Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War

by Mark Harris

  Then, one day while walking across the airstrip, Huston heard the roar of an unfamiliar engine. He looked up to see a Zero on reconnaissance five hundred feet overhead. The Japanese now knew the Americans were there. After that, a more accelerated schedule for the fight to retake the islands became necessary, and Huston started to feel acutely aware that his romantic idea of himself as a roving soldier of fortune–cum–war correspondent was about to be tested against a considerably less glamorous reality. For one thing, he was not, either by training or by natural talent, a cinematographer—“nothing I had ever shot personally as a photographer turned out well,” he wrote—which meant that he had to rely a great deal on the men on his team. Before he left for Adak, Huston had consulted with the highly regarded cinematographer James Wong Howe about what kind of production crew he would need. Howe had badly wanted to join Ford’s Field Photo Unit, but despite forty years in the United States, as a Chinese national he was ineligible. Eager to help, he ended up advising many Hollywood directors on how to shoot in difficult wartime conditions; he told Huston to request three cinematographers and to keep an eye out for “men who can serve as grips, gaffers, electricians and assistant cameramen—a four way threat as it were.”

  Huston got approval to bring along five men, one of whom was a cameraman named Rey Scott, who in 1941 had written, produced, and shot a feature-length documentary called “Kukan”: The Battle Cry of China, about Japan’s attack on China in 1940. Scott had wangled an assignment from England’s Daily Telegraph and had made his way from Hong Kong to the city of Chongqing, where he had stood on the roof of the U.S. embassy and filmed as two hundred tons of Japanese bombs rained on the city all around him. His efforts won him an Academy Award certificate for filming “under the most difficult and dangerous conditions.” He was now a lieutenant, Huston’s right-hand man on Adak, and, the director said with immense admiration, “a bloody, no-good rogue” and a “crazy son of a bitch—a cameraman who loved being shot at.” Big, bearded, and often drunk, Scott, said Huston, had “no regard for appearances, and no particular regard for authority.” He was also by all accounts completely fearless, at one point flying nine missions in six days.

  The conditions for shooting documentary footage could hardly have been worse. The Kodachrome film that Huston had brought with him required a level of bright light that was in short supply in the Aleutians. Aside from that, Huston, for all his taste for adventure, found the work terrifying. He took his role seriously; he believed that the army had essentially asked him to serve not as a propagandist but as a war reporter and that shirking from any chance to obtain information would constitute a dereliction of duty, so he never backed away from an opportunity to fly a mission in a B-24. But he quickly came to believe that his very presence in a plane was a bad omen. “Every time I went with them,” he recalled, “shit, something awful happened, and I got to be known as a Jonah. Bombs wouldn’t work; people would be shot out from under me.”

  The first time Huston rode along on a mission, it was aborted. The bomber he was in was late taking off because the crew’s tail gunner couldn’t be found, and, low on fuel and unable to catch up with the rest of the formation, the plane was ordered to turn back when it was still a hundred miles from Kiska. When it touched down on the airstrip back at Adak during a sky-blackening rainstorm, the brakes froze and the B-24 screamed down the runway, shearing off the wings of two other planes and skidding to a halt in a field, still carrying its full bomb payload. “Christ! We’ve got to get out of here before the bombs go off!” someone yelled as the crew, trailed by Huston, raced to get out of the plane through its only unjammed door. Huston ran around to the nose, trying to get some footage as a rescue ground crew attempted to extricate the unconscious pilot and copilot from the cockpit. Then, he recalled, “I began to shake uncontrollably. I put the camera down and ran.” On his second air mission, Huston was filming a Zero from over the shoulder of a B-24’s waist gunner in the center of the plane when the Zero fired back and the soldier fell dead at his feet. On another flight, Huston and his men came back empty-handed because of the simplest of rookie filmmaking mistakes; after loading the camera, he had forgotten to run out the “leader”—the strip of celluloid that precedes the unexposed film—so no images were captured.

  Whenever Rey Scott would get in a plane to shoot a mission, he would calmly leave his watch, his life insurance policy, and a letter of instruction on a piece of plywood near his gear, always assuming that he wouldn’t be back. Just as Ford had been at Midway, Huston was awed by the indifference to danger expressed by the men around him. He once listened to Colonel William Eareckson, who led the Aleutian bombing missions from Adak, tell his pilots that if they came under fire from Zeroes, there was little point in trying to take evasive action. “When you get into your run, stay there,” he said to the men. “You might as well run into it as away from it. And if someone plucks you by the sleeve and you look around and it’s a man with a long white beard, well, your troubles are all over.”

  As Huston’s forty-five days on Adak turned into two months, then three, then a fourth, he found himself “getting into a high state of nerves.” One night he and his men were asleep in their tents when they were awakened by a series of explosions followed by three sharp shots—the army signal for “Stand By to Repel Japanese Landing.” Convinced that they were about to find themselves in direct combat with the Imperial Navy, they ran for the slit trenches they had dug and waited ninety minutes before the all-clear sounded and they could go back to their tents and try to calm themselves and get some rest. The same jolting alarm was repeated the next night, and the next, and the next. “The thunder of engines makes the earth tremble and the ravens rise,” he wrote in his journal as the bombs fell in the distance. “Soon the earth below will blaze with hatred.” By late December, Huston felt he had all the footage he could use. Kiska and Attu were still in the hands of the Japanese, but there was no knowing when or if they would be retaken. He asked for and received permission for a thirty-day leave during which he would go home to Hollywood, visit his family, and begin to pull together a documentary. It was with a sense of flooding relief that Huston boarded USS Grant and made his way to Kodiak, then Anchorage, then Whitehorse in the Yukon, Prince George, Vancouver, Seattle, and finally Hollywood.

  Back at home, he was able to relax. With the Aleutians initiative seemingly stalled, the army was in no special hurry to have him complete his film, and investigators were no longer monitoring his every move. Unbeknownst to Huston, the army’s probe into his suspected Communist ties had proceeded straight through his time on Adak, with military investigators questioning his friends, colleagues, and employers at Warner Bros. Along with many others in Hollywood, Huston had been flagged because in the 1930s he had joined the League of American Writers, which had been founded by the CPUSA (Communist Party USA), in order to support Republican Spain; he had also been a sponsor of the National Fund Raising Campaign for Russian Relief. It is unclear who initiated the inquiry, but it came to a dead halt as soon as it reached Huston’s immediate superiors in the army. Colonel Schlossberg, though still no fan of Hollywood directors in uniform, exonerated Huston in his final report, writing, “His loyalty and integrity to the United States is unquestioned. . . . Lt. Huston has no Nazi, Fascist, or Communistic ties whatsoever.” Although his allegiance to the United States was no longer in doubt, his priorities were. One of his army colleagues described him as “one who cares for nothing else and talked of nothing else but the picture business” and “one who was self-centered.” Schlossberg’s report recommended that he not be given any assignment that would involve “access to confidential or secret information, and that he be kept under observation” while in the Aleutians. However, with Huston’s return from Adak, the army closed its file on him for the duration of the war.

  In California, Huston was able to spend some time with his father, who had recently finished playing “Uncle Sam” in Toland’s still unreleased December 7th project a
nd was also doing a good deal of voice-over work for Capra’s office on various propaganda and informational films. John told Walter that he wanted him to narrate Report from the Aleutians once he had finished editing it, and he spent a little time working on the film at Capra’s Fort Fox facility. But when his thirty-day leave ended, Huston relocated to the East Coast, where the army had leased space for its filmmakers at Astoria Studios in Queens.

  Huston was still married to Lesley Black and involved with Olivia de Havilland, but neither circumstance prevented him from pursuing a new romance. In New York, he was instantly smitten with a young, beautiful, and married socialite named Marietta Fitzgerald (later and better known as Marietta Tree), who met him at a dinner at “21” hosted by the playwright Sidney Kingsley and made a lasting impression on Huston by fainting in front of him. Fitzgerald’s husband was away at war, and although their involvement initially remained platonic, “it was a very romantic period and he had knockout charm,” she told Huston biographer Lawrence Grobel. “John’s outlook was so arresting and exciting. Everything he said was an astonishment, and of intense interest. I was overwhelmed by his knowledge. . . . There was nothing thin or superficial about him.”

  Huston was more than happy to be out of Los Angeles, where the lively party circuit of actors, agents, and executives that had until recently been at the heart of his social life now felt alien to him. “Having just returned from working with authentic heroes,” he wrote, “I was in no mood to put up with the screen variety.” New York seemed livelier, more heterogeneous, and pleasingly chaotic. On a bar crawl through Manhattan, he found himself alongside H. L. Mencken on one night, Robert Flaherty on another. And the Army Photographic Center in Astoria, where Huston did most of his work on Report from the Aleutians as 1943 began, was, he wrote, “colorful, to say the least”—a teeming, loosely managed facility where talents as diverse as William Saroyan, Clifford Odets, and Burgess Meredith were all hard at work on different projects. Huston loved his brief time there, and believed that the level of talent surrounding him exceeded that of “most of the Hollywood professionals” with whom he had worked.

  Rey Scott, his fearless Adak cameraman, wound up at the Army Photographic Center as well, and so did Irwin Shaw, now a private first class who was still looking to find his place in a filmmaking unit. Shaw had been sent east by the army, and as a member of Capra’s team found himself traveling back and forth between New York and Washington, D.C., on various short-term assignments, but he was just barely managing to stay out of trouble. One night, he was at the entrance of a private dining room in a hotel, ready to throw a punch at a maître d’ who was barring him from entering. Shaw was convinced that he was being kept out of the dining room because of anti-Semitism, and he was on the verge of starting a brawl with a civilian—an infraction that could get a soldier court-martialed—when a major who was out to dinner with his family saw what was happening and rushed over. He calmed Shaw down and explained to him that he wasn’t being prevented from entry because he was a Jew but because he was a private: The hotel’s restaurant had an officers-only policy.

  The major who saved Shaw from serious trouble that night was George Stevens, and his calm, unflustered sense of quiet authority made a strong impression on the hotheaded young author. Shaw was moved to see Stevens in uniform, just as he had been months earlier to see Wyler join up. “These were men who were way past military age who were all rather pacifistic,” he recalled. “Not pacifistic when it came to dealing with studio heads . . . but all very liberal men who had grown up with pacifistic ideas. And one and all, they gave up very lucrative and prestigious careers and went right into the Army. And they put themselves at the disposal of the Army even though they knew . . . that the possibility of making great pictures was almost nonexistent, because what the Army wanted from us was propaganda to help win the war, [and] propaganda doesn’t make great pictures.”

  Stevens was probably less concerned with making “great pictures” during his army years than were any of the major Hollywood directors who had preceded him into war; he was simply excited and ready for his service to begin—and still wondering where it would take him. In the fall of 1942, he had shot his last movie, The More the Merrier, for Columbia. Cary Grant, his three-time leading man and first choice to star, had become unavailable, so Stevens teamed Joel McCrea with Jean Arthur for what turned out to be one of the most sophisticated and charming home-front romantic comedies of the era. The film drew on wartime headlines in the lightest possible way; it was set in Washington, D.C., where so many young soldiers were billeted that within a few months after Pearl Harbor the district found itself in the middle of a major housing shortage. Against this backdrop—a city full of young “government girls” and rowdy GIs who were just passing through—Stevens created a romantic fairy tale with one foot in contemporary reality. He cast Arthur as Connie, a young woman who rents half of her apartment to a kindly old retiree named Dingle (played by jowly character actor Charles Coburn), who in turn rents half of his half to a handsome young guy named Joe (McCrea) who’s temporarily stuck in Washington waiting for his rather nebulous orders (he’ll “go where they send me—the government”).

  Stevens had shot The More the Merrier with the purposefulness and ease of a man who was finally getting what he wanted, but the picture made almost everyone else involved in its production terribly nervous. They seemed bewildered, if not downright frightened, by its combination of farcical shenanigans and a script so current that it not only acknowledged the housing shortage but recent news about the war in the Pacific (“Oh, Jimmy Doolittle flew over the seas / He wants to nip at the Nipponese,” Dingle sings at one point). McCrea, who had recently starred in a pair of comedies for Preston Sturges, asked his agent to get him out of the movie after the first day of rehearsal and had to be talked into returning. Harry Cohn panicked that the movie would make light of people in the service; Stevens had to reassure him that a scene with a group of WACs enjoying themselves in a D.C. bar would not include anyone in uniform. The Breen Office, which administered the Production Code, was convulsed with distress at the opportunity for innuendo created by so many beds in such close quarters and by the film’s depiction of Washington’s “eight gals to every fella” atmosphere: “We deem it very essential that these beds be a few inches from the thin partition which separates the two rooms,” Breen warned. “This is vitally important.” In addition, Breen recommended that “‘bathroom gags’ be minimized and some of them eliminated. . . . It is unacceptable to show Joe merely clad in his BVDs. He should be wearing some sort of bathrobe at all times.” The Production Code office also insisted that the script be approved by the FBI, since the bureau was mentioned in dialogue (J. Edgar Hoover signed off on it personally). And Breen asked that the phrase “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” be deleted, a request so prim that Cohn felt free to ignore it. Cohn didn’t even know what to call the movie; at one point Columbia offered a fifty-dollar savings bond to any studio employee who could come up with a title (among the names tested were Love Is Patriotic Too and Come One, Come All).

  None of the anxiety touched Stevens. He worked with care and grace, particularly to shape the tender, adult, and erotically charged relationship between McCrea and Arthur, but he did so without subjecting the cast and crew to his characteristic delays and silences, and he didn’t linger. In January 1943 he put together a cut of the film, tested it twice in front of preview audiences, and packed his bags without giving it another look; to Cohn’s evident distress, his contract was fulfilled. Cohn still wasn’t ready to let go: “George Stevens is leaving at the end of the week to enter the Service of his Country,” he wrote in a memo that seemed to express equal parts admiration and despair. He added, hopefully, “Anyone to whom you assign his office must take it with the understanding that he will vacate it when Mr. Stevens returns.”

  After Stevens’s year of deliberation, his transition from director to major happened so quickly that, in the memory of his son, “O
ne day he came home and told my mother, ‘I’ve joined the Army.’” On Jan. 6, Capra’s office sent a letter to Stevens’s local draft board in North Hollywood explaining that he would be “sent by the Special Service Division of the War Department on a mission outside the continental limits of the United States for an indefinite period.” Stevens received his letter of commission two days later. “I certainly didn’t know whether I was ever going to pick up a life with films again,” he said. “Everyone said, who knows, that might be the end for you.”

  More than most other directors, Stevens seemed to be at peace with that possibility. At thirty-eight, he considered himself to be “retired” after a fine career in the movies, and was now moving on to the next phase of his life. In February he packed his uniform and whatever Kodachrome film he could carry, traveled to New York City with his family, and prepared for his departure, taking George Jr. sightseeing and signing over his power of attorney to his wife, Yvonne. He then went to Washington for a quick check-in with Capra, and returned to New York on a TWA flight to say a final goodbye to his wife and son.

  The Stevenses were already adjusting to the downsized life of a military family; their room in the Waldorf-Astoria was one of the tiny ones that the hotel had set aside for officers who were paying the five-dollars-per-night rate that the army permitted. Stevens received his immunization shots and was just a day or two from beginning service when he became sick. Within a couple of weeks, he was so ill with pneumonia, made worse by his chronic asthma, that he had to be hospitalized at Fort Jay on Governors Island in New York harbor, where he then required an emergency appendectomy and weeks of recovery. Through March, Stevens and his family lingered in a kind of limbo far from their California home—Yonnie and George Jr. in a New York hotel room, Stevens in a hospital bed. It was almost April before he was well enough to be released.