3. KOREA
Welcome to the United States Army, Mr. Marshall
OVERNIGHT I WENT from being a college student to a “Fighting Machine.” I had a degree in journalism that I could do nothing with because for the next two years my full-time job was for the United States of America. I was sent to Fort Dix in New Jersey for a day, and to Fort Knox for basic training. In Kentucky we spent eight weeks learning routine soldier tasks like marching in place and loading a gun. My dad had helped me fill out my application, and he wrote down that I was a television cameraman. I had done some camera work in college, but the claim was mostly fiction. But Dad said, “Don’t put ‘writer,’ put ‘television cameraman,’ because television is going to be big.” Dad was notorious for doing this kind of thing. Even though I wasn’t a cameraman, he knew that if I stretched the truth, I would get a better assignment. He excelled at inflated résumé writing. I guess he also had confidence that I was smart enough to learn how to be a cameraman on the fly. Dad was right. That title qualified me for service in Astoria, Long Island, where I worked in a division that made army instructional films.
The films we made were about everything from how to read a map to how to detect venereal disease. I acted in one movie about dogs and ended up getting bitten by the dog. It left me with a fear of dogs for the rest of my life. The head of our unit was a lieutenant named Richard D. Zanuck, whose father was Darryl F. Zanuck, a famous producer and head of 20th Century–Fox. Richard would later become a producer and studio executive himself. In the army, however, he was a little aloof and not very friendly to enlisted men. Then, I didn’t consider moviemaking a profession I was destined for. It was just a nice way to pass my time in the army.
I worked in the film department for two months. The best perk was that I could go to Broadway shows for free if I wore my dress uniform. You had to stand up for most of the show, but it was worth it. The bad news was that I had to live with my parents and Penny, which was a bit of a letdown after being so independent at college. But the time flew by as I awaited my foreign assignment. Most of my friends and I had put down that we wanted to go to Germany. But it turned out the U.S. Army was launching a series of radio and television stations in Korea, and because I’d listed myself as a cameraman, they thought I would be an asset to their broadcast division.
Before leaving I called Fred Freeman, my writing partner from Northwestern, and told him I was heading to Korea. Because he’d signed up with the army reserves, he could stay in New York and do two weeks of service each year.
“I have plans for us,” Fred said when I called him.
“What kinds of plans?” I said.
“Someday we are going to move to Hollywood. But first we need to make some contacts.”
“Hollywood? Freddie, are you crazy?” I said. “Who would hire us to work in Hollywood as writers?”
“Just get your stint in the army finished,” he said. “And call me when you get back.”
Before I shipped out I spent a week in Chicago so I could play one last job with my band. That band at the time was called the Bob Owens Trio and had gathered a lot of interest because of our front man, piano player Bob Owens. We were headlining at the Compass Room, which was a big deal for me because most of the time I was the opening act, not the headliner. Before we went onstage I watched from the wings as our opening act performed. It was a group of young comedians doing improvisational comedy routines in a style I had never seen before. They didn’t seem to have prewritten routines but instead appeared spontaneous, which was unique for the time. They were doing situations instead of jokes. There were four performers, and their names were Andrew Duncan, Shelley Berman, Elaine May, and Mike Nichols. I didn’t know who they were, but it was obvious to me that they were incredibly talented. I was startled by their innovation and creativity. I was just days away from going to Korea, but my mind began to fill with possibilities. I wondered if I might be able to either perform or write that style of humor, too.
I must admit that when I shipped off for Korea I was a little scared. I boarded the ship with seventeen hundred other soldiers and sailed from Tacoma, Washington, for Seoul, Korea. I had never been to a foreign country before, let alone one that was so far from America.
While on the boat I met Gordon Belson, a round-faced soldier with a deep voice who worked as a professional radio announcer in his hometown of El Centro, California. When I told him I was a comedy writer, he mentioned that he had a younger brother named Jerry who liked to write comedy, too. Gordon also liked music and played the trumpet, with more joy than skill. So we formed a band and started looking for other members. Charlie Camilleri, a hippy, rebellious type and superb musician who played seven instruments, including piano and trumpet, joined us. Charlie got a few of his other friends to play, too. For the two weeks on the ship we entertained the troops and officers in the mess hall.
I also volunteered to write for the ship’s newspaper and some of the skits that soldiers performed each night. One of my more popular comedy routines which I rewrote from comic Harvey Stone went like this: “They call this ship a floating city. Well, I live in the sewer. We get six meals a day. Three go down and three come up. You should see what it looks like when a hundred guys are leaning over the ship’s railing getting sick. It looks like Niagara Falls in Technicolor. One day I went to take my tray of food to throw it overboard. Another officer asked what I was doing with the tray. I said I was eliminating the middleman.”
One night I met a corporal with a shiny personality, and I typed him up a skit to perform. But I noticed during rehearsals he was having trouble finding his way with the dialogue. I worked with him for a few minutes and he was still speaking gibberish. That was when I realized he was illiterate. I was pretty naïve back then, and I had never met anyone who couldn’t read. But I worked with him and he ended up doing a great job with the skit.
After the ship crossed the Pacific it made a stop in Okinawa, Japan, to unload soldiers who were assigned to serve there. I went out to the deck to wave goodbye to them, and as they stood on the dock they took their instruments and played the Dixieland song “When the Saints Go Marching In” especially for me. It must have pained them to play it because they all preferred jazz music, but it made me smile big. I discovered that day that the army was a place where you met people, found true friends, and soon had to say goodbye. I would not see Charlie again for four years.
Gordon and I, however, were both headed to Seoul to work in the radio and television station together. They made us disembark in the middle of the night. We had to climb down army ropes hanging from the side of the ship in the pitch black. Then we got into little boats like the ones I had seen in pictures of Normandy from World War II. As we were climbing into the boats, I approached my commanding officer.
“Why do we have to arrive in the dark when there is no one here who will shoot us?” I asked. After all, we were no longer at war with Korea.
“Who said so?” said my officer.
I hugged my duffel bag and snare drum and wondered what exactly I had signed up for.
I knew only one other person who had ever served for the United States in Korea. His name was Sandy McMillan, and he was a counselor at Camp Greenkill, my YMCA camp. Sandy had shipped off for Korea while I was still in high school, and within a year he was dead. So I guess in the back of my head I knew that danger was always a possibility.
The corporal in charge of our radio station was a somber, no-nonsense man named Mark Smith. He looked at my résumé the day I arrived.
“Says here you are a TV cameraman?”
“Yes,” I mumbled. “Correct.”
“We have no TV station here yet,” he said.
My father was right about the future of TV, but he was a little ahead of the army.
“Says you are also a writer. What do you write?”
“Jokes,” I said.
“Jokes?” he asked.
“You know, skits, little bits, funny things,” I said.
> “We don’t need jokes here,” he said seriously.
“Okay. What do you need then?” I asked.
“We need you to write serious material about the country of Korea. Radio documentaries,” he said.
For the next twenty months I would try to write seriously about Korea for my radio station—the Armed Forces Korean Network.
A typical day for me involved a combination of guard duty, meals, marching, and work at the radio station. Eventually I became the head of the six-station radio network, and I was in charge of picking the songs and the shows. I taught them how to do comedy shows. In between meals and work we sometimes had to go to classes and listen to presentations about things the army was introducing, such as new weapons, equipment, and strategy. I mastered taking apart a gun while blindfolded, a skill I had never imagined a stickball-playing kid from the Bronx would need. What I was very good at was shooting while resting on the ground. I had talent as a resting sniper, not a standing or kneeling one. So the army gave me a certain confidence and feeling of success.
Sometimes on Sundays we would get the day off and go into the city of Seoul to buy cigarettes and stationery to write letters home. On the walk into town I would daydream and think of new radio shows we could put on the air. I came up with Evenings with Elaine, which would become one of our most popular shows. I found an American girl who was working at the officers’ club and convinced her to come down to the station and read letters written to the soldiers by their girlfriends back home. The show was a big hit until some officers discovered that the girl I hired was African American. They shut down the show immediately. When I asked why they said it was because they couldn’t have a black girl on their network. It was one of my first experiences of censorship, and I thought it was ridiculous to pull someone off a popular show just because of race. Censorship seemed incompatible with creativity to me, but I had bosses I needed to answer to and salute to, so the show went off the air permanently.
We all had to get special security clearance to write the news and work for the radio station because sometimes we would handle sensitive and secret information. This required filling out a series of forms and questionnaires that seemed cumbersome but essential. One day Gordon, who was now our news announcer, received the paperwork for his high-level security clearance. He called me over to look at it with him.
“Well, would you look at this,” he said.
I looked at the form but didn’t see anything unusual.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Says here I’m adopted,” he said.
“So, what’s wrong with that? Plenty of people are adopted,” I said.
“This is the first I’ve heard of it. My parents never bothered to tell me,” he said.
Getting security clearance turned out to be quite a surprise for Gordon, who was more fascinated than disappointed by the revelation. While he was adopted, his sister, Monica, and brother, Jerry, were biological siblings. Gordon finally figured out why he didn’t look like his brother and sister.
I worked with another writer named Fred Roos (who later became one of the producers of the Godfather movies). Back then he was just a recruit from Los Angeles. When we weren’t writing material in the station, we sometimes sat on guard duty together on the night shift for the TV station they were building. I would make up jokes and tell them to Fred to pass the time.
“I think we need a password,” I said.
“What kind of password?” he asked.
“Something that people need to say in order to walk by us,” I explained.
“Okay. What is the password?” he asked.
“Matzo. Now you say the password,” I said.
“Matzo,” he said.
“You may now Passover,” I said.
Fred laughed and he wasn’t even Jewish.
The TV station contained so much expensive equipment that our bosses worried it might get stolen in the middle of the night. We were on guard to protect it. Although we had guns, we didn’t usually shoot at anyone, because if you shot your gun you had to fill out a lot of paperwork afterward. However, if you just threw rocks at the intruders, they usually ran away in fear and no paperwork was required. So we ended up saving our bullets and throwing a lot of rocks at people and at sounds in the dark.
The winters in Korea were terrible, even worse than the winters I spent in Chicago. I remember freezing while Fred and I sat diligently outside the base of the TV station with our rifles and rocks.
“What are you going to do when you get out of here?” said Fred one night.
“I want to write jokes,” I said.
“Really?” he asked.
“Yes. I went to journalism school, but I don’t do ‘serious’ well. I do ‘funny’ much better,” I said. “I think I could be an entertainer.”
“Well, give me a call in Los Angeles,” he said. “Maybe I can help.”
“What do you do?” I asked.
“I work at the William Morris Theatrical Agency.”
“Are you an agent?” I asked.
“I work in the mail room. But not for long,” he said. “If you ever get out to Los Angeles, I can introduce you around to some show business people. I’m going to be a producer.”
Walking on the midnight-to-8:00 A.M. shift with a gun in the middle of Korea, I had made my first real-life Hollywood contact.
Shortly after I arrived at the radio station, another soldier, named John Grahams, joined our group. He was from Milwaukee and had graduated from Marquette University. He was a professional radio announcer and a professor of radio history at Marquette. We hit it off right away. He had a great radio voice, and although I didn’t have the best voice, I could write for the two of us. It took a long time, but we finally convinced the army brass to give us our own show. We created the Uncle John and Uncle Garry Radio Show, in which we discussed different army topics and news of the world. We did radio salutes with a comedy twist to Valentine’s Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, and other holidays. Whatever holiday it was back in America, we would do a tie-in for the troops in Korea. We also did a sports-style play-by-play of a chess match that was quirky but the troops liked it. Finally the AFKN network was known for comedy.
From time to time, like in journalism school, I made mistakes when trying to be funny. Our boss, Mark Smith, told me one day that one of our radio shows was too long. He wanted me to cut our material down to make it fit. But I thought, Why cut our funny material when it is easier to cut the endless Korean song we were required to play in the middle of the show? So I tightened up the song. What I didn’t know was that the song was the Korean national anthem, and I’d offended a whole country. Instantly I was demoted for a few weeks. I had learned a valuable lesson: Ask for help in translation before cutting anything.
I redeemed myself during the Academy Awards a few weeks later. Sometimes when we were broadcasting a particularly popular show, the North Koreans would jam our airwaves just to frustrate us. This is what they did the night we were to air the Oscars. Everyone on our base was looking forward to Bob Hope’s opening monologue, but I knew ahead of time that the North Koreans had messed up the broadcast. So I tried to come up with some way to fix it. As I sat down to listen to it, Bob Hope’s opening monologue was completely chopped up by dead air. However, I already knew from experience how the jokes went from hearing them performed in clubs. So I was able to re-create the punch lines or straight lines. Then I hired a local guy who could imitate Bob Hope and had him fill in the blanks. Suddenly we were back in business broadcasting the opening of the Academy Awards. The other guys in the station thought I was a wizard, and they loved what I had done. So did my commanding officer.
I was always looking for a new project to work on. Another soldier I made friends with was Jimmy Anglisano, who also was from New York. Jimmy was a pleasant type who later became a banker. He wanted to form a band and heard I played the drums. I told him all I had to offer was the snare drum I had brought with me, not a complete kit. Thi
s information did not deter him. One night he picked me up in a jeep. We crawled under barbed wire and entered the back door of a large building. When he turned on the lights I saw the entire room was filled with musical instruments. He helped me carry out a complete drum set, and we transported it piece by piece underneath the barbed wire back to our jeep.
“I’m a little nervous,” I said.
“Why? What’s the problem?” Jimmy asked.
“I want to form the band, don’t get me wrong. But won’t we get in trouble for stealing? There are people in charge of this building.”
“The person in charge of this building is me,” he said. “And I’m fine with us taking it.”
Jimmy played the accordion and was also a good leader. He also found a good guitar player to join us. He said our band could benefit from a southerner, so we recruited Marv Dennis, who was from Nashville. To round out our band Jimmy brought in a soldier who was known for doing Elvis Presley impersonations. His name was Jack Larson, and he often performed at the officers’ club. Jack, an energetic, gyrating kid with the moves of Elvis Presley, later changed his name to Lars Jackson to give himself a more European flair. As a band we did very well with Jack. Eventually, however, Jimmy and I made the decision to reinvent ourselves as a two-man team so we could enter the army’s network of variety contests. Jimmy did mime-style humor while I narrated like a circus barker with a metal crowbar instead of a cane. For some reason, our act was a big hit with the soldiers. They seemed to find it not only funny but also unique. Maybe they wanted to laugh more than they wanted to listen to music. We entered our act in a few contests. Much to our surprise we won the All-Korea Event, followed by the All–Far East Competition. Before we knew it we were being invited to fly to Washington, D.C., to compete in the All-World Entertainment Competition.
My Happy Days in Hollywood Page 4