A 1920s thrill-seeker through and through
What feats! Aloha Wanderwell recounts over a decade of non-stop adventure (along tens of thousands of kilometres of “barely existing roads” on several continents) and the challenges of telling the true story of real-life adventurer Idris Hall — a girl who made “dogged attempts to revise, reinterpret, or flat-out fabricate some of the events in her life.”
With a writing project that began in 1998, biographers Christian Fink-Jensen and Randolph Eustace-Walden took painstaking efforts to sift through old diaries, letters, newspaper articles, legal documents, an unpublished reminiscence of nearly 700 double-sided pages and a ghostwritten memoir from 1939. All told, it’s an impressive feat of determination.
Besides the authors’ hard work, which is undoubtable, there’s their subject, once a tall and confident young girl, Idris Hall (b. 1908), whose English-born mother met her manor-born second husband in Salmon Arm, B.C., in 1909.
Restless, curious and deeply inspired by the can-do modernity and glamour of Mary Pickford, the world-wanderer embodied the roaring ’20s.
Following her stepfather’s death near Ypres in 1917 and (as her journal notes) “tortured by strange yearnings” at 16, the impulsive Canadian, then residing in France, answered a newspaper ad by one Captain Walter Wanderwell. The “American” daredevil and self-promotion whiz was seeking a “lady secretary” who agreed to “forswear skirts” when she signed up for a world tour by auto. (Born Valerian Pieczynski in Poland, the captain’s iffy past and fondness for reinvention predates Gatsby’s by a decade.)
World famous — billed as the first woman to drive around the world — by the time she was snapped while parked atop the Sphinx in 1924 (the biography is abundantly illustrated), Aloha Wanderwell had no inkling she’d be even more photographed at a Los Angeles courthouse in 1932, during her husband’s murder trial.
Before settling into life with a second husband — on Vancouver Island and, later, as a motel proprietor in the northwest — Wanderwell saw a world that technology would soon make much smaller and easier to access. She caught it on films, too, that showed far and wide.
If Wanderwell’s personality and motivations take the occasional back seat to the sheer enormity of globe-trotting, it’s to be expected.
Before the Lazy-U Motel in Wyoming, she was a thrill-seeker through and through.