The C-47 on which I had flown in from Hollywood landed with a load of vomit, not only from me but from about two dozen navy fighter pilots on leave from the Pacific. An electrical storm over the Rockies had sent the plane screwing through the air, dropping and rising several hundred feet in a matter of seconds, wings flapping visibly and at one point scraping treetop level along a mountain slope. The sole undisturbed passenger was a woman in her late sixties who sat in the single-seat righthand row with her legs crossed, reading a paper while nearly upside down and eating Hershey bars with almonds. So severe had our punishment been that the pilots were sent onward by train. Once on the ground, I, like them, kept turning my ankles as I made my way to the interior of the simple airport building, where I sat and waited to be picked up by a taxi Pyle had sent. On my hotel bed I lay on my back only to find my legs rising straight in the air. I sat myself up and then lowered down on my back again, but up they swung out of control. Finally I lay on my side and let them rest extended at right angles to my body. A week later, when I was in the airport waiting for a plane back to New York, Ernie introduced me to the woman who tended the souvenir counter, and she recognized me. “I really thought you were having an attack last week and was just about to call an ambulance when the taxi man came. I couldn’t believe you could get up and walk out. You looked dead.”
As is so often the case with American heroes, Pyle was a tortured man, uncertain of himself and ridden with guilt. Slight of build, with sandy hair thinning to baldness, gentle and self-effacing, he seemed the last man in the world to bring himself willingly into battle. He lived with his wife, who was at the moment in the hospital being treated for—he insisted on uttering it—alcoholism. Their home was a small tract house, one among twenty or thirty recently put up at the outer edge of the town. The place seemed somehow airless and unhappy, but when one stepped off his stoop and faced the mesa, the endless scope of New Mexico spread out in all its marvelous painterly colors, always changing, always new. On our after-dinner walks the main street was empty by sundown, an occasional passing car only emphasizing the amazing silence of this small city. One evening we saw a lone Indian man standing on a corner with a bundle under his arm, staring straight ahead toward the setting sun. I thought he was waiting for the traffic light to change, but when it did he remained motionless. Many years later I wrote him into The Misfits, but John Huston, impatient with this symbol of the American displaced person, swept the camera past him without really registering him. I guess the man’s symbolism was too personal to mean much to others.
It was on these blue-lit evening walks that I came to realize that Cowan was using me to get Ernie to sign the contract, so I informed him that I had no control over the final script and that he shouldn’t base his decision on a favorable impression of me. But such was his desire to immortalize the American GI that he convinced himself my presence guaranteed the script would not be cheapened. I was so flattered that I convinced myself likewise, and we embraced this happy illusion together.
One evening I told him the story of my play The Man Who Had All the Luck, which had been optioned for production the next year. Facing the fire in his sparsely furnished living room, I acted it all out for him, revising as I went along, and discovered a look of amazement and baffled awe forming on his face. When I was done he asked, “Where’d you get that story?” I had invented it, I said, based on my wife’s relative. “That’s the story of my life,” he said.
As he described himself, he had been too modest and shy to imagine becoming the star reporter he was now. Indeed, it was his inwardness that had moved him to invent the greatly successful idea of touring the small towns with his wife, thus avoiding major stories and the journalist’s usual need to impose upon people. He had managed to create the public image of a romantic pair of comrades savoring the everlasting truths of the unsung American majority. Luck had been his lifelong companion, he thought, and he had never understood why his professional life had been so successful. In the back of his mind disaster waited for the moment when it was least expected.
We were drinking and warming to our unexpectedly interesting lives when, staring into the fire, he began a long story about an experience in Italy. Not many months before, he had come upon “a pile of dead Italians and some German troops. They were just stacked up and must have been killed at about the same moment, because rigor mortis had set in and they nearly all had enormous erections. Some of their cocks were popping through the buttons. Must have been nearly two hundred of them facing up to the sky.” I recalled reading the column, but he had of course not mentioned the erections. And then, hardly glancing at me, “I had this accident as a boy …” He broke off before adding the unnecessary.
It was my turn to confess now, and I surprised myself by talking about the woman in Washington whose husband had been lost at sea, but he was ahead of me and cut me off. “Don’t, don’t do anything like that ever. The marriage is everything. That sex stuff is no good, it won’t get you a thing. … You think you have to do it, but you don’t. Your wife sounds like a wonderful woman …” What amazed me suddenly was the depth and innocence of his caring, and what I imagined was a certain envy for my good physical luck.
But the main news he gave me on that and the other nights was his refusal to hate the enemy soldiers, men trapped as ours were in this killing. Through that respectful and suffering vision of his, of a human disaster transcending politics, I saw his tragic nature for the first time. It bound me never to betray his hopes for a valid film, one that could certainly not be about a big guy and a little guy and a girl.
Back in Brooklyn a few days later, I got a call from Lester announcing that Ernie had signed the contract and the film was now “definite”—quite as though he had ever informed me it wasn’t—and that United Press was having a celebration to which I was invited by Lee Miller himself, the head of the organization of which Ernie, of course, was the star. I got on the subway trying to forget Stallings’s realism of some weeks before and looking forward to seeing Pyle again.
It was after ten o’clock in the evening when the drinking in the UP office paused long enough for ten or twelve of us to escape to 21 for some dinner. There, in the dining room already half empty, seated alone at a table chewing on crumbs from a broken piece of bread, was another American hero, John Steinbeck. He turned out to be an old friend of Miller’s, who had sent him to Russia and elsewhere as a correspondent. Nothing would do but that we join him.
I had never seen Steinbeck before, and it struck me that like Ernie Pyle, he could easily blush, but unlike Pyle, he seemed to want to expand himself physically, to present a strong and able and heartily Western image, his basic sensitivity and sentiment covered by an aggressively cynical wit that could move over the edge into cruelty. He had written—in The Red Pony, Of Mice and Men, the story “The Daughter,” and of course The Grapes of Wrath— scenes that were engraved on America like the Indian’s profile on the nickel, and I felt a faint disappointment to find him idling in this decadent place. I sat, as was natural, at the foot of the table and had no conversation with him. Pyle was neither eating nor drinking, and I imagined that he had for some reason lost the desire to celebrate. When the check came Steinbeck grabbed it, and only when Lee Miller protested that UP would pay did he relent enough to toss a coin for it. He lost the toss and paid whatever hundreds of dollars it all came to. It seemed an excessive gesture and left the others feeling some awkwardness as he did the business with the waiter.
On the sidewalk Pyle took me aside and said, “I hope you stick with this. Don’t let them ruin it, will you?” I promised to do all I could, and he said that he probably wouldn’t be seeing me again till the picture was finished because he had decided to return overseas—this despite Lee Miller’s pleading that he had risked himself enough and could stay at home and do anything he liked for UP for the rest of his life. But his unhappiness here was sunk in his eyes, the more so now at the end of a night of false gaiety. We shook hands. In 1945, during
the invasion of a tiny island off Japan called Ie Shima, he died in a foxhole, a bullet through his head. He had had enough of having all the luck. Maybe he could not bear surviving his dead or his time.
I walked with Steinbeck up Sixth Avenue toward his apartment. Something almost frenetic betrayed his anxiety and discontent with himself. His drinking wife had recently fallen off a balcony of their apartment, and he bore the special conflict of the celebrated—the desire to confide and the distrust of all confidants. He seemed an ungainly small-town fellow out of his element, grabbing the check like a provincial—a New York writer would not have thought to pay for ten people he had not invited for dinner, it smacked more of inner uncertainty than confident noblesse. It was cold but he wore no overcoat and enjoyed breasting the sharp wind as we walked toward the park. He seemed a shackled giant of a man fit for sun, water, and earth and not sidewalks and smart people. His face was no longer blotched with embarrassment, and he had ceased to guffaw sardonically at some bitter truth about people—in the restaurant he had been all laughing irony—but he was still jumpy and unhappy and restless. I did not know then that he had just broken up with his wife. That the author of prose so definite and painterly could be so personally unsure was beyond my experience.
I said good night to Steinbeck and walked on to the subway station. Waiting in the nearly empty train for the doors to close, I saw an old Orthodox Jew enter, clutching the inevitable bundle wrapped in brown paper and twine. A long white beard and broad-brimmed black felt hat, the traditional sidelocks and all the anxious energy of the survivor. Such men had always seemed like atavisms, fossils of a long-dead past. My father had run into Orthodox Jews in the garment industry and showed some irritation with their way of life; they were either collecting alms or were too sharp as businessmen, a charge I found hard to listen to.
The man seemed in a sweat of anxiety as he glanced up and down at the few passengers. Finally he chose me to sit next to. The redness of his cheeks reminded me of Steinbeck’s flush in the restaurant. An evening full of anxious men. Suddenly he leaned toward me and, putting his lips close to my ear, asked, “Are you Jewish?”
“Yes.”
“You’re Jewish?” he repeated, wanting some added assurance, balanced on the knife edge of trust.
“I said yes.”
His eyes widened with apprehension as he took the plunge: “Does this stop at Canal Street?”
I wanted to laugh but nodded and assured him that it did, and he seemed to relax in contentment, which relieved me as well. I could feel the heat of his body through my sleeve. That people like him were being hunted down like beasts was once again incredible. I determined to conquer whatever problems there were in the screenplay and to make sure it strengthened support for our men fighting the enemy, but to do so by giving each character his own viewpoint and space in the film.
Back in Hollywood in a few weeks, I was discouraged to find yet another putative director wandering about in the Cowan offices, also unpaid. One afternoon I was staring in futility out the studio window when, as in a dream, about twenty perfectly shaped chorus girls carrying identical metal lunch boxes appeared on the green lawn, sat down under a two-story-high white Grecian arch supported by Doric columns, remnant of some set or other, and proceeded to eat. Their faces were painted half white and half green to match similarly divided tights and two-color stockings and shoes. One of them rose now and then on long, gorgeous legs and moved like some humanoid gazelle to chat with another. They were beyond earshot, and the silence loaned the scene an added air of hallucination. A tractor appeared pulling a wheeled circus wagon with an enormous brown bear behind the bars. It halted amidst the girls, who laughed and waved happily to the bear, who looked down at them as though he too were in a dream.
A bulky old Minerva open touring car driven by a uniformed chauffeur now moved into view and came to a glistening halt just below the cage. It was the kind of glorious limousine Sid Franks and I had loved to watch lining up along the curb on 110th Street. A white-uniformed nurse stood up from the backseat and helped an old gentleman to his feet. He was then handed to the ground by two men who had hurried out of one of the sound stages in the background to meet the car. The passenger, I now made out, was W. C. Fields.
A portable stair was set in place beside the cage, and the great comedian, wearing a straw hat despite the wintry chill, made it up the three or four steps to a platform level with the floor of the cage, where a photographer stood focusing a Graflex. Fields was handed an apple, which he held up between the bars to tempt the bear to its feet. The bear blinked uninterestedly at the apple. Fields tossed it to him, and the bear gulped it down but did not rise. Fields took another apple and held it high between the bars, still with no results. Suddenly, without apparent reason, the bear stood and gripped the bars with his gigantic paws, stretching his muzzle toward the apple, which Fields held just beyond his reach. The flashes went off: a picture of Fields and the bear a few inches apart, Fields’s expression astonishingly bearlike as he traded looks with the animal.
As the bear held his position stretching for the apple, Fields carefully drew from his breast pocket a water pistol and with an expression of infinitely vicious joy squirted it directly into the bear’s astounded face. The animal reared back and nearly fell over. Fields hurried with amazing agility down the stair and into his car and was instantly driven away, the nurse covering his lap with a blanket.
It was not easy to turn my mind back to the World War II epic lying on my desk. Anyway, I had come to the end of my invention and was simply moving elements of the story from one place to another, with Cowan cryptically hinting that the script “still had a way to go.” But where and to what end? The contrast between the holiness of the sacrifices in the war and the absurdity of Hollywood began eating into me now that I had exhausted my imagination. The girls had left the lawn, the bear and his cage were gone, and only the flat, empty Grecian arch remained.
I was surprised now by the sound of a motorcycle engine right under my window. A rider dressed in black leather, black helmet, emblazoned gauntlets, and black leather puttees was swinging off the black machine. A truly Hollywood-type messenger, I thought. Again I tried to concentrate on the script, but there was a knock on my door. Opening it, I found the motorcycle rider with his helmet under his arm, removing his gauntlets. To my surprise he wore eyeglasses and was middle-aged. I imagined he carried a special message to me from Cowan, who was at the moment back in Washington, doubtless arranging for the use of a hundred thousand tanks and a million men.
“You’re Miller, right?”
“That’s right.” I expected him to hand me an envelope.
“My name is LeMay. I’m your collaborator.”
“My collaborator?”
“Didn’t Lester tell you? He’s put me on the script with you.”
“No, he never mentioned it. Come in, sit down.”
I had in that instant decided, without conflict or even effort, to quit the project, but I wanted to find out how this procedure worked.
We sat at the lone desk. Alan LeMay, whose name I gradually recalled in connection with action films, seemed a contented technician happy to tackle yet another problem job. He now took out of his pocket a brand-new deck of file cards, which he laid on the desk. “I think the best way would be to put the name of each character on a card …”
“Excuse me,” I said, “but have you read my script?”
“No, not yet, but I will. But I think we can save time if you give me the names of each of the characters and we make up a card for him.”
“And what do we do with the cards?”
“What we do, we combine them to reduce the number of characters. In other words, under each name we put his main story actions and see if we can take several actions and give them to one guy instead of three or four.”
“I see. So we can end up with… like a big guy and a little guy?”
“Not necessarily only two. We might end up with three or
even four, but there’d be one major guy and a sidekick, sort of. On that order. But have you had lunch?”
“Not yet. How about a ride on your motorcycle?”
“Great. I know a place about a mile away.”
On the way out of the office I felt, for the first time in Hollywood, thoroughly at home with myself. I paused at the desk of Cowan’s secretary to ask her to send him a wire in Washington thanking him for the opportunity to write this film but saying that I had never agreed to a collaborator and was returning to New York tomorrow, my services at an end.
LeMay was a terrific maneuverer through traffic, and the ride on the back of the British Triumph was glorious. We leaned way over on turns and came to such a stylishly sudden halt in front of the restaurant that I nearly slid up his leather back and over his head.
LeMay probably did some good work on the picture and was naturally replaced by another writer and yet another, but The Story of GI Joe was finally made and turned out to be surprisingly good. Of course it had lost almost all relation to the original scheme and had become the plain story of a caring infantry captain, played by Robert Mitchum, who in the end is killed. It was a moving tale but totally without any formal invention or interest for me. Ernie was played by Burgess Meredith, then a youthfully lyrical actor with a sweet American intelligence. I sensed, however, that a dimension of Pyle was missing, not from the performance but from the conception of the script. I only realized what it was decades later, during the Vietnam War, when I recalled Pyle’s insight that all war was civil war between brothers and that this fratricide overshadowed all compensatory glory and threatened any claim to meaning itself. The film, understandably, was about a fight between enemies, for it was very nearly impossible at the time to equate the Germans with those who fought them. Yet with his ordinary Main Street language, Pyle had glimpsed the war on the awful plane of tragedy—a word he would have shied from as far too intellectual—and if Cowan brought off a respectable achievement that honored Pyle and Americans, it was a far shallower portrait than they deserved.
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