Julia Flynn Siler

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Remembering a Hawaiian Queen

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A few weeks ago, I was asked by a producer at Wondery if I’d be interested in being interviewed for the podcast American History Tellers about Hawaii’s last queen. I hesitated at first because my book on Hawaii had been published more than a decade ago. Agreeing to the interview would mean that I’d have to give myself a crash refresher course on my own book.

Since I’d never fully listened to the audio version of Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure, I dove into it to prepare for the interview. Produced by Brilliance Audio and narrated beautifully by Joyce Bean, who mastered the Hawaiian names and words, I felt as if I was reading someone else’s book. It was  a joy to have a voice actor read it to me.

Working with the producers Lushik Lotus Lee and Polly Stryker from Wondery was a pleasure. We ended up doing two takes of the interview, in large part because I wasn’t as relaxed as I might have been during the first one. When Polly made the trek to my house to re-tape it a second time, the interview flowed more smoothly. Not to mention that Polly brought me a gift of homemade marmalade as a gift!

A few days later, Polly shared with me an article she’d found from Hawai’i Magazine titled “5 Beautiful Versions of ‘Aloha Oe,’ Queen Lili’uokalani’s Most Famous Song.” To my surprise, the magazine had found versions of Aloha Oe covered by Israel “Iz” Kamakawiwoole, Tia Carrere, slack key master George Kahumoku Jr, and Amy Hanaiali’I – but also a haunting version by Johnny Cash.

American History Teller’s host, Lindsay Graham, asked me at the end of our interview what I thought Queen Lili’uokalani’s most powerful legacy might be. She sat on the throne for a brief period – from 1891 to 1893. Yet the more than one hundred songs she composed are still performed today. To many people, she is remembered as much as a composer as a queen.

Honoring Hawaii’s Queen

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At a time when statues are toppling across the nation, one work of public art stands tall.

It is the eight-foot-tall bronze of Hawaii’s Queen Lili’uokalani, who faces the state Capitol in Honolulu. This  beautifully rendered artwork, by the American realist sculptor Marianna Pineda,  is even more powerful today than it was when it was erected in the 1980s.

If anything, this regal public monument become even more beloved over time. To understand why, watch this PBS American Masters short documentary on the Queen that’s just been released. It’s a wonderful and very moving.

Queen Lili’uokalani ruled the independent Kingdom of Hawaii for two years in the last decade of the nineteenth century. In 1893, a group of local businessmen, aided by U.S. Marines, overthrew her. A few years later, the U.S. annexed Hawaii as a territory.

I wrote about the Queen and her overthrow in Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure. I visited the statue many times during my research trips to Honolulu. I was also the historian interviewed for the recent PBS American Masters documentary.

The last time I visited the statue of Queen Lili’uokalani was at opening day of Hawaii’s legislative session in January of 2020. People had draped multiple strands of delicate pink flower lei around the statue’s neck to honor her memory.

Facing the Capitol with her right hand outstretched, the statue seems to say “I surrendered my authority to the United States to avoid bloodshed, but I am with you,” as Richard Rodrigues, community relations specialist in the Hawaii governor’s office, suggests.

In her left hand, the Queen’s statue holds three documents — Hawaii’s Constitution; the Kumulipo, Hawaii’s creation story; and ‘Aloha Oe,’ the most famous of the more than 150 songs and chants that she composed.

It is as if the artist meant the statue to remind today’s legislators that “As you shape Hawaii’s future, remember its history, values and traditions,” Rodrigues adds. The Queen is a powerful and inspiring reminder of the struggles that have shaped our nation. You can watch the PBS documentary here.

Book group pick: Lost Kingdom is now out in paperback!

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Mahalo nui loa –  Hawaiian for thank you very much – to the dozens of book groups I’ve spoken with from around the country that have picked Lost Kingdom as their monthly or quarterly read. I’ve met some of these groups in person and have skyped with some and phoned in to others. It’s been a wonderful experience and now that Lost Kingdom is just out in paperback, I hope to meet with even more groups (including a wonderful group in Kentfield, Ca. that invited me to join them to discuss the book over a feast of kalua pig, poi, and coconut layer cake — so ono!)

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I’m truly grateful to all of you – from Liz Epstein’s Literary Masters groups (10 book groups in the San Francisco Bay Area) to the marvelous ladies of the Hawaiian Historical Society, to the book group that met in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights and included descendants of the Dillingham family as well as an astonishing pineapple cake, to Catherine Hartman’s lovely group of Stanford alum and other book-loving friends in Chicago to Jason Poole (The Accidental Hawaiian Crooner) who also organizes a reading group in Pittsburgh. I’m especially grateful to Julie Robinson of Literary Affairs, who organizes book events and moderates book groups in Beverly Hills and the Los Angeles area, for choosing Lost Kingdom as one of her recommended reads.

Here are some questions to discuss on Lost Kingdom that come from Liz Epstein at Literary Masters and adapted by Beth Baily Gates, who’s been running the Fairfax Public Library’s book group for nearly a decade. Hope they’re helpful and if you have other questions, I’d be delighted to skype or phone into your book group for a chat if my schedule permits: here’s the link to request me.

 

Points to Ponder for Lost Kingdom

  • Whose story is Lost Kingdom and who should be telling it? Do you think Julia Flynn Siler, a mainland writer, does a good job of showing all sides of this story about nineteenth century Hawaii?  Do you think it is an important story?
  • Is there a hero/heroine or villain/villainess in this story?
  • How do you feel about Hawai’i’s last ruling queen, Lili’uokalani?  Could she have done anything to alter the course of historical events?  Should she have?  Do you consider her a tragic figure?
  • How responsible was King David Kalakaua for the course of events?
  • How do you feel about the way the United States handled the annexation of Hawaii?  Grover Cleveland claimed “Hawaii is ours…as I contemplate the means used to complete the outrage, I am ashamed of the whole affair.”  Do you agree/ disagree with him?
  • How do you feel about the way the Hawaiians handled the annexation of Hawaii?  Did you get a good sense from the book as to how and why they behaved as they did?
  • What surprised you about Claus Spreckels?  What about Dole?  Are there other characters in the book that you feel played a pivotal role and you’d like to know more about them?
  • What were the motives of the original missionaries in coming to Hawaii, and then how do you feel about their descendents?  Was everyone generally well-intentioned, or was self-interest paramount?
  • What is the relevance of this history for us today?
  • Can you imagine an alternate history?  Where would Hawaii be today if the US hadn’t annexed it?  Where would the US be today without Hawaii?
  • This was our non-fiction selection for the season.  Do you think this particular history of Hawaii could be better told as ‘historical fiction’?

 

 

Hau’oli Lānui from San Francisco….

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My husband and I went to several holiday parties this year and perhaps the most heartfelt took place in early December, at the Japanese Cultural and Community Center in San Francisco.

We were invited to the J-Town hui’s annual holiday show and potluck. The hui (Hawaiian for a club or association) was made up of students in the music and vocal classes led by a beloved and longtime Hawaiian music teacher in the city named Carlton Ka’ala Carmack. There were ukeleles, hula performances, and mountains of delicious food. As the island saying goes, it was real ono!

Julia Flynn Siler, author of “Lost Kingdom” (left) and Carlton  Ka’ala Carmack, Hawaiian music teacher (right) in Dec. 2012

Ka’ala grew up on Oahu and performed in a play written by John Dominis Holt, whose 1964 essay “On Being Hawaiian” helped spark  the Hawaiian Renaissance movement. Also known as Dee, Ka’ala moved to San Francisco in 1978 and played a key role in educating a new generation of students in the Bay Area on the subtleties of Hawaiian music.

An ethno-musicologist who speaks six languages and a gifted singer and musician, Ka’ala’s done everything from serving as an artist-in-residence for the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University to teaching a pilot course in Pacific Islander Studies at San Francisco State University.

For more than a decade, Ka’ala directed the J-Town Hui, a well-loved ukulele and vocal ensemble based out of the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California (JNCCNC) where he teaches ukulele classes and a course called “Hawaiian Expressive Singing.”

Members of the J-Town Hui performed at Roy and Kathy Sakuma’s  41st Ukelele Festival in Honolulu in July of 2011 and at the Maui Ukelele Festival in Kahului, Hawai’i last fall.

I got to know Ka’ala when he very kindly agreed to play some of Queen Lili’uokalani’s songs at a gathering for the launch of my book, Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure, earlier this year.

After that, we did a number of events together – including appearing on KQED’s Forum show with Michael Krasny, the Foothill College Authors Series in Silicon Valley for Pacific Islander month, and as keynoters at this year’s Hawaii Book and Music Festival in May.

If you’d like to hear Ka’ala, he composed and performed the music for the recently released documentary, “Towards Living Pono,” produced by the award-winning filmmaker, Rick Bacigalupi. (Pono is a Hawaiian word with many meanings, including goodness, uprightness, morality.) You can also watch him perform Queen Lili’uokalani’s Aloha Oe here.

Patrick Makuakane, the hulu kumu of San Francisco’s well known Na Lei Hulu troupe was also at the party to pay his respects to Ka’ala. He was one of a large number of people who waited in line to greet and thank him.

The afternoon of ukulele playing, hula dancing, singing, and a lot of hugging was made even more poignant because it was also a goodbye party for Ka’ala, who is taking a job teaching chorus, voice, and an introduction to Hawaiian music at the Windward Community College on Oahu starting this spring.

Hau’oli Lānui (happy holidays in Hawaiian) and aloha, Ka’ala. See you soon in the islands!

Carlton Ka’ala Cormack (left) and Julia Flynn Siler (right) at the Hawaii Book and Music Festival in May, 2012

 

Call Me Ishmael: Herman Melville and the San Francisco Opera

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It is one of the most memorable first sentences of a novel ever written. With three simple words, it draws us into the story, lets us know who the narrator is, and hints at dramatic transformations to come.

This opening line – Call me Ishmael – was written by Herman Melville in his epic about Captain Ahab’s quest to kill the white whale Moby Dick. One of the surprises of the San Francisco Opera’s current production of Moby Dick is that this line is used in a different way in the story – to very good effect. I won’t spoil the pleasure in telling you how, but would urge you to see this wonderful production  yourself.

The cast of San Francisco Opera’s performance of Moby Dick Photo by Corey Weaver.

Born in New York City in 1819, Melville spent four years during his twenties (1841-1845) working on whaling ships. He began as a cabin boy on a whaler  heading from Massachusetts, around Cape Horn, to the Pacific. He lived amongst the Typee, took part in a mutiny, and worked for a time as a pin setter in a bowling alley in Honolulu.

Melville was one of the more interesting characters to land in Hawaii during the first half of the nineteenth century, when the whaling industry was at its height. His impressions from that time are notable for their bite: he was no fan of the Christians who came from Massachusetts and other eastern states to spread the word of God to the native Hawaiians.

Unimpressed with the quality of the Westerners who became courtiers to King Kamehameha III, he described them in a footnote to his first novel, Typee, as “a junta of ignorant and designing Methodist elders in the council of a half civilized king ruling with absolute sway over a nation just poised between barbarism and civilization.”

Aside from getting their religion wrong – the missionaries who came to Hawaii were mostly Congregationalists, not Methodists – and insulting Hawaii’s king, Melville did capture the sense of change sweeping over the kingdom. Since the Missionaries first arrived in Hawaii in 1820, they’d given the Hawaiians, whose culture up until then had been oral, an alphabet and printing presses. By the 1840s, a flowering of literacy was taking place in Hawaii.

Jonathan Lemalu (Queequeg) and Stephen Costello (Greenhorn) in SF Opera’s Moby Dick. Photo by Cory Weaver.

Watching the opera of Moby Dick last week, I couldn’t help but think about Melville, who makes a cameo appearance in my history of Hawaii, Lost Kingdom. As someone who loves language, I was awed by the work of Gene Scheer in turning his sprawling, 800 or so page opus, into the 60-page libretto for the opera Moby Dick.

In the novel, Ishmael narrates the story – looking back in time. Instead, Scheer set all the action on the whaling ship.  The narrator who begins with the famous line Call Me Ishmael is gone – at least in the role as the person telling the story.

Jane Ganahl, Litquake’s co-founder, profiled Scheer in the opera’s program notes. She also helped organize a Litquake event with the librettist on October 8th that I truly wish I could have attended. He told her that one of the key challenges in adapting a book into another medium is that “people don’t want to see people on stage telling the story, they want to be shown the story. I struggled with how to get at the truth of the story, until I had a breakthrough, and realized I should have the story unfold through the eyes of Greenhorn, the only person who had never been on a whaling ship. His is a transformative journey.” (Greenhorn is the character in the photo smoking a pipe — and baritone Jonathan Lemalu was wonderful as Queequeg.)

Perhaps the most powerful magic for me in the opera was Scheer’s use of Melville’s language. Scheer estimated that at least half the libretto was taken directly from the book. Set to music and sung, the words were more like poetry than prose.  Melville’s words set to Jake Heggie’s music was powerful and profoundly moving.

Jay Hunter Morris (Captain Ahab). Photo by Cory Weaver.

 

The Queen and the Clevelands (Grover and George…)

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September 2 is the birthday of Hawai’i’s last reigning monarch, Lili’uokalani. Born in a grass house in 1838 and adopted by Hawai’i’s ruling dynasty, the infant girl who would become Hawai’i’s last queen began her tumultuous life 174 years ago at the base of an dormant volcano in Honolulu.

Queen Lili’uokalani, Hawai’i State Archives

For the past several years, historians, Hawaiian cultural practitioners, and others who keep Lili’uokalaini’s memory alive, have gathered at the grounds of ‘Iolani Palace on her birthday to lead walking historical walking tours in an event called Mai Poina (Don’t Forget.) The tour on her birthday sold out but there are still a few spots left this coming weekend, September 7-9.

This year’s Mai Poina is set to be a very unusual one. According to a story in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, President Grover Cleveland’s grandson, George Cleveland, visited Hawaii this past weekend to celebrate Lili‘uokalani’s birthday. As part of that trip, he planned to take part in the Mai Poina re-enactment of the overthrow on the palace grounds.

Grover Cleveland, who was the newly elected Democratic president at the time of the overthrow, had doubts about what had happened over those four days in 1893 in the far-away independent kingdom of Hawai’i.

He hastily withdrew the Hawaiian annexation treaty, which his successor, Republican President Harrison, had hoped to push through before leaving office and appointed a special commissioner to investigate the matter that a New York Times headline decried as the “Political Crime of the Century.”

New York Times coverage of the overthrow  in 1893

But partisan politics and heavy lobbying on the part of pro-annexation forces bogged down the question of restoring Liliuokalani to the throne.  Not long after Cleveland’s successor Republican William McKinley took office, the Spanish-American war broke out – making Hawaii suddenly enormously valuable to the war effort as a vital refueling station between North America and Asia.  Hawaii was quickly annexed by a joint resolution of Congress — not a vote — in 1898.

U.S. President Grover Cleveland

Upon hearing that news, Cleveland, who had retired to Princeton, New Jersey, spoke eloquently for those who had opposed annexation. “Hawaii is ours….as I contemplate the means used to complete the outrage, I am ashamed of the whole affair.”

With those words, Cleveland came to be revered by Hawaiians, some of whom continue to mourn the loss of their nation to this day. Indeed, to this day, Cleveland’s gravestone in Princeton is festooned with shell and flower lei in honor of the stance he took. My friend and colleague Silvia Ascarelli, who I know from our days together in the London bureau of the Wall Street Journal, took this photo and several others and sent them to me.

 

President Grover Cleveland’s headstone in Princeton, New Jersey, festooned with lei, courtesy of Silvia Ascarelli

 

The family tradition, it seems, is continuing. The Star-Advertiser reports that reports that George Cleveland has been working closely with Hawai‘i’s Pacific Justice & Reconciliation Center’s Cleveland-Lili‘uokalani Education Project. According to the Associated Press, which distributed the Star-Advertiser’s story, “(George Cleveland) says he’s occasionally the target of criticism for his partnership with the center but he believes there is some kind reparation due for the overthrow.”

I wish I could attend today’s re-enactment, but I was lucky enough to be in Honolulu during one of these gatherings two years ago. The walking tour was fascinating, but best of all was the opportunity to engage with University of Hawaii professors as well as a staffer from the Mission Houses Museum and others on a moment in history that continues to puzzle, anger, and grip so many people.

Mai Poina is co-sponsored by the Hawai‘i Council for the Humanities and the University of Hawai‘i’s Center for Biographical Research. It covers the four days in January 1893, leading up to the overthrow of the sovereign kingdom of Hawai‘i. By moving from station to station on the palace grounds, the tour covers many of the places where the overthrow occurred.

On the year I took the tour, the Center for Biographical Research’s director Craig Howes, dressed in period costume, playing the role of a Greek businessman commenting on the tense political environment. His scene took place at King Kalākaua’s Coronation Pavilion on the palace grounds. One of my favorite memories of that evening was of Craig delivering his lines at dusk on the steps of the pavilion, It turns out he’s an amateur actor in his spare time, and was very good in his role!

Craig Howes in period dress

“The Wave” by Susan Casey

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The ancient Polynesians felt profound respect for the power of the sea. Their custom was to carry ti leafs with them when they went on risky journeys. As Susan Casey reports in her masterful book, The Wave, California-born but Hawaii-bred surfing legend Laird Hamilton, perhaps superstitiously, always carries a ti leaf along with him as he hunts down the world’s monster waves. “You take the leaf out,” Hamilton told her, “and the leaf brings you home.” So far it’s worked for him.

The Wave is one of the most suspenseful and fascinating works of narrative nonfiction that I’ve read in a long time. Casey, whose first bestseller was about Great White Sharks, weaves together three different story lines to explore what she calls “the freaks, rogues, and giants of the oceans.”  She visits the scientists who are tracking and trying to predict and understand these giants. She spends time with world-class surfers and windsurfers like Laird Hamilton, Darrick Doerner, Brett Lickle, and Dave Kalama – penetrating an extreme subculture to the point of being invited by Hamilton to surf the giant wave off of Haiku on Maui’s north shore, known as Pe’ahi or “Jaws” with him on a Jet Ski. And she also seeks out the mariners – the ship captains and crewmen aboard ships – that have come face-to-face with these terrifying, killer waves.

Part of the pleasure for me in reading “The Wave” was that Casey spent much of her time reporting on the north shore of Maui, a place I’ve visited several times over the past year. Here’s her marvelous description of the former sugar plantation town of Paia, where

      “…someone had affixed another sign: “Please Don’t Feed the Hippies.” The edict was delightfully impossible to obey, as everyone in Paia had a touch of hippie soul; it was only a matter of degree. No one cared about your resume in Paia, or that you hadn’t brushed your hair all the way through, or that your truck had seen better days. In the town’s hub, a ramshackle grocery store called Mana Foods, yoga instructors shopped alongside heavily pierced drifters, and pot farmers mingled with supermodels, and Brazilian kitesurfers lined up at the deli counter behind Buddhist priests, and three-hundred-pound Samoan construction workers jostled in the aisles with movie stars…”

There are many such nuggets in “The Wave” and she’s equally gifted at describing places and people. But the emotional heart of her book for me, was her nuanced profile of Laird Hamilton, and his tight team of surfers from Maui’s North Shore who have each other’s backs.  Here’s her description of Hamilton’s genius as a surfer:

“Not only did he ride waves that others considered unrideable, at Jaws and elsewhere, but he did it with a trademark intensity, positioning himself deeper in the pit, carving bottom turns that would cause a lesser set of legs to crumple, rocketing up and down the face, and playing chicken with the lip as it hovered overhead, poised to release a hundred thousand tons of angry water. He seemed to know exactly what the ocean was going to do, and to stay a split second ahead of it.”

Laird Hamilton

 

Casey propelled me through her narrative, including the sections on wave science and the math and physics behind it. But the risks that Casey’s characters were taking was the book’s jet fuel. Would Laird (called Larry by his friends) find a bigger wave? Who would die? Who would get crushed by the insane power and unpredictability of these waves? As someone who studies narrative nonfiction, I was struck by Casey’s skill at making me care about the stakes involved – not just human lives, but the far larger picture of a period of rising seas and steadily bigger waves as a result of climate change.

There are other reasons why I this book captured my imagination. There’s a power in Hawaii that I’ve come to sense – and fear –more and more each time I’ve visited. On my recent stay in Hana on Maui’s windward side, I came away with renewed respect and terror for the ocean. We’d brushed against it ever so slightly, after paddling sea kayaks from Hana Bay to Red Sand Beach in heavy surf. It’s not often that I truly get scared, but that’s what I felt when faced with swells approaching perhaps ten or twelve feet

Consider, then, the rush of adrenalin and fear that accompanies fifty-foot waves – or a hundred foot monsters – or even a hundred and twenty foot behemoths. Then, take one imaginative step further and join writer Susan Casey in not only tracking down the big-wave surfers who hunt down these terrifying beasts on Jet-Skis in California, Mexico, South Africa, and Hawaii – but even has the courage to join them out on those seas (most terrifyingly, on the back of Laird Hamilton’s Jet Ski as he confronts Jaws.)

Did I love this book so much because I’m afraid of the ocean and, thus, found it fascinating to read about people who overcome their fear? That could help partly explain it. In terms of Casey’s ability to talk to such a wide range of people and truly be invited into their worlds, as a reporter, I admire what she did. I’d love to meet her myself some day and ask her more about how she reported this book. But the very best part of The Wave for me was at the very end, as a typhoon approached Maui’s north shore in late 2009 and Hamilton flies from his home on Kaui to ride his board, the Green Meanie, on Jaws. I won’t spoil the suspense by telling you what happens, but it’s beautiful.

A footnote: Casey’s book has inspired me to take a tiny first step of my own towards not fearing the ocean so much. Our local community college has a course called “Surfing 101,” which takes place out at Stinson Beach, just north of San Francisco. I’m signing up for it today but am wondering – can I find a ti leaf to carry with me?

Lunching with One of Hawaii’s Real ‘Descendants’

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By Julia Flynn Siler, first published in the Wall Street Journal‘s Speakeasy blog on 3/12/2012

Julia Flynn Siler and Her Royal Highness Princess Abigail Kawananakoa.

A few days before heading to Honolulu on book tour for “Lost Kingdom,” I got a phone call from the assistant to Her Royal Highness Princess Abigail Kawananakoa, the woman who is the most direct descendant of the last queen of Hawaii. If the monarchy had not been overthrown in 1893, Princess Abigail today might well have become Hawaii’s queen.

I’d interviewed Princess Abigail by phone for a page one story I’d written last year for the Wall Street Journal. The story was about how the Friends of Iolani Palace, a group of volunteers founded by Princess Abigail’s mother, had been on a decades-long search to recover lost furniture and artifacts that disappeared in the months and years after a small group of businessmen deposed Queen Liliuokalani at the end of the nineteenth century.

While I’d visited Iolani Palace many times in the course of researching Lost Kingdom (the palace is on the same grounds as the Hawaii State Archives) I had not met Princess Abigail. Known by her Hawaiian name “Kekau” (pronounced kay-kow) the Princess is in her eighties and divides her time between homes in Honolulu and California. The last time a journalist had interviewed or spent any time with the Princess was for a Life magazine profile of her in 1998.

I was thrilled – and also a little terrified – when her longtime assistant, Maggi Parker, invited me to join the Princess for lunch at the Mariposa, the restaurant in the Nieman Marcus at Honolulu’s Ala Moana shopping center. What would I wear? What gifts should I bring? How should I address her? I wasn’t such a hard-bitten reporter that I didn’t fret over the etiquette required – even though our luncheon was taking place not at a palace, but at an all-American shopping mall.

I chose a conservative light -grey pants suit, which turned out to be a good pick for the occasion. I’d raced to a nearby stationery store before the lunch to buy a bright orange gift bag and pink tissue to wrap a bottle of Robert Mondavi cabernet I’d brought her from California, as well as a signed copy of my first book, “The House of Mondavi.”

As I rode the escalator up several floors to the restaurant, past hundreds of gold-colored butterflies suspended from the ceiling, I was damp with perspiration and worried I’d be late. As it turned out, I arrived before almost everyone else. The table was still being decorated with cuttings of delicate black-stemmed ferns – Queen’s Ferns, as it turned out —  from a guest’s garden, along with fuschia-colored orchid lei.

We sipped on blood-orange spritzers as we waited for the Princess’s chauffeur, driving her deep blue Rolls Royce, to drop her off. When she arrived, a ripple of excitement passed through the restaurant, as the manager and staff made a fuss over her, escorting an elegant octogenarian with carefully coiffed blonde hair who was wearing a flowing, cream and white silk pants suit to our long table. We sat with our backs to the wall where a large mural portrayed of hula dancers in grass skirts were dancing on a beach behind us. (The Princess later commented that the dancers didn’t look particularly Hawaiian to her.) Our view through the Mariposa’s windows was of the vast Pacific.

Fox Searchlight
George Clooney as Matt King and Shailene Woodley as Alexandra in “The Descendants.”

The occasion, as it turned out, was a celebration of her assistant Maggi’s birthday, which she had modestly forgotten to mention to me on the phone. Luckily, I’d brought her a small gift too. But Maggi had very kindly seated me next to the Princess, where I had the treat of hearing about her days as a boarder at Notre Dame High School in Belmont, Ca., a Catholic girls’ school outside of San Francisco.

The Princess was not entirely pleased by the service at the Mariposa: more than once, she extended her index finger at the overworked waitress, arched her eyebrows, and commanded her to bring drinks and menus to the table right now! I was secretly pleased to see that the Princess acted like, well, a princess. Later, Maggi explained to me that the Princess typically demanded excellent service and, in turn, was known for tipping generously.

Before the slices of Valharona chocolate cake arrived, Maggi’s friend Ann McCormack gave us a nice surprise. In the 1950s and 1960s, Ann had sung in the Honolulu nightclub that she had owned with her husband and toured with Frank Sinatra as his opening act in Las Vegas and elsewhere. At lunch, she sang a special birthday song for her long-time friend.

Ann and Maggi also swapped stories of appearing in small roles in the original “Hawaii Five-0″ and the movie “Hawaii,” based on James Michener’s 1959 novel. Ann and Maggi, it seems, were quite the girls-about-town in Honolulu during the 1950s and 60s. The funniest story involved Maggie once appearing onstage at the nightclub wearing a Playboy bunny’s outfit as a gag, and they reminisced over the filming of Hawaii, including one of the scenes shot at the Princess’s Honolulu home.

What a treat for me – and a big mahalo (thank you in Hawaiian) to Maggi for including me at such a lovely luncheon. After having spent the past four years digging through archives to write a book about the Princess’s family (she is the great-grand niece of King David Kalakaua and Queen Kapi’olani.) I was deeply honored by their interest in my book.

I couldn’t resist asking Kekau (yes, she invited me to call her that) whether she’d seen “The Descendants,” the Oscar-nominated movie starring George Clooney which is based on the novel by local writer Kaui Hart Hemmings (It’s out on DVD on March 13). She hadn’t – and while I offered to take her to the movies to see it – she was decidedly cool to the idea. It seemed that she hadn’t been to a commercial movie theater to see a film in a very long time.

To deepen the mystery, however, one of the other guests, Teri Stroud, seated to the other side of the Princess, leaned towards me. In a conspiratorial whisper, explained that the Princess was the real descendant  – in other words, the person upon whom the George Clooney character, Matt King, in “The Descendants” was based. In Kaui’s novel, Matt King was descended from Hawaiian royalty on one side and white sugar plantation owners on the other. The Clooney character describes himself as looking like a haole – the Hawaiian word for a foreigner, but generally used to describe a white person – even though he is part-Hawaiian.

Princess Abigail, likewise, does not resemble what  some think Hawaiian princess would look like. She told me at lunch that when she first arrived at her boarding school in California, she overheard some girls talking about her and wondering how fat and how dark-skinned she would be – not realizing they were being overheard. For the record, the Princess is light-skinned and slender with blue eyes. Like Matt King, she could easily be mistaken for a haole herself.

And like the Matt King character,  Princess Abigail is a member of a powerful family – the Campbells – which held many of their assets in a trust. Princess Abigail played a crucial role in 2007 in deciding what should happen to the Campbell Estate when it ran into a Hawaiian law, the rule against perpetuities, requiring it to wind down twenty years after the last death of the direct descendants who had been alive at the time of the trust’s creation.

The thirty beneficiaries of the trust are descended from James Campbell, an Irishman who immigrated to the islands in the mid-nineteenth century and who built his fortune as a partner in a Maui sugar plantation. According to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, she was the largest beneficiary of the trust and her proceeds from it were close to a quarter of a billion dollars. She has used some of that wealth to help fund the Abigail K. Kawananakoa Foundation to support the preservation of Hawaiian culture.

That said, “The Descendants” author Hart Hemmings told me she’d based her fictional characters on a number of families and family trusts in the news at time she wrote her book – not just the Campbells. Another family that went through similar experiences were the Wilcoxes (whom the author Hart Hemmings is related to) according to friends that I met later in my trip and had drinks with at the Outrigger Canoe Club, one of the settings of Hart Hemmings’ novel. While the novel was based on an amalgam of powerful local families, it was still a great honor to meet Princess Abigail, who was born long before Hawaii became the 50th State and who’d lived through its tumultuous history.

How often, after all, does one have the chance to meet true American royalty?

Julia Flynn Siler is the bestselling author of “Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure,” published by the Atlantic Monthly Press. For more information, please visit www.juliaflynnsiler.com

Talking Story at the Outrigger Canoe Club

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On my last night in Honolulu on tour for my new book, Lost Kingdom, I was invited for drinks at the Outrigger Canoe Club, which sits at the far end of Waikiki Beach, in the shadow of Diamond Head. The club is a key setting for the novel, The Descendants, which is now an Oscar-winning film starring George Clooney.

The Outrigger is a small, private club with an outsized history in Hawaii. Founded in 1908, it is the place where legendary surfer Duke Paoa Kahanamoku, a five-time Olympics medalist who competed as a swimmer and water polo player for the U.S. in the 1912, 1920, 1924, and 1932 games. A photo of Duke is mounted on the wood-paneled wall as you enter the dining room, with the words underneath it, “Ambassador of Aloha.”

Duke Paoa Kahanamoku on the beach in front of the Outrigger Canoe Club

Our host for drinks that evening was Puchi Romig, the outgoing chairman of the Friends of Iolani Palace, the group that supports the National Historic Monument through fund-raising and other activities. The highlight of her tenure may well have been last fall’s Renaissance Ball – the first formal ball at the palace in more than a decade.

One of the guests that joined us that evening at the Outrigger was Marvin “Puakea” Nogelmeier from the University of Hawaii’s Manoa campus, who is one of the world’s leading experts on the Hawaiian language. I’d had the opportunity to profile Puakea in a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal and had come to like and admire him very much. He has volunteered as a docent at the Palace since the mid-1980s.

Puakea, who had just returned from a trip to New Zealand, had brought with him a copy of his new book, Mai Pa’a I Ka Leo, which is about translating Hawaiian-language newspapers from the nineteenth century into English. He’s now deeply involved in a project to do just that – with some 2,500 volunteers pulling together to unlock this potentially huge treasure chest of information, which offers a much deeper look into the Hawaiian perspective from the times than we have today. Even non-Hawaiian speakers can help out: for more information, please visit the Awaiaulu project’s website.

Puakea had helped me better understand some of the subtleties of the Hawaiian language and had read and commented on the Note on Language that is at the end of Lost Kingdom. He has spent decades studying Hawaiian culture, language and history and, as a relative newcomer, I was grateful for his help, though I recognize that Lost Kingdom, as a popular history, could have benefited from using even more of the new Hawaiian language materials that he and other scholars are uncovering every day.

Puchi’s other guest was another true descendant, in her own way similar to Princess Abigail Kawananakoa, with whom I’d had lunch when I first arrived. She was Robin Midkiff, a Punahou and Stanford graduate who was a descendant of one of the most prominent missionary families. She is related to Juliette and Amos Starr Cooke, a missionary couple who taught Liliuokalani and other royal students at the Chief’s Children’s School in the 1830s and 1840s in Honolulu.

Robin Midkiff, Julia Flynn Siler, and Puakea Nogelmeier at the Outrigger Canoe Club

Robin is also related to Paul Neumann, an attorney who began his career in California but moved to Honolulu in the early 1880s, quickly rising to the position of the kingdom’s attorney general under King David Kalakaua.  Neumann represented the last queen, Liliuokalani, at her military trial in 1895 and witnessed her forced abdication. To honor him, the deposed Queen and her lady-in-waiting had stitched his name into the Victorian era crazy quilt that they worked on together during Liliu’s eight months of house arrest at the palace.

In addition to working as a senior executive at the First Hawaiian Bank and serving as a member of the Atherton Family Foundation, Robin is deeply involved in preserving the history of Hawaii in her role as chairman of the Washington Place Foundation, the group formed to support the gracious, white pillared home in downtown Honolulu where Liliu spent most of her life. The deposed queen died at Washington Place in 1917 and it long served as the official residence for Hawaii’s Governor. In 2007, it was designated as a National Historic Landmark.

We watched for a green flash as the sun sank into the Pacific. Puakea and Robin talked history about the early days of Kamehameha I and his bloody conquest of the island of Oahu. As I sat between them listening to their conversation, I thought to myself how I’d never known a place where history lies so close to the surface of daily life – with reminders every day in the street names reflecting the days when the islands were ruled by Hawaiian royalty.

Book Group Pick: Lost Kingdom

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Mahalo nui loa –  Hawaiian for thank you very much! – to the dozen or so book groups I’ve heard from around the country that have picked Lost Kingdom as their monthly or quarterly read. I’m truly grateful to all of you – from Liz Epstein’s Literary Masters groups (10 book groups in the San Francisco Bay Area) to Catherine Hartman’s lovely group of Stanford alum and other book-loving friends in Chicago to Jason Poole (The Accidental Hawaiian Crooner) who also organizes a reading group in Pittsburgh. I’m especially grateful to Julie Robinson of Literary Affairs, who organizes book events and moderates book groups in Beverly Hills and the Los Angeles area, for choosing Lost Kingdom as one of her recommended reads. Here are some questions to discuss on Lost Kingdom that come from Liz Epstein at Literary Masters. Hope they’re helpful and if you have other questions, I’d be delighted to skype or phone into your book group for a chat if my schedule permits.

Points to Ponder for Lost Kingdom

  • Whose story is Lost Kingdom and who should be telling it? Do you think Julia Flynn Siler, a haole or white foreigner to the islands, does a good job of showing all sides of this story about nineteenth century Hawaii?  Do you think it is an important story?
  • Is there a hero/heroine or villain/villainess in this story?
  • How do you feel about Lili’u?  Could she have done anything to alter the course of historical events?  Should she have?  Do you consider her a tragic figure?
  • How do you feel about King David Kalakaua?  How responsible was he for the course of events?
  • How do you feel about the way the United States handled the annexation of Hawaii?  Grover Cleveland claimed “Hawaii is ours…as I contemplate the means used to complete the outrage, I am ashamed of the whole affair.”  Do you agree/ disagree with him?
  • How do you feel about the way the Hawaiians handled the annexation of Hawaii?  Did you get a good sense from the book as to how and why they behaved as they did?
  • What surprised you about Claus Spreckels?  What about Dole?  Are there other characters in the book that you feel played a pivotal role and you’d like to know more about them?
  • What were the motives of  the original missionaries in coming to Hawaii, and then how do you feel about their descendents?  Was everyone generally well-intentioned, or was self-interest paramount?
  • What is the relevance of this history for us today?
  • Can you imagine an alternate history?  Where would Hawaii be today if the US hadn’t annexed it?  Where would the US be today without Hawaii?
  • This was our non-fiction selection for the season.  Do you think this particular history of Hawaii could be better told as ‘historical fiction’?