Straight Life (10 page)

I was going to wait to see the guys, but if I had gotten together with one of those black guys from inside I would have killed him or gotten killed. I left the place and found me a jug and drank it and wandered around the town. I was mad. I was really confused. I was hurt. And finally I got on the bus and went back to the post.

I was drafted too late to get into a band. They needed people for combat, not for bands, but I had my horn sent to me anyway, at Camp Butner, so I could play. I was stationed right next to the 225th Army Ground Force Band, and when I realized that, I took out my horn and started practicing in my barracks, playing out the window so they could hear me. They ran over and just wigged out when I told them who I was. They had all heard of me because I'd been with Stan Kenton, and they started a campaign to get me into the band.

It was a difficult thing to do, but there was a warrant officer in charge of the band who played oboe and really dug me. He was a classical child prodigy from a wealthy family. I think he played with the Pittsburgh Symphony. He had blue eyes, blondish, curly hair, a pouting mouth and effeminate ways, delicate hands, long, slender fingers. He had a very refined manner of speaking and was brought up, I think, as a loner, like myself, only he was rich. He didn't really care for anyone else in the band, and he had found a friend in me; in fact, he was a little overly friendly and I always felt strange around him. He never made any sexual advances, but whenever I'd mention my wife or anything like that he'd get uncomfortable and change the subject. It's a thing I've run into lots of times, guys who liked me with almost a homosexual intensity but with no overt actions. This warrant officer had a lot of pull, and he kept working, and, finally, just before the outfit I was with went overseas, I got a transfer. That was right before the Battle of the Bulge, and most of the people in the outfit I was in were killed, but I got into the band.

When it was time for the baby to be born I got a furlough and went back to Los Angeles. Patti was living with my grandmother on Seventy-third Street. Her stomach was real big, and it was strange to feel the baby move. I was praying she'd have the baby before I had to go back, and just before I was supposed to leave she started getting labor pains close together. We took her to the hospital, and I sent a wire to the warrant officer requesting an extension. I got a wire back. He said if I came right away he'd guarantee we'd stay in the U.S., but if I didn't come back I'd be AWOL and I'd probably be transferred into another outfit and sent overseas. I had to leave Patti in the hospital.

When I got to the base there was a telegram waiting for me saying that the baby was born, a girl, six pounds, eight ounces. She was born January 5, 1945, the day after I left. I thought, "Well, anyway, I won't have to go overseas." But the reason the warrant officer had told me to hurry back was that the band was going overseas immediately and he wanted me to go with them. We were shipped to Camp Miles Standish in Massachusetts and loaded onto a boat in a convoy and sent to France.

Everyone was scared. The war was raging. The trip was okay until about the fourteenth day on the water, when it got stormy. It was a bad storm, and everybody was seasick. In the latrine, the vomit and the urine would roll from one end of this long tin urinal to the other, hit the end, and fly out onto the floor. It was hard trying to stand up with all the vomit and the piss. And then, one evening, just as the storm was abating, I felt a huge lurching of the ship and heard an explosion. There were two more explosions; it sounded like they were right under the ship; and then all the lights went out.

They started talking to us over the loudspeaker, telling us to be calm, not to panic, and to put on our life jackets. Finally they called our group to get up on deck. We filed up, and it was night. The motors were all shut off. The captain kept talking over the loudspeakers as softly as he could. He told us the convoy had been infiltrated by German submarines. We were about twenty-six ships and there were six navy destroyers with us. On the trip sometimes we'd see them running through the convoy.

I was fortunate enough, when I came up, to get fairly close to the rail. I was able to see down, and even though the motors were off, the ship was drifting, and where it was floating through the water there was phosphorous. That was the only light. You could see it to the left and to the right and in front; the light of the boat cutting through the water.

I had my life belt on. It was cold. It was February, and we were just approaching the tip of England, going through the Channel. This was the spot where the German submarines used to lie in wait to get the convoys. We were all scared to death. Every now and then the captain, I assumed it was the captain talking, would say that they were going to set off depth charges, don't be frightened. And that's what I'd heard at the beginning. We saw a huge explosion off the back side to the right, and a little while after that there was another. Two of our ships were hit and exploded. We thought at any moment a torpedo was going to hit us.

You can never find out what happens, but I heard later that three submarines were hit. They kept testing by radar until they found that all the subs had left and, after a long, long time, they turned the engines on and we started moving again, but we had to stay on deck just in case. Sometimes they'd turn off the engines and lay on the bottom and wait-the radar picked up the engine vibrations-and then start up again.

Up to this point we hadn't known for sure where we were going-England, France, or North Africa-but at last we entered Le Havre, and I'll never forget the sight of that harbor. There were all kinds of ships, sunk, huge hunks of wreckage, and I guess the harbor was shallow because they were just lying there in the water. There were gun turrets blown to bits; you could see these huge howitzers, broken, all bent. The harbor itself was nonexistent: there were no more docks, so the Seabees had made landing places out of metal stripping.

The people started unloading and we watched from a porthole, but when our ship's turn came to go to the landing area everybody was unloaded except us. We didn't know what was happening. It was too good to think we wouldn't have to get off there and go to the Battle of the Bulge. We had been trained in stretcher bearing. If we did go we served as medics, helpless, no chance of defending ourselves. At the end of the third day there was no one on the ship but the crew and the band. Our warrant officer couldn't find out why we hadn't received orders to debark. We wanted to know if we could get off the ship and see the town, so he inquired and found that no American soldiers could go walking around Le Havre because the French would kill them. The Germans had taken the town at first, and there was a little damage, but they did just what they had to do, nothing more. Then the Americans came and took Le Havre back from the Germans and just mutilated the place. They were barbarians, animals, and the French despised them. We weren't allowed to get off the ship.

After five days we were frantic, but at last the warrant officer came back. He said, "I've got great news!" We'd been ordered to Bournemouth. We landed at Southampton, where they had trucks waiting for us that took us to a convalescent center in an old city in England, a huge camp filled with people who'd been wounded in battle. If they weren't dead but were wounded so badly they could never fight again, they were sent to the States, but if there was any chance at all of mending them up enough to put them back into battle, they were sent to England to one of these centers. Our function was to play for these people and give them a little entertainment, a little joy.

I stayed at the convalescent center for eight or nine months, playing and watching the V1 and V2 rockets fly overhead, bombing London, and then I became an MP.

At the end of 1945 a lot of people were released from the war. They were sent home if they had enough points for longevity. Most of the guys in the band had been in the army for years so they qualified to go home, and rather than getting replacements they decided to do away with the band. I was put in the MPs and sent to London.

(Alan Dean) It was in the forties toward the end of the war, and I was singing with a small band in a hotel in Southampton. Southampton in those days was quite a place because it was more or less a clearinghouse for all the G.I.s who has fought in various areas of Europe during the war. They would come back to Southampton, and, according to priorities, would be put aboard troop ships and go back home, As I remember, Art and the guys that played with him in the military band had the unfortunate job of playing for them every morning as they took off to go back to the States. Of course the band remained behind.

I first met Art, I suppose, one night when he and a couple of other fellows came to us and said, "Hey, we like your band. Can we sit in?" We were, I must admit, a little reluctant at first, because it had been our experience that when a G.I. would say, "Can I sit in with you, I used to play with Tommy Dorsey," it usually turned out that he hadn't played with Tommy Dorsey at all. He could barely play his instrument. And it was bit embarrassing. But these guys seemed to be genuine, so we said, "Sure. By all means, sit in." Well, of course, when they started to play we knew that they were fine musicians, particularly Art, who just ... absolutely ... just stopped us in our tracks, he was so good. And, after that, they would come into the hotel almost every evening and sit in and play a set with us, and we became good friends.

The engagement, which was for several months at this hotel, came to an end, and we went back to London, and almost at the same time the military band that Art was playing with was disbanded because some of their members were being sent back on the priorities system. They broke it up and sent Art back with a few of the other guys to London, and, of all things, made Art an MP, which I don't think he was very happy about. He wasn't cut out for that kind of action.

London was really quite an exciting place to be in those days. There was a sort of free-for-all atmosphere. The war had taken away a lot of the stuffy social stigma that I remember England having before the war (I haven't lived in England for many, many years now). I know the war made people more together. They had nothing to lose so they had a good time. I know I did. Oh, there was rationing, and they had lots of bad air raids and that sort of thing, but generally life wasn't that bad.

My dad had a pub in London, which is only significant because good liquor was very hard to come by during the war, and my dad, having a pub, used to get a fairly good supply and would always keep a few back for me or himself or his friends. Whenever Art and the guys needed a drink, they'd just buzz me, and I could usually rustle something up. I was always amused when I'd get a phone call from Art sometime around midnight, and he'd say, "I can't take this MP thing. Have you got any gin?" I would say, "Yeah, I can get a bottle of gin." "Well, get in your car and meet me on the corner. . ," of Picadilly and something or other. I'd get in my car and park, and suddenly, out of the darkness, this small figure with a huge white hat would loom up, and it would be Art, and he'd take a quick look around and hop in the back of the car and dispose of about a half a bottle of gin, and he'd say, "Well, now I feel more like it." And back he'd go on the beat again. Studiously avoiding problems. He went the other way when he heard a fracas. He just wasn't interested, and I didn't blame him either.

The fellows came to my house on many occasions, and we used to sit 'til all hours of the morning playing records and getting boozed. On one occasion, one of the guys got hold of something that resembled grass, but I don't think it was. I didn't smoke anything, even ordinary cigarettes; I still don't, so I didn't participate. Fortunately. Because the other guys smoked whatever it was and were all violently ill and fell about the place. I don't think they tried it again.

Jazz was pretty hard to come by in London in those days, but there was this one place run by a man called Feldman who had three sons who were aspiring musicians-Robert, Victor, and Monte. Victor, who was then about ten, played the drums, and of course, it's the same Victor Feldman who's one of the top guys in the studio scene in Hollywood now. He played amazingly well as a child, and then took up vibes and piano, and, as you know, he's quite a giant.

Feldman's was the place where jazz happened, and Art would go there and sit in and play and, of course, made a tremendous impression on the musicians around him because his technique, his fluency, his complete command of his instrument, was far ahead of any of the other musicians around. None of the English saxophone players ... There were some good ones, but they just didn't have it all together like Art did. I think perhaps one of the reasons ... I can't remember knowing anyone, ever, quite so dedicated to their music as Art was. Even when he was doing those awful MP things, walking around until five o'clock in the morning with a great white hat and a nightstick, he would grab a couple of hours sleep and a shower and go straight to a rehearsal room and practice his instrument for hours and hours on end with very little sleep. For him it was more important to maintain his ability and improve, and he did it studiously, without any hesitation. No matter what else was going on that had to happen. And I always admired that tremendous ability he had to dedicate himself to his work.

One time in Feldman's, a young fellow, oh, he wouldn't have been more than sixteen I suppose (I was about twenty at that time), a young kid, asked if he could sit in with us. We asked him, "What do you play?" He said clarinet, and we said, "Don't you play saxophone as well?" He said no, only clarinet. We said, "Well ... alright." He played beautifully, and we asked him what his name was, and he said, "Johnny Dankworth." He said, "I'm actually studying to be a classical musician, but I love jazz, and I thought I'd like to try it." And I remember Art asked me who he was, and I said I didn't know. Art said, "Well, he has more promise than any musician I've heard in England to date." And I think he was very perceptive where that's concerned, because Dankworth, as you know, turned out to be one of the finest jazz musicians England has produced, and he's still very prominent along with his wife, Cleo Laine.