Stage Door Canteen (2 page)

“Hey, what show are you in?” “Are you a singer?” They crowded her, taking in her slim figure, long bright hair, approvingly. “Miss, are you in Hellzapoppin? I had a USO ticket to that show, it’s great.”

She knocked twice on the Canteen’s front door. Then a pause followed by another knock, the signal for the staff. The door opened and Charlie Hanrahan stepped aside to let her pass.

“You’re a little late, Miss Rose.” Charlie had been the backstage doorman for the Shubert Theater for forty years. At the canteen he checked dog tags necessary for admission, handled small emergencies, kept out the drunks. He said, with a vaguely morose air, “Mr. Lunt was looking for you.”

The main room of the Stage Door canteen had a warm, rich odor, Jenny found, sniffing the air, that could only be baked ham. It had been so long since she had smelled anything like it. It suddenly brought back all the unrationed Sunday dinners of peacetime. “Charlie, my God, I smell ham! Tell me, did we get a donation of ham for tonight?”

He looked glum. “That’s what Mr. Lunt wants to see you about.”

The Theater Guild’s Stage Door Canteen occupied a large basement painted and decorated by scenery and stagehand volunteers from the theaters around Times Square. The original Canteen had been founded during the First World War by patriotic actresses from the New York stage, the current one had been opened in a hurry after the Japanese had attacked at Pearl Harbor. Producer Lee Shubert had quickly donated the rent-free site of a former speakeasy, Irving Berlin had sent over an expensive new piano. Great theater names from Ethel Barrymore to Al Jolson to Marlene Dietrich came to help, if not as often as the publicity handouts said they did. So did the working people of the New York stage, from wardrobe mistresses and stage managers to millionaire theatrical producers.

Right from the start the Stage Door Canteen was enormously popular with Allied armed forces who wanted to rub elbows with the stage and screen stars they’d seen and heard of nearly all their young lives. The fighting men and women did not seem too disappointed when most of the canteen’s day-by-day volunteers turned out to be as ordinary as the people they’d left back home.

Most days, when Charlie Hanrahan got the signal at five thirty and threw open the Canteen’s doors, the place filled with a rush. Now, Jenny saw, a dozen junior hostesses were already present in their striped aprons, cleaning off tables, filling up paper napkin dispensers and trying to look useful. Across the Canteen’s tiny dance floor musicians were setting up on the equally tiny bandstand: a bass player, two saxophones, piano and rhythm guitar. The canteen staff was instructed to be especially welcoming to the volunteer musicians, hard to get since so many of them had been, or were about to be, drafted. Only occasionally did someone like Xavier Cugat or Tommy Dorsey bring in their full bands. On Monday and Wednesday the Canteen made do with recorded music.

Carmen Thompson, the supervisor of volunteers, looked up from a table covered with schedule sheets. “Miss Rose,” she greeted her, “you’re late.”

“Hello to you, too, Carmen.” She kept smiling. “I need to talk to you. That little air force sergeant I told you about is outside. We’re going to have to do something about him. He spends his time trying to pick fights. Tuesday night we had a bunch of British marines—”

“There’s a pile of telephone messages,” the other woman interrupted, “in the office, I wish you could see if you can do something about them. They’re from our volunteer hostesses. Maybe you could do some telephoning. Mrs. Bennett is going to be late, the Long Island Railroad is broken down again. There may be some other things, I haven’t had time to sort it all out.”

Anne Bennett was the canteen manager. The Long Island commuter line was notorious. Its chronic breakdowns had become worse since the war.

Jenny said, “Can’t you get somebody else? I really can’t do telephoning, I’m scheduled to work at the milk bar. Look, Sgt. Struhbeck, is especially obnoxious with Allied service people. Last time it was the Australians. That’s really looking for trouble.”

Carmen Thompson went back to checking her lists. “We can’t take action unless they’re drunk and disorderly, and even then we think twice about calling in the military police. Read the canteen guidelines, Miss Rose, our fighting men are our honored guests. The sacrifices they’re making for us transcend, uh, personality flaws.” She paused. “Is Struhbeck the one with the War Bond group at the Waldorf?”

“Personality flaws? Is that what you call it?” Jenny tried not to laugh. “It looks to me like he has a great big chip on his shoulder. And he’s going to start some sort of riot, mark my words.”

“We’ve never had a riot in the canteen, that’s absurd.” She did not look up. “I asked the office not to give us those telephone calls to do because once we open up the Canteen we need every volunteer out here with the servicemen. But they insist it has to be done around dinnertime when the girls are home, as most of them work. Except the students from the performing arts academy in Brooklyn. The dean there has taken an oath those kids are all over eighteen but I don’t believe him. Try to distribute them across the schedule, will you, so we won’t have a gang of Brooklyn teenagers in here all on one night?”

“What’s wrong with Brooklyn teenagers?” Jenny wasn’t enthusiastic about spending her evening in the back office, telephoning. “If we didn’t have teenage girls from the Bronx and Brooklyn around here, I don’t know what we’d do for warm bodies.”

The other woman put her pen down, and looked up. “Miss Rose, I can’t help it if the office passes telephone calls on to us. Somebody has to do it. Besides, you can’t work the milk bar tonight. Katherine Hepburn is coming in.”

For a moment Jenny could only stare. Then Jenny said, “You mean, the newspapers are coming to do another story on our wonderful volunteer celebrities.”

The other woman went back to checking her lists. “Actually, no, Miss Hepburn comes in at least once a month when she’s in New York. She’s really very dedicated.”

Jenny had glimpsed the great Katherine Hepburn only once. But those who had seen her with servicemen and women in the canteen said she was flatteringly attentive, admirably gracious. The distinctive voice, too, helped. The GIs were too dazzled to be intimidated. But the staff was.

Jenny sighed. “All right, I give in. But I still have to go to the kitchen and see what Mr. Lunt wants. He left a message for me.”

When Carmen didn’t answer, she made her way to the back of the main room, past the milk bar and food service counter, then the small, hot, smelly kitchen. The distinguished stage star, Alfred Lunt, a tall man with a harried air, wore a white chef’s apron. He was supervising the volunteers, two women and a man, at a table covered with rows of unwrapped baked hams. Lunt was officially in charge of Stage Door Canteen food, which usually meant rounding up donations but he seldom if ever prepared it.

“My goodness, what’s going on?” Jenny said.

He kissed her on both cheeks, not puting down a huge carving knife, which he brandished dangerously close to Jenny’s left ear. “Jenny, my darling,” he said in his plummy actor’s voice, “and how is the third most beautiful woman in the world?”

She kissed him back. “It depends on who’s first and second.”

He laughed, really looking at her this time. “Darling Lynn, of course, one’s wife is always the most beautiful. And number two is—um, probably Garbo. Look at these goddamned hams,” he went on, pointing. “I pried them out of Gristede’s, it took me six weeks of negotiating with their public relations department. And now—voila! Jenny darling, I do need you to carve. Tonight is special, we’re giving the fighting men and women of the free world ham sandwiches, something decent for a change in place of that disgusting pork product that says it’s ham but is really pig meat in embalming fluid.” He handed her the knife. “I am immeasurably grateful to you because I have to get the hell out of here, I’m meeting darling Lynn in half an hour to go to dinner at Terry Helburn’s.” He stopped, “God, that reminds me. Terry and Larry Langner aren’t going to ask us for money for your damned musical, are they? Christ, Lynn and I are not rich enough to be backers, tell me the Theater Guild’s not that desperate.”

“I wouldn’t say the Theater Guild is desperate.” She wished, now, that she’d had time to read her copy of Variety; perhaps something terrible had happened that she hadn’t heard about.

“Frankly,” he was saying, “if I had any money to invest I would definitely put it in soemthing by Dick Rodgers and Larry Hart. But the point is they’re no longer together. I know, I know—Larry’s become impossible to work with, and nobody blames Dick for dumping him. But what’s Rodgers without Hart? Or the other way around, for that matter?”

It was wise not to argue, even if she wanted to say that Dick Rodgers had not dumped Larry Hart. Alfred Lunt had taken off his long white chef’s apron. Now he put it around her, saying, “Although I admit Ockie Hammerstein is a big teddy bear, he can work with anybody, the man’s brilliant. Maybe he and Dick Rodgers can work together.”

“If they’re going to put on a preview for you,” she said cautiously, “I know it will be wonderful, Dick Rodgers has already written quite a few songs.” Someone had told her that. “But I don’t know what they have planned, I don’t know anything about raising money, I’m only an actress.”

“And a very fine actress.” He bent over to tie the strings of the apron. “In my opinion the problem is the play. A musical version doesn’t exactly inspire enthusiasm. I remember the thing had a miserable run when it opened years ago, when it was called—what the hell was it called?”

“Green Grow The Lilacs.”

“Yes, of course. I never liked the title, either.”

“It’s the name of an old Civil War song, I think.” Jenny found she had on the apron, the knife in her hand, without really agreeing to anything. Certainly not slicing baked ham. But that was Al Lunt’s magic. If she’d been a theater full of people she would already be in his power, waiting to burst into applause.

“You really want to do this, don’t you, darling?” he said in her ear. “I would be devastated if I felt I’d forced you to make ham sandwiches when the very thought revolted you.”

She laughed. “I’m really quite strong. I can take a lot.”

The three kitchen volunteers looked up as she joined them at the table. One of the women handed her a roll of paper napkins. “Here, Miss Rose, you’ll need this, the grease gets all over your hands.”

The other woman said, “I think I saw you last year in New Haven in Showboat, Miss Rose, and you were wonderful. Just think, oh my goodness, here we are now, making sandwiches!”

Jenny laughed again.

They worked for about an hour, putting the ham together with white bread and mustard and a leaf of iceberg lettuce. When they finished and viewed the stacks of sandwiches, one of the women said something longingly about ration stamps and not having tasted real ham for at least six months.

“We can’t even eat one, can we?”

They agreed that it was best not to dwell on it. Meat was being diverted to the men and women in the armed forces. “All this is for a good cause,” George, the third sandwich maker, reminded them.

While they were working, Charlie Hanrahan opened the canteen’s doors. The racket of the eager crowd stampeding down the steps carried through the main room and back to the kitchen, then dimished as lines formed at the food service counter. The band began to play. Jump jive, full blast. The noise level in the main room rose several thousand decibels.

“Isn’t it a little early for dance music?” one of the dishwashing detail complained. “Don’t they know all these guys want to do first, is eat?”

Jenny picked up a tray of stacked sandwiches to take outside. Elise, a a refugee from eastern Europe who often helped as an interpreter, picked up another. As she backed through the door into the main room Jenny smiled at her. Elise, who was so shy that she never initiated any conversation that Jenny could remember, smiled back.

It was still early, but the canteen was three quarters full. The U.S. servicemen who had been waiting outside were first, followed by a group of Australia-New Zealand Air Force enlisted personnel from their training base in Canada. Then a handful of Dutch or Norwegian sailors who had escaped the Nazi occupation with their merchant ships.

Recently there had been protests to the canteen committee about the proliferation of “regulars,” GIs from metropolitan New York military bases whose schedules allowed them to come early and claim a place in line on 44th Street. That made sure they got inside the canteen, even though it might shut out others who were only in New York on leave for a day or two.

It was certainly a valid complaint. And a representation of other Allied forces in the canteen usually made everyone a little happier. Among the GIs lining up for sandwiches there were those wearing the US Army collar tabs of the coast artillery, meaning they would spend the war behind big shore guns defending places like lower New Jersey, sailors from the Pacific theater with rows of combat ribbons, Navy yeomen and other clerical types from New York’s military regional command offices, several WAACS who could be in transit for overseas duty rumored to be North Africa, merchant seamen from the perilous North Atlantic run, and the shabby, bearded Norwegians who stood to one side, surveying the food line.

The Norwegians were probably wondering if they had to pay. It was a common problem. Some confused Allies could get stuck in a canteen limbo for hours if they didn’t speak English.