Stage Door Canteen (15 page)

She soon found out why.

“Ah, thank God you’re here, Miss Rose,” Charlie Hanrahan told her as he let her in. “Mrs. Bennett was hoping you’d come in early. Things are in a bit of an uproar.”

Noise from the basement room blared up at them. “What’s going on, Charlie? We’re not open, are we?”

“Well, we are and we aren’t.” The veteran stage doorman was almost wringing his hands. “We’ve only got an hour before we open and look at this. The movie people are here, and the committee didn’t expect them until next week. They said they wanted to film a scene from the Canteen movie today. Some of the board members had to rush over to take charge. Mr. Lunt is here and so is Miss Helen Hayes.” He kept talking as he followed her down the steps. “Then the movie people saw the servicemen what was lined up waiting outside, and they said they were going to bring them in to use as extras. They also brought some English sailors from the Royal Navy Club. That’s what they’re filming, a scene here in the canteen with English sailors. And an English singer, Miss Gracie Fields. British music hall star. Do you know her?”

“I’ve heard of her,” Jenny said, and stepped into the basement room.

“They’re not really supposed to be here. It’s going to be a mess, shooting a movie tonight nobody expected. You can’t count on a thing around here, Miss Rose,” he complained.

“No you can’t,” Jenny agreed.

NINE

When Jenny got home she showered, put on a nightgown, picked up a tablet of writing paper and a pen, and crawled into bed.

She wrote:

Thursday morning at 1:45 a.m.

Dearest Brad, my darling, incomparable husband,

I know the hour is ungodly and I have an early call at the theater in the morning to go over the Persian Goodbye/Oklahoma Hello scene which is driving us all mad (more about that later), but I had to write. What a wonderful, lovely surprise to find a letter from you in the mailbox when I picked up my mail down in the lobby. That is, wonderful and terrible! Wonderful to hear from you after that stupendously long call of Monday night which must have sent your telephone bill skyrocketing. And horrible because of what you tell me. Oh God, please don’t tell me you are going overseas! I hope the rumors are WRONG and that ISPD is not going to follow General Wedemeyer’s staff to London. Brad darling, I don’t want you in London! I know it’s bad form to have hysterics, the government tells everyone that we have to support our loved ones with a stiff upper lip and all that stuff, but I’m not blind. The newspapers describe the bombing in England as horrendous. I could sit down on the floor and scream and weep. I can just hear you saying, “Now Jen, you know that’s not going to do any good.” Nevertheless, I count my blessings every day that you are not in a combat company. I don’t think I could live or work with the thought of you in a bomber, or fighting with a bazooka, or in a tank division like Jake’s son. You remember Jake, who runs theatre district newsstand at the corner of Broadway and Forty-Fourth. Poor man, he doesn’t know where his son Anthony is, but thinks it’s North Africa, so I know he must be suffering.

Meanwhile I am hoping and praying that, as you say, there’s the possibility ISPD will be at a base somewhere in the English countryside. Or even as far away as Scotland or Wales. That I will pray for immediately. And keep praying. I want you away from the bombs, that’s not unreasonable, is it? I can’t help it, I am clutching at straws. I am as desperate about your not going overseas as all the poor women I meet every once in a while who rail against the Army or the Navy or whatever military arm, because there is no escaping the inevitable cruelty of “orders.” Now it’s happened to me, that the war will scoop up my husband and carry him away to some foreign battlefield. Oh Brad, what will I do without you? Why haven’t I taken the train to Washington to be with you every weekend!! You can’t know how much I blame myself for not pulling up stakes, leaving theater work entirely, and going to live with you somehow. I know, don’t say it again, please. That there’s no space to be had in Washington for love or money, and you do have a roommate, etc. I am drowning in frustration—somehow I know we could have done better. Now it’s too late. We could have slept in Union Station. We could have spent the night on a park bench in front of the Lincoln Memorial. I miss you so much—just to touch you, to kiss you, to hold you. Did you ever think I would want you, need you, this much?

I’ll stop. Darling, I’ll stop. I realize this is not doing you any good. I should help you more and this is not being helpful, is it? I will change the subject. I will think of something funny.

Here’s something anyway: I found out today from our set designer Lem Ayers that Richard Rodgers and Ockie originally considered Groucho Marx for the role of Ali Hakim, the peddler. When I told Marty Levin he was vastly amused, as they say in Dickens. At least Marty said he was vastly amused. We agreed neither of us could picture Groucho as Ali, the Persian peddler, slouching about the stage wagging his eyebrows at me. Although as Marty said (with his own version of the eyebrow wagging schtick), it was something to think about.

Lem Ayers also confided that our teen-age, former-child-star-now-Hollywood-starlet Shirley Temple had been considered for Laurey. (The female lead, in case you’ve forgotten the details of your wife’s current employment.) I think we are all relieved that Richard Rodgers and the Theater Guild didn’t hire Groucho and Shirley. I didn’t ask Lem who had been considered as a possible Ado Annie. Besides me, that is. My actor’s ego makes me like to think I was their first and only choice. I really don’t want to know.

Dearest Brad, oh how I need to lean my head on your shoulder! My ‘life upon the wicked stage’ is in something of a mess. Things are not going smoothly (she said with a sigh). Not only has there been a dreadful Greek chorus offstage (drama critics, gossip columnists, Winchell, et al) prophesying the downfall of Away We Go, but there is more than the usual share of nerves and unhappiness among the cast. Everyone knows musicals are always tough to put together; dance directors and music directors and composers and playwrights will erupt and scream and rant, bless their hearts, and the director has to be a genius with a steely will to pull it off. You know, because I’ve told you, that Reuben and Agnes de Mille do battle at every rehearsal. I’m not exaggerating. I think it’s wearing us all down. And it doesn’t help with other problems waiting to be fixed. Like this afternoon, when we had an exasperating but sort of hilarious run through of the damned Persian Goodbye scene. I need—Marty and Lee do, too—to get Reuben to decide what he and Richard Rodgers (because Dick is the one really running things) want from the Ali Hakim-Ado Annie-Will subplot. You know my part of Ado Annie was changed from the rather pathetic fat girl in the original play, but no one seems to be able to say what she is now. Reuben seems to think we are letting it “evolve.” Which is another way of saying the burden’s on me. In the script Ado herself says that the year before she was a beanpole and nobody even looked at her. But now that she’s suddenly “filled out” all the boys are chasing after her. And because she says she can’t seem to help herself, she chases back. It’s this part that has me up a wall.

I’m sure when Ockie wrote that line he thought it was very touching and explained everything, but actually that only happens to girls when they are thirteen or fourteen (the “filling out” part that is). At the latest fifteen or sixteen. I am almost afraid to ask Ockie Hammerstein how old Ado Annie really is. We seem to be feeling our way through some changes that don’t make much sense and Marty and Will agree, although lately they seem to be backing away a little from my disgruntlement. But Lee Dixon, poor boy, is not much better off. His part of Will, the shy cowboy who loves Ado, is brand new. Will wasn’t in the original play at all. Lee does have a wonderful break, though: Agnes gave him a solo to improvise—well, partly improvise because everybody knows Agnes is going to put her imprint on everything—in the Everything’s Up To Date In Kansas City number, and everyone says what he does with the dance—a tap routine to a ragtime tune—is marvelous. Today was a little bit awful, though, because the three of us worked on a run-through of the Persian Goodbye in which Ali the peddler wants just one more smooch, right there in front of Will, before he leaves.

It was the same old problem for me: Ado Annie is sexy enough to attract Will and Ali Hakim, but she acts like an idiot. And I don’t mean wacky blonde. I could play that. As Ockie has her currently written, she is so contradictory I’m still trying to find the right nuance. Reuben isn’t happy, either; he sits out there in the darkened theater and frowns. Today he said, when I got kissed by Marty and Lee, that I acted like I was being raped. He apparently thinks I’m too standoffish. So Marty decided to help out. (I don’t really need Marty’s help, he’s like Til Eulenspiegel the prankster, leaving havoc in his merry wake.) Marty’s idea of being helpful was to grab me and proceed to give me a Persian Goodbye kiss that would have been banned in Boston if we’d been playing there. It also made Lee oddly sullen. He would barely speak to me.

I understand Lee told Rodgers and Hammerstein when he auditioned for the show that he had a problem with alcohol, but that he had it under control. Of course they hired him for Will, he’s so boyishly good-looking and a marvelous dancer. But when you get up close to somebody in a kissing scene you find out right away. Lee may have his problem under control but he’s still drinking. It was pretty strong. That’s so worrisome, because he’s such a young, winning guy, and Agnes has just given him his big break with his solo.

The outcome of the rehearsal of the Persian goodbye scene was that no one was particularly happy except Marty, but Reuben let it stand. He didn’t dismiss us, either, but went on to rehearse Alfred Drake and Joanie Roberts for the rest of the afternoon. We sat around, Marty read one of his books and Lee joined the poker game, and at four o’clock we all went home. I decided to walk down Broadway from the Theater Guild building to the canteen on Forty-Fourth. It was a fine evening to take a walk. I can’t say “stroll” because the sidewalks are too crowded in midtown these days, balmy and soft and with that particular lavender twilight that the city sometimes has now because the lights are out. Thanksgiving is coming, and store decorations are out, even a lot of Christmas displays. I can’t get over how early Christmas things are put out. Next year I fully expect they will come out right after Halloween!

I thought of you, of course, as all the men in uniform passed by, and I couldn’t help but see how much we have all changed, how the city has changed. New York has such a feeling of electricity in the air, in the throngs of people in the streets, the wartime brownout. Last week about a dozen or so of the cast went out for drinks and one of the dancers began an argument about the beneficial effects of a major war. How it stimulated discovery, or at least rapid development, of all sorts of things. Like airplanes, for instance, and radio, and I suppose the crossbow if one wants to go that far back. I really couldn’t accept in the hot discussion that followed, the idea that a devastating war has a good side. But I must admit last night walking down Broadway one could sense the energy, it’s all through us like an invisible high voltage. You can feel it, see it, it seems to penetrate the very air. It’s as though we are mobilized, energized in our cause like a giant beast. I think of an American dragon, flexing its muscles for the great effort to come. Dearest, does this sound silly? I am certainly not a poet in spite of these flights of words and ideas you have to put up with, and not much of a letter writer, I’m sorry to say, even when I am writing to my husband and can say pretty much what I want. Or at least I feel that way. But if there are positive forces like those things that fly around in the atmosphere that you have explained to me—eons? Ions? (Well, I am an actress, not a scientist. You can fall off your chair laughing.) They were there last night in Manhattan. You can’t help but feel that our souls and spirits are in this conflict, we are just breathing out power and mighty will. It means we are going to win this terrible war.

Eventually, of course, I got to the canteen. I was on the schedule. They let you know they are so put out when you cancel. But believe me, the Canteen was not exactly what I needed after an afternoon wrestling with Ado Annie. It was chaos. The film crew had come in to film a segment of the Canteen movie, and they hadn’t given anyone proper notice. Members of the board of governors who could be rounded up in a hurry rushed right over. It turned out it was Gracie Field’s schedule the film people were trying to accommodate. The British music hall star was supposed to fly out to Toronto for a war relief benefit show or something that very evening, and it had to be done right then. You’ve heard me talk about The Movie, haven’t you? The Canteen has decided to give permission, after great controversy and debate, because it was argued that after all it has the radio show, Stage Door Canteen, so making a movie might seem like overdoing it. But in the end the board of governors decided making a movie about the Canteen was just more testimony to the theater world’s absolute, unswerving patriotism. And that viewpoint carried the day.

I suppose so, but I can tell you this evening was an odd footnote to all the above, I really have mixed feelings. So, surprisingly, do some of the staff. First of all, it disrupted everything, the film crew had trouble getting the cameras and big lights and miles of cables into what is, after all, a rather cramped basement. They came in through the alley, then the kitchen, and everything had to be dragged out of the way to let them through. We have been told most of the film will be shot elsewhere, probably at a film studio on Long Island, which is a relief, but that some scenes will take place in the canteen with real life members of the Allied forces. They had asked for a group of British sailors from the Royal Navy Club, which is sort of the Brits’ own canteen, but then they brought all the others waiting outside in to the canteen to act as extras. Everyone sat down at tables, the hostesses on hand put on their striped aprons and tried to look happy, and there was a small band to accompany Miss Fields, although I believe someone said the actual music for the scene is to be dubbed at some later date. And then—oh then, darling Brad, Gracie Fields, this British music hall star, sang a song especially tailored for “our” part of the war. Something about the Yanks (that’s us) are now shooting down the Japs and chasing them from island to island somewhere. Gracie came to the edge of the canteen stage, with British sailors arranged sitting at her feet, and sang this bouncy, wonderful ditty, and I confess I didn’t know what to make of it. Certainly the other hostesses standing with me had the same reaction. The refrain rendered by Miss Fields was unforgettable. Something like—Rat-a-tat-tat, Johnny Yank is getting his Japs! Accompanied by gestures of holding a machine gun and spraying bullets from side to side. All of us standing in the back were positively mesmerized, it was all so jolly. I got the strange idea that Gracie Fields’ number was very ‘First World War.’ You know, patriotic, campfire-style songs that everybody sang then and still sing, like “K-k-k-katy” and “Over There.” Wasn’t “Over There” the song with the line ‘the Yanks are coming, the drums are drumming,’ and so on? Well, there was Gracie bouncing around (I think she was on the stage in World War One, I swear I do) in that English musical hall style that always sounds as though they haven’t got the voice to sing but somehow manage to, with her ditty about the Yanks shooting Japs, rat-a-tat-tat, holding her arms out like she’s holding a submachine gun. And there are the Brit sailors sitting at her feet smiling very politely. Some of them are from ships that have been terribly shot up and have barely managed to put into American ports for repairs. Bless them, they watched Gracie Fields jumping around so jolly, singing about mowing down little yellow Japs with her machine gun and they never batted an eyelash. Ann Bennett said something to the effect that it would undoubtedly all look better in the final film. So when the film crew had taken their final shot and started dismantling the gear, we moved away to go about our various duties. Which, last night, included staying out of the way of our wonderful Madame X on one of her visits to the kitchen.