In the 1920s and 30s, three names conjured the glories of adventure travel: Lindbergh, Halliburton, and Earhart. Like Theodore Roosevelt, Richard Halliburton was a small-framed, sickly child and compensated with a life of pushing himself to extremes. He climbed the Matterhorn, made the first recorded winter summit of Mount Fuji, and took the first aerial photo of Everest. In 1931, with a hired pilot, he circled the globe in an open cockpit biplane, the Flying Carpet, (though they put the plane on ships to cross the Atlantic and Pacific), giving first flights to royalty in Iran and Iraq, the White Rajah's wife in India, and the chief of the Nyak, who paid him in shrunken heads.
Always thirsting for adventure, Halliburton bent local laws well past custom and legality: He tried to enter Mecca, was jailed for photographing the guns at Gibraltar, hid within the Taj Mahal to spend an evening alone, savoring the solitude at sunset and swimming in the pool by moonlight. He registered his body as a ship, the S.S. Halliburton, in order to enter the Panama Canal and remains the only person to have swum its length, 48 miles. Thoroughly original, he twice retraced other travelers' trips in tribute, swimming the Hellespont like his hero Byron and crossing the Alps by elephant as Hannibal had in 218 BC.
As for pushing boundaries at home, Halliburton was likely lovers with the gay movie star Ramón Novarro, and, even more openly, he commissioned an architect to build his cantilevered home, nicknamed Hangover House, in Laguna Beach with three bedrooms: one each for himself, his boyfriend Paul Mooney, and Mooney's boyfriend, the architect. It is the basis for Heller House in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.
In March 1939, now enormously famous, Halliburton, Mooney, and an experienced crew left Hong Kong in their custom Chinese junk, the Sea Dragon, to make landfall at the San Francisco World's Fair. Exactly three weeks out, they hit a typhoon and perished. Much earlier, he had written to his father,
And when my time comes to die, I’ll be able to die happy, for I will have done and seen and heard and experienced all the joy, pain and thrills—any emotion that any human ever had—and I’ll be especially happy if I am spared a stupid, common death in bed...
Ever mindful of his public persona, Halliburton occasionally peppered his narratives with nameless, entirely made up female love interests, yet he lingers over male beauty, and his private letters are explicitly gay. Many of his seven travel books are back in print, the first of which he dedicated to his roommates at Princeton, whose “sanity, consistency, and respectability” inspired him to flee.
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