The mouse that roared
Hazel and Leonard Wibberly on the porch of their 24th Street, Hermosa Beach home in the early 1960s.
The oldest, Kevin, is a retired home builder living in Pahoa, Hawaii. I began my phone interview with Kevin by asking him about an entirely different island, Ireland. Kevin’s father took him and his sister Patricia on an extended stay there after a seven-year-old Kevin inquired, “Why do you call yourself an Irishman, dad?”
The family spent two summer months in a village near Clifden, on the rocky west coast of Ireland north of Dingle, where “Ryan’s Daughter” was filmed.
“I remember this spectacular horse race in Galway, best. The neighbors who joined us all wore “Ribbons” declaring they would stay sober for the trip to Galway and back. But, once out of eyesight of the town, they were clamoring for Guinness at the first public house and wound up half silly when they got trackside.”
“There were no guard rails between the spectators and the riders and I remember the horses thundering at us along a turn of the hill. And then one horse died before our eyes after making a leap carrying its rider, broken back and all, over the finish line. We kept that horse in our prayers the rest of the trip.
“It is all vividly captured in the memoir The Island that Wasn’t There that Leonard conjured up from his memories.”
Leonard Wibberley in his study with the sextant he used on his many sailing trips. Kevin Wibberley recalled a trip to Hawaii when his dad used the dropped the sextant, but insisted on using it. “After consulting his charts he announced that we were in the middle of Norway. After that we followed the airline vapor trails.”
The best laid plans…
What called the author of the Mouse that Roared back to my mind recently was his commanding photograph — sitting in profile, like King Neptune, on the south wall of the Hermosa Beach Library. Librarian Elmita Brown introduced me to the library’s Wibberley Collection. It consists of well over 50 works of fiction, history, mysteries, travel and adventurous memoirs by the Hermosa Beach author (A more complete collection of his 150 books is held by the USC library).
I read The Mouse That Roared and The Mouse On Wall Street when I was in high school at Bishop Montgomery. In fact, since his children — Kevin, Patricia and Chris — were all in attendance at that time, their father would come to our school assemblies and give talks to help us imagine what we could do with our futures. I remember him telling us in his melodious accent about his inspiration for The Mouse That Roared. He title came from the Scottish poet Robert Burn’s observation that, “The best laid schemes O’ Mice and Men, gang oft agley.”
After World War II, his Irish friends would joke about the generous Marshall Plan that America enacted to help former enemies Germany and Italy. Ireland had remained neutral, prompting his Irish friends to kick themselves for not fighting and losing to America so their own, poor, little country could be patched up.
And “Eureka,” he thought to himself, along came the improbable tale of a mouse-sized kingdom named The Grand Duchy of Fenwick, whose people wage war on America intending to lose; only to have their plan go hilariously awry. They win.
It’s a rollicking farce of a story with echoes of G. Bernard Shaw, whom Wibberley paid homage to in a “One Man Homage” he performed late in life.
I also saw that show and I that’s where I learned that Albert Einstein once congratulated Shaw on his ability to “make these creatures of whimsy dance in an enchanted world guarded by Muses and Graces.”
That certainly holds true for the “Mouse Series” that Wibberley created about Duchess Gloriana and a Q-Bomb, that make up the lucky realm of Fenwick.
During his Bishop Montgomery talks, he recalled the trepidation he felt when his whimsical take politics of the Cold War politics was made into a movie in 1959. He said he hired a funeral hearse for the premier, figuring, “I could attend the cinema and then stage my own heart attack at the premiere — leaving the filmmakers and stars gaping at the sight of this stricken author staggering down the red carpet and being trundled off in the back of a long, black hearse.”
But instead of being disappointed by the adaptation, he found himself laughing throughout the movie at the comic antics of Peter Sellers, who was just making his start in movies 50 years ago; and whose genius for farce would later make “Dr Strangelove” a film classic. Wibberley had to call off his waiting friends and soak up the good cheer of the film producers, instead.
Wibberley with actress Roslyn Russell at the Beverly Hills home of novelist and screenwriter Robert Nathan.
Anywhere but here
Leonard Patrick O’Connor Wibberley was born in Dublin in April, 1915, just prior to the tumultuous events leading up to the Easter Rebellion, Ireland’s most determined effort to throw off British Rule after hundreds of oppressive years of virtual serfdom. His father Thomas, an agronomy professor, taught young Leonard to speak Gaelic like his ancestors, but he lost the knack when the family moved to London. From this point, his life followed the Emerson adage about the three wants never satisfied, which concludes “the traveler who says anywhere but here.”
Wimberley became a copyboy on Fleet Street for the Sunday Dispatch, and then made his way throughout England as an iterant violin player, before settling in as a reporter for the Daily Mirror. The years approaching World War II found him traveling to Trinidad as a news editor, marrying there, and then, when the war began, serving as a foreign correspondent for the London Evening News and a cable dispatcher for the Associated Press in New.
This is also the time when his first marriage to dance choreographer Olga Maynard of Trinidad came to an end.
“Leonard met my mom Hazel Holton in San Francisco. She came from a pioneering Quaker family in Whittier. They married and he found a reporting job with the L.A. Times; so they bought a place on 31st Street. This is all at the same time he started writing The Mouse.”
“We went from eating watery homemade stew to Blue Plate Special Steak and Potatoes,” Kevin recalled.
In 1959 the family moved to 24th Street in Hermosa. For many years Hazel Wibberley served as principal of Our Lady Of Guadalupe Catholic Grammar School in Hermosa.
Live it up, write it down
“You got to live it up, to write it down,” Wibberley’s contemporary Ernest Hemmingway advised. Wibberley had enough adventures under his belt for a lifetime of writing when he arrived in Hermosa and began conjuring up over a 100 books.
EV: Tell us about his writing habits.
Leonard Wibberley diving off the South Bay in 1975. Photo courtesy of Don Sievert
KW:
Leonard would often have two books going at the same time. He wasn’t a morning person unless he was planning to do some deep-sea diving with his lifeguard friend Bud Stevenson, or the Meistrell brothers (founders of Dive N’ Surf). Dad would say in BBC-sounding English that ‘no reasonable man should get up in the morning while the poisons of the night air still linger.
EV: Did he have any rituals to get in the mood for writing?
KW: Yea, here’s his ritual. “Damnation,” in a very loud voice. “Pipe down, I’m trying to put bread on the table up here.” But seriously, he used to write between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m., unless he was writing two books or articles. Then he would also write in the afternoon.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of having a writer as a father?
KW: The advantage is that you learn to take care of yourself and your brothers and sisters. Money never was a regular event. Even when he hired a company to manage his money, it didn’t work. He was impulsive. When he made money, he spent money: cars, boats, travel — no real investments. When he didn’t have money he always believed more would come in. He was always writing, always working. In the end, I think it wore him out. He was tired. Consequently, I have always invested my extra money. We do all learn from our parents, one way or another, cliche` or no.
EV: It seems like he created books as assignments to increase his own knowledge in all manner of subjects?
KW: I had not thought about that before, but it kinda makes sense given the habits he formed back on London’s Fleet Street.
EV: Was their an author he would turn to for inspiration?
KW: Leonard loved Robert Louis Stevenson. His favorite book was Treasure Island. He also loved the J.R.R.Tolkien series and the plays of George Bernard Shaw. Mostly, though, he read non-fiction. God, he would have loved the internet. He wrote so much, I don’t think he read much fiction. He was too busy creating fiction. He had his own style of writing and did not want to be affected by other writers’ styles.
I know he would often read articles in Easy Reader. He liked small papers. He was an editor of a small paper in the late ‘40s, up in Mill Valley. He said he doubled the subscriptions by printing that he had been arrested for drunk driving. He said people then thought of the paper as an honest periodical.
EV: What did he think about Hermosa Beach? Was it comfortable or too small in outlook? How about local politics?
KW: He liked Hermosa Beach. He enjoyed the ocean. He had friends from all walks of life in the town. He thought it was a good place to raise children. He didn’t care about local politics. They asked him to be on the planning commission once. He bowed out by telling them that he wasn’t a U.S. citizen. He honestly believed that you should be a citizen, after all, if you’re going to be on a City Planning Commission!
EV: He never became a citizen in all those years?
KW: U.S. Immigration wouldn’t let him. He arrived in 1943 in New York with the draft on. He was newly married, with a young son Patrick Maynard, who later became a well-known Canadian philosopher and author in his own right, so Leonard signed the Irish Neutrality Act.
EV: What were some of your dad’s favorite expressions and quotes?
KW: I don’t remember him using cliches or repeating sage words of wisdom. He hated cliches and frowned on us if we used them unless it was in a humorous way. He was brilliant at swearing and used to make my mother and later on, me laugh. He used English swear words. I never heard him use the F word. Leonard would ask mom: ” Why are you laughing when I am mad?”
EV: Did he encourage you to explore the world?
KW: My father gave me a lot of freedom and responsibility. Like most fathers, he was worried that I was too naive, and that the world would teach me some hard lessons. But, he had faith that I would survive. When I was planning a trip to Europe, he told me I was going the wrong way and I should be going to the South Pacific. As it turned out he was right.
EV: Did Hermosa serve as any kind of inspiration for the Grand Duchy of Fenwick — or was it Leichtenstein?
KW: I don’t think Hermosa Beach or Leichtenstein were his inspiration. I think that the Super Powers of the Cold War, English Politics, young Queen Elizabeth, the USA’s gracious rebuilding of Japan and Germany were more of an inspiration. I think he created Grand Fenwick to be his vehicle. It was more like an English Parliament democracy. I think Parliament still confers with the queen. I know the Prime Minister does. Remember he spent his youth — from 15 to 25 years old — on London’s Fleet Street learning the newspaper business.
Leonard Wibberley at his Hermosa Beach home during a 1975 Easy Reader interview. Photo
Did your dad ever comment on Walt Disney’s Mouse — or compare them in any comical way?
KW: No, wasn’t Disney a newspaper man? He did tell a story about Disney. I guess Walt Disney was having a bad day writing so he ripped a page out of his typewriter and threw it in the waste paper basket. And, a mouse jumped out and well… the rest is history.
EV: He also participated in the South Bay Nuclear Freeze initiative with your mom and I back in 1982. Redondo passed a supporting resolution. He seemed to have many ideas on how to make the world a better place. Did he talk about solving the world’s problems?
KW: Yes. He could see the big picture and he knew the way governments worked and how he thought they should work. He was always warning anyone who would listen about the potential power of the Chinese.
EV: Your brother, Cormac, fondly refers to him as “The Leonard!” Do you share that sense that he was one-of-a-kind?
KW: Of course, aren’t we all?”
Click here to read a 1975 interview with Leonard Wibberly B