The Girls of Hawaii

a paean to the winsome wahines of our elysian archipelago

In the History of man's quest for romance and adventure -- which has taken him in search of fountains of youth and cities of gold -- perhaps no dream has been pursued longer, nor more longingly, than the vision of a palmfringed, white-stranded South Sea island thronged with beckoning Tondelayos. On January 20, 1778, when Captain James Cook, in command of two British four-masters, put ashore on a verdant Pacific archipelago which he called the Sandwich Islands, it seemed -- for a while, at least -- that man had at last found his elusive paradise. The Stone Age natives, who had never seen a white man before, hailed Cook as Lono, God of the Harvest, and forthwith bestowed upon him -- in exchange for the immemorial beads and mirrors -- a prodigal bounty of fruit, hogs and voluptuous brown-skinned girls. "No women I ever met were less reserved," he wrote dazedly in the ship's log. "Indeed, it seemed to me that they visited us with no other view than to make a surrender of their persons."

In the 183 years since this auspicious beginning, relations between the outside world and the Sandwich Islands -- now known as Hawaii -- have undergone a good deal of sophistication. To the disenchantment of some contemporary visitors, an intervening legacy of strait-laced missionary influence constrains most of the latter-day wahines of this updated El Dorado from swimming out to greet incoming ships -- or even from waiting on shore -- with favors granted as casually as a handshake. To the delight of all, however, they remain among the most refreshingly natural and disarmingly unspoiled women in the world. Indeed, more than a century of unprecedented racial intermingling -- engendered by the mass immigration of labor to the Islands' (text continued on page 86) multibillion-dollar sugar and pineapple industries -- has produced in the girls of today's Hawaii a combination of infinite variety, radiant beauty and extravagant endowment that is unique among the peoples of any land. Where else on either side of the international date line would you be likely to find a girl with long blonde Swedish hair, slightly slanted Korean eyes, tilted Irish nose, wide Samoan mouth, and full Polynesian bosom -- ambulating under the mouth-filling monicker of Gull-Britt Kalaniopuu O'Donahue?

Seasoning Hawaii's proliferating population of 633,000 are more than a hundred equally exotic amalgams, drawn mainly from seven predominating strains: Japanese, Caucasian, Hawaiian, Filipino, Chinese, Puerto Rican and Korean. No group of women anywhere could be more disparately constituted; but this fact has nurtured a mutual tolerance and understanding that make the girls of Hawaii even more alike than they are dissimilar.

Above all, after generations of living on a total land area roughly one twenty-fifth the size of California, they share a deep feeling of kinship not only with each other, but with the lushly verdured domain of a proud people who migrated from Polynesia to Hawaii's twenty islands more than a thousand years before the white man arrived. Beneath the veneer of Twentieth Century civilization, they have preserved for the soil and sand of their Islands an unalloyed devotion. In a silken climate where air and water temperatures seldom fluctuate from a benign 75 degrees, however, they pursue outdoor pleasures with something less than Scandinavian dedication. Suffusing them, in fact -- as it does the peoples of most tropic lands -- is a sun-warmed insouciance which those from more temperate latitudes often mistake for indolence -- until they, too, have been swept into the soft rhythm of Hawaiian life.

Small wonder, and small loss, in an atmosphere of engaging informality, that these unjaded girls have little use for many of the trappings of sophistication with which the residents of cosmopolitan environments are so richly supplied -- and often vainly preoccupied. Living amidst copious natural wealth, they lack the motivation to prize the fruits of labor -- mental or material -- so valued in less favored regions. Despite burgeoning, urban-centered modernity, they are still, and probably always will be, rurally oriented creatures, in that their fundamental attunement is to things that grow rather than things that are made. In an environment of seasonless tranquillity, they feel a kind of muffled remoteness from the outside world -- from Cuba and the Copa, from Metrecal and the Met, from Gleason and Gagarin.

Clearly, the virtues of Hawaii are not those of worldliness, but of life, and love of life, Island-style, which the natives call hoomanawanui (literally: "Let's take it easy"). In such an intellectual and emotional climate, it is hardly surprising that they approach the matter of careers with something less than the Manhattanite's well-known devotion. Some don tapa and ti leaf to hula for the lei-laden customers at Don the Beachcomber's, Hawaiian Village or one of the other Waikikian tourist temples; though others less gifted, and less exotically accoutered in pasties and G-strings, ply a somewhat broader version of this ancient art in the strip joints along notorious (but typically overrated) Hotel Street, unofficial headquarters for pass-holders from nearby Schofield Barracks. A few of these downtown doxies, in fact, amid the peeling plaster and ceiling mirrors of adjoining houses away from home, offer even more tangible comfort to our fighting men. But most of Hawaii's girls peddle less flamboyant wares as salesgirls and cashiers in Honolulu's thriving mercantile maelstrom. Relatively few will take stenographic and secretarial jobs with the big business firms on downtown's King Street, mainly because typing and shorthand, along with other skills and capabilities considered de rigueur by working girls from Bangor to Beverly Hills, are simply too much bother for most of Hawaii's hoomanawanui-steeped wahines. There are more adventurous types, of course, who become stewardesses on the local airlines, or desk clerks at Waikiki travel agencies; but such restless souls, in a land of bounty and beauty, are in a small minority. Whatever her professional proclivities, the Hawaiian girl is likely to be less governed by the familiar stimuli of salary and status than by such fetchingly uncomplicated considerations as short working hours, pleasant company and accessibility to the beach.

Quite simply and unquestioningly, then, she accepts and delights in her abundant land, and in her own full-bodied, unthreatened femininity. To Island and mainland males alike, she is unabashedly approachable to a degree rivaled only by the girls of Sweden. Though she lacks the unreserved aloha of her ardent antecedents, she is disarmingly direct and artlessly honest; and she expects the same in return. If the initial amenities are observed with sincerity -- and above all, if the chemistry is right -- she will respond with an unguarded intensity, an unarticulated simplicity and an inventive sensuality that will come as a revelation to any who have known only the embrace of those of more temperate climes and dispositions.

When the end of the affair finally comes -- as it often does when her lover is a visiting mainlander -- the aloha oe will be refreshingly string-free, if not entirely tearless. Though the Hawaiian girl feels the familiar feminine instinct to prolong -- and perhaps formalize -- such liaisons, she is almost always content to love in the present -- which, in a land profuse with simple pleasures that enrich everyday existence, is its own reward.

Since Hawaii has long been a realm of potent and polyglot allure to the West as well as to the East, the Islands harbor also a sizable contingent of resident Caucasian girls who, if not exactly native in blood, are either native born, or "go native" soon after arrival, and must therefore be considered among the girls of Hawaii no less than those of pure Hawaiian ancestry or of nonwhite admixture.

Many of the native-born girls, daughters of old-school white families, can trace their Island origin to the first wave of Boston missionaries who went to Hawaii in the early 1800s burning to "do good, but did well instead." Such venerable names as Dillingham, Bishop, Dole and Robinson identify clans that became the ruling dynasties of the Islands -- its leading fief-holders, and the most powerful seigneurs of its enormous sugar, coffee, pineapple and cattle industries.

Tastefully aloof from the downtown din in such Nob-Hilly neighborhoods as Nuuanu Valley and Makiki Heights, they live on well-manicured estates in Oriental-carpeted mansions from which their dutiful daughters are sent to perfect their accents and hone their sensibilities in the nearest acceptable halls of higher learning: Vassar and Wellesley. After the prescribed period, they return to the hearth ripened for the coming-out cotillion and for the cementing of inter-family ties in wedlock -- but not before padding out the servants' entrance, dancing pumps in hand, for a final fling of old-fashioned hoomanawanui.

The second breed of resident white girl has migrated to Hawaii too recently to earn the title of kamaaina (long-time resident), and too long ago to be dismissed as a malihini (newcomer); usually the period is about two years. Almost all of them find Honolulu at first depressingly indistinguishable from such high-powered paradises as Palm Beach and Cannes, devoid of the aboriginal charm envisioned from overseas -- and with everything but pineapples, sugar and coffee costing twenty percent more than on the mainland.

Soon, however, the wahine-to-be finds herself a comfortable, semifurnished one-and-a-half in the palm-treed and pink-stuccoed Kaimuki district, a mile or so from Waikiki. It costs $100 or more, and it isn't on the beach, but the (continued on page 106)Girls of Hawaii(continued from page 86)lanai does have a view of the glittering harbor -- over the TV aerial of her nextdoor neighbor. By taking on an easy clerking job at a downtown bookstore (best seller: Michener's Hawaii), and by modeling touristy beachwear at Waikiki hotel fashion shows on the side, she manages to swing not only the rent, but the payments on a second-hand sports car, which she soon learns facilitates not only getting around but making friends.

Occasionally, on the beach or at work, she will allow herself to be picked up by a sufficiently attractive tourist -- provided he avoids the newcomer's temptation to make bad puns about leis. If she lacks access to an authentic native hukilau (beachside fish fry), she is usually Island-hip enough to suggest they stop in at Honolulu's number-one gourmet gathering place: Canlis' Broiler, the only outpost on Waikiki where, as a determined antitourist, she feels really at ease. Afterward, she'll take him on a leisurely crawl through the better Honolulu pubs, winding up at some friend's house party, where the spirits of fellowship will flow more inexhaustibly even than at a similar soiree in New York or Los Angeles. When the revelry peters out, she'll take her escort home for a nightcap, an album of Alfred Apaka (the Sinatra of the Islands) and perhaps a brief interlude of preliminary hanky-panky on the lanai. Then -- remote from the tensions and conventions of mainland life -- she may invite her companion to tarry with her overnight -- for the simple reason that she likes him. And when his sojourn is at an end, she will have learned to greet it with an equanimity approaching that of the existential native girl: ever-hopeful, tender to the last, unpossessively content with the pleasures of the here and now, in a land enchantingly anchored in both.

But the enticement of the Islands is far from monopolized by its extravagant feminine fauna, indigenous or transplanted. To thousands of malihinis, pouring through Honolulu in an endless, gurgling stream, Hawaii offers blandishments no less seductive. They savor its fragrance only fleetingly, but these omnipresent, ever-changing transients are as intrinsic to the fiftieth state as its winsome natives. There are so many of them (especially during the heavy holiday season from June through August) that the male visitor, from his awning-shaded deck chair on the terrace of any of the beachside hotels, can behold an almost unbroken vista of suntanoiled epidermis, ranging in shade from mainland-pink to burnished mahogany, stretching from horizon to horizon.

From his panoramic perch, the traveler has but to single out an unusually lovely naiad, then thread his way through the towels to proffer a strong male arm as she tugs her rented surfboard into the briny. Almost any opening gambit will suffice -- even the lei routine, in some cases; for if this army of tanning transients has anything in common, it is a uniform susceptibility to the seductive, somewhat schmaltzy spell of ukuleles, silvery moonlight, tropical flowers and hundred-proof rum. The alimony-funded Park Avenue divorcees; the L.A. secretaries on two-weeks-with-play, the over-twenty-eight-but-still-swinging single girls who've dipped into savings for a last fling; the fly-now-pay-later ladies with box cameras and stifled libidos; the well-fixed, well-stacked society chicks slumming on the wrong side of the ocean; the jet-propelled airlines stewardesses on three-day stopovers; the mainland coeds who've come to the University of Hawaii to sharpen their scholarship in hula, surfboarding and beach-balling -- all have converged on this animated archipelago with but one thought in mind: to take off their I. Millers, let down their Jackie Kennedy coiffures, and throw caution to the trade winds.

Once a connection is made, the louri (as Honolulu's beach boys call her) customarily coaxes her escort to introduce her to die somewhat overnourishing cuisine and Dorothy Lamour decor of Waikiki's assorted kaukau palaces (restaurants) and thatch-roofed grogshops. More often than not, by the evening's end, the tippling louri is in such good spirits that the hoped-for invitation to her hotel room becomes an appeal for guidance to that destination.

If she happens to prefer largo to allegro vivace as a holiday tempo, she may abandon the saturnalian scene on Oahu for the more primeval beauty of neighboring Kauai, Maui', Molokai, Hawaii or Lanai. Whether island-hopping or making the scene in Honolulu, however, the tourist girl pursues Hawaii's pleasures with a dedication matched only by the avid fun-seekers in such cement pleasure gardens as Las Vegas and Miami Beach. She has usually come to the fiftieth state hoping for a kind of Walt Disney Polynesialand, full of picturesque papier-mâché flowers and realistically automated hula dancers. If she has spent her fleeting vacation on Oahu -- which has much of this outward appearance -- she won't be disappointed; for this overcrowded, overdeveloped island needs time to become known, valued and ultimately cherished. But if she has ventured to the other islands, where the true enchantment of Hawaii is closer to the surface, she will find that some uniquely evocative catalyst in their lambent and fragrant atmosphere has whetted her capacity for living to a keener edge than she ever thought possible back on the mainland, only five flying hours, but many worlds, away. And she will leave with a sense of loss.

For the white girl who lives in Honolulu, Hawaii is a very different place. Unlike the totutri, she came expecting to find an unspoiled island elysium, and was quickly disenchanted -- until she began to fall into the quiet tempo which beats beneath the staccato rhythms of tourism, and to perceive the genuine warmth of the aloha spirit behind the seemingly empty travel-poster catch phrase. Every so often, of course, she'll still get the fleeting feeling that she's out of the mainstream, that the big things are happening in Paris and New York and the Riviera, that Honolulu, for all its glitter, is basically a pretty provincial town. Sometimes she'll find herself longing for the sting of autumn air, the smell of burning maple leaves, the sight of a snow-felted meadow: or simply to browse at Saks, sip a frozen daiquiri in the Pump Room, or dig a hip comic at the hungry i. But these moments of restlessness always pass; for she knows that a week back on the mainland would be all she could endure. Hoomanawanui is in her blood; she could never leave.

Even less could the Island-born white girl be happy away from home, though she lives in a land where her family influence is inexorably declining; where the untouched luxuriance of the paradise in which her grandparents settled a century ago has been profoundly altered by the impact of modernity. For she realizes that the shift in power and the changing face of the land are part of the irrevocable tide of contemporary life. And she cannot help becoming infected with the sense of get-it-done-yesterday vitality with which the land continues to grow. The ingenuous essence which originally drew her family to the Islands, however unfamiliar its ultimate façade, she knows, will never really disappear.

The native girl basks serenely in the harmony with which Hawaii's numerous races and nationalities share their close Island quarters. She realizes that the fiftieth state is still far from being the arcadia so admired by amateur sociologists. But with all its shortcomings, she knows that Hawaii is still the most laudable lab demonstration of interracial brotherhood witnessed in recent history. She accepts its inadequacies as she does those of her own friends, calmly confident that time -- in the gently drumming rhythms of this beneficent land -- will eventually erase even the few remaining frictions.

Certain querulous critics have said that her Hawaii is too luxuriant, too prodigal, too salubrious; her life too serene, too secure, too insular. But these same worthies, drawn by the allure which brought Captain Cook's ships to its white-stranded shores almost two centuries ago, keep coming back -- to it and to her. Hawaii -- like all storied island paradises -- isn't, in reality, total perfection. But for those relaxed enough in temperament to succumb to its polyglot charms, it remains a sanctuary sans pareil. And the Hawaiian girl remains its most eloquent embodiment.