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This
story first appeared in our August 1977 issue. Last year, Travelers
Tales published a paperback version of The Royal Road to Romance.
“Sometimes,
once in a long, long while, sentimental dreams come true. Mine did, and
it was as colorful and satisfying as all my flights of fancy had
imagined it would be.” — Richard Halliburton, The Glorious Adventure
The
second two decades of the twentieth century — the Twenties and
Thirties — constituted perhaps the last age of adventure and conquest
acknowledged by the modern world. It was the era of Lindbergh and
Hemingway, of Babe Ruth and Rudolph Valentino. It was the era, too, of
Richard Halliburton. Unlike his contemporaries, however, Halliburton is
largely forgotten today. The exploits that made him famous in his
lifetime are uncelebrated in his absence; his books, tremendous
best-sellers in their day, are long since out of print.
There are those who would argue that this circumstance is fitting enough
for a man whose writings have as little relevance to the present-day
world as an operator’s manual for a Stanley Steamer. Be that as it
may, Richard Halliburton was in his own way a remarkable man who lived
an interesting and eventful, if incomplete, life; and for a decade and a
half, anyway, he was the most famous Memphian in the world. Those
who do find their way to Halliburton’s adventures today generally
represent two widely separate segments of the reading public — older
readers, who remember the man from his heyday half a century ago, and
adolescent readers, whose minds and spirits are still attuned to the
romantic and adventurous frequency on which Halliburton operated so
enthusiastically. Indeed, Halliburton’s acquaintance is probably best
made during adolescence, when the romantic urge is at its strongest,
when the lives of adults seem to be endless drudgery at best.
Halliburton represents — in his writing at least — an escape from
all that, a casting off of tiresome responsibilities and mundane
obligations, a carefree questing after the joys and adventures of life
wherever they may be found, be it Borneo or Timbuctoo. Richard
Halliburton was born on the ninth day of the twentieth century in
Brownsville, Tennessee; shortly thereafter he and his parents, Wesley
and Nelle Halliburton, moved to Memphis. Richard briefly attended the
Hutchison School for Girls, where his mother taught, and later was a
student at the Memphis University School for Boys. Wesley Halliburton
had hopes that his gifted son would attend his own alma mater,
Vanderbilt, but Richard had his eye set on Princeton, and to further
that end he was sent to prep school at Lawrenceville, a mere six miles
down the road from the Ivy institution. It was
at Princeton, which he entered with the Class of ‘21, that Richard was
first overcome by the wanderlust which was to dominate his life. At the
end of his sophomore year he “ran away” to New Orleans, where he
signed on as an ordinary seaman on a freighter bound for England. Life
aboard the freighter was harder and much less romantic than the young
man had expected, however, and he would have jumped ship when it put in
at Norfolk, Virginia, but the Halliburtons were vacationing nearby, and
Richard’s mother, insisting that he carry out his obligation to the
captain, persuaded her son to return to the ship and complete the
voyage. Halliburton later saw the incident as the turning point in his
life. Richard
spent the next several months walking about England and France, taking
in all he could with seemingly boundless energy, and sailed home again
in January of 1920. He returned to Princeton in the middle of the spring
term, where his leave-taking and newfound worldliness earned him a
mixture of envy, awe, and resentment. Halliburton sold his first piece
of professional writing, an account of a hunting and fishing trip he
took with friends to the Montana Rockies, which Field
and Stream bought for $150. Richard had entertained the rather
unlikely notion of spending his life traveling and adventuring about the
world, supporting himself by writing about his activities. With the
success of his first story, he determined not
only that he could, but also that he would. Richard
had earlier made his most important determination, however
— that he would never resign himself to the “even tenor” of
life his father hoped he would settle into when his youthful exuberance
was spent. He had written his father from Paris: I
hate that expression and as far as I am able I intend to avoid that
condition. When impulse and spontaneity fail to make my way
uneven then I shall sit up nights inventing means of making my life as
conglomerate and vivid as possible. . . . And when
my
time comes to die, I’ll be able to die happy, for I will have done
and seen and heard and experienced all the joy, pain and thrills
— any emotion that any human ever had — and I’ll be especially
happy if I am spared a stupid, common death in bed . . . . Upon
his graduation from Princeton in the spring of 1921, Halliburton
sailed for Europe, beginning his first trip around the world. Until such
time as he began to sell his magazine articles, Richard was receiving an
allowance of $100 per month from his father; Wesley Halliburton had also
arranged for The Commercial
Appeal to buy all the travel articles his son sent in at $35 apiece.
After extensive, though uneventful travel in northern Europe and the Low
Countries, Halliburton arrived at last in Zermatt, Switzerland, the site
of his first genuine adventure (as distinguished from the ersatz
adventures he created, on occasion, in order to add zest and excitement
to his later writings). On September 23, 1921, Richard, in the
company of a friend and two capable guides, began his ascent of the
Matterhorn, arriving at the 14,701-foot summit just
before noon on the following day. Richard had never climbed
before, and that fact, plus the dangerous climbing conditions which
prevailed so late in the season, combined to make his ascent of the
Matterhorn a feat worth bragging about. After
further travels in France and Spain, Halliburton arrived in Gibraltar in
January 1922, where he succeeded in getting himself arrested as a German
spy by persisting in taking photographs of British installations after
having been warned repeatedly that it was forbidden to do so. He was
finally left off with a ten-pound fine. He did not have that much money
himself, but he borrowed it from an acquaintance and quickly fled the
island. (Halliburton’s personality inspired generosity in others, and
he was never the least bit backwards in taking advantage of it.) After a
brief stay in Egypt he traveled extensively throughout India, the high
point of his Indian adventures being a midnight swim in the elevated
pool before the Taj Mahal. Halliburton stretched his limited funds while
in India by stealing free rides on trains — dodging conductors and,
when necessary, lying about having lost his ticket. In fact, he seems to
have held to the belief that when he committed crimes of this nature
they were to be regarded as light-hearted pranks. From India he traveled
considerably — and often dangerously — about Asia and on to Japan,
where he scaled 12,700-foot Mt. Fujiyama alone in a season when the
climb was regarded as impossible. He finally sailed from Japan as a
seaman on the liner President Madison and arrived back in Memphis on
March 1, 1923. Of the
dozens of articles he had written during his travels he had only managed
to sell a couple to Travel and
one to National Geographic,
so after a brief visit with his parents he went to New York to try to
sell his writings in person. His efforts were uniformly unsuccessful,
and by early summer he turned in desperation to lecture agencies,
finally being signed by the Feakins Agency. At last he began to turn his
travels into profit, being booked for $2500 worth of lectures and
quickly rising from 45th to sixth place on Feakins’ list of lecturers.
The one drawback was that his busy lecture schedule left him with no
time for turning his notes on his travels into a book. Finally he
retreated to seclusion on Nantucket Island and had a breakdown of sorts
before finally whipping the book into shape (in a sanitarium) by the
year’s end. Even with the finished product in hand he had trouble
selling it to publishers, who regarded it as sophomoric; finally, in
April 1924, his Princeton connections, on which he relied heavily
whenever possible, helped get the book accepted by Bobbs-Merrill, on the
condition that it be pared down somewhat in size. The
Royal Road to Romance (which Richard adamantly insisted the book be
titled, over the strenuous objections of his publishers) was on its way
to publication.
It is
somewhat curious that Halliburton would resort to exaggeration — and
in some cases, fabrication — in the course of this and later travels.
Most of his “adventures,” however shallow or contrived, were real
— and perilous — enough. The Hellespont swim, for example, was not
unique, but it was a genuinely brutal experience: the white-capped water
was numbingly cold, and Halliburton emerged severely sunburned,
suffering from nausea and exhaustion. Indeed, the author took incredible
risks, albeit often unknowingly, and never avoided a physical challenge,
whether it took the form of hostile Turkish troops, towering peaks, or
cobra-infested jungles. Amazingly, till the end of his life, and
especially in his most foolish exploits, Halliburton seemed protected as
much by his innocence somehow as by his cunning and wit. Richard
was back in Memphis for Christmas, 1926. The
Royal Road to Romance was out and meeting with decidedly mixed
reviews. By the end of January, however, it had made the best-seller
list, and by year’s end it had sold 100,000 copies. Halliburton’s
lecture tour during this time was a fantastic success, and his 1926
earnings totaled $70,000 — quite a lot for a 26-year-old vagabond.
August and September he spent holed up in his parents’ apartment in
the Parkview Hotel (overlooking Overton Park) working on his second
book. The book, which Richard entitled (again to his publisher’s
embarrassment) The Glorious
Adventure, was due at Bobbs-Merrill in November. It was published in
May 1927. Despite
the celebrity and financial success
he achieved during this time, Halliburton was the object of
increasing critical disdain for the superficiality and shallow romance
of his works. Though he repeatedly — and proudly — justified his
adventures by claiming they were what the public truly desired — and
he had the sales to back him up — Richard occasionally took on the
mantle of self-doubt himself as to the worth of his writings. Some of
his closest companions even chided him from time to time that he was
wasting his talents, that he was capable of more significant
contributions to the literature of the day. It was perhaps in response
to this feeling that Richard sailed for England in mid-1927, where he
spent several months gathering material for a biography of Rupert
Brooke. Ironically, his hero’s mother proved to be one of the few
elderly women alive capable of resisting Richard’s charms, and she
absolutely forbade him to write about her son while she was still
living. Halliburton returned to New York in October with masses of
notes, but the biography was never written, not even after Mrs.
Brooke’s death a short time later. Neither did Richard ever turn his
hand to “serious” writing again. Back in
the U.S., Richard returned to the lecture circuit where his popularity
was, if anything, even greater than before. Despite his substantial fees
and the royalties from his second best-seller, however, he seemed to be
perpetually broke. He could never explain even to himself where the
money went. In 1928, he earned some money by endorsing Lucky Strike
cigarettes, though he didn’t smoke, and his chaotic spending habits
forced him to agree to another trip, despite a weariness of travel that
had suddenly settled over him. Ladies’
Home Journal would pay him $3,000 apiece for ten articles on Latin
America, which he could later rework into a book. In
April 1928, he sailed from New Orleans to Mexico, where he retraced on
foot Cortez’ conquest of the country and climbed Popocatapetl. In the
Yucatan he visited the ancient Mayan site of Chichen-Itza, where young
virgins had been ritually thrown into the “Well of Death” to appease
the rain god. Standing alone at the lip of the Well, 70 feet above the
dark surface of the water, Halliburton was suddenly overwhelmed by a
desire to experience what those maidens had felt centuries earlier;
before he could think twice, he had stepped off the ledge and was
falling. Later, climbing back up the cliff-like walls of the pool, he
realized the romantic potential of his action. Also mindful of the
skepticism with which some of his earlier feats had been greeted,
Richard leapt again into the Well on the following day — this time
with a camera faithfully recording the event. For his
next stunt, Halliburton swam the Panama Canal through the locks; though
he made the swim in stages over eight days in mid-August, it was a
difficult, and occasionally dangerous, feat which managed to bring him
still more notoriety. Breaking
off his adventures in January 1929, Halliburton returned to the States
to spend some time on the lecture circuit, where he now commanded a
$900-per-week guarantee. His books also continued to sell at a brisk
pace. After a hero’s welcome in Memphis in May, he went back on the
trail again to complete his obligation to the Journal.
That summer he spent several weeks at the infamous French Prison on
Devil’s Island, living for a time as a prisoner, and for the remainder
of his stay as a guest of the governor. He later stopped off on the
island of Tobago, where he played Robinson Crusoe for two weeks,
complete with a man “Tuesday,” before returning to New York in late
August. Halliburton’s stories had increased the Journal’s
circulation so much that the magazine gave him a $2,000 bonus, and he
went into seclusion at an Atlantic City hotel to convert the articles
into a book. Published in November 1929, it was entitled, in the
unmistakable Halliburton style, New
Worlds to Conquer. After
numerous delays, The Flying
Carpet began its adventures in March 1931, with extensive flights
around North Africa, highlighted
by a daring 1,300-mile flight across the Sahara
and a visit to Timbuctoo, where Richard observed the workings of
the slave trade. The Journal,
in the meantime,
backed out of its agreement to buy
Richard’s stories, leaving him with no immediate source of
income. At this point, however, Halliburton was too heavily committed to
the trip to have backed out had he wanted to. This
downturn of luck was immediately followed by a series of near-disasters.
Richard acquired a sunburn so severe in swimming across the Sea of
Galilee that he had to be hospitalized in Jerusalem for a week. In Nepal
he failed to secure his seatbelt and almost fell out of the cockpit when
Stephens rolled the plane. Flying high up the slopes of Mt. Everest on
his 32nd birthday, Richard nearly caused the plan to stall by standing
up in the air stream to snap a picture of the summit. In Singapore he
almost got himself killed by catching an anchor line in the propeller of
the now pontoon-equipped Flying
Carpet. Finally, in April 1932, after a pleasant bit of hobnobbing
with headhunters in Borneo, the weary travelers headed home. Halliburton
returned to the U.S. not merely broke, but $2,000 in debt. Before
returning to the lecture circuit, he spent several months at the
Alexandria, Virginia, home of Paul Mooney, a younger writer he had met
in California who would collaborate with Richard on the new book.
Entitled, reasonably for once, The
Flying Carpet, the book appeared in late November, 1932. This time
out, the reviewers discovered in Halliburton’s accounts a new maturity
for which they applauded him roundly. Unfortunately, the book market was
still in a slump.
Richard
was travel-weary at this point, and after a whirlwind lecture tour he
took an apartment in San Francisco and settled for a while. In time,
Bobbs-Merrill approached him with the idea of doing a book for children,
combining adventure and geography, and Richard was taken by the idea,
particularly since it would not require any additional travel. The book,
to be called Richard
Halliburton’s Book of Marvels, would be done in two volumes, one
on the East and the other on the West. Halliburton spent the summer of
1936 working on it before resuming his lectures in the fall. It was
about this time that Halliburton’s attention first turned toward what
was to be his last adventure. A friend gave him the idea of sailing a
junk from China to San Francisco for the 1939 World’s Fair; the more
Richard thought about the idea, the more he liked it. Such a scheme
would cost far more, of course, than he then had access to, but the
World’s Fair was still three years away, so he had time to work on the
finances. For the
moment, Richard turned his attention to more immediate matters. He moved
to Laguna Beach, brought his friend Paul Mooney out from Alexandria for
companionship and assistance on the Book
of Marvels, and turned at last to building a home for himself on the
lot he had purchased three years earlier. The avant garde structure,
which Halliburton dubbed “Hangover House” due to its position on the
ridge, took 15 months to build and cost $36,000 — characteristically,
almost four times the original estimate. In
October, Halliburton embarked on his 1936-37 lecture tour, leaving
Mooney to complete the first volume of the Book
of Marvels. Mooney finished in March, but Richard had to rewrite it
because it smacked too much of Mooney and not enough of Halliburton.
When the first volume finally appeared, sales were tremendous and the
critics, for once, were virtually unanimous in their praise. Richard
turned over the second volume of the Book
of Marvels to Bobbs-Merrill in June 1937. For the
rest of the summer Halliburton concentrated his efforts on raising money
for his upcoming ocean crossing. He was not very successful, and he was
finally reduced to fund-raising among his friends and relatives,
supplementing this by mortgaging his new house, and in effect,
persuading several wealthy young men to pay for the privilege of
accompanying him on the adventure.
Finally, on September 23, 1938, Halliburton boarded the President
Coolidge bound for Hong Kong. After
his arrival in Hong Kong, matters went
quickly sour. The Sea
Dragon, as Halliburton christened the outsized junk he had specially
built for the voyage, was poorly designed and constructed, and as usual,
it cost far more than he anticipated. In addition, the captain
Halliburton had hired, one John Wenlock Welch, turned out to be, in
Richard’s words, “a regular Captain Bligh.” On top of all this
there was some question as to whether the Japanese, who had already
begun their aggressions in Asia, would allow the vessel to pass through
their waters unmolested. Finally, however, the Sea
Dragon sailed from Hong Kong on February 4, 1939, bound for San
Francisco. Six days later she limped back into Hong Kong harbor for
repairs and modifications. Two of Halliburton’s young
patron-companions took advantage of the return to disassociate
themselves permanently from the venture (as did Halliburton’s
Phillipine cook), thereby saving their lives. The Sea
Dragon put to sea again on March 4th. It was last heard from, via
radio, on March 23, 1939, encountering heavy weather near the
International Dateline. Inevitably,
Richard Halliburton changed as he grew older, and the change was
reflected in his writing. His critics applauded it as the tardy but
welcome onset of maturity; Richard saw it, at times, as the loss of his
joie de vivre. He rightly perceived, late in his still young life, a
more significant change — a change in the world around him. The
appetite of the public for his special kind of fare was waning — his
“unreasoned thrills” were becoming less and less “irresistible.”
The twentieth century was approaching its forties; the world was no
longer young.
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Swimming
the Hellespont, which Richard Halliburton did in 1926 in
imitation of his hero Byron, was but
one of the dreams,
sentimental or otherwise, made real by the
adventurer-writer in his brief, spectacular life. His
exploits were featured on the front pages of local newspapers around the
globe; his own accounts of his adventures were translated into virtually
every major language. Between 1921 and 1939 he ventured the company of
Borneo headhunters and heads of state, French Foreign Legionnaires and
Devil’s Island convicts, Oriental sages, South American Indians, and
subscribers to the Ladies’ Home
Journal. In the end, his life and works were indeed as colorful as
could be imagined; as for satisfaction, he might well have settled for a
single Byronic stanza.
Even
before the book was off the presses, 
In 33
years of life, Richard Halliburton had not made a single move towards
establishing a definite home for himself. In the spring of 1933, he made
a tentative one by purchasing a dramatic ridge-top lot near Laguna
Beach, California. This might also have been a hint of emerging maturity
had the acquisition not been financially absurd. Halliburton could
hardly afford the property, and the result was that he had to undertake
another “adventure” in July; he was to be paid $200 each for 50
2,500-word newspaper articles. The trip took him from Baja, California,
to the Caribbean, then on to Europe and Asia, where his most notable
achievement was an exclusive interview in Siberia with a man who claimed
to have overseen the execution of the Russian royal family and the
disposal of their bodies. He also rode an elephant Hannibal-style across
the Alps. By the time he returned in August, Richard’s newspaper
articles had increased his popularity beyond anything it had ever been
before, and he was once again in great demand for lectures. But he was
tired, and he dreaded the work necessary for readying his new book,
which he entitled (in a regrettable lapse into his old ways) Seven
League Boots. He finished it, however, in a month’s visit to
Memphis, and though it received generally favorable reviews,
surprisingly it did not sell very well.