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Indochina Dreaming
By ROGER COHEN
DALAT, VIETNAM €” In 1898, the governor general of Indochina, and future French president, Paul Doumer, set out his vision of a retreat in the highlands of Vietnam that would offer morose Gallic colonizers a respite from the sweltering coast and a taste of "la douce France."
What Doumer sought was a spot in the "high and salubrious plateaus upon which Europeans could find a vivifying and temperate climate." The result was this hill town €” or hill station as the British put it over in the subcontinent €” with its golf course, strawberries and a Riviera-style hotel.
A 1932 manual at the hotel, now the Dalat Palace, stipulated: "Domestics in contact with visitors must have a complete mastery of their trade, and speak sufficiently good French."
Mais oui.
It's hard to find anyone who speaks French in Vietnam these days €” the scooter-propelled youth prefer English €” and it's impossible, in this space, to chronicle the twists of Dalat's fate over the past century. Suffice to say Ho Chi Minh banned golf as bourgeois, only for the Communist-capitalist elite of today to consign that diktat to history's trash heap.
But, no, that doesn't quite suffice, for there's a story here of baroque intrigue in which colonial France meets Kingsburg, California. Allow me to explain.
The Dalat Palace, high-ceilinged and airy, today affects a kitschy, faux-French air with its Toulouse-Lautrec reproductions and claw-foot bath tubs. Its least pretentious corner is Larry's Bar, where a Hockney-like portrait of said Larry hangs, a man of indeterminate age and high forehead, in jeans and black T-shirt, gazing out through oversized shades.
The man in question is Larry Hillblom, who merited a brief obituary in The New York Times when his World War II-era seaplane disappeared in the Pacific Ocean off Saipan in 1995, but scarcely a line before or since. That's a pity: He merits a book.
Hillblom, a native of Kingsburg, is the "H" in DHL, the express-delivery company he co-founded in 1969 after noting, as an impoverished law student at the University of California, Berkeley, that he could make a buck ferrying legal documents in need of urgent execution from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
That trivial aperçu turned out, in the best American tradition, to be worth billions of dollars to him and other shareholders.
With DHL, Hillblom challenged the U.S. postal monopoly. Behind its rapid growth was his winning intuition about globalization. In fact, Hillblom never saw a regulation he didn't want to overturn or an oversight he didn't exploit. Anarchy did not so much touch as inhabit him.
After he retreated, for tax reasons, to Saipan in 1981, Hillblom took to flying without a license. A first crash, in 1991, survived with head injuries, led him to judge the chances of a second infinitesimal. Asked about the crash's consequences, he deadpanned:
"When you're not licensed, you're not supposed to fly. That's it. There is no follow-up!"
But life specializes in follow-ups €” even when, four years later, your plane disappears into the Pacific, your body is never found, your will leaves everything to a charitable foundation, and you have no wife or acknowledged offspring.
I'll get to that. But before his watery "Hasta la vista," Hillblom had found one more regulation to overturn here in Vietnam.
Arriving in a rundown Dalat in the early 1990s, with a U.S. embargo in place, he used an overseas holding company to invest over $100 million. When asked by the U.S. Justice Department what he was up to, he scrawled a four-letter expletive over the letter. The revamped hotel, now run by France's Accor Group, reopened just before his death.
A death that proved no more than a mise-en-scène: Hillblom has had an extravagant afterlife.
Its principal source proved to be his vigorous taste for young, often very young Asian women. Several €” from Micronesia, Vietnam, the Philippines €” stepped forward to say Hillblom fathered their children. A paternity suit ensued, involving stealthy quests for Hillblom's DNA €” his bathroom was mysteriously scoured with acid after his death and his every possession buried €” and years of transcontinental litigation.
"He cut a wide swathe through the Pacific," Barry Israel, a lawyer who represented Junior Larry Hillblom, the oldest of four children ultimately recognized, told me. Each of the penniless Asian kids received about $50 million, after tax, from the $600 million Hillblom estate.
Junior, however, is now suing Israel and other lawyers. He thinks they took too much. Money does drive people nuts.
Absent a book, Alexis Spraic, 27, an American moviemaker, has made an excellent, just-released documentary on Hillblom called "Shadow Billionaire." I asked her what she made of her subject: "Some people find him despicable, but I couldn't have made the movie if I did."
I'm with Spraic. Hillblom laughed at life, one protracted guffaw, an achievement that outweighs his flaws. I imagine him still laughing in death.
A portrait of Doumer, assassinated in 1932, should go up beside Hillblom's in Larry's Bar: Colonialist and Californian, governor and gambler, unlikely pair, bound by dreams and fate, even if they never got to play 18 holes together.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/op...ohen.html?_r=1
By ROGER COHEN
DALAT, VIETNAM €” In 1898, the governor general of Indochina, and future French president, Paul Doumer, set out his vision of a retreat in the highlands of Vietnam that would offer morose Gallic colonizers a respite from the sweltering coast and a taste of "la douce France."
What Doumer sought was a spot in the "high and salubrious plateaus upon which Europeans could find a vivifying and temperate climate." The result was this hill town €” or hill station as the British put it over in the subcontinent €” with its golf course, strawberries and a Riviera-style hotel.
A 1932 manual at the hotel, now the Dalat Palace, stipulated: "Domestics in contact with visitors must have a complete mastery of their trade, and speak sufficiently good French."
Mais oui.
It's hard to find anyone who speaks French in Vietnam these days €” the scooter-propelled youth prefer English €” and it's impossible, in this space, to chronicle the twists of Dalat's fate over the past century. Suffice to say Ho Chi Minh banned golf as bourgeois, only for the Communist-capitalist elite of today to consign that diktat to history's trash heap.
But, no, that doesn't quite suffice, for there's a story here of baroque intrigue in which colonial France meets Kingsburg, California. Allow me to explain.
The Dalat Palace, high-ceilinged and airy, today affects a kitschy, faux-French air with its Toulouse-Lautrec reproductions and claw-foot bath tubs. Its least pretentious corner is Larry's Bar, where a Hockney-like portrait of said Larry hangs, a man of indeterminate age and high forehead, in jeans and black T-shirt, gazing out through oversized shades.
The man in question is Larry Hillblom, who merited a brief obituary in The New York Times when his World War II-era seaplane disappeared in the Pacific Ocean off Saipan in 1995, but scarcely a line before or since. That's a pity: He merits a book.
Hillblom, a native of Kingsburg, is the "H" in DHL, the express-delivery company he co-founded in 1969 after noting, as an impoverished law student at the University of California, Berkeley, that he could make a buck ferrying legal documents in need of urgent execution from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
That trivial aperçu turned out, in the best American tradition, to be worth billions of dollars to him and other shareholders.
With DHL, Hillblom challenged the U.S. postal monopoly. Behind its rapid growth was his winning intuition about globalization. In fact, Hillblom never saw a regulation he didn't want to overturn or an oversight he didn't exploit. Anarchy did not so much touch as inhabit him.
After he retreated, for tax reasons, to Saipan in 1981, Hillblom took to flying without a license. A first crash, in 1991, survived with head injuries, led him to judge the chances of a second infinitesimal. Asked about the crash's consequences, he deadpanned:
"When you're not licensed, you're not supposed to fly. That's it. There is no follow-up!"
But life specializes in follow-ups €” even when, four years later, your plane disappears into the Pacific, your body is never found, your will leaves everything to a charitable foundation, and you have no wife or acknowledged offspring.
I'll get to that. But before his watery "Hasta la vista," Hillblom had found one more regulation to overturn here in Vietnam.
Arriving in a rundown Dalat in the early 1990s, with a U.S. embargo in place, he used an overseas holding company to invest over $100 million. When asked by the U.S. Justice Department what he was up to, he scrawled a four-letter expletive over the letter. The revamped hotel, now run by France's Accor Group, reopened just before his death.
A death that proved no more than a mise-en-scène: Hillblom has had an extravagant afterlife.
Its principal source proved to be his vigorous taste for young, often very young Asian women. Several €” from Micronesia, Vietnam, the Philippines €” stepped forward to say Hillblom fathered their children. A paternity suit ensued, involving stealthy quests for Hillblom's DNA €” his bathroom was mysteriously scoured with acid after his death and his every possession buried €” and years of transcontinental litigation.
"He cut a wide swathe through the Pacific," Barry Israel, a lawyer who represented Junior Larry Hillblom, the oldest of four children ultimately recognized, told me. Each of the penniless Asian kids received about $50 million, after tax, from the $600 million Hillblom estate.
Junior, however, is now suing Israel and other lawyers. He thinks they took too much. Money does drive people nuts.
Absent a book, Alexis Spraic, 27, an American moviemaker, has made an excellent, just-released documentary on Hillblom called "Shadow Billionaire." I asked her what she made of her subject: "Some people find him despicable, but I couldn't have made the movie if I did."
I'm with Spraic. Hillblom laughed at life, one protracted guffaw, an achievement that outweighs his flaws. I imagine him still laughing in death.
A portrait of Doumer, assassinated in 1932, should go up beside Hillblom's in Larry's Bar: Colonialist and Californian, governor and gambler, unlikely pair, bound by dreams and fate, even if they never got to play 18 holes together.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/op...ohen.html?_r=1
Quite a story! 
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