was needed to intern a passel of rebellious Vichyites. Eventually these detainees were moved to yet another island. Then it was stocked with German and Italian prisoners of war. The two factions took to overheated quarreling until the German head honcho drew a line across Motu Ota. He was emphatic about what would happen to the first Italian who crossed the line.

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When the Mariposa docked in Papeete, we watched Tahiti’s single armed forces unit--about 200 troops--march to the music of a brass band.

Before passengers disembarked, an officious Vichy politician boarded and forfeited the visas of my father, Gene Fowler, and my mother because, he said, Pop had declared in 1937 that Adolf Hitler was preparing Germany for war. “Therefore,” he said, “Mr. Fowler is considered a political hazard to this French possession.”

Pop told me to go ashore and enjoy myself, so I headed for Quinn’s, the most infamous and disreputable bar in the South Pacific. On the way I paused to listen while a priest reprimanded a giggling vahine who hadn’t attended Mass for the past six months. Tahiti was on holiday until the big ship departed three days hence.

It had rained and the dust had settled on the main street. As I crossed, a pretty vahine pedaled past me going flank speed. She squealed “Whee!” then was swallowed by a crowd dressed in colored array.

Entering the Bar

Quinn’s facade consisted of thick bamboo trunks bound together with hemp twine. The corrugated tin roof was green. The entrance was generous, and the place was big.

I peered in, anticipating a fight. Quinn’s had that reputation. It was quiet, though, until a small clutch of natives taking their version of a siesta eyed me. One picked up his guitar--there’s always a guitar--and began peacefully strumming as the others hummed along.

The bartender, who sported a large mustache and manufactured Aussie accent, served me a bottle of the local Hinano beer.

I asked if the place had gone senile.

“Wait’ll the sun ‘its the meridian, mate,” he said, “when the women-seekin’, fight-seekin’ sailors come aboard. . . . Then you’ll find Quinn’s ‘ill start gettin’ damned interestin’. . . .”

I left and headed down the main drag to drop into a small curio shop for a roll of film. That’s where I met Denise and Elaina Russell. Unlike other islanders, Denise was blessed with long, thin legs. Her smile was vague and her eyes dark.

Denise, Elaina and I browsed Papeete’s Chinese general stores, which had reassuring names such as Sincere and Conscience. The three of us biked up to a place called Taharaa Headland, and an abutment named One Tree Hill.

From its 500-foot elevation, we could easily see the crescent of black coral beach and the Matavia Bay pier filled with a forest of trading schooner masts and booms. Moorea boldly stood out as the only land mass within sight of Tahiti. A huge, white cloud hung over the island like an eternal chaperon.

This is the way it was back in 1941: When locals said they were going to the country, this meant they were taking a few steps out of town.

Bicycle travel was the dependable mode of transportation. But if one became antsy about getting somewhere in a hurry, a bus trip down a potholed road was in order.

Fixing a Flat

Whenever a herniated tire blew, its replacement or repair became a communal project that inevitably turned into an impromptu party. Domestic animals would be released to graze, and the natives would dance and sing while others worked half-heartedly on the ruptured tire.

Just before the Tahitian sky changed from hues of salmon and rose to ruby and sienna, the sisters Denise and Elaina and I made it up to the Fautaua River, carrying mangoes, bananas and a half-cooked suckling pig. The sisters started a fire and we swam in the wide area of the river until the pig was cooked.

Instead of returning to the Mariposa, I took a bed at one of the few two-storied hotels where I was offered a room with a balcony overlooking the harbor. This and a sumptuous breakfast of fruit juice, eggs and half a boiled chicken cost $1 a day.

A scattering of roosters awakened me the next morning. Elaina would work in the curio shop that day, so Denise and I headed toward the Papeete Yacht Club. The uniqueness of this fraternity was that no member owned a yacht. Not even a dinghy.

We climbed the creaking stairs that led to a rickety veranda.

The club’s bar was near the billiard room, whose greatest attraction was an unrepaired hole in its wall. The breach had been made by a German warship’s shell during World War I. Today the bartender serves drink orders through the huge embarrassment. And--naturally--each year, the 1914 bombardment is commemorated in holiday.

Denise and I parked our bikes at the yacht club to walk along the crescent-shaped harbor. Along the way she pointed to artist Paul Gauguin’s son, Emile.

‘Not Too Bright’

“His father never legally recognized him,” Denise said. “That is very sad. I believe it was because Emile is not too bright in the head. Paul Gauguin was a very mean man.”

“Can he paint?” was the obvious question.

“He can’t even write,” she said.

“God, if he ever learns to paint,” I fantasized.

Thirty years later, humorist H. Allen Smith told me something most disconcerting about poor Emile Gauguin.

In one of his letters, he said he had met up with an even more bloated Emile Gauguin:

“I used to see Emile from time to time. Tourists heard about Emile and began seeking him out to pose for pictures. He eventually gave up making his fish traps and began pathetically walking up to the tourists saying, ‘Me Gauguin. Pose for pictures. Five francs.’

“He was in and out of jail a lot for drinking when I got word an unscrupulous couple had been taking him out of jail three times a week for painting lessons . They even paid Emile 300 francs each day he spent with them.

“This made me damned mad. I went out of my way to confront the couple. I asked if there just might be an ulterior motive attached to the painting lessons.

“ ‘Heavens, no,’ they said. ‘We’re just interested in rehabilitating Emile.’ ”

Later I discovered that poor Emile’s grand rehabilitators had hied him off to Chicago as his art representatives.

And still later I met James Norman Hall in Tahiti. He wished to settle where social activity was at a minimum. Denise and I had biked up to the Hall Cottage. It stood high above the sea. Below was a smaller cottage where the great novelist housed a prized Victrola and a collection of Caruso records.

The Hall Library

Hall’s wife, Sarah, answered the door. Then the man himself appeared. The outwardly undemonstrative author showed me his library of nearly 3,000 books. It didn’t lean too heavily on South Seas literature, but his favorite volumes on the subject were those of Herman Melville (whose “Typee” had lured him to Tahiti), Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London and Pierre Loti (whose classic, “Le Mariage de Loti” was composed in 1880). It was a thinly disguised autobiography of a young naval officer in a love quandary with a 14-year-old vahine.

Hall must have had a casual literary interest in my father’s works because I noticed copies of “Timberline” and “The Great Mouthpiece” there.

“I don’t own a radio; never listen to them,” he told me. The radio taboo also precluded newspapers and periodical publications.

A storm had occurred while my friend Phil Rhodes was visiting Tetiaroa. Years later, a typhoon had virtually leveled the island.

“I did get to Papeete, though,” Rhodes said. “And I had no trouble locating people who had known the Russell girls. They both married, Denise to a French island official and Elaina to a full-blooded Tahitian. “They live in France today.”

I knew what Rhodes was going to say now.

“Tahiti got too crowded for them. They started building hotels taller than the old four-story Grand.”

I wondered then why the Russells hadn’t sought out another island. Rhodes said: “Probably thought it would just be a matter of time before the same thing happened again.”

And so the memories of that visit years earlier returned like a soft rain over Moorea.