Pacific Nocturne, 1944

by Don DeNevi

  While the Hope group quickly rotated turns in and out of the facility, the comic, first one in and first one out, stood outside the wooden frame structure with Peter. Meanwhile, several musicians exited the last trucks to arrive, and, with their stringed instruments, started to hasten toward the bandstand. Hope, seeing them, cupped his hands over his head and waved, shouting,

  “Thanks, fellas! You all make us feel real welcome. After this damnable war is over, and you are back home, we’ll form a band and call it ‘The Boys from Pavuvu - - A Band of Exotics In A Sea of Rolling Coconut Trees’! Yes, sir, men! We’ll recruit the Big ‘C’, Crosby, as our featured coconut.”

  Everyone cheered, causing the waiting audience to chant,

  “Bob Hope! Bob Hope! Bob Hope!”

  “Well, general, we better hop on stage. My crew is ready, and I’ve been ready since I was born and where and when I was present.”

  As the troupe trooped up the steps of the bandstand, the lieutenant honoring his assignment’s every step, Peter heard his name being called out,

  “Peter! Peter Toscanini! Lieutenant Toscanini!”

  It was Ellen! And, with her, was William Lundigan! And behind them was Dr. Schneidermann, the 1st Division psychiatrist.

  “Wow! You three! Wonderful sight. So happy you came. Take the first three chairs in the first row by the steps there. I have to remain close to Hope. I’ve been assigned to be his ‘bodyguard’. Stay nearby, so I can catch you up on what’s going on. I want you to meet Hope, but I can’t take my eyes of him, fearing the Ghoul will strike, if he is given the chance.”

  As the commander and the comedian led the short two-by-two procession up the steps of the bandstand and onto the stage, the phonograph records’ recordings of Glen Miller, Harry James, the Andrew Sisters, among others, diminished in volume.

  Suddenly, with Rupertus stepping away as the Marine band leader handed Hope the microphone, “Thanks For the Memory”, the comic’s signature theme song from the 1938 musical comedy, “The Big Broadway of 1938” which won the Academy Award for best movie song of that year, was played by the band.

  Over 20,000 Marines and supporting staff who had been waiting patiently in the pure, white light of Pavuvu’s shimmering August heat and humidity, broke into unmitigated applause, cheers, shouting, and other assorted hoopla. Peter, relishing the loud moment, thought to himself,

  “Here’s a world-famous man dressed in ordinary baggy trousers with a thin open-neck collared shirt, wearing argyle diamond-patterned knitted socks, a punster with an illimitable intrinsic sensibility of the humorous performing in torridity’s sweat, risking his life before so many, including the Mad Ghoul, who is surely observing out there to prepare to murder him in the blackness of nightfall. Bob is a model of youthful spirit, with good-nature in his eyes that squint joy and eagerness, as he sees all our men! He is truly a delight, on the stage as he was in our sedan, in the staff car as he is now. Himself, true to the bone. Nothing false or fancy. Just real wherever he is.”

  Then, as the final phrases and verses of “Thanks for the Memory” drew to a close, a rapid succession of light, playful pitter-patter and teasing began.

  “Hiya, boys. You know me, the vaudevillian wanderlust, Bob ‘Mosquito Net’ Hope, hopping from island to island with you, until we all land on Tokyo together, the huge sign hanging from the ceiling over my head that reads, ‘Hiya Bob’ should read ‘Hiya boys! Thank you for making the Japs take it on the lam….’ This afternoon’s performance is part of the ‘Somewhere in the South Pacific show of the Art of Living Series aired over the NBC Affiliates. Everything from this point on will be impromptu.”

  “Boys, before I properly introduce you to my Gypsies, first the girls with legs and other alluring appendages and accouterments that you’re fighting so fiercely for, then the altar boys, Big Beautiful Moustache Colonna, and the other brave knights who watch over them, including the homely kid on the block, Tony Romano, guitarist, I’d like to take a few minutes to tell you how it is we all happen to be here waiting to be murdered by a murdering-mad lunatic Marine.”

  “And, by the way, if you’re out there, in all seriousness, give yourself up. You don’t want to hurt any of your buddies anymore. Why? You’re just temporarily off-track, plodding away to kill good American boys. We all wander from the course. We don’t go around killing our brothers, our friends, our own. You do, and, because of that, you need help. Just walk up to the nearest MP or high-ranking officer and say, ‘It’s me. Stop me from hurting another fellow Marine.’”

  “Okay, that said, let me go on for a few moments about how we got here this afternoon. When this war started, me and my Gypsies, sometimes five or six or seven, if you count me, under the auspices of the USO got involved as often and as much and as best we could. And since then we’ve been bombed, strafed, shot at by snipers, and generally cussed out on the battlefield, from North Africa, across Sicily and Italy, and now the South Pacific. We’ve been cold in Alaska, foggy in England, hot in Egypt. But none of us would trade a second of those happy times. And besides, we love the applause. But wherever you are, the Hope Vaudeville Circus will be ready to make you laugh. Out here, it’ll be known as the ‘Pineapple Circuit’. Same laughs, but more women, more legs, more . . . well, you know what I mean. Occasionally, in between, we’ll make a musical feature film comedy or two, and say funny words on the radio. Now, you guys here in the Pacific are our focus.”

  “Along the way from island to island, we heard of you boys training for the past six months, on this tiny island for the invasion of some island you never heard of. We heard that you were all but forgotten, that you hadn’t seen a movie star for over a year when Gary Cooper came by to say ‘Hello’.”

  “It seemed to us the islands were getting smaller and smaller, the Marine crowds larger and larger, the Japs closer and closer. Then we hit the island next door, Bonika, or Banika. As we prepared to perform, the 1st Division recreation sergeant asked me if I’d take the Gypsies to Pa-poop-poop-u, or whatever the hell the name of this wanna-be . . . piece of sh - - is, this dot of crab crap, that’s not even on the map. He started to beg, ‘there are almost 17,000 guys over there and they need to laugh. They’re forgotten. They don’t know how to laugh anymore. They’ve had no entertainment. Please go see them!’.”

  “Can they wait another 10 minutes?” I asked. “I’ll round up my people. You get the plane or cars ready and we’ll go now!”

  He laughed and said, ‘The island has no airstrip, meaning we’ll have to land on a road of crushed sea rocks. It’s not that dangerous, yet it is a bit dangerous. Do you still want to go?’

  ‘Is Crosby there?’ I asked.

  ‘No, of course not. Pavuvu is nothing but a swamp, a cesspool, a hellhole of rotting coconuts.’ He said you would fit right in since you always smell something decomposing.”

  ‘Is it a good place to hide from my draft board?’

  ‘Mr. Hope, even the snakes can’t find it. The Japs had it and said they’d rather lose the war than live on it.’

  ‘Then we’ll go. We’ll give those forgotten boys the best show we have yet given on our tour.’”

  “Well, as it turned out, we’d had to wait until today to come over. All six Piper Cubs had to be flown from Henderson on Guadalcanal to Bonica or Banika, whatever that damned island is named. All I can tell you, men, before we start, is that seeing you by the thousands cheering on the beach over there as we flew in, seeing you on this baseball field, cheering as we buzzed over twice, low enough so that we could see you looking up with your smiles, made us want to be here even more. My God, what we wouldn’t do for you guys!”

  For Peter, the introduction was one of the most exhilarating presentations and remarkable sights of his life. Smiling, Bill Lundigan, sitting next to him, elbowed his friend. Dog-legged from his mesmeric trance, the lieutenant glanced past his best friend and noted Ellen next to him, followed by Dr. Schneidermann, Captain Del Barbra, Sergeant Guidi, Assistant Commander Shepherd, Major G
eneral Rupertus, and Chaplain Pinoe. All his friends, all chuckling, giggling, tittering, and outright laughing until tears filled their eyes, were there in the first row adjacent the stairs on the side of the bandstand.

  Then, as Bob Hope began the show’s impromptu patter, the one-liners, the introductions of all his Gypsies, the gags, jokes and songs, a hint of discord seemed to creep into and disturb Peter’s mental equanimity. Usually, Peter showed himself as capable, self-reliant and confident. Now, as he watched and listened to the performance, some vague imminence seized him. His marvelous self-control was weakening and a troubling anxiety seized his mind. Despite the mass of men in the audience behind him, and his colleagues and associates, all armed with .45 caliber automatics holstered at their sides, Peter slowly descended into a mild depression, a return to an earlier unidentified apprehension, a foreboding of danger, toward himself and those around him he loved. But of what? Certainly, he felt a presentiment of impending peril as he grinned saturningly at what Hope was saying on stage.

  Sitting silently, preoccupied with Hope’s every movement, his lip stiff, face rigid, and sullen, eyes coldly piercing, Peter only heard the final words of a long one-liner, “ . . . want to put me into mass production.” As everyone roared with laughter, clapping, hooting, and hollering, Peter steely agreed, the mass production of a kind, generous man, the absolute antithesis of a murder - mad Ghoul spinning death over everyone. And, amid the few moments of fun and joy, what better place than to spoil it all, in the open and in the daylight, than with a famous murder or two? Why wait until midnight to kill, in the blackness of night, unseen?

  Riddled with such questions, Peter could only brace himself for the rest of the day’s events. But, somehow, it wasn’t the thought that the afternoon performance would be the perfect scene for the murder that made him uneasy. He was unnerved because of something he noticed, or what someone said in the last few days. But what? And, by whom?And, why? The Ghoul was certainly an officer, a recognizable with bars and stripes that allowed the Ka-Bar to rise within inches and plunge into his heart and chest. Who? And what was said?

  Meanwhile, Frances Langford was on stage a few feet in front of Hope beginning to sing, “I’m In The Mood For Love.”

  “I’m in the mood for love

  Simply because you’re near me

  Funny, but when you’re near me

  I’m in the mood for love... “

  “Heaven is in your eyes

  Bright as the stars we’re under

  Oh! Is it any wonder

  I’m in the mood for love?”

  “Why stop to think of whether

  This little dream might fade

  We’ve put our hearts together

  Now, we are one, I’m not afraid”

  “If there’s a cloud above

  If it should rain we’ll let it

  But for tonight, forget it!

  I’m in the mood for love!”

  Just then, a young Marine in the second row jumped up, his cap clutched in his hand, ran into the main aisle, and up to the stage before Frances, and with arms held wide open, shouted.

  “You’ve come to the right place, honey!”

  The thunderous clamor that followed lasted a full minute, Hope, Colonna, Langford, Thomas, and the others on stage, including the members of the Marine band, buckled over in uncontrollable laughing convulsions. Peter, too, had difficulty maintaining his composure, laughing so hard.

  Hope’s show that afternoon promised to be no more, and no less, no better or no worse, than any of the hundreds he had performed since 1942 in England, North Africa, Sicily, and Italy. It would be held impromptu, and with no preparation, not that it would suggest a casualness, or offhandedness. Each rendition of it would be based upon the success of the preceding one, not in a studied manner, but a reflective one.Months earlier, Hope wrote in the Preface of his newly published book, “I Never Left Home” (1944), which in its first four months sold more than 1.5 million copies,

  “I saw how they worked, played, fought, and lived. I saw some of them die. I saw more courage, more good humor in the face of discomfort, more love in an era of hate, and more devotion to duty than could exist under any tyranny. I saw American minds, American skills, and American strength breaking the backbone of evil... “

  Bob’s opening monologue was always a variation on the theme of the ordinary soldier’s daily experiences. His skill at improvisation coupled with an intuitive sense of satire, gentle ridicule, and silly sarcasm made “the boys laugh, saving the day”. He learned almost from the beginning that “the boys” laughed the hardest when the one-liners and jokes dealt with the men themselves, the man who fought from the foxhole, who struggled to endure to stay alive.

  Thus, when Hope and Colonna used the infantryman lingo, joking about their lister bags, Atabrine tablets, armor artificers, the soldiers in the audience laughed the loudest. “They were speaking our language, which made their gags even funnier,” wrote Lieutenant John D. Saint, Jr. to his parents, Mr. and Mrs. John A. Saint of South Claibone Ave. in New Orleans.

  Later, Hope recalled facetiously,

  “Whenever I came on stage and delivered my opening monologues, the crowded, overflowing audience was so ‘excited’ by my words that not a sound came out of them. Often we’d be in gullies, on hillsides, or on the flat ground, often drenched by rain, or even snow, or the blazing sun overhead, their rifles and machine guns cocked and ready to fire.”

  “Then, when I would introduce Tony Romano, Jack Pepper, and the other Gypsy boys, those thousands upon thousands of wonderful fellas cheered like mad. But when I brought out and introduced Frances Langford and Patty Thomas, they stood up en masse, as a whole, as one, and cheered and whistled so loudly, so forcefully, its wind blew me right off the platform. When my two girls came forward to the edge of the stage, MPs positioned themselves all over wearing rubber gloves ready to push the eyes back in the sockets of men who hadn’t seen women’s legs in more than a year.”

  And, so it went for more than an hour, Frances singing and Patty dancing their hearts out. In between their solos, Tony Romano, “Who could get more out of a guitar than anyone, including the world’s great classical guitarist,” played with such feeling that even the men with the hardest combat-experienced hearts suddenly felt tears flooding their eyes.

  With the completion of singing two songs each, with the minimum accompaniment from the band so as not to interfere with her beautiful voice, Patty handed the microphone back to Bob. Having spotted during the interlude several hundred Seabees in the middle of the audience, he spontaneously, as was always his want, to pay tribute to members of the Armed forces rarely recognized for their brilliant achievements.

  “I see out there members of the 48th Naval Construction Battalion . . . Seabees, they call you. You are the guys who transformed coconut plantations knee-deep in rotting oval edible fruit with white meat oozing sweet milky fluid into airstrips, runways, and parking lots for aircraft. You build anything, and everything buildable, wharves, docks, road, chapels, hospitals, country clubs, houses of prosti…, no, I’m kidding. Who needs those? You’re not afraid of swamps, open sand, or hip-high mud. Unhampered by flooding rains, typhoon winds, and endless Jap snipe fire, you put up 16-foot tents, Quonset huts, mess halls, and beautiful luxurious silver privies with golden toilets for officers while digging one-foot deep trenches for the run-of-the-mill trooper. You are the guys who can’t care less about freezing cold, searing heat, bugs and land crabs, scorpions, and officer reprimands and insults. What you can’t stand, however, is boredom and abstinence. Your only relief from the reality of the Jap eyeing you over there is falling in love with the hula dancer tattooed on your buddy’s arm. You’re the one who’ll dreamily ask if she has a sister.”

  “All you guys are special, every member of the armed forces. Everyone here. But, the Seabees? A unique edge, I would say. What you guys build is almost as important as what the others around you capture. The Seabees allow supplies to be
brought up through the jungle, and airfield to be constructed in places so remote even Club Med hasn’t found them. And, MacArthur adores the Seabees. When he left Corregidor, he waded through the ocean to a submarine. It’s not true he left his footprints on the water. When he said he would return to the Philippines, he added the 1st Division would lead the way with the 48th Naval Construction Battalion building the bridges connecting all the islands.”

  “No sir. The Seabee has a bit of a shine to his edge. These sailors with hammers in their wide pants read blueprints part of the time instead of Esquire Magazine all the time. They’re really rugged, and although the Seabees are only two years old, they have a great reputation as a corps. When you hear the 1st Division landed some place the chances are the Seabees built what they landed on.”

  “Well, enough of heaping praise. But as my Frances and Patty come on next, and my Gypsy boys play in between and, when appropriate, fondle, I mean ‘feel along’, I’ll check out the officers’ toilette, powder room, chamber pot, or whatever else you want to call where you peepee, or do your yuck-a-do.I think I saw it out there behind the grandstand, a reddish color thingamajig with decorative trim.”

  So, as the audience hooted and hollered, clapped and cackled, Bob concluded, “Where’s my bodyguard? Oh, there he is, the youngster sitting there in the first row. He looks young enough for me to be his bodyguard. The kid could be Crosby’s new baby boy.”

  Glancing behind him and seeing “his two girls” poised to perform, laughing and waving at the audience, Bob, pretending to look nervous and worried, said,

  “I don’t know if I should give up my microphone to these two Gypsies in order to go tinkle. Look at the sillies, ready and roaring to take my place as I innocently and lovingly answer a 30-second call of nature, maybe more, since it involves number two, the yuck-a-do. What kind of friends are these? Put them in their place, boys, by answering, my question, WILL YOU MISS ME IN THE NEXT 10 MINUTES?”