Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War

Posted: April 19th, 2022 | No Comments »

Though Deborah Cohen’s Last Call at the Hotel Imperial is not specifically about China, the war in Asia, the attacks on China do get a bunch of mentions plus, most interestingly a host of characters who at one time or another interacted, visited or commented upon China do feature.

VIncent Sheean, John and Francis Gunther, Raina and Bill Prohme, Red Knickerbocker, the ill-fated Gareth Jones gets a mention as does Emily Hahn. Nothing really new about them and not focussing on their China experiences (if you want more of that see my book Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao) but Cohen does nicely put them in context as a group sharing their lives and experiences and has room to talk about their non-China lives in much more detail than I was able to.

They were an astonishing group: glamorous, gutsy, and irreverent to the bone. As cub reporters in the 1920s, they roamed across a war-ravaged world, sometimes perched atop mules on wooden saddles, sometimes gliding through countries in the splendor of a first-class sleeper car. While empires collapsed and fledgling democracies faltered, they chased deposed empresses, international financiers and Balkan gunrunners, then knocked back doubles late into the night.

Last Call at the Hotel Imperial is the extraordinary story of John Gunther, H.R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson: a close-knit band of wildly famous American reporters who, in the run-up to World War II, took on dictators and rewrote the rules of modern journalism.

In those tumultuous years, they landed exclusive interviews with Hitler, Franco and Mussolini who sought to persuade them of fascism’s inevitable triumph. Nehru and Gandhi also courted them, seeking American allies against British imperialism. Churchill, for his part, saw them as his best shot at convincing a reluctant America to join the war against Hitler. They grabbed front pages across the world, causing Goebbels to rage about ‘international liars and counterfeiters.’

Alongside these backstage glimpses into the halls of power, they left another set of records – equally incredible. In their private lives, Gunther, Knickerbocker, Sheean and Thompson committed themselves to the cause of freedom: fiercely and with all its hazards. They argued about love, war, sex, death and everything in between, and they wrote it all down. The fault lines that ran through a crumbling world, they would find, ran through their own marriages and friendships, too.

Told with the immediacy of a conversation overheard, this revelatory book captures how the global upheavals of the twentieth century felt to live through up close.

---