South Laguna’s Forgotten Giant : 50 Years After His Death at Sea, Adventurer Halliburton’s Exploits Are as Obscured as His Mansion

The fortress-like mansion of concrete and steel is perched high atop a bluff in South Laguna, practically concealed from view by other hillside estates.

The private road to the old mansion, with a rise so steep that it threatens to flip cars end over end, discourages a closer look.

Few people these days have cause to brave the dizzying drive. Half a century ago, however, the winding road leading to 31172 Ceanothus Drive carried a steady procession of curiosity-seekers.

The fact that the mansion, built in 1937, was an architectural wonder of its day was just one reason for the public interest. The real draw was the aura of the man who built it but lived there for only a few months before he disappeared at sea.

The man was Richard Halliburton, one of the most famous adventurers and authors of his time. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Halliburton’s disappearance while sailing in a rickety Chinese junk from Hong Kong to San Francisco. The handmade junk--christened the Sea Dragon--sank in a howling typhoon, killing the 39-year-old Halliburton and all 14 of his crew members.

The tragedy served as an appropriately dramatic end for Halliburton, a Brownsville, Tenn., native who performed such daredevil feats as climbing the Matterhorn so he could “spit off the top,” swimming the length of the alligator-infested Panama Canal and flying in an open-cockpit plane up the face of Mt. Everest--all in an effort to draw attention to his wildly popular series of travel books.

“He is frequently compared to Indiana Jones,” said Bill Short, curator of the Halliburton Archives at Rhodes College in Memphis.

The books that took Halliburton to the far corners of the world, including “The Royal Road to Adventure,” “The Flying Carpet” and “Seven League Boots,” were best sellers to a Depression-era generation of Americans who did not have the money or means for such travel.

Although public libraries still contain those books, the Halliburton legend has been all but forgotten. He is remembered by an ever-diminishing number of aging contemporaries as well as a small but fervent group of young admirers.

The decline of Halliburton’s popularity is reflected by the waning number of pilgrims to his South Laguna estate.

“Tourists the first few years were quite a problem,” said Zolite J. Scott, 88, who has lived in the Halliburton house since she and her late husband, Wallace T. Scott, bought it in 1941. Today, she said, “we get a few inquiries only now and then.”

The house doesn’t even stand out as it once did, when it perched all alone on a bluff overlooking breathtaking shoreline on one side and solitary canyon wilderness on the other. Today, three other estates stand on the hill above the Halliburton house, and the hillside below is crawling with residential development. Even the wilderness canyon is wilderness no more. It is now the nine-hole Aliso Creek Golf Course.

Neighbors say that practically no one comes around asking about the Halliburton house anymore.

Attracts Little Attention

“Aside from the fact it is a house that has been there for some time, it attracts little attention,” said Treva Tilden, who lives in the next house up the hill.

Scott lives in the three-story, four-bedroom house with a collection of cats and family members who periodically visit. Inside, a gallery and spacious dining and living rooms command breathtaking views. The house, which was built in 1937 for the then-princely sum of $40,000, sits atop a hill where, local real estate agents say, similar houses go for $750,000 to $1.5 million.

Scott professes to have no idea how much the house is worth. She said she has no interest in selling it and is involved in a project to replace some of the aging glass.

Scott, whose husband died in 1978, said she does not welcome visitors, although over the years many have dropped by.

“Every time an article would appear in the paper, we would get a bunch of looky-loos,” she said. “We have also had some architects come up. But they usually call first.”

Through the years, stories have circulated that the Halliburton house is haunted by the young adventurer’s restless ghost. Scott has said that she thinks the ghost stories were started by a tenant who lived in the house during World War II and claimed that Halliburton had tried to “get through to her” twice while she was at work.

Scott, however, scoffs at the notion that a ghost roams her home of 48 years.

“I assure you that it is not haunted,” she said with a laugh, adding that the only unusual noises she hears at night come from raccoons and skunks.

If Halliburton does not live on as a ghost, he certainly lives on in the memories of those who were befriended by him more than a half-century ago.

Rose Schulze--who co-starred with Halliburton in the 1933 film “India Speaks”--vividly remembers the handsome adventurer.

“Dick was wonderful to work with,” Schulze, now 73 and living in San Juan Capistrano, said of the adventure film in which Halliburton played himself. The film was a box-office flop.

Halliburton chose South Laguna as his settling-down ground after living out of a suitcase for much of his adult life. He grew up in Memphis, attended Princeton University and decided after graduation to pursue the life of an itinerant travel writer.

He became a seaman on a freighter to Spain. Then he traveled around the world, pausing along the way to swim the Nile and the Dardanelles in Turkey, a five-mile saltwater strait that separates Europe from Asia. He also hunted tigers, was captured by pirates and beached in Bali. One night, he bathed by moonlight in the pools of the Taj Mahal. Halliburton compiled all of these adventures into a book titled “The Royal Road to Romance.”

The book was a best seller when it came out in 1925, and it spurred him to write and travel more. In six ensuing best sellers, Halliburton dazzled American reading audiences with his exploits, climbing Japan’s Mt. Fujiyama in midwinter, diving twice into the “bottomless” Well of Death at Chichen Itza and riding across the Alps on an elephant. He lived for a time with the convicts on Devil’s Island and marched with the French Foreign Legion in Africa.

But by the late 1930s, the specter of world war rendered Halliburton’s novels about adventure and romance increasingly irrelevant. That prompted Halliburton to attempt bold adventures, climaxing in 1939 with his most daring feat of all--crossing the Pacific during peak typhoon season in a Chinese junk.

Between making preparations for the death-defying stunt--which he advertised as his last great adventure--Halliburton preoccupied himself with tending to the construction of his new home in South Laguna.

Bill Alexander, now 80 and living in the Hollywood Hills, was the architect of Halliburton’s house. The house was Alexander’s first major architectural project, and he remembers Halliburton giving him the directions to build.

Went With Concrete

“Dick had wanted it to be something monumental,” Alexander said. “That’s what turned me to concrete.”

Alexander’s job was exceedingly complex, for the house was to be built atop a narrow ridge. First he had to blast a road to the site. To give himself room to work, Alexander then directed workers to build a 17-foot retaining wall, hooked back by concrete beams into the bedrock. Finally, Alexander directed the workers to pour the monolithic, concrete structure, whose innovative design included such then-novel features as a garbage disposal, central heating and a dumbwaiter connecting all three floors.

When the mansion, which was finished in nine months, was nearing completion, Halliburton could not contain his enthusiasm.

“It is the most wonderful house in the world. . . . I can’t say in words how amazing it is. Pictures just don’t give a small part of its drama and beauty. It doesn’t sit: It flies!” he wrote to his parents on April 27, 1937.

The architecture was so innovative for the day that the house can still be classified as modern.

“It’s still intriguing when you look up at it,” said Beverly Pavlovich, a South Laguna real estate agent.

Hangover House

Halliburton dubbed his new home the Hangover House, not because of any post-inebriation illness, but because it overlooked a cliff, Alexander said. Halliburton moved into the house with Paul Mooney, his longtime secretary, as well as Alexander.

But Halliburton, being Halliburton, did not stay in one place for very long. By the fall of 1938, he was off to Hong Kong to oversee construction of the 75-foot Chinese junk that he planned to sail 9,000 miles back to San Francisco.

The Sea Dragon set sail March 3, 1939. The voyage had been scheduled to start in January, but a series of delays moved the departure date back. The vessel had been out at sea only a few days, however, when one of the crew members, John R. (Brue) Potter, was struck by a boom and suffered internal injuries. Halliburton decided to turn back to Hong Kong so Potter could receive proper medical care.

That decision spared Potter from a watery grave.

“I’ve never forgotten this extraordinary, brave, kind man who saved my life,” Potter, who died two years ago, said in a recent tape of his reminiscences.

With Potter safely deposited in a hospital in Hong Kong, the Halliburton expedition set back out across the ocean. On March 24, the liner President Coolidge--1,800 miles west of Hawaii--picked up a radio message from the Sea Dragon saying the lee rails were under water. The Coolidge itself was bucking 40-foot typhoon waves.

Last Message

The message received by the Coolidge said: “Southerly gales . . . rain squalls . . . lee rail under water . . . wet bunks . . . hardtack . . . bully beep . . . having wonderful time . . . wish you were here instead of me.”

It was the last message ever received from the Sea Dragon. A weeks-long search failed to turn up the missing vessel. A Memphis jury, seven months later, reluctantly declared Halliburton legally dead.

Alexander--working on another house in Connecticut at the time of the accident--received from Halliburton a teak chest that had been mailed from Hong Kong the day before the voyage began. Inside the chest were piles of negatives, which when developed portrayed Halliburton and his crew smiling and hard at work on the Sea Dragon.

Alexander still has that chest and the photographs. Many times he has wondered how Halliburton would have turned out had he survived the typhoon.

“He would have settled down and received endless people like he was received all over the world,” Alexander said. “It was such a pity.”