STRANGERS ON A PLANE - Charles Collingwood

STRANGERS ON A PLANE

(CHARLES COLLINGWOOD)

The Saturday morning flight home from Mexico City was not the flight I had intended to take. I’d been commuting back and forth every other week between New York and Mexico City since September 1968 and now, in the Spring of 1969, expected to be doing the same for at least the rest of the year. My bi-weekly schedule was pretty well set. A late Tuesday afternoon flight on Air France from Kennedy to Mexico City (one of the best traveling, eating and drinking experiences you could ever imagine), three days in Mexico City overseeing an important assignment for the largest bank in the Republic and meeting with the client, and Friday night’s return flight to New York on Aeronaves de Mexico (not one of the best traveling, eating and drinking experiences you could ever imagine).

However, something came up. My regularly-scheduled Friday afternoon progress report to the chairman of the bank, had to be postponed until Friday evening, so I wouldn’t be able to fly out until the following morning. I was able secure a 1st Class seat on Saturday morning’s Eastern flight to New York and that’s when and where I had the great good fortune to meet Charles Collingwood for the first time.

We were accidental seatmates in the 3rd or 4th row on the left side of the 1st class cabin, he the window, I the aisle, and I recognized him immediately. Notwithstanding the early hour, when the stewardess offered coffee or tea before take-off, we both ordered scotch. Having thus established a basic commonality, we introduced ourselves, I handed him a business card and he reciprocated. His card was elegant in its simplicity: “Charles Collingwood – Chief Foreign Correspondent”, with the London address of CBS News - 100 Brompton Road - and a telephone number. (To this day, I still use this business card as a permanent bookmark in my copy of his excellent Viet Nam novel THE DEFECTOR.)

Charles Collingwood died in 1985 at the age of 68. Today, in the year 2009, many people may not recognize his name. However, forty years ago he was probably as well known as almost anybody on the planet, including most people on television, and infinitely more experienced, eloquent, polished, wise, witty and urbane than all of them. A Rhodes scholar at Oxford University in 1939, he was soon tapped by CBS’s Edward R. Murrow who was assembling a small group of on-air journalists, young men who would cover the fighting in Europe and who would quickly come to be known as ‘Murrow’s Boys’. Along with Charles Collingwood, the group included Walter Cronkite, Eric Sevareid and Ed Murrow himself, the cadre that would come to define ‘broadcast journalism’. Collingwood covered the fighting in North Africa, reported on the Normandy Invasion from Omaha Beach, the liberation of Paris and continued his international reporting with his many visits to and reports from Viet Nam. In addition to being CBS’s Chief Foreign Correspondent, he had also spent several years covering the White House, hosted Jackie Kennedy’s televised tour of the White House, and had stepped in for Walter Cronkite when Cronkite was overcome with emotion at JFK’s assassination. He also hosted CBS’s award-wining program, Eyewitness to History. All of which accounted for my shocked delight at the prospect of spending the next four or five hours in his company.

I tried to remember some of his history as we touched glasses and had the first of many scotches we’d share during this flight and several others. (He requested Dewar’s and, as they had no Johnny Walker Black on board, I had the same.) The remaining hours of our original flight together were an absolute delight. He was a storyteller and he most certainly had the stickers on his luggage to validate his stories. I was most interested in what he’d have to say about Viet Nam. He’d been covering that part of the world for several years and I remembered the CBS speciaI on Hanoi that he’d hosted about a year earlier. He was more than happy to talk about the time he spent in Hanoi, not only because of his reporter’s inclinations, but because his Hanoi-based novel, THE DEFECTOR, was about to be published. For some reason, what I remember most clearly was his description of the topsy-turvy nature of daily life in Hanoi; how, in reaction to the U.S. bombing in the daylight hours, most of the daily activities were conducted before sunrise and late in the day, the several hours before sunrise being the busiest of the day.

He seemed to really like the Vietnamese people, and was very knowledgeable of and sympathetic to their history – a century of French involvement ending with the Indo-China War followed by the awful situation in which they now found themselves, living in the midst of a battleground of political ideologies. But he never really felt that comfortable amongst them. Being a tall ‘round-eye’ he always was a curiosity to the locals and, being who he was, he was a focus of attention of the officials.

He was in his early 50’s, I was 37 and, as much as he was willing to share his experiences with this relative youngster, he also seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say. He had the reporter’s mind’s eye for detail and questioned me closely on my combat experience in Korea, limited as it was and insignificant when considered in respect to his having reported on the Normandy invasion from Omaha Beach. He was also very interested in my initial reactions to Mexico City. I’d mentioned that my first night there in September 1968, days prior to the opening of the 1968 Olympic Games, was spent looking down from the 16th floor cocktail lounge of the Hotel del Paseo on the riots unfolding on the Paseo de la Reforma below. I said that I’d felt like Dante looking down on Chaos below and was despairing as to how successful my next year in Mexico might be. However, over the next few months I grew to recognize Mexico City for the cosmopolitan place it was and enjoyed working there. He had many questions about how I was able to interact with the Mexican businessmen and I tried to describe to him exactly what I was trying to accomplish. Our conversation throughout the flight was non-stop. I was absolutely fascinated at whatever he had to say, realizing the depth of experience underpinning all of his observations. I was also touched that he expressed interest in what I had done, even though I recognized the possibility that his interest, in some part, may merely have been to make conversation. In the course of our conversation, we realized that there were several similarities in our schedules. We were both commuting back and forth from home (he from London, I from New York) to Mexico (he to Puerto Vallarta, I to Mexico City). While I was doing it every other week, he was doing it more or less monthly.

At the time, Charles and his wife, Hollywood actress Louise Allbritton, lived principally in London but also had a place in Puerto Vallarta and were very friendly with two other part-time inhabitants, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, who had a place in the section of Puerto Vallarta that came to be known as ‘Gringo Gulch’. As a matter of fact, his novel THE DEFECTOR is a story that opens in Puerto Vallarta (or Puerto Secreto, as he calls it in the book) and ends up in Hanoi.

As we were getting ready to land in New York, we decided that, because we had similar schedules and seemed to be fairly compatible seatmates, there was a good chance we’d meet again on a future Saturday morning flight to New York. From that point on, we both looked for each other and managed to share three more flights to New York over the rest of 1969.

This last time we spoke had to have been in late November or early December 1969. I can mark the time because one of the things we discussed was President Nixon’s televised “Silent Majority” speech to the nation on November 3,1969. I remember the date of the speech precisely as it occurred on my 37th birthday. The main thrust of Nixon’s speech was his laying out a plan to end the war in Viet Nam through a combination of diplomacy, negotiation and Vietnamization, requesting the support of the ‘great silent majority’ of the American citizenry. But there were also allusions to secret channels of communications, secret meetings with the North Vietnamese and others using both official and unofficial conduits, all of which had been going on for some time.

I had wondered whether Charles might have been one of those conduits, or even something more sinister, but was hesitant to ask not wanting to stick my nose in where it might not be welcome. However, I am not normally reticent and, to the extent that we were experiencing a weather delay and had been in the air, drinking for about 5 ½ hours, I suppose I was even less so. As we returned to scotch after having had wine with the meal, I plunged right in with something like, “Nixon hinted at secret meetings with the Viet Cong using unofficial approaches. You’ve been in and out of North Viet Nam several times since he was elected a year ago. Have you been one of those sneaky types?” The drink that had loosened my tongue had done more to him. His initial reaction was anger and I was afraid I’d gone too far. He said something like, “Don’t ever ask me anything like that!” Then he quickly cooled and smiled and we moved on to something else. To this day, I don’t know whether it was that I had hit a nerve, whether he had done something clandestine and didn’t want it known or, was it just the booze after all. There were stories about his drinking, but in our few times together, this was the only time I was even suspicious that he might be showing the effects. At any rate, I was careful where I tread after that, not wanting to ruffle any more feathers and jeopardize an acquaintanceship I enjoyed.

After calming down, he reached under his seat, slid out a soft leather zippered case and pulled out a paperback book, his Viet Nam novel THE DEFECTOR. He handed it to me, possibly as a peace offering, and said he hoped I’d enjoy it. At my request he signed it for me, just his name, and after we landed at New York’s JFK airport and said our goodbyes, I never saw him or talked to him again. However, I did read his novel, a story about a well-known journalist employed by a large television network as its premier foreign correspondent who is recruited by a shady CIA type. The mission - to secure permission from North Vietnam to visit and report from Hanoi, and while there covertly approach and assist an important North Vietnamese official whom the CIA believes wants to defect.

Now, by nature I’m not constantly on the lookout for conspiracies, but there seemed to be just a few similarities between the plot of Charles’ novel and my question to him which was met with a brief, though heated, reaction. Nevertheless, I draw no conclusions and make no accusations, especially since he’s no longer with us to set me straight.

I wish he were.

Incidentally, a few years later, one of my wife's cousins from her birthplace in Italy was spending a few months with us at our home in Ridgefield, Connecticut. After having exhausted all the sight-seeing opportunities in Manhattan, we decided to take her to Washington, D.C. for a weekend and, to give her some sense of current events, we booked two adjoining rooms at The Watergate Hotel, a place which was all over the news in those days. On Saturday afternoon, October 20, 1973, we took a tour of the White House and Anna, my wife's cousin was fascinated with the place. The one disappointment was that we were not allowed to see the Oval Office, the only reason given was that it was being used at the time. It wasn't until a few hours later, back at our rooms at The Watergate, that a television news flash provided a fuller explanation. This was the so-called "Saturday night massacre" where President Nixon's Watergate scandal deepened with his firing of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, followed by the resignations of Attorney General Eliot Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus.

The other casualty of that momentous weekend was my signed copy of Charles Collingwood's book, THE DEFECTOR. When we returned home on Monday afternoon, we found about a foot of water covering the lower level of the house, the result of a leak in our water heater. Among the waterlogged items in the lowest shelves of the bookcases in my office, were my high school and college yearbooks and THE DEFECTOR. I was at least partially able to rescue the yearbooks, but Charles' paperback was destroyed. I replaced it with a hard cover copy. Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity to ask Charles to autograph it.

I wish I had.

AFTERWORD

Just as an aside (and only slightly concerning Charles Collingwood), in mid-1970 my wife Maria and I took a weeklong holiday split between Mexico City and Puerto Vallarta. We normally would spend at least two weeks on any holiday we took but I’d been away from home frequently over the previous 18 months and she’d just given birth to our second son in February. We decided we needed some time together and she certainly had earned a holiday. She was also curious to see what all my raving of Mexico City was about.

We spent a long weekend being shepherded around the Capital and surrounding areas of interest by several of the friends I’d made over the last year and a half. After three days, Maria had seen enough of Mexico City and we were both exhausted. Remembering Charles’ suggestion about hotels in Puerto Vallarta, I’d followed his advice and made reservations at the Camino Real. This was a new hotel in Mismaloya, the locale in which THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA was filmed, not far from downtown Puerto Vallarta. Maria and I flew over to Puerto Vallarta, checked into the Camino Real and spent a delightful four days relaxing in the sun on the hotel’s beach on the Pacific Ocean's Bahía de Banderas. We really had no desire to do anything but relax and, to the extent that I knew Collingwood was not in Puerto Vallarta but elsewhere either plugging his book or on some other mission, I was not particularly keen to leave the hotel grounds. However, on the day before we were scheduled to leave for home, I grew a little curious as to what the town might be like and figured that this might be the only chance I’d ever have to see it.

Maria was content to stay on the beach, she’d done enough sightseeing in Mexico City to last her for a while, so I found a taxi driver out front who claimed to know everything about Puerto Vallarta, and had him give me the tour. The town had been a backwater resort, well off the beaten path, visited mostly by vaguely creative types, poets, dreamers and homosexuals looking for cheap surroundings and kindred souls. Director John Huston’s filming of THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA there in 1963 changed all of that. The world press converged on the three-ring circus featuring the Richard Burton-Elizabeth Taylor extra-marital affair, the battles between the film’s stars, principally Burton and Ava Gardner, and the battles between the stars and the director. The sleepy little coastal town had become an international curiosity and was experiencing all the growth and development that came with the territory.

After a general tour of the town, my driver’s premiere destination was the Burton/Taylor house, a place called the Casa Kimberly. It was an enormous spread up on a hill beyond a church in a section of town that by now had come to be called "Gringo Gulch." The driver told me that the house had spectacular views of the Bay of Banderas, and the city of Puerto Vallarta itself. I declined his offer to go up the hill to get a closer look, asking him instead if he knew where the Collingwood’s lived. Obviously, Charles was not as big a draw as Cleopatra and her Antony, and the driver came up blank. But I did remember a bar that Charles had mentioned (I can’t recall the name now, 40 years later) and had the cab driver take me there and wait while I went in for a drink (he refused my offer to join me). Charles had said it was one of the best places in town to get a dry martini and one of the few places where they had Gordon’s Gin. The martini was bracing and, though it’s not my preferred poison, I enjoyed it and the specter of Charles’ company as I drank it.

I got back to the Camino Real late that afternoon and, after rejoining Maria on the beach, decided to take my last swim in the Bay. It almost turned out to be just that, my last swim, as I forgot about the warnings we’d been given about the Bay and the strong ocean-bound pull of the current. The next half hour or so in the water was a struggle to….….but, as Charles Collingwood might have said, that’s another story.