The Falcon and the Snowman (2 page)

There is nothing in their school records, or in the memories of their friends or teachers, to indicate that they were anything but two devout Catholic boys growing up in happy, warm families in one of the most affluent suburbs in America, living one version of the American Dream and facing nothing but the brightest of futures.

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Dr. Daulton Bradley Lee had grown up a long way from The Hill in a small farm town in Illinois where his father was the local dentist. It was not a poor family, but during the Depression it was not a wealthy one either. As long as anyone could remember, he had been regarded as a young man driven by high ambition—an ambition, he later said, that he had inherited from his father.

After graduating from high school, he left the farm town to attend a small college in Eureka, Illinois. But World War II intervened, and a few weeks after Pearl Harbor, his National Guard unit was mobilized. He was sent to an infantry training base in Tennessee, where he applied for a transfer to the Army Air Corps, hoping to become a combat pilot. He scored high marks on the screening test and immediately was accepted for flight school. After preliminary flight training in Alabama, he was ordered to Davis-Monthan Air Base, which had been hurriedly bulldozed out of sand and sagebrush near Tucson, Arizona.

Second Lieutenant Daulton Bradley Lee was a handsome man who had brown curly hair, stood more than six feet tall and had a style about him that made his leather flight jacket and trailing silk scarf look as if they had been designed expressly for him. He had not been at Davis-Monthan long before he met a coed at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

It was a fast wartime romance. After dating for four months, he married Anne Clark in November, 1942, before the altar of Ss. Peter and Paul Catholic Church in Tucson. The following August, he was on his way to Europe.

Anne Lee had been born in Montana but had moved with her mother and father—a physician who specialized in heart disease—to Long Beach, near Los Angeles, as an infant, and she considered herself a native Californian. A beauty who would keep her good looks long after she had lost her youth and her hair had turned prematurely gray, she had enrolled at the university with plans to become a teacher. But after her husband went overseas, she dropped out of college and moved back to her parents' home in Long Beach, where a daughter was born the next year.

Her husband, meanwhile, was distinguishing himself in the air: flying B-24 bombers over Italy, Daulton Lee had become a lieutenant colonel by the time he was twenty-three, and when the war was over, he came home with the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Air Medal and the Croix de Guerre with palm—and his old ambition. Before the war he had thought about becoming a doctor, and encouraged by his father-in-law, he enrolled in the Medical School at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he got high marks, and then decided to specialize in pathology.

While he was still in medical school, though, the couple experienced a major disappointment: Mrs. Lee learned she could not have any more children. They wanted a son, and in 1952 they heard through friends that an infant boy might be available for adoption. In those days, before the pill and other advances in birth control, it was easier to adopt a child than it would become in the future. That winter they brought home their second child and named him Andrew Daulton. (As the years went on he preferred to be called Daulton, after his father.)

Not much was known of the child's natural parents except that they were of Polish and Lithuanian ancestry and were blue-collar workers. “They were educated people in technical fields; they had an electronics type of education,” Anne Lee, his adoptive mother, would recall later. Although his natural parents had been married, theirs had been a stormy marriage, and they had gone to the divorce courts before his conception to obtain an interlocutory divorce decree. Under California law at the time, a year's waiting time was necessary before an interlocutory decree could become final, and if the couple engaged in sexual relations during that year the decree became invalid. It was during this twelve-month waiting period that Andrew Daulton Lee was conceived. Still determined to dissolve their marriage, his parents decided not to reveal his conception to the court, and he was placed for adoption.

When Daulton was two years old, Mrs. Lee procured a booklet that had been written to help adoptive parents explain the circumstances of their children's birth. She settled Daulton onto her lap and told him how she and his father had yearned for a child, and when at last they had seen Daulton they had loved him and selected him over all other children. And, she recalled later, he had seemed to accept the fact of his adoption as easily as if she had been teaching him how to tie his shoes. Eventually, the Lees decided they wanted more children, and in 1954 they adopted another sister for him, Mary Anne, and in 1958, a brother, David. Meanwhile, as the family grew, Dr. Lee was becoming increasingly successful—and prosperous—in his field.

Along with other pupils at St. John Fisher, Daulton was indoctrinated in a brand of Roman Catholicism somewhat harsher than that which would prevail a few years later following the winds of liberalization that blew from Rome during and after the tenure of Pope John XXIII. His was a religious training rooted in a doctrine that to commit a mortal sin meant risking eternal damnation in the fires of hell. But he accepted it and was a regular communicant at St. John Fisher.

Daulton learned other lessons at home. His father, whose childhood had not been materially bountiful, assured Daulton that he was determined to give his own children some of the things that he had missed; and indeed, whether it was toys, clothing or travel, Daulton enjoyed a childhood of abundance, financed by the growing wealth of his father. When he was eleven, his parents sent him to Southern California's most exclusive summer camp—Gold Arrow Camp, in the High Sierra mountains, where his camp-mates included the sons of comedian Jerry Lewis; Otis Chandler, the publisher of the
Los Angeles Times
, and other prominent and wealthy people. By David Strick, the son of movie director Joseph Strick, who shared Daulton's cabin, he was remembered as a tough competitor, generous and likable, but troubled by his size—“A Mickey Rooney character,” he called him. “He was a plucky guy who sort of walked with a swagger, I think, because he was conscious of his shortness. When we had a water fight, he stayed in it until the end and never wanted to give up. When his parents sent him a box of candy,” Strick recalled, “he walked around and gave some to everybody before he ate any; he loved to give gifts; everybody else who got something from home hoarded it.”

Daulton was an unspectacular student at St. John Fisher, but he discovered in grade school that he had a talent most of his classmates didn't have: he could make things with his hands better than almost anyone else. With a hammer and saw and modest materials, he could fashion a tree house, a go-kart or other toys that became the envy of his friends.

A lot was made in the Lee household of Dr. Lee's rise from the obscure Illinois farm town to a position of importance near the top of the Peninsula's medical hierarchy. A lot was made also of his war record. Daulton lost count of how many times his father's decorations and his picture in Uniform were taken out of a closet to be shown and admired by the family; and of course, there was the oft-told family legend that Daulton would recall many years later with still a trace of awe: “He was a lieutenant colonel when he was twenty-three, one of the youngest in the Air Corps. His commanding officer told him, ‘I'd like to make you a general—you deserve it—but I'd get too much flak if I made you a general at your age.'”

Perhaps it is difficult under the best of circumstances to be the son of a doctor in America: Society elevates physicians to pedestals regardless of their faults; men and women with lesser occupational status pay deference to them, inducing in some physicians a sense of exaggerated self-importance and impatience in others that is extended beyond medicine to encompass whatever they do. In a social milieu where ambition is a religion and money is the ultimate laurel of success, the shadow may be cast even larger on a young son by his father because, of all the professions, his is one of the most richly rewarded. If it is difficult, then, under the best of circumstances for a son to shape his own identity in the presence of such a shadow, what if the father is a war hero who stands more than six feet tall and the son, at maturity, is only five feet two? What if the son is adopted, not natural-born; if he is bright but not academically driven? What if the father is handsome and athletic and his eldest son is not?

When he was a child, there was talk of Daulton's following his father and becoming a physician, but as Daulton grew older, Dr. Lee became increasingly bitter over what he saw as the coming of socialized medicine. “Medicine's a dying profession,” he repeatedly told his eldest son. “Those bureaucrats in Washington are killing the practice of medicine as we know it.” Rather than press his son to become a doctor, he gave this advice to Daulton:

“Do whatever you want in life, but whatever you decide to do, be the best at it.”

When Daulton was still in grade school it was decided that someday he would attend Notre Dame, the famous Catholic university in South Bend, Indiana. His father told him frequently that it had been his childhood dream to go to Notre Dame, with its rich traditions of scholarship and football excellence, but his family couldn't afford it because of the Depression. Things would be different for Daulton and David, he said: their family had the money, and his sons could have what he had been forced to miss. Daulton and his father also dreamed of how someday he would play football for the Fighting Irish.

Unfortunately, Daulton stopped growing when he was in the fifth grade. As his classmates kept growing taller, and he did not, he became defensive about his stature and seemed uncomfortable around taller friends. Years later he could still recall the kind of questions that would embarrass him then: “People would ask me, ‘How come you're so short and your dad is so tall and your brother is six inches taller?'” It was a question that was doubly painful because, obliquely, it raised the issue of his adoption. When Daulton became depressed, his mother would tell him, “Don't worry all the time about size; there have been lots of people who were short and have done marvelous things.” Daulton had other troubles, too. He worried that his ears were too big, and as a youngster he began to develop serious problems with acne on his face and body.

It was a problem that would haunt him for years.

Daulton went out for Little League baseball, and his father coached the team. “He was a dogged little guy,” remembered Msgr. Thomas J. McCarthy, the first pastor of St. John Fisher, who often celebrated Mass with Daulton serving as altar boy on one side of him and Christopher Boyce on the other. “Daulton was small, but he made up for what he lacked in natural ability with moxie.” The priest noticed one thing in particular about Daulton's participation in sports: he seemed preoccupied with proving himself to his father. When he struck out or dropped a ball, the first thing Daulton usually did was look over in the direction of his father to see if he was watching. Later on, Daulton took up golf in hopes of sharing another of his father's interests, but Dr. Lee almost always won, and Daulton's inability to beat his father was a source of laughs for the family.

After Daulton was graduated from St. John Fisher in the spring of 1966, he enrolled at Palos Verdes High School, a complex of low-slung buildings topped with red tile roofs styled vaguely, de rigueur, like a Spanish mission; the school was about a mile from the Lee home and only about 200 yards from a bluff overlooking the Pacific. Students could look out and see ships passing by. It was a school where, on the average, at least 90 percent of each year's graduating class went on to college and where the student parking lot was usually crowded with Cadillacs, Corvettes, Mercedes-Benzes, Porsches and other expensive cars. The following year, Christopher John Boyce followed Daulton to Palos Verdes High.

Chris's parents had also grown up far from The Hill. His mother, Noreen, was the product of an Old World Irish Catholic family from Ohio, one in which the Sacraments were observed and Mass was an obligatory joy on Sundays. Under the influence of the sisters at the parochial school that she attended, Noreen Hollenbeck decided as a child to become a nun, and at eighteen she entered a convent operated by the Ursulines, an order devoted to the education of young girls. But eighteen months after entering the convent, she decided that she was not suited for the cloistered life after all and elected not to take her final vows. She left the convent but not the Church. Then, as in the future, seldom did a day begin for Noreen Hollenbeck without Mass and Holy Communion. The young girl who had wanted to become a nun had the stunning good looks and the sturdy, ample frame of an Irish country girl, and it was not long after she left the convent that Charles Eugene Boyce fell in love with her.

Boyce was a native of Colorado who had a natural gift for athletics and a keen academic mind, two qualities that had presented him with a dilemma: after he was mustered out of military service following World War II, he could not choose between becoming a lawyer and becoming a professional baseball player. Although he wasn't a Catholic, he enrolled at Loyola University, a Jesuit college near Los Angeles, on the G.I. Bill, playing semipro baseball as a sideline while choosing his plans for the future. A pitcher, he was good enough to be recruited by the New York Giants' farm-club system, but an elbow injury ended what could have been a promising career in baseball. In 1948, after three years of prelaw at Loyola, he decided to enroll in the Southwestern School of Law. After graduation, he was recruited by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He remained in the bureau for almost two years, dealing with the potpourri of cases that came the way of a young agent stationed in those days in the New York City and New Haven offices—bank robberies, fraud, forgeries and the epidemic of espionage scares during the McCarthy era. Attracted by the prospect of a better-paying career in industry, he resigned from the bureau in 1952 and took a job helping to oversee plant security for an airplane manufacturer in Southern California, which he now considered his home.