A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking
Page 12
"I don't like all that gibble-gabble," I said. "Socializing is a pain in the ass. I enjoy being alone, making up characters and stories on my Royal..."
"Come hunting with me," he said. "You'll enjoy it."
"Shooting some poor goddamned animal, Howard, whether it's a fox, a rhino, or a rabbit, is unfair."
"Okay, Sammy, okay," said Hawks, catching my drift. "You're a writer, not a hunter."
Regardless of our very different personalities, I was nuts about Howard Hawks and the way he made films. I never did go hunting with him, but, after the war, I gave him a double-barreled hunting rifle with an iron cross that I'd brought back from Germany. On the gunstock was engraved "To the glory of Hermann Goring." The Gray Fox loved it.
Like Ford, Raoul Walsh was a Hollywood pillar. He'd broken into the business as an actor in silent films, playing the part of John Wilkes Booth in Birth of a Nation. In a career that lasted fifty years, Walsh made over a hundred movies, including the great High Sierra (i94i). He loved directing and sometimes took on projects just to keep working, without a gut conviction about the story. I loved Raoul's roguish sense of humor and selfeffacing manner, the kind of guy who works hard without taking himself too seriously.
In the late seventies, I took Raoul to lunch at Musso & Frank's with Christa. He must have been almost ninety years old by then. He still looked great. Wearing a big cowboy hat, he could have starred in any body's Western. We had so much fun with Raoul. That would be the last time I'd see him.
I was making progress on The Dark Page, but whenever I needed some dough, the book had to be put aside. I'd write a script, sell it, then go back to work on the novel. Power of the Press was bought by Columbia, directed by Lew Landers, and finally released in 1943. It dealt with a Hearst-like newspaper publisher who dies, leaving his New York paper to an old friend, a respected newspaperman from the Midwest. Gangs of the Waterfront was a follow-up to Gangs of New York. Republic Pictures produced it, and George Blair directed. It wasn't released until 1945, a straightforward crime picture that I knocked out pretty quick.
My next script was called Warden Goes to jail. John Huston had introduced me to his father, Walter. I was so impressed that I wanted to write a yarn that would be a vehicle for Walter. To research it, I needed to get some background material on Alcatraz, so I went to San Francisco for a couple weeks. My story was about a harsh prison director who kills a man over his wife and is incarcerated in the same prison where he was once warden. The prisoners don't exact revenge on him. They simply watch him go slowly insane, victim of his own prison rules. I loved writing the tale of a man who creates his own laws, then is killed by them. Paramount bought the script but never produced it.
I was learning that one of the most frustrating aspects of the Hollywood system was that, many times, hard-hitting stories like Warden Goes to jail didn't make it to the screen. It made me so goddamned mad that I was seriously thinking about trying my own hand at directing. That way, my scripts would not just get made, but, once up on the screen, the movie would look the way I'd written it.
See, by 1941 I was doing pretty well in Hollywood, selling stories and scripts one after the other. I had some accomplished friends, and I was making pretty good dough. Yet I considered my stay in Hollywood as temporary. Deep down in my heart, I always dreamed of being an editor in chief. Even a small-town paper would do. It always seemed that I had one foot in and one foot out of the movie business. The way they rewrote my scripts made me increasingly dissatisfied with just being a screenwriter. I no longer could watch a film without questioning the director's judgment, figuring out how a particular shot could have been improved, wondering why the hell the director didn't yell "Cut!" sooner on a never-ending sequence.
Since the beginning of the movie business, there has always been a conflict between screenwriters and directors. The conflict continues to this day. There are screenwriters who are aggravated by how directors translate their stories into movies. There are directors who can make a great film with only the wisp of a script. I've come to understand that it's impossible to say who's more important to the final product, the writer or the director. There's no solution to this natural antagonism in moviemaking, and there will never be one. My own approach to the problem was to become a writer/director.
Every soldier got this letter from FDR. That zuay, we knew our marching orders came directly from the commander in chief.
But for the time being, there were more important conflicts to worry about. Hitler was master of continental Europe, having first occupied Czechoslovakia, then invaded Poland, swallowing up Denmark, Norway, and the Low Countries, then France. It was clear to everybody that the Nazis were criminals who had to be stopped.
Early Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, I was driving my car in Los Angeles, listening to the radio. That's how I heard the news about the attack on Pearl Harbor. My novel, the scripts I was doing in Hollywood, my plans to try directing-all of it-suddenly seemed unimportant. It was, as President Roosevelt told Congress, "a date which will live in infamy." America, the lumbering giant, was finally awakened to the danger of passivity. As soon as Congress had voted for war against Japan and Germany, I was very sure about what I had to do.
I went down to the U.S. Army draft office and got in line with all the young men waiting there. At twenty-nine years old, I was much older than the average guy who decided to enlist. Luckily, they needed plenty of soldiers, so there was no bias against "old" volunteers like me. There was a required interview with a recruiting officer. I requested a few weeks before being sent off to hoot camp, in order to finish up a first draft of my novel. The officer gave me the extra time. Then he asked me why I wanted to go to war. Hell, I certainly wasn't enlisting with the idea of becoming a hero. I asked if I could level with him, and he said yes. So I told him that, sure, I was inspired by Roosevelt's call to arms against the aggressors; however, the prospects of military life-being in uniform, marching, carrying a rifle, fighting-didn't really give me a hard-on. What kept going through my brain was that I had a helluva opportunity to cover the biggest crime story of the century, and nothing was going to stop me from being an eyewitness.
PART
II
My war journals were quick jottings of story ideas and combat incidents. This auto portrait was done in North Africa, a GI still wide-eyed and untested. There was a lot more war to fight.
12
The Big Red One
I heard my mother shudder when I told her I was going to be a soldier. My country needed me for a little while, I reassured her, and everything was going to be all right. As deeply worried as she was, Rebecca kept her composure and did her best to back me up. I asked her to hold on to my most precious possession, the just-finished first draft of The Dark Page. As soon as I returned from the war, I'd find a publisher.
The army sent me to Fort MacArthur, near San Diego. Like every other draftee, I had to take a battery of standardized tests and answer a helluva lot of stupid questions. When I told them about my background in journalism, they sent me over to the Communications Department. An officer there offered me an assignment on the staff of the armed forces newspaper. I turned it down flat. I'd joined the army to be in the thick of the action, not behind some goddamned desk.
They marched all the draftees to a railroad station, each of us carrying two heavy canvas bags. A tall, broad-shouldered captain next to the tracks barked out our names one by one. I was sent into a line with maybe a thousand other men. Never had I seen so many men in one place at one time. A train was about to pull out of the station, packed to the gills with soldiers. Ignorant and impatient, I walked up to the captain.
"Where are those men on the train going?" I asked.
"Soldier, you'll call me `Sir'!"
"Sir," I said, "where are those men going?"
"Infantry!" shouted the captain.
"I want to go with them," I said.
"Get your ass on the train!" he yelled, glad to be rid of me.
; Relieved to be moving forward instead of standing in that endless line, I happily jumped aboard. The crowded train pulled out of the station. In my naivete, how could I guess the horror that lay ahead for me and my fellow passengers? My precipitous leap onto the infantry train was one of the most decisive steps of my entire life. For Chrissakes, the infantry! Guys who joined the infantry, I discovered, came back from the war one of three ways: dead, wounded, or crazy. When you're a dogface, you're the lowest rung on the army's hierarchy. You're nothing more than an ant. Military attitudes about the infantry haven't changed much since Napoleonic times. Hell, you don't even have a name in the infantry, just a number.
They sent us to training camps in Georgia and Louisiana, two months in the first, three months in the second. Holy shit, you can't imagine how hard they trained us in those goddamned camps! I marched and marched and marched, until my rifle didn't feel like a rifle anymore but like a third arm. My forty-pound backpack became as light as a feather. We fired our rifles at targets until our shoulders were black-and-blue from the kick of the rifle butt. When you screwed up, a red flag was waved, signaling everyone that you'd missed the target. The red flag was called "Maggie's Drawers," named after some dame's underwear from the nineteenth century. The best shots were country boys from Tennessee, Arkansas, or Iowa.
Since we were all treated like shit, a healthy camaraderie developed among the recruits, an affinity that went beyond social and educational barriers. You name the ethnic background, we had it: Irish, Polish, Jewish, Italian, Latino, Armenian, Slav. Except black. At that time, blacks got sent to their own regiment. The guys grunting alongside me came from every walk of life, from cities, towns, and villages across America, most with rudimentary educations. We were all equal, militarily speaking, the lowest of the low. A real melting pot. When we weren't crawling on our bellies, marching, or shooting, we got bombarded with patriotic propaganda, slogans, music. Everywhere were those "We Want You!" posters, Uncle Sam's fierce eyes staring at us, reminding us that we were sweating our balls off for the home of the free and the brave.
In the second training camp, I ran into an officer named Kenneth Fox, who'd been editor in chief at the Kansas City Star. Fox couldn't believe that I'd enlisted in the infantry. He immediately took me over to see General Edwin S. Parker. Fox told the general that I was a helluva newspaper reporter and suggested that I be promoted to second lieutenant and transferred to the war correspondents' detail. General Parker had no objection. But I did. I suppose it was my pride or my stupidity. Or both.
"I don't do publicity," I snarled.
"You're making a big mistake, Sammy," said Fox.
"Maybe," I said. "But I've got no one to blame but myself."
Resigned to my lowly rank, I went back to the barracks with the other recruits, proud of not having been tempted into some cushy office job. How many times would I think back to Kenneth Fox and General Parker, smiling to myself at what a dumb bastard I'd been not to have accepted their offer? Maybe a thousand!
The tough physical routine and the monotony of training were getting to me. The camps were morbid. Hell, I wanted some real soldiering. Tired and overwrought, I began to have nightmares. I regret not having written them down, because they were straight from some mysterious inner eye, perfect for a future novel or a movie script. I remember one about me being in a German village with Nazi signs posted in the place, people starving everywhere. That nightmare turned out to be disturbingly prophetic.
We thought we'd never get out of training. It was like being in a prison without bars. Seemingly chained to our sergeant, we marched our asses off all day long. When we got some leave, we went into the neighboring towns, which were almost as harsh and depressing as the camps.
"When are we going to do something?" I asked my sergeant.
"General Eisenhower has important plans for you," he told me.
"When, goddamnit?"
"Just wait."
"But when?"
"You'll see soon enough."
It was worse than waiting for Godot. Finally the big day came. We were put on a long train and shipped to Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania. It was about midnight when we arrived there, the middle of nowhere, cold as hell, a moonless night. There were a million stars in the sky. A sergeant on the platform started yelling commands at us as we got off the train. He was wearing a dark steel helmet. Thanks to a solitary light in the train yard, I saw a red "i" reflected off the sergeant's helmet. Soon, we'd all be issued helmets like his, wearing them like another part of our skull, sleeping in them, fighting in them, dying in them.
"Listen up! I'm going to call out your names, followed by your assignments! First your regiment! Then your battalion! Then your company!"
I got assigned to the Twenty-sixth Regiment, Third Battalion, Company K. After he finished the entire roll call, the sergeant said, "You are now members of the First United States Infantry Division. Since 1775, it's been called `the Big Red One'!"
At that point in our military training, it seemed like more indoctrination, so we didn't pay much attention. We didn't give a shit about 1775; we wanted to see some action in 1942. After more weeks of drills and training, we were moved to a base just outside New York in preparation for being shipped overseas. We had permission to make just one phone call. We couldn't talk about where we'd been. We had no idea where we were headed.
I called my mother. She wanted to come over to kiss me good-bye.
"We're not allowed to see anyone," I told her, trying to act tough.
"Where are you going, Sammy?" she asked.
"I'll let you know as soon as I get there." We caught up on family stuff Then she told me she'd read The Dark Page.
"It's excellent, Sammy. Best thing you've ever written. I'm going to try to find a publisher for it."
"Okay, Mama. If you do, keep the money for yourself. Don't worry about me, for Chrissakes, just send some cigars once in a while!"
Then came the good-bye kisses. I tried to stay tough and not let the tears well up, but they did.
The next day we boarded the Queen Mary at Manhattan's Pier 9o. The fifteen thousand men on board were crowded into every nook and cranny like sardines in a can. The luxury liner had been converted into a troop transport by taking out everything that wasn't welded to its hull, leaving its many decks bare. There were only a few square feet for every soldier to park his ass and equipment. We ate and slept in shifts. We wouldn't find out until we were in the middle of the Atlantic that we were heading for Scotland. Sailing for Europe! Hell, for many of the boys that was the first time they'd been away from home. At least whatever lay ahead was far away from those goddamned training camps.
We landed in Gurrock, near Glasgow, on August 7, 1942. It was colder than Kelsey's nuts. They moved us to southeastern England, near Salisbury, and put us through forced marches, drills, and assault maneuvers with real explosives and ammunition. We were ready for combat; or, at least, that's what we thought. By the end of October, the entire regiment boarded two British troopships, the Warwick Castle and the Duchess of Bedford, and set sail. We knew we were going on an amphibious operation but still had no indication of where the beachhead was. I felt lucky to be on the Warwick. The other ship was quickly renamed "the drunken Duchess" because its shallow draft caused it to roll miserably in the rough weather. We headed down the coast, rounded the Iberian Peninsula, past Gibraltar, and turned into the Mediterranean to join an armada of Allied ships sailing east. During the voyage, they briefed and rebriefed us on our mission: to land on the beaches of Arzew and Damesne, in Algeria, and move inland against Oran, twenty-five miles to the west. We were part of General Eisenhower's campaign to invade Africa, code-named "Torch." In addition to the military plans, they distributed pamphlets about the Arab culture, what to do, what not to do, admonishing us to be respectful of their conservative customs. It was pretty simplistic, but useful for doughboys from Alabama who couldn't tell an Arab from an Australian.
We were part of an armada of two thousan
d Allied vessels heading for the North African coast in November 1942 to take part in Operation Torch.
At oioo on the night of November 8, my outfit boarded the landing craft that took us into Arzew beach. This would be the first Allied assault of the war, attempting to force the enemy off land it had usurped. The reputed balmy Mediterranean breeze was freezing cold that night. Still, when I took a deep whiff, I could smell the sand, the palm trees, the belly dancers, and the sheiks. Momentarily, my mind wandered to dashing legionnaires in Herbert Brenon's Beau Geste and exotic tales from Percival Christopher Wren's books. I'd soon be fighting alongside those hardened men from the Foreign Legion who'd left behind their prison records, unrequited love affairs, and broken families. As the boats approached the desolate beach, there were lights, as if we were expected. We were. Tons of leaflets in French and English about our arrival had been dropped by Allied planes.
"Put your rubbers on!" our sergeant yelled. "You're gonna get wet!"
We took out the standard-issue condoms and fitted them over our rifles to keep them dry. The doors of the landing craft were flung open. Waisthigh in the water, we scrambled up the beach and hit the sand. Shots rang out. The French were firing at us. We fired back. It felt uncomfortable shooting at the French, even if they were with Vichy. There were strong ties between France and the United States. For Chrissakes, American soldiers were killed at battlefields with names still fresh in our memories: Soissons, Chateau-Thierry, Argonne. The French-American connection went way back. How the hell would we have won our War for Independence without Lafayette? We'd been trained to shoot Nazis, and suddenly we were forced to return fire at the French. Their shells were exploding everywhere, and their machine guns were rattling at us from their positions in a seven-hundred-year-old Moorish fortress overlooking the beach.