Out to Lunch

JOHN HEILPERN

JOHN HEILPERN dives out for Peking duck with deep-sea explorer Peter Gimbel

WHEN I met the Gimbels for lunch, I liked them instantly: Peter Gimbel, the adventurer who has confronted death too many times for comfort, and his wife, Elga Andersen, the worrier. Elga, in her blue jeans and tailored man’s shirt, rather chic; Peter, in his Levi’s, pinkish jacket, and pink shirt, rather pink. “Gimbel looks good in pink,” she said. “Well, it matches my nose,” he replied. She calls him Gimbel.

We met in Manhattan at Shun Lee West, where we feasted on kidney, thousand-year-old egg, and Peking duck. “It’s damn good,” he said eagerly, and it certainly was.

Gimbel is the man whose stunning film about his search for the great white shark, Blue Water,

White Death, paved the way to Jaws. More than once, he has nearly been eaten alive. “Now then, Elga... ” he said in his self-deprecating way when she mentioned the terrible dangers he’s encountered. “But it’s true, Gimbel! And what about the serious accident on the Andrea Doria dive?”

“Potentially serious, Elga.”

“Okay. But you could have died.”

“I had what we call an oxygen hit,” he explained calmly. “If you convulse underwater, you’ll lose your equipment and drown. It was the one time in my life when I felt total, uncontrolled panic—except when I lost a film camera. Anyway, they got me out and I was fine.”

“I was on the boat when it happened,” Elga added. “I never wanted to go back to the Doria after that. ’ ’

“But you did,” I said.

“It took him years to convince me.”

“They were bitter times,” Gimbel said gently.

“Thank God we walked away from the last dive safe.”

Peter Gimbel has been obsessed with the wreck and mystery of the Andrea Doria, once Italy’s most luxurious ocean liner, ever since it collided with the Stockholm, in 1956, and sank south of Nantucket Island. It was said to be unsinkable. Gimbel has dived for the Doria some three dozen times over the years, risking his life each time.

I asked why. To my surprise, so did his wife.

“I never satisfied my curiosity,” he replied, sounding uncomfortable. “I still haven’t, but I won’t go back again.”

“He wants to return. I know that,” Elga said quietly.

“No,” said Gimbel with the finality of a man who doesn’t quite believe himself.

“The Doria did something to all of us,” Elga explained. “Next to the Titanic, divers consider her the ultimate, the Mount Everest below. I can’t explain it. She keeps you hungry. There’s something spooky about that wreck that wants company.”

“It’s unconquered,” said Gimbel.

On August 16, Andrea Doria: The Final Chapter, the Gimbels’ film of their last expedition, will be shown on nationally syndicated television and via satellite around the world. Tantalizingly, the Doria’s bank safe—miraculously salvaged from the wreck, sealed by U.S. Customs, and bonded for $2 million—will be opened for the first time during the broadcast. The Gimbels are fond of a Rigby cartoon of the historic event in which an ecstatic host announces to the camera, “A television first! The moment we’ve all been wai...” But behind him, a killer shark has emerged from the open safe.

It is rumored that when the Doria went down she took with her a fortune in cash and diamonds. “But to be really certain,” said Gimbel, “we had to get both safes. We had to get the purser’s safe.”

“What went wrong?”

“Remember, the ship lies on its side.”

“Like a collapsed hotel.”

“It’s like searching for something after an earthquake. We had to excavate 240 feet underwater. It took us eighteen days of saturation diving to find the

bank safe. We were lucky.”

“They were also crazy,” said Elga, and Gimbel didn’t disagree. ‘ ‘We had just lived through a hurricane. The divers were exhausted. Gimbel was sick.”

“It’s true,” he said, “we were accident-prone by then. Put it this way: When you live in a saturation oxygen chamber, it’s not a question of whether you get sick but when. We tried for the purser’s safe. We didn’t make it.”

“It was like a fever with those guys, and it took a while for reason to sink in,” Elga added. “Gimbel had to agree to walk away. Ciao, bella, and let’s go home.”

The lost purser’s safe contains the safe-deposit boxes. If the jewels exist, they are likely to be in there, at the bottom of the ocean. The Gimbels’ realistic guess is that the salvaged bank safe holds currency and negotiable traveler’s checks—unless, that is, an unaccompanied consignment of jewels was sent via the bank from a customer in Italy. Well, we’ll soon find out.

Though according to maritime law the bounty will probably belong to the Gimbels, in fact they could hardly care less. Peter, one of the family that built the Gimbels department-store chain, is wealthy enough. He didn’t undertake the Doria expedition as a treasure hunter. In his way, he was more a real, live raider of a real lost ark. He filmed it. “The treasure isn’t in the safe,” said Elga. “It’s in the film.” “For us, anyway,” said Gimbel.