She was not a party girl. And her husband made the mistake of trying to turn her into one. So I guess you could say that she got her own back.
The Thalia Massie affair, and the subsequent trials, were as scandalous in 1930s America as the kidnapping of Lindbergh’s son. A heady cocktail of rape, racism, lynching, and quasi-judicial pardoning – it all seems still very much of our era. And the fact that it all happened in Hawaii bestows on these unforgotten events the aura of a paradise lost.
“Something terrible has happened,” as Thalia Massie said; in fact, several kinds of something, but it has never been harder to separate the signal from the noise.
What we know for sure is on the night of 12 September 1931, Thalia Massie did not want to go and hang out at the raucous Ala Wai Inn in Honolulu with her husband and his crew. Lieutenant Thomas Hedges Massie, a submariner in the US Navy based in Pearl Harbour, was not to be easily put off' he twisted her arm and she went – albeit with a bad grace, and determined not to enjoy herself. Which she didn’t.
If he had just let her be at their bungalow on Kahawai Street, none of this would have happened. All human misfortune stems from our inability to remain at rest in a room, as Pascal pointed out, or – he might have added – other people’s inability to let us remain at rest. It seems as if we would rather see good people die than tolerate a party pooper. She had recently started taking classes at the University of Hawaii, but this night would see the end of her intellectual aspirations.
The scene at the Ala Wai Inn is also clear. Lieutenant Massie is downstairs, carousing with his Navy buddies. Thalia Massie is upstairs: sulking, stewing, steaming. She may well be wondering why in heaven’s name she got married at the age of 16 – she is now aged 20 – to her diminutive would-be action hero husband.
They were clearly not suited. She was all about thinking or being; he was all about doing, or over-doing. One other incident stands out in my mind, involving a Lieutenant Ralph Stogsdall, popularly known as “Moose”. For one thing, he was a big guy: several inches over six feet tall, with broad shoulders to match. He towered over Lieutenant Massie, for example. But he was upstairs, towering over Thalia.
Perhaps he thought she needed a big guy. He must have made a pass at her, because she was suddenly slapping him around the face and saying to anyone who would listen that he was “no gentleman”.
Sometime before midnight, Thalia Massie leaves the Ala Wai Inn. Alone. She is sick of her husband and the whole US Navy, and stomps off into the night. An hour later, she is picked up by the kindly Eustace Bellinger, stumbling along the side of the road, in a state of “disarray”. She says she has been beaten up by “Hawaiians” and dumped, and asks to be taken back to her house.
When her husband finally returns, she tells him she was not only beaten but raped too – repeatedly, in the area known as Ala Moana, by a group of Hawaiian men. She doesn’t know what they looked like: it was too dark, and no, she didn’t know the number plate of their car either.
The police pick up a carload of likely lads: Hawaiian and Asian. Some of them have criminal records already. One of them, Joe Kahahawai, a local boxer of some eminence, had on the same night punched a local woman in what appears to have been a fit of road rage. They are arrested, held in detention, and paraded before Thalia Massie.
Fairly soon, she is convinced that they had done it and also remembers the number plate, which happened to coincide with the number plate of the car belonging to said Hawaiians – that had just been mentioned to her.
