The Happiest Days

For the first time in years, I met a man I shall here call Morris Rich aboard a yacht that I am afraid I must call the Happy Ness moored in Hudson Harbor off 79th Street in New York. The boat was one of those fat floating fiberglass apartments that somehow make me feel both envious and contemptuous at the same time. Her name, the like of which is dismally common around marinas these days, did not increase my admiration for her owner, a man whom I shall call Carl Ness to conform with the change I have had to make in his boat's name. He was a guy with an ugly but luxurious $200,000 vessel cutely named after himself and for business reasons I had to go to a party he was giving aboard. The boat basin is beautiful from a distance when many handsome craft are moored there, but ordinarily I do not like to go near it. The Hudson River is, to put it most mildly, unclean there. Perhaps because of indecision about plans for marinas in the city, the place has not been improved much over the decades and somehow retains most of the inconveniences with few of the charms that it had 40 years ago. The wash from large ships often sets yachts rolling against wharves in an unnerving way. Electrical connections and water supplies are uncertain. The outraged complaints of yachtsmen are turned comic by the rows of ragged black children and ancient paupers of all colors who stand at the rail of the adjacent park and solemnly stare at the 100-ton toys gleaming in the sun. The atmosphere of the place never cheers me up much.

On the day I went aboard the Happy Ness, I was in an even worse mood than I usually am when I visit that pier, because Carl Ness made me feel like a precious snob for disapproving so heartily of his ugly boat with the cute name. Carl was, after all, a movie producer with undoubted courage and talent. He did not know as much about yachts as I did, but he sure knew more about motion pictures and money. Although very young by my standards, about 35 compared with my 50 years, he had followed a string of critical successes with a good picture that was also a financial triumph. With his Happy Ness, he was riding the crest of quite a wave, whether the yacht was seaworthy or not.

Carl met me at the gangway of his boat with considerable courtesy. He was dressed in white bell-bottom trousers, which I don't think he associated with the sea, a lace-ruffled shirt and a lavender jacket. His blond hair was done in what I used to call a pageboy bob, but I had seldom before seen it on a person who looked so much like an Elizabethan page boy. The dozen or so guests who were gathered around an elaborate bar on the afterdeck of the yacht were also young, beautiful and dressed in extreme styles--all except for Morris Rich, who was sitting in an armchair near the stern. A distinguished-looking man in his early 60s, Morris wore white-flannel trousers and a navy-blue jacket. With his close-cropped white hair and handsomely tanned face, he looked as though he should have been sitting aboard a graceful yawl built of teak and mahogany back somewhere around 1930.

I had met Morris before and had heard a lot about him, but had never known him well. An urbane man whose confident Harvard accent was made charming by the suggestion of a diffident stutter, he seemed to combine the best of several worlds. He had been a brilliant teacher of drama at Yale. He had been a sailing companion of President Roosevelt, some of whose ebullient charm apparently had rubbed off on him. The son of a banker who had left him a lot of money, he had started at the top in the business of producing plays and had created some memorable successes in the late Thirties and early Forties. Recently he had become interested in producing movies, I had read. He seemed to combine the charms of a gentleman of the old school with those of, as my children would say, a really turned-on character. Despite the fact that he was nearly twice their age, he was perfectly at ease with this new crowd of Broadway and Hollywood people.

He was also, as it turned out, quite a raconteur and had lived an even more varied life than I had suspected. That evening as the setting sun made the Hudson glitter deceptively shining and clean, he held the whole ship's company spellbound with the story that follows. Afterward he gave me permission to retell it if I would change his name and the circumstances a little, as I have dutifully done, although I hope I have preserved the rather elegant essence of the narrator. Before starting, I should also add that Morris would not say whether his story was entirely true or entirely false. He simply smiled and replied that his business was the creation of illusion and that he had long passed the point where he could tell precisely what was fact and what was illusion in his own grab bag of memories.

His story began when Carl Ness asked him point-blank how he had gotten into the business of producing plays. Morris never really answered that question directly. Staring out over the opalescent waters of the dirty river, he said his first loves had been the sea and radio communication, which had been his ticket to many voyages. After graduating from a small boarding school in Massachusetts, where he had become an enthusiastic ham radio operator, he had gone to sea as a radioman and had traveled all over the world on merchant vessels for three years, starting in 1927.

"The happiest and strangest days of my life came during my voyage on a slow ship from New York to Hong Kong," he said. "The trip started miserably. I was very shy during that period of my life and my stutter was so bad that I was lucky to be able to communicate almost entirely by telegraph key on the radio. I must have seemed a strange bird to my shipmates, for I looked even younger than I was and wore an elaborate wardrobe of supposedly seagoing clothes that my mother had ordered from Brooks Brothers. On this particular voyage, which proved to be my last, we had a great burly captain who was bitter because he had just lost his life savings and his home in the crash of 1929. He and his crew had sailed together for several years and the captain had talked many of them into investing in stocks that had plummeted. They were a disgruntled and tough bunch of men who felt cheated by both the world and one another. You can imagine how they felt toward me, who appeared boyish, almost totally unable to speak and rich on Daddy's money.

"When we sailed from New York, the captain had been reading financial reports that gave him hope that the stock market was going to rocket up again. By asking me direct questions, he learned that my father was a banker and kept asking my opinion on the future of Wall Street. All through the Depression, my father always said that things would get better soon, and I echoed his optimism. The captain liked this and told me to forget receiving weather reports. The one thing he wanted from my radio shack was stock-market reports, which he told me to type up in as much detail as possible and to deliver to his cabin at breakfast time every morning. I soon found that when the market went up even the smallest amount, he became a cheerful man and went around deck reassuring the crew as though he were taking them safely through a fearful gale; but when the stocks dropped, he confined himself morosely to his cabin and yelled at anyone who intruded. When I brought disappointments for him to consume with his breakfast, he gave me almost the Greek treatment for bearers of bad news and viciously mimicked my stutter as he ordered me to return to my shack and listen for new developments.

"My ordeal worsened when we were about a week out of New York. After a day of slightly encouraging news from Wall Street, the ship's radio receiver broke down. The vessel was a run-down Hog Islander, a relic of World War One, and much of her equipment had been pawned in New York by the previous radio operator, who also had gone broke by taking his captain's advice. I had few tools, fewer spare parts and no alternate receiver, but this was not considered a sufficient excuse for silence. The captain accused me of gross incompetence and the men became so vicious toward me that I grew afraid to go to mess. When the captain finally ordered me to stay in the radio shack until I could make the receiver work, I was hardly sorry at first, despite the fact that we had a grueling monthlong voyage ahead.

"For about a week I remained in the shack, trying to construct a new receiver out of cannibalized parts from the transmitter and bits of wire. I worried about putting the transmitter out of action, but the captain said we had nothing to send but much to receive. The whole attempt proved futile, for I lacked the training to construct a receiver from so little. Soon I gave up trying and lay miserably in my bunk, just outboard of which a generator chattered and rattled endlessly. As we entered the tropics, the radio shack became almost unbearably hot, and I was afraid to open the door because knots of men would gather and swear at me unless I gave the appearance of working very hard. Condensed moisture dripped from overhead. The constantly increasing heat gave me an intense form of claustrophobia. I soon believed that I actually would suffocate if I didn't get out, but no matter how cravenly I begged the captain for a chance to take a walk on deck, he told me that I would stay where I was until I got the radio receiver to work or we got to Hong Kong, where he planned to discharge me for my failures and send me home without pay. He even had the chief engineer put a padlock on the outside of my door.

"The panic of my claustrophobia made some solution necessary, and I could think of only one. I knew that it was cowardly and that in the end it would almost undoubtedly make my disaster worse, but there are times in a man's life when he simply cannot afford to think of the long-range effects of his actions. One broiling noon shortly after we had crawled through the Panama Canal, I simply decided to pretend that the receiver had been fixed. I could still make it emit sounds of static and buzzing. If I kept my earphones on, no one could tell that I was receiving nothing. That night I typed up the list of the captain's stocks to show that they had gained slightly.

"The captain was so happy that he gave me a bottle of Scotch and a regular bear hug. At dinner that night, the crew treated me like a hero. A good many of them had been waiting for various kinds of news and they pressed their requests upon me. Bets on baseball games remained to be settled and the boatswain wanted to know the details of a tornado in the area where his family lived.

"The temptation to continue my deception and to step it up became irresistible. I knew that eventually there would have to be some horrible day of reckoning, but I could not help myself from putting it off as long as possible. The next day I had the stocks inch up again irregularly and I had the tornado give southern Illinois a thrilling, nondestructive near miss. The baseball bets were harder to work out, because I couldn't make everybody happy. Shamelessly I allowed people I liked to win bets with those who had been most unkind to me, and when I had no feelings on the matter, I flipped a coin.

"Two days later, I got cold feet and had my radio break down again. Everyone soon became furious at me and the captain once more confined me to my shack until I made repairs and he promised to fire me when we got to Hong Kong unless I got the news damned fast. It grew so hot that my whole body was stinging with sweat, so the next morning I obliged all hands by reporting that I had rebuilt the receiver successfully. I gave myself a measure of revenge by having the stock market dip sharply and I rained out their favorite ball games.

"That was the day that I forgot my conscience and the day of reckoning in the future for a little while at least and the whole deception became fun. Once I realized how completely the emotions of the entire ship's company were under my control, I could not resist playing God for the remaining weeks of the cruise. There was hardly a man aboard whom I could not cause to weep or jump with joy. The power I had over them made me compassionate. The very men I had feared and hated now seemed pitiable to me, poor wretches condemned to poverty-stricken wandering aboard rusty hulks for the rest of their lives. Why not give them a few weeks of happiness that we could all enjoy together?

"My sense of omnipotence temporarily erased fears of my own future. After all, the captain had been going to fire me when we got to Hong Kong anyway, so nothing would be lost if I jumped ship before the men discovered my lies. The kindness of my power grew so great that I worried mostly about the damage I might be doing my shipmates. To prevent them from going on wild spending sprees the moment they got ashore, I resolved to return the stock market to its depression shortly before we moored. If I got a chance, I might be able to get some facts from a passing ship by blinker lamp and leave my shipmates with some grasp of reality. Before confronting them with such sadness, I decided to give myself the pleasure of creating for them as beautiful a world as possible.

"The sports news gave me a chance to be really creative. Never did a ship's crew enjoy such stirring baseball games. Favorite players pitched no-hitters or scored record numbers of runs. Underdog teams won by enormous scores, always by dramatic comebacks in the last inning.

"In godlike fashion, I had a flood threaten the captain's home in Alabama and an earthquake shake the timbers of the chief engineer's house in San Francisco, but at the last moment I took pity on them and saved them all. I allowed a poor oiler to become a runner-up in the Irish Sweepstakes.

"All this was fun to make up, but it had small effect compared with the happiness created by my rampant bull market. As his fortunes soared, the captain, who had been an ogre, turned into a gentle king who regarded me as his fair-haired prince. The poor man's whole appearance changed. Gone was the mean, hangdog look. His very jowls seemed to tighten; his leaden complexion rosied and he walked with the spring of youth. All the officers had their beards shaved off and got their hair trimmed. The chief engineer and the mates to whom the captain had given financial advice treated him as a savior instead of as a malignant fool. They stood around the bridge all day excitedly making plans for buying new automobiles, farms and homes for aged parents. Children were sent to college in those conversations; debts were paid and the bachelors among us talked of marrying beautiful young girls. The married men kept giving me jubilant messages to send to their wives, and I had to remind them that I had been ordered to cannibalize our transmitter. They didn't seem to mind much. Good news could wait, the captain said, and undoubtedly it had traveled fast by itself anyway.

"Their jubilation caused me to worry more about the effect the great letdown of truth would have on them, but I told myself that they had been so unhappy anyway when I found them that they couldn't be plunged much deeper. Sometimes I even found myself hoping that some of my news, at least, might turn out to be reasonably true. My father, after all, had always said that prosperity was just around the corner. Perhaps my spirit was in touch with God and the facts were getting through to me without a radio receiver. Perhaps that was the reason I felt suffused with compassion, not guilt.

"My only immediate problem was to keep my bull market and my athletic extravaganzas within the bounds of credibility, but I soon found that these men, who had witnessed the big boom of 1928 and the gaudy sports of that period, would believe anything. They even got mad when my stock market started to jump only about ten points a day. They wanted their holdings to double and (concluded on page 210) Happiest Days (continued from page 98) redouble in value every week, and, by God, I gave them their way. The world had never seen such a boom, and I had J. P. Morgan, Jr., prophesy that this was only the beginning. Tomorrow would be even better and the day after tomorrow would be even more fantastic. President Hoover, I reported, danced a jig on the White House steps. Ford stopped making flivvers because everyone wanted a Lincoln. Slums were being torn down and replaced by palaces everywhere. It was fun to make that sort of stuff up and soon I wasn't even surprised when the men believed it.

"Before long, the officers stopped talking of buying little farms. They were for buying fleets of their own and big country estates. For about three weeks every dream came true, only to be succeeded by a more ambitious one. Perhaps I should still be ashamed of putting men over such a roller coaster, but I will tell you one thing: Those fellows had one happy voyage that they will never forget. Even the lowly oilers and seamen who had nothing invested in the stock market basked in the atmosphere of glee. No one yelled at them when they idled, for no one gave a damn about keeping up the rusty old ship. Grudges were forgotten, taut nerves relaxed and fears gave way to soaring self-confidence.

"When we were about a week out of Hong Kong, we ran into a typhoon. I suspected that perhaps like men on drugs, our crew would prove unable to cope with the realities of nature, and I thought it might not be too bad a thing if we all went down together at that apex of our lives, but the reverse proved true. The men fought like lions to get home to their riches. Their strength was superhuman and they rebuilt bulkheads as soon as the sea would smash them. With shouts of triumph, they brought the old ship through.

"Only one man did not take part in the wild celebration that followed. He was a melancholy Swede who kept insisting that good times always bring bad times and that the best of times always produces the worst. This he had observed to be true all his life, he said, so joy scared him and adversity gave him hope. The rest of the men joshed him about his pessimism and the captain promised to cheer him up by showing him how to make enough money in the market to bring the fairest girl in Sweden to his home in Wisconsin as soon as they got ashore.

"In the midst of all this elation, I did not have the courage to bring the stock market down to reality again. We passed no vessels close enough for visual communication, and I was not sure, after all, what the truth of the market was. Almost all the great men at home, as well as my father, had said that tomorrow would be better, and a whole month had gone by since I had received real news. If I told the captain that the Depression was still on, he would be furious at me. If later he learned that some prosperity had returned, he would be just as angry as if he learned of my lies the other way. It was easier to keep quiet, and that's what I did.

"As we neared Hong Kong, I began to panic at the thought of what would happen to me if the men found out about my grand deception before I had a chance to jump ship, or if they captured me before I could escape Hong Kong. Abruptly my compassion for them vanished and I feared only for my own skin. If I had built them up to a giant letdown, so be it. Every man has to face reality on his own.

"As I made plans to jump ship the moment we touched the wharf, I realized that even if I made my way back to the States safely, I could never travel in any world where I might meet these men or their friends again. That meant the end of my career at sea. Never again would I dare go near wharves or board the great ships, even as a passenger.

"When we were a day out of port, I became so acutely nervous that I could not stop a convulsive vomiting. It was a glass-calm day and the captain worried that I might have appendicitis. He loved me by that time and he himself suggested my escape. With tender care, he put me on a pilot boat and had me rushed ashore before his ship entered the inner harbor. After allowing myself to be taken to a hospital by one of the pilots, I dashed out a side door and shipped as a passenger aboard the first vessel out of Hong Kong. She was a small British mail boat that sailed for Bombay almost as soon as I ran aboard her."

Morris paused and took a sip of a highball.

"Did you ever hear what happened?" our host, Carl Ness, asked breathlessly.

"No. I came home and went to Yale, where few old sailors are to be found. I guess that the whole crew of that old Hog Islander got drunk and turned over every bar and hotel in Hong Kong looking for me. Then they probably picked themselves up and found the incredible courage to continue on their own dogged, miserable ways. I have not thought about them for a long time, but now I wonder: Years later, did any of them ever thank me for giving them a month of beautiful illusions, or did they always only hate me for telling lies?"