Rascals in Paradise

  For the greater part of his Tahiti experience, this unusual dedication to work earned Leeteg a very meager living. Much of the time he existed close to poverty and it was only in his later years that he lived well. Far from being a loafer’s paradise, the South Pacific for Leeteg was a sentence to the hardest kind of work—and one in which the rewards were slow and the demands constant. When he did finally earn a decent return, he sensed that his capacity for sustained work was diminishing. Some of his saddest letters are those in which he reports his extreme tiredness accompanied by his premonitions of death or failing eyesight. “You misunderstood my letter about waiting for my dough,” he writes. “I know you never made me wait. What I meant was that although I should not be made to wait I would be willing to rather than have you borrow on your insurance. Of course I gotta have enough to keep going here, too, but I don’t want you to go into debt and then go bankrupt. Pay off those loans and stay solvent. After this month I will let some money stand with you each month. You may use this money without interest until I need it. I’ll stick with you, too. But, Barney, don’t try to expand your gallery now as I don’t know how long I can keep up this pace without turning out sloppy stuff. I’m badly in need of a rest. You order six more ‘Beachboys’—that’s great business, but I make every one a super-duper.”

  Leeteg would have had a much easier life in California and would probably have earned more money and been able to spend it more profitably on the material things he craved. He found much happiness in Mooréa and subject matter ideally suited to his brush, but he certainly never found release from work or responsibility. Toward the end of his life he wrote, “If I was to leave here I would not be allowed to take over a hundred dollars out though my property holdings are worth around ten thousand not to mention my bank account and other assets. So this paradise is a sort of prison too, especially as Uncle Sam would not accept my kids.”

  So far as finding a retreat where he could work undisturbed is concerned, Leeteg’s life in Tahiti falls into two segments. For many years he lived almost in isolation and nearly went crazy from the lack of friendship. His wife and his mistresses left him partly because Mooréa was so far from Papeete, and many residents of that city recall the days when any stranger would be invited or even dragged over to Leeteg’s place for a visit that might extend to two weeks. In those days the Mitiaro hauled an amazing procession of freeloaders, drunks, wastrels, sex maniacs, and good storytellers to Edgar’s hut, where they camped endlessly and drank his booze. And whenever he got a few francs ahead, he would hurry to Papeete so that he could escape the terrible boredom of his retreat. In later years, of course, this loneliness ended and he was deluged by visitors, but then they became such a nuisance that he had difficulty finding time to work. “Have been having my old trouble again,” he protests, “visitors every goddam day. Sometimes twice a day with the result that I only started five velvets in October. Even getting mean don’t help. Only thing to do is leave Mooréa and build so small a house in Papeete that there will be no room for overnight guests and also no reason for them to stay all night as there are hotels in town. One Australian brought his Tahitian bride here for three days and she pissed right on the floor—too lazy to go outside. I had to have a maid to scrub the whole house after he left. It’s a hell of a life being host in Mooréa to the kind of people one meets here.”

  In fact, in order to hide his papers and velvets from his unwanted guests, he redesigned his house in order to build several hidden closets. But this gave him only partial relief, for now cruise directors started advertising in their brochures: “In glamorous Mooréa three days will be set aside for a romantic visit to the workshop of Edgar Leeteg, a real South Seas artist.” And when these uninvited tourists did arrive, he had to house them, feed them, do their laundry, provide drinks and interrupt his work. But even so, he was never able to be firm, and tour directors could play upon his vanity and he would permit “just one more visit.”

  His hospitality was so abused, however, that finally he sent off to the Honolulu papers a cry of despair: “With the advent of air travel and the packaged tour, our hospitality has grown into a terrifying monster which is destroying us.… I don’t want to be your sightseeing guide. My home was not built to be a museum with a free bar.… I’m tired, and you unreasonable uninvited tourists have made me so!”

  Yet even after having published this letter, he continued to stop strangers in Papeete and invite them to Mooréa. Mom would grumble, native girls would amble by to see if a party was in progress, booze would vanish, and when the stranger left, Leeteg would have to work overtime to compensate for lost hours of sunlight.

  Most white men in the South Pacific follow this cycle: retreat, call in the drunks, go crazy with the noise, retreat again, call in the drunks again. Leeteg was no exception, but finally the expense became so great that he cried, “Am sure of one thing. Will build my next hut on a hillside and won’t even own a pair of shoes more than I can take care of easily. Am gonna get the few comforts and gadgets I want and call it a day. The house will be very simple and not too big.” But two days before he died he was planning an addition to the doll’s village he already had. He never broke the cycle.

  In one respect Leeteg’s flight to the South Pacific was outstandingly successful. The bay on which he settled is majestic. Its rugged shoreline bespeaks some ancient volcano whose sides have collapsed through centuries of marine erosion, leaving a body of cerulean water surrounded by a wonderfully broken shoreline. The mountains at the head of the bay look as if they had been stolen from a child’s fairy tale, so grand and grotesque are they. And around both the bay and the foot of the mountain a natural vegetation of extraordinary luxuriance grows. The combination is at the same time so judicious and yet so opulent that many men would surrender the remainder of their humdrum lives to have known such beauty even once. There is no lovelier spot in the South Pacific than Edgar Leeteg’s peninsula. Regardless of the vantage point from which it is viewed, his location for his home is a masterpiece, and in the debate that will continue as to whether or not he was a true artist, one of the most telling arguments will be that out of all the available land in the South Pacific, he chose the most magnificent.

  There were drawbacks. In walking at night one constantly stepped on land crabs that exploded with a squishy noise. Storms sometimes lashed at the moorings of the doll houses, and mildew was a tyrant. Weeks might go by when fogs hung low upon the bay and the sun was never seen, and it is doubtful if any location should be considered satisfactory that could be reached only on the dismal Mitiaro. But even when mildew commandeered the place, the peninsula was glorious, and we can say without qualification that in Mooréa Edgar Leeteg did find a passionate, tempestuous, luxuriant beauty that most of us never know even remotely and few intimately. As he once said, “A man spends a good deal of his life sitting on the can, and at Villa Leeteg even the outhouse is beautiful.”

  It would be incorrect to think of Leeteg as one acquaintance described him: “That great, free, liberal soul who sought release from the confinements of life in the soaring freedom of the Pacific.” Actually, he was a reactionary, and in his letters often referred to Roosevelt as the destroyer of America and of Truman as “that S.O.B. in the White House.” His contempt for nonwhite, non-German people was notorious and his letters repeatedly speak of “niggers, chinks, them jap s.o.b’s, them dirty jew-boys, kikes and dagoes.” Most curious, he was never able to accept wholeheartedly the mores of Tahiti and often spoke as if he were a New England moralist: “Papeete receives 17 U.S. army men from a nearby base each weekend. Fine, clean boys. The wife of our consul, who is a refined and social lady, tried to arrange picnics and sightseeing trips for them but the chippies meet the boys at the wharf and thereafter they can be seen hanging out of a hotel window with a beer glass in one hand and a whore in the other—this continues until the furlough expires and that’s all these boys get out of their lucky opportunity to see these lovely islands.”

 
Nevertheless, Leeteg did find in Tahiti that sexual freedom which seems to form such a large component in the average man’s dream of an earthy paradise. His testimony is unequivocal: “I lay most of my models.” Lest this be interpreted as an unsupported boast he says in another letter, “Getting some choice stuff lately and missing more than I can use. Missed one lovely by being drunk and just wandering away from her. Can you imagine that? Why, it’s enough to make me quit drinking.” We have many intimate accounts of how he operated, one of the tenderest being: “Last Saturday and Sunday I was on an excursion to Little Tahiti, the wild, only partially explored part of the figure-eight shape of Tahiti. I doubt if more than a score of Americans ever saw this wild jumble of jungle-clad peaks with its dark rivers disappearing into narrow valleys and waterfalls leaping from the cliffs straight into the sea. There are no roads, only a footpath. I counted seven houses. Will send you a few snaps later. Boy, what a spot to play Robinson Crusoe. I took a honey along and we slept under the ironwood trees on a little island. How easily we whites slip into primitive native ways.”

  His typical experience was far less poetic: A couple of friends from Papeete were “my guests for ten days, at the same time as Doc Bridgman, who is a wonderful chap from New Zealand; then to make a full house I took in a strange gal who landed here from Paris looking for Leeteg. She stayed four days. Doc bet me a gold cup that I would not get into her pants … so when you come again next year you can drink your champagne out of a golden goblet.”

  In these years he was willing to accept almost anything that came his way: “I’ve already got a swell I’il sixteen-year-old native gal lined up for some nudes. That’s why I’m sick. I kept her all night to study her charms and strained myself.… Guess I gotta realize I’m getting old.”

  One of the most extraordinary aspects of Leeteg’s sex life was his habit of reporting on the bedroom qualifications of his playmates, as judged by his own standards. One who knows the Pacific well is sometimes embarrassed on meeting an attractive young lady to remember Leeteg’s evaluation of her: “Last week I dated a young thing that I had my tongue hanging out for for several years and when I got her in my bed she was the worst lay I had; was so disappointed I nearly decided to give up rutting and cut it off.”

  It would be sanctimonious to ask, “But did a grown man really enjoy this monotonous procession of island girls?” Leeteg says he did. He also admits that his private life was a shambles. He fought with his wives, lost his mistresses, suffered under his mother’s domination, and in his later years rarely spent even one entire night with one girl. A sort of coconut Casanova, he was reduced to bouncing back and forth among the professional wharf rats who have always populated Papeete harbor. He lived in sad chaos and in one brief period seriously contemplated the following alternatives: he would re-establish his marriage with his third wife; he would have nothing more to do with her and would institute court action against her; he would woo his model again; he would marry a fine girl from New York; he would take over the mistress of a visiting yachtsman when the yacht sailed; he would bring to Mooréa a beauty he had stumbled upon during a Tuesday drunk; he would have nothing whatever to do with girls. Any one of these alternatives would have made sense. But he acted upon them all, at the same time.

  Admiral du Saint Front, reviewing those difficult years, introduces a new and rather somber note: “Polynesian life is not quite, perhaps, what most people imagine: he could have found any amount of vahines to keep house for him, with all it entails, but not to have a discreet affair. He knew very little French, and practically no Tahitian, which did not make things easier. But above all there was ‘Mom,’ the children, and his unsuccessful previous attempts at a normal life. In this land of plenty, where he had no doubt, at one time, grazed at will, he could only get a few hurried and unsatisfactory mouthfuls.”

  Yet one is perplexed by this statement, for usually any man in Tahiti can find all the girls he wants. Indeed, that is probably why Leeteg lived there so long. His peculiar relationship with his mother necessitated a society in which casual girls were available, since permanent arrangements would inevitably be destroyed. Why, in the 1950’s, should he suddenly have experienced difficulty in finding girls?

  The authors were going to leave this tantalizing question unanswered, until they met by accident a Frenchwoman who had long lived in Punaavia. “Leeteg!” she cried. “How interesting that you are writing on Leeteg! He was a man of immortal misery, and I hope you can tell of the sadness in this man. In the end, you know, he was an outcast. Nobody would invite him to a decent home—except one very fine French admiral who could tolerate his ways. His language had become foul, his drunkenness complete. I used to see him on the street those drunken Tuesdays. His eyes were vacant and filled with lonely terror. Then I understood. A very good friend of Leeteg’s”—and here she named one of the painter’s most trusted companions—“came out to Punaavia and told us, ‘You had better tell the young girls of Punaavia to stay away from Leeteg. You had better see to it that he has nothing to do with any girls who work in your home.’

  “ ‘Why?’ I asked stupidly.

  “ ‘He has a terrible sickness,’ this friend explained. ‘He has the sickness which girls should stay away from.’

  “ ‘Don’t the new drugs cure that?’ I asked.

  “ ‘Not any more. He has worked his way through them all,’ the friend explained. ‘Penicillin, streptomycin, the sulfas …’

  “ ‘What will happen to him?’ I asked, for girls were his bread and water.

  “ ‘It’s all right,’ the friend said. ‘Within a year he will be dead.’ ”

  This friend had visited all the villages advising young girls to stay away from Leeteg. He reached Punaavia with his message on the day before Edgar Leeteg climbed aboard the back seat of a motorcycle.

  *Al Ezell, Leeteg’s original Hawaii agent, thinks Leeteg may have done “about a hundred copies of Hina.” He owns one of the finest, as well as many other super-dupers.

  Selected Bibliography

  Special thanks are due for bibliographic help from the University of Hawaii Library, Honolulu (Dr. Carl Stroven, Librarian, and Miss Janet E. Bell, in charge of the Hawaiian and Pacific Collection); from the Mitchell Library, Sydney, Australia (Miss Phyllis Mander Jones, Librarian); and from the Library of Congress, Washington, D. C. (Col. Willard Webb, Director of the Stack Division).

  CHAPTER 1

  LAY, WILLIAM, and HUSSEY, CYRUS. A Narrative of the Mutiny on Board the Ship “Globe” of Nantucket, in the Pacific Ocean, January, 1824 … New London, Conn., 1828.

  MORISON, SAMUEL E. Historical Notes on Gilbert and Marshall Islands. American Neptune, vol. 4, 1944, pp. 87–118.

  PAULDING, Lieut. HIRAM. Journal of a Cruise of the United States Schooner “Dolphin.” … in Pursuit of the Mutineers of the Whale Ship “Globe.” New York, 1831.

  STACKPOLE, EDOUARD. The Sea-Hunters. Philadelphia, 1953.

  WHIPPLE, A. B. C. Yankee Whalers in the South Seas. New York, 1954.

  CHAPTER 2

  BECKE, LOUIS. The South Sea Bubble of Charles du Breil, in Rídan the Devil. London, 1899.

  DUPERREY, LOUIS ISADOR. Voyage autour du Monde … Paris, 1825–30.

  GROOTE, P. DE. Nouvelle-France, Colonie Libre. Paris, 1880.

  Last Link with De Rays Horror. Pacific Islands Monthly, vol. 26, 1956, p. 127.

  LESSON, RENÉ PRIMEVÈRE. Voyage autour du Monde … sur la Corvette “Coquille,” 2 vols. Paris, 1838–39.

  LUCAS-DUBRETON, JEAN. L’Eden du Pacifique. Paris, 1929.

  Marquis de Rays Link Broken. Pacific Islands Monthly, vol. 26, 1956, p. 159.

  NIAU, JOSEPHINE H. Phantom Paradise, Sydney, 1936.

  ROMILLY, HUGH H. The Western Pacific and New Guinea. London, 1886.

  TUDOR, JUDY. The Marquis Provided the Millstone. Pacific Islands Monthly, vol. 19, 1949, p. 43.

  CHAPTER 3

  BLAIR, EMMA H. and ROBERTSON, J. A. The Philippine Islands, 1493–1898, vols.
12, 29, 36. Cleveland, Ohio, 1906.

  BOXER, C. R. The Rise and Fall of Nicholas Iquan. T’ien Hsia Monthly, vol. 11, 1941, pp. 401–439.

  CAMPBELL, WILLIAM. Formosa Under the Dutch. London, 1903.

  DAVIDSON, JAMES WHEELER. The Island of Formosa. Yokohama, 1903.

  DÍAZ, CASIMTRO. Conquistas de Las Islas Filipinas. Valladolid, 1890.

  FERRANDO, FR. JUAN. Historia de los Padres Domínicos en las Islas Filipinas, vol. 3. Madrid, 1871.

  HUMMEL, ARTHUR W. (ed.). Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period (1644–1912). Washington, 1933–44.

  KEENE, DONALD. The Battles of Coxinga: Chikamatsu’s Puppet Play. London, 1951.

  MONTERO Y VIDAL, JOSÉ. Historia General de Filipinas. Madrid, 1887.

  PONSONBY FANE, R. A. B. Koxinga: Chronicles of the Tei Family. Transactions and Proceedings of the Japan Society of London, vol. 34, 1937, pp. 65–132.

  REID, R. W. E. Piracy in the China Seas. Unpublished M.A. Thesis, No. 170, University of Hawaii. Honolulu, 1938.