Johnson: “I think I know every inch of Balboa Park.”

Photo by Craig Carlson

Ernest Hemingway was good company, but his drinking and hard living were difficult to keep up with. Argentinian president Juan Peron was either a tad insincere, or he didn’t dare challenge the will of his legendary wife, Evita. Mexican president Lazaro Cardenas deserved his reputation as the perhaps the least corrupt president in Mexican history. And B. Traven, one of the most reclusive and mysterious writers who ever lived, kept his secrets but revealed more than he intended.

These disparate observations were plucked from several recent discussions with journalist and writer William Weber Johnson, whose long and varied career includes fleeting encounters with many great men, including the four named above. The Hillcrest resident, now seventy-seven years old, is the author of a dozen books, including three in the well-known Time-Life Books series. His most famous work, Heroic Mexico, published by Doubleday in 1968, is still one of the most widely read popular histories of the Mexican Revolution. Johnson worked for Time Inc. from 1941 until 1961, serving stints as bureau chief in Mexico City and in Buenos Aires.

William Weber Johnson. Deadlines for Time magazine, and late-night bull sessions with Ernest Hemingway were more than he could handle.

Photo by Craig Carlson

In 1961 he became a journalism professor at UCLA and was department head there from 1966 until 1971. In addition to his books, he has published free-lance articles in Holiday, Geo, the Saturday Evening Post, Life, Smithsonian, and numerous other publications.

But credentials aren’t what is most impressive about William Weber Johnson. One is much more struck by his demeanor, which is polite and unassuming for a man of his accomplishments, and by his curiosity, which has led him to investigate subjects ranging from the Mexican Revolution to sea otters to an obscure Texas painter named Harold Osman Kelly. “There’s not an ounce of vanity in the man,’’ says John Boynton, who edited a 1984 version of Heroic Mexico, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. “I was impressed by his practicality and everyday common sense in concert with real intellectual depth.’’ Johnson would appreciate this description of what every journalist should strive for. Like many of his breed, Johnson has acquired over the years a rich collection of anecdotes about the lives that have crossed his own.

In the spring of 1944, war correspondent William Weber Johnson discovered that the pressures of falling German buzz bombs, deadlines for Time magazine, and late-night bull sessions with Ernest Hemingway were more than he could handle. Though he would happily have dispensed with the bombs and the deadlines, it was the late-night talks that had to go. Forty-two years later, peeping voyeuristically into the past, the story of Johnson’s encounters with Hemingway reveals that a minor — though not entirely insignificant — detail has been mistakenly reported by many of the writer’s biographers.

Johnson worked for Time magazine’s London bureau during World War II when he met the great writer, who was staying in the room down the hall from him at the Dorcester Hotel. The Dorcester was a famous watering hole for war correspondents at the time, and Hemingway was recuperating there from a severe head injury he'd received in an auto accident. He was in London with his wife Martha, but the two were rival correspondents from different magazines and weren’t getting along. Johnson, then thirty-five, got to know Hemingway well and was at once fascinated and disturbed to see one of America’s greatest writers suffer through a tormented period of his career. “I didn’t drink a lot, but whenever he’d go out, he’d ask me along, and we’d go out to the bars and have a drink, then another drink,” Johnson recalls. “He was drinking far too much. He was worried he’d scrambled his brains in the auto accident and would never write again ”

After making rounds at the bars, the two men would return late in the evening to the Dorcester Hotel, where Hemingway would want to talk. ‘‘I'm an early-night, early-morning person,” says Johnson. “But Hemingway would want to sit there and talk into the night. I told him once that one of my favorite stories of his was ‘The Big Two-Hearted River.’ He was drunk and told me the whole story of how he wrote it. It didn’t make much sense because he was so drunk, but I stayed up half the night listening to him.”

The next day at the Time bureau, Johnson ran into a young reporter named Mary Welsh, who would later become Hemingway’s third wife. Welsh had been living in London’s West End when the Germans began bombing London, and she felt unsafe there. So Johnson found a smaller room at the Dorcester and offered his large room to Welsh and her friend Connie Ernst. The day after his late-night tete-a-tete with Hemingway, Welsh saw Johnson yawning in his office and commented that he looked tired. “Hemingway kept me up all night,” Johnson told her.

“You know Hemingway?” Welsh asked. “I’d like to meet him.” The next night, Johnson and Hemingway again made the rounds at the bars. “We came back to the hotel, and he sat down and started talking again,” Johnson recalls. “I said, ‘Listen, why don’t you go down the hall and meet these two nice girls [Welsh and Ernst]? Just go knock on the door. They’d like to meet you.’ ” Hemingway did just that. “The next day I saw Mary at the office, and she looked tired,” continues Johnson. “I asked her how it went with Hemingway, and she said [in an exasperated tone] ‘That guy kept us up all night.’ ”

Johnson’s account of how Mary Welsh met Ernest Hemingway contradicts Welsh’s explanation in her autobiography. The Way It Was. Welsh (who died last November) and other Hemingway biographers have always claimed that Welsh was introduced to Hemingway by writer Irwin Shaw at the White Tower, a popular Greek restaurant in the Soho section of London. Johnson isn’t sure whether Welsh’s memory failed her or whether she had some other reason to alter the story. “Maybe her version sounded better?” Johnson surmises.

Three years after his encounters with Hemingway, Johnson was named Time-Life bureau chief in Argentina. He was fluent in Spanish, having spent time in Mexico during his college years in the 1930s and having served as bureau chief in Mexico City in 1946. During his first year in Buenos Aires, he wrote a Time cover story about the legendary Eva Peron, better known as Evita. The article, which made reference to Evita’s unsavory past and her humble origins, was ill received by Argentina’s first lady — “Unless something was flattering, Evita considered it an insult,” Johnson says — and she decided to take vengeance on Time. Through her connections, she managed to block distribution of the magazine throughout the country.

After the article came out, Johnson’s phones were tapped and his valued sources in Buenos Aires began shunning him for fear of reprisals. “One of my sources just said, ‘Don’t call me anymore,’ ” Johnson recalls. “I was between marriages at the time, and I’d have dates, and the secret police started following them.” The authorities further harassed Johnson by taking away his carnet, an identification card needed to send a cable. His mail was seized as well, and he had to send letters to New York via Uruguay. “They didn’t actually throw me out of the country; they just made it impossible to work,” Johnson says.

The bureau chief began getting pressure from Time headquarters in New York to resolve the problem. So, fully expecting to be turned away, he requested a meeting with Argentine president Juan Peron, who had a policy of never speaking to the foreign press. “I never thought I’d get an interview, but I did,” Johnson says. “He told me his wife had friends in the customs house who were all loyal to her, and they were stopping Time from being distributed.” Johnson asked what could be done about it, and the most powerful man in Argentina shrugged and said there was nothing he could do.

Months later, after Johnson had been reassigned elsewhere, distribution of Time still hadn’t been restored in Argentina. In retrospect, Johnson wonders if Peron didn’t have a hidden motive for granting him the exceptional interview. “He was very good natured with me,” Johnson says. “But my impression afterward was that he was a kid pulling wings off a fly. He said he had nothing to do with [blocking distribution of Time], but I knew that was a goddamn lie. I think the reason he agreed to meet me was because he wanted to torment me a little.”

Beginning in 1946, when Johnson was head of Time's bureau in Mexico City, he collected information about the Mexican Revolution, a subject that had interested him since he traveled to Mexico as a college student in the early 1930s. In the mid-1960s, he finally found time to write about it. Heroic Mexico is an attempt to sort out the confusion of the Mexican Revolution, to figure out why the great heroes of the thirty-year struggle — Francisco Villa, Emiliano Zapata, Venustiano Carranza, Alvaro Obregon, Francisco Madero — fought for the same ideals yet seemed intent on destroying each other. Ramon Eduardo Ruiz, now a history professor at UCSD, wrote a favorable review of Heroic Mexico when it came out in 1968. He called it “a political-biographical study of the revolutionaries who, having triumphed, turned their armies against each other in a graphic demonstration of the truth of the historical axiom that revolutionaries devour their own.”

“My interest with the revolution began in 1931, when I was a student,” Johnson says. “I met some old veterans of the revolution, the porter in my hotel, for example. All of their stories disagreed. That fascinated me. Some said Villa was a hero, others said he was a deep-down son of a bitch. Some would say Carranza was the greatest man who’d ever lived. Others would say he destroyed the revolution. My curiosity was piqued. This was just something I got interested in, like someone getting interested in butterflies.”

Though Johnson says he wrote Heroic Mexico primarily to order the confusion in his own mind and to understand the revolution himself, he admits another motive. “I wrote the book, I guess, because I hoped people could understand what Mexico went through, so they could understand the catharsis,” he says. “That way, people could approach the Mexican people with more sympathy. I hope that explanation is not too pompous.”

It is no doubt Johnson’s lack of pomposity that created in him such admiration for Lazaro Cardenas. In 1965, when Johnson was beginning to work on Heroic Mexico,

Cardenas was the only living former Mexican president who had held office during the revolutionary years between 1910 and 1940. Cardenas, who was an army general before entering politics, returned to his native Michoacan when his term ended in 1940 and he disappeared from public life entirely. For journalists, Cardenas was a subject of fascination for many reasons other than because he refused to speak with them. He was an austere, puritanical leader, courageous and unyieldingly faithful to the revolutionary ideals. He abhorred corruption and, according to Johnson, was possibly the only Mexican president who has ever left office poorer than when he entered.

One of his first acts when he took office in 1933 was to cut his own salary in half and eliminate altogether his entertainment expense allowance. He hated pomp and ordered buglers to break tradition and cease heralding his arrival to work each morning. He banned presidential portraits in public buildings. Cardenas loved the campesinos, the peasants, and is credited with having instituted systematic land reform, instead of merely talking about it, as many revolutionary leaders had. He is perhaps best known for having nationalized the oil industry, a move that alienated Mexico from the rest of the world but which united the Mexican people.

Despite Cardenas’s reclusive nature, Johnson managed to obtain an interview with him. He did so by contacting a Mexican friend named Adolfo Orive Alba, who had been in the Cardenas government.

“He [Alba] had complimented me on the Time-Life book on Mexico,” recalls Johnson. “He said he thought I’d been very fair to Cardenas and that he’d do what he could do to get me an interview.” A few days later, Alba called and told Johnson to go to an address in the Lomas Chapultepec section of Mexico City. “I went and Cardenas met me there,” Johnson recalls.

“He was very cordial. I asked him, ‘What are you doing now?’ and he replied, ‘Have you got a week? I’ll show you.’ ”

Within days Johnson and Cardenas flew to Iguala, where Cardenas was developing a hydroelectric power plant in the Rio Balsa basin, southwest of Mexico City. Cardenas was in charge of the Rio Balsa Commission, a government project to develop the region. During his week with Cardenas, Johnson saw several incidents that may have influenced his portrayal of the revolutionary leader as the man who most faithfully embodied the ideals of the Mexican Revolution. Johnson recalls that even in the hellish heat of Iguala during the summer of 1965, the stoic former president dressed far more formally than the occasion demanded. “He had on a shirt, necktie, Palm Beach jacket, and a Panama hat,” Johnson recalls. “And despite the heat, he never seemed uncomfortable.” However, he was uncomfortable with the adulation of his beloved Indians.

“We went to an Indian village, and the people would be trying to kiss his hand,” recalls Johnson.

“Cardenas, who was an absolutely selfless man, would get fussed over that. The Indians had pictures of the Virgin of Guadalupe [the patron saint of Mexico] between candles. Right next to the Virgin, they’d have pictures of Cardenas. He got fussed about that as well.”

During their week together, the two men spent time on the beach drinking coconut milk, and they visited several villages together. In one of the villages, while he was giving a speech, Cdrdenas noticed a little boy with milky-white eyes. “Cardenas asked, ‘Is that boy totally blind?’ ” recalls Johnson. “Someone said, no, he was just impaired. Cardenas asked, ‘Is anyone doing anything about it?

Would his parents let him go to Mexico City with me to see a specialist?’ The little boy had no parents, so Cardenas asked him if he wanted to go, and he said yes. I still remember his name. It was Trunquilino, and all he owned was a shawl to keep warm and a violin.” Johnson heard later that Trunquilino went to Mexico City, but the doctors said they could do nothing to help him.

Cardenas’s wariness of the press emerged when Johnson asked him to answer some questions. The former president insisted that Johnson write down his queries on paper, and he would respond in writing as well. “They weren’t very good answers,” Johnson recalls. “I don’t think I ever used anything I got from him.” Johnson isn’t sure what he gained from spending a week with Cdrdenas. “It didn’t help in writing the book,” he says. “It just confirmed my feeling that this was one of the great men. It confirmed to me that he was genuine.”

In 1966 Johnson met and became friends with one of the most mysterious and reclusive literary figures of the Twentieth Century, B. Traven. Traven’s life, it seems, was devoted as much to hiding his past as it was to writing novels.

“His life is the most tangled trail there ever was,” Johnson says.

Since his youth, Traven, who has sold an estimated 25 million books in thirty languages, had assumed one false identity after another. Biographers have strong evidence suggesting that Traven was once a Bavarian revolutionary who used the name Ret Marut and who fled Germany in the early 1920s to escape a death sentence; that Marut arrived in Mexico in 1924 and became Traven Torsvan, a Norwegian who was a naturalized Mexican citizen; and that in about 1947 Torsvan, whose link to the elusive writer B. Traven was revealed by a probing Mexican journalist, adopted the pseudonym Hal Craves, an American who happened to have a thick Germanic accent.

The most reasonable explanation for Traven’s fierce denial of his identity is that he never lost his fear that Ret Marut’s German enemies would seek him out and kill him. In addition to the dozens of pseudonyms he used (including Bogumil Schiebenkleben and Pguwlkschrj Rnfajbzxlquy), Traven invented apocryphal stories about his origins — so many that the numerous scholars who would later attempt to trace his past had to contend with a labyrinthine network of false leads. Traven doggedly denied his German heritage — evidence suggests that he was born in eastern Germany in 1882 — and insisted that he wrote his manuscripts first in English, then translated them into German. Though most doubt this, some scholars still debate the issue.

At times in Traven’s life — for example when the Humphrey Bogart film based on his novel The Treasure of the Sierra Madre appeared in 1947 — skeptics wondered whether Traven really existed or whether his work may have been written by a combination of several writers. John Huston, who directed The Treasure of Sierra Madre, invited B. Traven to work as a consultant on the film, which was made in Mexico. However, a man named Hal Craves showed up instead, insisting he was Traven’s agent and translator, that he knew Traven’s work as well as the author himself, and that he had permission to offer advice on Traven’s behalf. Everyone on the movie set suspected that Craves was in fact Traven.

In 1966 William Weber Johnson wrote a critique of Traven’s book The Night Visitor and Other Stories. The article, which appeared in the New York Times Book Review, caught the eye of one R.E. Lujan in Mexico City. Lujan, whom Johnson didn’t know, sent him a letter saying that the review was very nice and that if ever Johnson was in Mexico City, he should call. “My wife and I were in Mexico City that summer,” says Johnson. “I called the number she’d put in the letter, and R.E. (Rosa Elena] Lujan turned out to be the wife of B. Traven. She invited us over for drinks.”

The invitation to meet Traven in 1966 was ironic, given that twenty years before, while Johnson was Time-Life bureau chief in Mexico City, he’d written an article for Life about Traven. In 1946 Johnson had been besieged at the Time-Life offices by Mexican journalists and

writers who believed that Time-Life was offering a $5000 reward to anyone who could locate Traven, if indeed there was such a man. At this point in the writer’s career — just as The Treasure of Sierra Madre was soon to become a movie — the mystery of his life was deepening, and the reward story seemed plausible. However, it turned out to be a hoax, a publicity stunt cooked up by an agent promoting a new book by Traven called Una Canasta de Cuentos Mexicanos.

The stunt proved effective, and wild stories of Traven’s whereabouts poured into Johnson’s office. He was said to be a worker in a Tabasco oilfield, a beachcomber at Boca del Rio, a drunkard in Tampico. It was even said that B. Traven was in fact Jack London. According to this outlandish account, the famed adventure writer of the Pacific Northwest had allegedly faked his suicide in 1916 and fled to the tropics. To conceal his recognizable style, the story went, London/Traven supposedly saw to it that his manuscripts were first translated into German and then retranslated back into English.

Johnson found all these yarns fascinating and wanted to write about them. But how to get through to Traven? Johnson contacted Esperanza Lopez Mateos, Traven’s agent and Spanish translator. Johnson promised her he would respect Traven’s passion for secrecy; the article, he assured her, would be about the apocryphal stories and not dig for details of Traven’s life. So Esperanza cooperated. She told Johnson more stories, including a rumor that she herself was B. Traven, and added an anecdote about her client’s obsession for privacy. One day she had a lunch date with Traven at a popular Mexico City restaurant called Sepps but at the last minute had to cancel. Unable to contact Traven, Esperanza sent her brother-in-law, filmmaker Gabriel Figueroa, to the restaurant with instructions to tell a man named Hal Craves that she couldn’t make the meeting. Esperanza gave Figueroa a detailed description of Craves. He went to the restaurant, saw a man who fit the description perfectly, and approached him with the message. But the man denied he was Hal Craves or that he knew any woman named Esperanza. “But you look just like the man she described,” Figueroa said. “No, it isn’t me,” Craves replied.

Soon after his meeting with Esperanza, Johnson received a twenty-five-page, single-spaced typed letter written in stilted English that read as if it had been translated literally from German. Johnson has no doubt it came from B. Traven, and it offered still more outlandish stories about Traven’s identity and whereabouts. Johnson was instructed by the writer to send the letter to Alfred Knopf, Traven’s publisher. “I sent it, but I made a photocopy of it first, of course,” Johnson says wryly. Today that photocopy is in a special collection of writings about Traven at the University of California, Riverside.

When they met in 1966, Johnson says that he and Traven — who never referred to himself as such but stuck to his identity as Hal Craves — hit it off “famously.” Johnson, a modest man himself, was impressed by the self-effacing writer who once said that he was no more important to the production of his novels than the paper-mill worker, the typesetter, or the scrubwoman who cleans his publisher’s office. During their first encounter, over drinks, “Craves” pulled out the Life magazine article Johnson had written back in 1946 and said, “You see, I appreciated it so much I saved it all these years.” Johnson was shown Craves’s library, which contained hundreds of copies of B. Traven’s books in many languages and editions.

The two men talked about Mexican history and about Indians, subjects they both found fascinating. The conversation continued the next day, when Johnson and his wife returned for lunch. Craves and Johnson later took a picnic to the village of Tepotzotlan, the site of some Spanish ruins and a restored Jesuit church twenty-five miles outside Mexico City.-

During their talks, they planned a trip. Johnson would buy a four-wheel-drive land cruiser, and together the two men would retrace Traven’s travels of decades before through the Sierra Madre mountain range. They would rediscover the towns and villages where B. Traven worked in the oil fields, the cotton fields, and in the jungle eradicating 0locusts. The trip would start in Tampico, on the Gulf coast of Mexico, and descend the eastern Sierra Madre to Mexico’s southernmost state, Chiapas, where Traven had researched stories and become a beloved figure among the Indians. Of course, during the trip they would take notes, which would later be compiled into a book Johnson and Croves would write together. Unfortunately, Croves died at age eighty-six in the spring of 1969, just months before the trip was to get under way. There is no telling how many Traven mysteries might have been solved had Johnson been able to spend several months with the enigmatic author. “That would have been one hell of a book,” Johnson says with more than a tinge of regret.

Johnson, however, did get another chance to write about Traven. In the town of Ocosingo in the state of Chiapas, where Traven lived, worked, and explored in his youth, a memorial service was held after the writer’s death. Johnson was invited by Rosa Elena Lujan to take part in the ceremony, which culminated when Traven's ashes were taken up in an airplane and dropped over the Lacandon jungle, the setting for many of B. Traven’s adventure novels. Johnson wrote about the funeral in Life magazine on May 30, 1969. In the article, he respected the spirit of Traven’s life by emphasizing Ocosingo’s importance to Traven, rather than vice versa. Johnson introduced his reader to the mystery and harshness of the place and, halfway through the article, finally informed the reader that the purpose of this literary pilgrimage to Ocosingo was to tell the story of a funeral of a man who happened to write books. Traven would have appreciated Johnson’s gesture.

On the way back to Mexico City, Rosa Elena Lujan asked Johnson to write a biography of her husband. Johnson agreed, on the condition that he be given access to Traven’s archives and complete editorial control over the project. Since most of the manuscripts in Traven's archive were written in German, Johnson took a crash course in German at UCLA, where he was then head of the journalism department. His effort was in vain, however. Though he negotiated with Lujan for an entire year, they couldn’t come to terms. “I agreed to do everything I could to keep her happy, but wouldn’t give her veto power,” Johnson says. “After a year, I gave up. This was during my most productive period, and I couldn’t waste any more time.”

Two widely read unauthorized biographies have appeared since Traven’s death. One of them, written by BBC documentary producer Will Wyatt, revealed through exhaustive research some unflattering facts about Traven’s past. He discovered, for example, that the writer — who had claimed he was born in Chicago — was in fact from a small town in East Germany, now part of Poland. His mother was a mill hand and his father a potter. Rosa Elena Lujan had more grandiose notions of her husband’s origins. Though she denied it later, she once told Stern magazine in Germany that Traven was an illegitimate son of Kaiser Wilhelm.

Johnson isn’t sure why Lujan wouldn’t agree to his terms concerning the biography. “Lujan assured me her only concern was that everything be right,” Johnson says. “She assured me that there was no concern about mentioning the women in Traven’s life. He was quite a womanizer, you know. I suspect there was a lot she didn’t know about him, and she was afraid of disclosing her own ignorance about her husband. She was embarrassed that her husband didn’t tell her everything about himself.” Lujan and Johnson have remained friends despite the disagreement. In fact, she called in November and asked Johnson and his wife Elizabeth Ann to come spend some time with her in Palm Desert. Johnson begged off, however. He’s slowed down a bit these days due to fragile health. He still finds time for the passions of reading and writing, however. Last May he published an article on Mayan art in Smithsonian, and he’s now working on the text of a book to be published by Texas A&M University Press about an old friend of his, novelist and painter Tom Lea. When Johnson isn’t reading and writing, he’s indulging another of his passions, walking. For years Balboa Park has been his most frequent haunt, but he admits he’s a bit tired of it. “I think I know every inch of the park,” Johnson says. He and his wife are very excited about their decision to sell their Maryland Street home and move downtown to the Marina Park condominiums. “Think of all the walks you can take down there!” Mrs. Johnson exclaims, obviously pleased for her husband. “There’s all kinds of places to go.” In a few months, a familiar figure will be stepping daily through new terrain, studying the contemporary urban architecture, visiting the galleries, browsing the bookstores. If you see him, stop and say hello. Or better still, ask him to tell you a story.