Stage Door Canteen (43 page)

Jenny sat up, took the drink away from him and put it on the night table. “You said you weren’t going to waste a moment of your twenty-four hour pass.”

“Well, we’ve got to eat.” He looked at her, frowning. “Jen, do you ever ask yourself why we’re fighting this war?”

“The Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor.”

“No, before that. There were plenty of Americans who wanted to stay out of it. A worldwide war has happened for the second time in twenty years. Sure, we’re on the right side, we’re fighting for a better world than one that Hitler and the Japs can deliver. But when you see the bodies of young men lying by the side of some desert road they’re hellishly real. I have nightmares about them. We’re going to win, Jen, but we’ve got to make it right.” His voice cracked. “It’s got to be worth all this goddamned sacrifice.”

She kissed him, her arms around him, holding him. “I know. I know.”

He put his arms around her. “I love you, sweetheart. I know that much when I’m not sure about a whole lot of other things.” He started to kiss her, then pulled back. “God, I’m a bastard, I haven’t even asked you about the show. I got some of your letters before I left London. Are you okay?”

They had gone from war and the summit in Casablanca to Oklahoma! in a giant leap. But Jenny was used to it.

She smiled. “Yes, I’m fine. Harold is looking for parts for me. He knows I don’t want to go overseas with a USO troupe, not just yet, although he thinks it would be good for me professionally. Entertainers who do a USO tour get plenty of publicity.”

He pulled her close. “Yeah, don’t go overseas unless you can follow me around.”

“Mmmm, that would be the idea.”

She stroked her fingers through his hair. It had stopped raining. They could hear the westerly wind coming up from the Hudson River, moaning around the sides of the building. The room was growing cold.

“It’s so wonderful the show is a smash hit,” she murmured, “but I’m not sorry, now, about Oklahoma!. It’s a gigantic hit. Walter Winchell writes about it in his column as though he supported it from the very beginning, when actually Winchell couldn’t do enough to make fun of it. Every New York critic raved about it, Brad. Somebody at the Canteen told me you can’t get tickets for Oklahoma! at all, not until the fall some time.”

He murmured against her shoulder, “Are you going to go on with what you’re doing there?”

“I guess so. We have such a big turnover, volunteers just seem to come and go. They need everybody, especially theater people.” She hesitated. “Oklahoma! was such a gamble for Dick Rodgers and Ockie Hammerstein because it’s so different, but audiences seem to catch on right away. The armed forces get free theater tickets, you know, mostly SRO. Marty Levin says every night there are the guys in uniform in the back of the theater, three deep, watching Joanie Roberts and Al Drake sing Oh, What A Beautiful Morning, and the chorus do Oklahoma! and Agnes’ dancers in the Laurey ballet, and oh, God, Brad—they stand there with tears running down their cheeks! Would you believe this Broadway musical has come to mean something very special?”

He kissed her again. “I’m not surprised.”

“You’re not? Brad, you know the old saying, ‘Vita brevis, ars longa’? That while we were putting on a musical it was more than that? Somehow with the war and everything, Oklahoma! has become really important. More than we ever dreamed.”

“Sure, it’s important as hell for those kids at the back of the theater. It’s what we want to believe in. Pioneer America, freedom, cowboys and cowgirls, liberty. The American Way of Life, the pursuit of happiness, Mom’s apple pie, you name it. Rodgers and Hammerstein have a gold mine. Look, I’m getting hungry. Let’s go out to eat. We’ll walk over to Broadway.”

She said, “You don’t have to be flip about it.”

He sat up and pulled her up beside him. “I love you, Jenny Rose. Loving you has saved my life a couple of times out in the desert when I wanted like hell to survive so I could come home to you. You don’t have to look like that. I know what you mean about the show.”

“I was serious about the standees, Brad. Oklahoma! really is different. It says something about America. It may be corny, but it’s what we want to believe in. The whole country seems to want to.”

He took her in his arms. “Genevieve, my darling, my own, when the hideousness of this war has just become a faded memory, people will still be singing Rodgers and Hammerstein’s music. They’re already playing it on the Armed Forces overseas radio twenty-four hours a day, I heard Surrey With A Fringe On Top a hundred times in London. People need the prospect of a beautiful morning, just like it says in the song. Keep that in mind, darling, that we’re going to have a beautiful morning. The whole world is. That,” he told her, kissing the top of her head, “is why we’re going to win.”

She put her head against his shoulder. “I keep telling myself that eventually this will all be over. It’s got to stop sometime.”

“Yes, Jen darling, we have the men and the guns and materiel. We’re going to overwhelm Hitler and the Japs, time is on our side. It’s coming.”

“But how long—”

“Jenny, don’t worry your lovely head about it. Peace will come, I guarantee you. We’ll get the beautiful morning Rodgers and Hammerstein promised us. And we’ll live happily ever after.”

He took a sip of his drink and his arm tightened around her. “Well, okay, that one’s no guarantee,” he said after a while. “The ‘happily ever after’ part. But at least this time around, God help us, we’ll have another crack at it.”

Author’s Note

Except for the main (fictional) characters, Stage Door Canteen is based on fact, including the difficulties surrounding the original production of Rodgers And Hammerstein’s innovative Broadway musical Oklahoma!

British and U.S. intelligence certainly knew of Nazi death camps like Sobibor, but no acknowledgement of them was made by either government during the war. Arnold Foster of the Anti-Defamation League tried to publicize the plight of the Jews in Europe, but the Allied position was that the Nazi death camps were an issue that did not advance the war effort.

Nevertheless, a woman correspondent, Marguerite Higgins, had a major “scoop” when she and photographer Peter Furst, scouting ahead of the US Seventh Army in a jeep, arrived at Dachau near the end of the war. They somewhat unwillingly accepted the surrender of the death camp personnel.

Former members of the International Brigade who fought in the Spanish Civil War were largely regarded by the U.S government as Communist “fellow travelers.” Most were kept under covert surveillance.

The story of the B-17 “Cincy Gal,” a fictional aircraft, was based on the events surrounding a Flying Fortress in the western Pacific as related by President Roosevelt in a radio Fireside Chat in May, 1942.

The account of a B-17 mistakenly trying to bomb a U.S. submarine at Midway was related to me by Lt. General James Edmundson, USAF, who piloted a B-17 in the same squadron. After the battle of Midway the crews of the Navy sub and the bomber crew met on the north shore of Midway Island to try to smooth things over.

German U-boats frequently surfaced off thre coast of the United States in the first year of the war. U-426 was an actual submarine commanded by Kapitanleutnant Christian Reich. It was sunk by depth charges from an Australian Sunderland aircraft with all hands lost on January 8, 1944 off the coast of France.

The actor who played Ali Hakim in Oklahoma! was from the famed New York Yiddish theater, but the character of Marty Levin is fictitious. Lee Dixon, though, brilliantly played Will Parker, but made life miserable for Celeste Holm (playing Ado Annie) when he chewed garlic to hide the odor of liquor on his breath. Agnes de Mille’s battles with Reuben Mamoulian were notorious. Mark Platt did stick her head under a water tap backstage during a bout of hysterics, as noted in several biographies.

Genevieve Rose is a fictional character. Celeste Holm, the original Ado Annie, went on to an illustrious film career, winning an Oscar for her role in All About Eve with Bette Davis. She auditioned for her part as Ado Annie by doing some authentic hog calling.

The Pentagon was under construction for most of the war. The Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (WAAC) became the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) in 1943. They were segregated, as were regular Army units, during World War Two.

Walter Winchell, flattered and encouraged by FDR, who used him as a valuable public relations tool, considered himself a super-patriotic spokesman for the American people. Winchell was surprisingly powerful in molding public opinion.

The US military tried to keep women war correspondents out of combat areas for most of the war. The women’s press corps worked around this, sometimes successfully.

Matha Raye was, with Bob Hope and singer Frances Langford, one of the war’s most-traveled USO entertainers, often covering the front lines in a jeep.

The ongoing conflict between the U.S. and the British (and early in the war, the French) continued at high levels until the end. Churchill, especially, would not concede Britain’s weakening empire, even though there were serious demonstrations for independence, particularly in India. Field Marshall Dill’s remark at Casablanca about Roosevelt and Churchill “making a mess of it” was eventually quoted in histories of the era.

Roosevelt and Churchill decided to do something at Casablanca about the German U-boat devastation of Allied shipping in the Atlantic, which had been stepped-up in the fall and winter of 1942-43. Radar or high frequency radio wave direction finding (Huff Duff) was installed on Allied ships with the result that by May of 1943, U-boats were sustaining terrible losses.

Several merchant ships as well as Allied warships tried to ram U-boats. The message “We are sunking,” was transmitted by Commander Otto Ktretchsmer’s submarine after it had been rammed, then shelled, by a British warship. Kretchsmer, a leading U-boat ace, and most of his crew survived, and spent the remainder of the war in a Canadian prison camp. U-boats cruised on the surface and their speed, a maximum of 17 knots, enabled them to outrun most warships. Contrary to popular belief, they fired the majority of their torpedoes when surfaced, and often used their deck guns to finish off wounded ships.

All the leading characters in Stage Door Canteen are fictional with the exception of well known stage and screen personalities. Oklahoma! opened on Broadway not in January, but a few weeks later, in March, 1943.