by Mark Harris
Stevens and his family took the train back to Washington, where he met with his army supervisor, Colonel Lyman Munson, and Darryl Zanuck, who was still working on his documentary, to discuss an assignment that would send him to North Africa. There was time for him to take in the opening day of baseball season with George Jr., but five days later, on Easter Sunday 1943, “separation was really upon us,” he wrote in his diary. “Got up early and had breakfast with my two dear ones. We all felt pretty blue. . . . I had a hard time to keep my eyes dry when I kissed my dear little boy and my dear little wife good-by. I’m so happy when I’m with those two. They are both so fine. I’m a very lucky person to have them for my own. I will be very happy when I can come back to them.”
The next week was one of the most disorienting Stevens had ever experienced. He was shipping out with only the vaguest orders, and every time he got back into military transport for the next leg of his long journey, he found himself another degree farther from anything he could call familiar. From Washington, he was flown to Miami, then to British Guiana, then to Brazil, and then to Nigeria, where he arrived in the sweltering military garrison in Maiduguri and dropped his gear in a makeshift bunkroom, still not sure what he was supposed to do there. “Almost everyone sick,” he wrote. “Slept on the porch of the barracks right by the door.” He went to bed pouring sweat under nothing but mosquito netting, then woke up freezing and looking for a blanket. The next morning, he was back on an army puddle-jumper, bound east for Khartoum. He and his men grabbed a brief nap there—they barely knew what time of day it was anymore—and were awakened at 1:15 a.m., given breakfast, and driven to an airstrip. “We flew along in the dark, down the Nile Valley,” he wrote. The men bundled up in the blackness against the plane’s metal hull, shivering until 5 a.m., when they saw the sun rise. They tried not to vomit as the plane bounced in the choppy air.
They landed in Cairo, where Stevens had an unlikely encounter with Hollywood, which now seemed many worlds away. He was taken to an open-air amphitheater where hundreds of American GIs, starved for entertainment or any taste of home, were treated to a two-year-old 20th Century Fox thriller called I Wake Up Screaming that featured Betty Grable, a popular starlet whose pin-up pictures had made her an army favorite. “It was a film you would avoid seeing,” said Stevens. “It just wasn’t my cup of tea. But I sat there with 20,000 other guys, and I saw the Passion Play! . . . There was a good sister and a bad sister, and a foreign chap, and what do you think—it’s the bad sister who’s winning all the way. Betty Grable is the good sister, because she’s glossy and cute and the G.I.’s dream.” Every moment in the movie, Stevens recalled, had “fifty times the weight on each individual” than its makers had intended. Cut off from the simplest experiences of their lives back home—a date, a night out, a soda fountain, a kiss—the men experienced what Stevens called a “catharsis” through exactly the kind of work he had been so eager to leave behind. “I was a little bit more of a person after that,” he said.
But he was back on the road the next day, this time headed for Tripoli and then Benghazi, where the only sign of war he saw was the graffiti “Hitler is bastard” that someone had chalked onto a piece of concrete. He knew he was getting closer to the action because he and his men were now accompanied by air escort as they flew into Algeria, first to Constantine and then to Algiers. The day he arrived, more than two weeks after leaving Washington, D.C., The More the Merrier was opening four thousand miles away in New York. Time magazine called it “a smart, civilized [comedy] about wartime that does credit to Director George Stevens (now an Army major) as his last civilian job.”
Stevens was finally where he wanted to be—he was ready to shoot the campaign in North Africa that the Allies had been successfully waging for more than six months, pushing the Axis forces to retreat all the way to Italy. He stepped off the plane into Algiers, the city that had served as the campaign’s central base of operations, and was surprised to find himself in an atmosphere of unhurried comradeship and general relaxation. Hitler’s army in central Tunisia had been badly beaten and was one day from surrendering. The campaign was over. There was no combat left to film. Stevens had, so far, filled his journals with thoughtful notes and observations. “Life’s a journey,” he wrote at one point early in his war travels, “and it’s always most interesting when you’re not sure where you’re going.” But on the day he learned he had gotten to Algeria too late, he confined his entry to three words: “THIS DAMN WAR.”
THIRTEEN
“Just Enough to Make It Seem Less Than Real”
ENGLAND, HOLLYWOOD, AND WASHINGTON, JANUARY-MAY 1943
As the new year began, William Wyler was starting to wonder if he was fated to sit out the war in a London hotel room without ever shooting a frame of film. He rang in 1943 at Claridge’s drinking bad scotch with William Clothier and Harold Tannenbaum, both members of his crew—although they could scarcely be called a crew since all they did was show up regularly at Army Air Force headquarters on Grosvenor Square and ask if any orders had come through. It had been more than four months since Wyler had been instructed to “organize and operate the activities of the Eighth Air Force Technical Training film unit,” but, as his supervisor wrote in a sympathetic memo, those orders “did not state with ‘what’ he was to organize and operate it, nor where or how he would get the ‘what.’”
In the fall, Wyler had asked Major General Ira Eaker, the head of the Eighth Air Force, if there was anything he could do to help him get to an airbase. Wyler had already requested flight training that would allow him and his small team to be aboard the B-17s as they went on their bombing missions; without that training, they would be limited to serving as a ground crew, trying to teach gunners how to operate cameras when they weren’t shooting at the enemy, and then watching the planes take off and hoping that young men who had never even held cameras before would return with usable footage. Eaker responded with a memo in which he ordered that Wyler be granted “the necessary directives . . . funds . . . and authority” to start making a documentary about “the U.S. Army Air Force carrying the air war to the enemy.” He also gave Wyler a new on-site boss who was sympathetic to his frustration: Lieutenant Colonel Beirne Lay, who had written the screenplay for a popular 1941 drama about the Air Corps called I Wanted Wings and who was instructed to get Wyler what he needed and then light a fire under him.
When Lay first met Wyler at Claridge’s, “Willy had this brand-new uniform and his military experience consisted of that—a change of wardrobe,” he told Wyler biographer Axel Madsen. “I was immediately struck by his warmth, his intelligence, and his enormous inferiority complex. . . . He had been a general on Hollywood sets, and here, he was completely lost.” Lay soon realized that Wyler had no idea how to negotiate army bureaucracy and was instead spending most of his time bogging down in internecine disputes. He wasn’t getting along with his handpicked writer Jerome Chodorov, who was urging Wyler to use reenactments to make his documentaries rather than to insist on actual flight footage. In addition, producer Hal Roach, who had committed his independent film company to making war documentaries and was now in London, had been overseeing him with a heavy and obstructive hand. Lay reassigned both of them and became Wyler’s champion just as the army was about to write the director off as ineffectual and out of his depth.
Wyler still had only one piece of equipment—the camera he had brought with him—and his unit was “only partially functioning,” Lay wrote in a stinging army memo. Tannenbaum, who had been brought over to record sound, was now training as a cameraman, since nobody believed that the sound equipment he needed would ever cross the Atlantic. “Supply agencies have appeared to be mystified by the existence of a Film Unit,” Lay wrote, since the general who had given Wyler his assignment at a Washington, D.C., party back in June had never followed up with any official orders. As a result, “one of the most talented directors in the world, with tremendous prestige in British film circles, was dispatched to England without
funds, without a qualified Army officer assistant, without a written directive from Washington and without an organization, and was instructed on arrival to make pictures. Major Wyler attempted this task, starting out minus an office, a car, or even a typewriter, and with no knowledge of Army procedures.” Lay concluded his report by stating his “considered belief that the highest credit is reflected on Major Wyler by the patience, initiative, humbleness and loyalty to duty he has displayed under the most discouraging circumstances.”
Lay was able to do what Wyler couldn’t; his stern report thrashed through army red tape, and in early February, Wyler and his men finally received approval to attend gunnery school for four days. During the long wait, Wyler had merged his two best ideas for documentaries into one—he now wanted to make a film that portrayed the crew of a B-17 bomber as it flew a single mission. But before he would be permitted to fly, he needed a quick education in aerial combat photography. “We had to learn aircraft recognition, so we would shoot at enemy planes and not our own,” he said. In addition, Wyler and his men would need to learn how to “take a machine gun apart and put it back in 60-degree-below-zero weather” and how to operate their equipment behind heavy masks that were attached to oxygen bottles, since the B-17s were uninsulated, unpressurized, and so cold that frostbite was taking a substantial number of flyers out of the action.
Wyler’s mission was almost cut short before he ever got off the ground when a 50-millimeter cannon exploded near his face as he was learning how to fire it. He dashed off a letter to Talli assuring her that the headlines the incident had made back in the States (“Director Escapes Injury”) had exaggerated the danger he had been in, although, he added, “I was also glad to see I wasn’t forgotten.”
A few weeks later, in the middle of the night, he was awakened and driven along blacked-out roads to Bassingbourn Air Field, twenty miles north of London, where he arrived at 4 a.m. for his first mission, which would be aboard a B-17 nicknamed the Jersey Bounce. The bomber’s captain, Robert Morgan, was a twenty-four-year-old from South Carolina; he had been piloting another plane since November, but on its most recent mission a week earlier, the Memphis Belle had sustained serious damage and was temporarily out of commission. Only a dozen B-17s would go out that day; the 91st Bomb Group, known as the “Ragged Irregulars,” had been flying first over occupied France and then over Germany itself, and by the time Wyler got there almost half of its fleet of thirty-six planes had either been shot down or grounded for repairs.
The bombing missions that the 91st undertook were high-risk even before the planes reached enemy territory. The B-17s would typically fly northeast over the North Sea with ten-man crews, and their necessarily rapid ascent from six thousand to twenty-six thousand feet would often cause engine or fuel-pressure problems. On February 26, 1943, just before dawn, the plan was to bomb Bremen in northwest Germany. Wyler was worried enough to write another short letter to Talli before taking off: “All my thoughts are with you and the children—just in case—But I’ll be back. Love darling, Willy.”
The mission that day was not a success. “Nothing happened as it should,” wrote Clarence Winchell, the Jersey Bounce’s waist gunner, in his diary. A navigation miscalculation put the plane on a course far south of Bremen, which brought it directly into the line of German fire. Over the North Sea, “the flak was terrific,” Wyler recalled. “We’d fly through entire belts of it, so thick that . . . the blue sky looked like a punctured sieve.” With Bremen under heavy cloud cover, the Allied planes were redirected sixty miles northwest to the coastal town of Wilhelmshaven, which housed a German naval base.
As they flew, Wyler moved up and down the plane’s catwalk, trying to get a shot through one of the gun openings on the plane’s sides and in its tail. Because everyone wore oxygen masks and the roar of the plane’s four engines obliterated every sound but gunfire, the only possible communication was over the open speakers the crew shared. The gunners and navigators weren’t sure what to make of the slightly rotund, bespectacled, vaguely foreign-sounding man almost twice their age who had no fixed position and was manning not a gun but a camera. “We could hear him cuss over the intercom,” said Vincent Evans, the crew’s twenty-two-year-old bombardier. “By the time he’d swung his camera over to a flak burst, it was lost. Then he’d see another burst, try to get it, miss, see another, try that, miss, try, miss. Then we’d hear him over the intercom, asking the pilot if he couldn’t possibly get the plane closer to the flak.”
The Bounce ended up dropping its bomb payload into the harbor short of Wilhelmshaven. Wyler tried to film from the nose of the plane, but in the 60-degree-below conditions, his camera had frozen. By the time the plane returned to Bassingbourn that afternoon, it was clear that the American losses had been terrible. Seven B-17s had gone down, and dozens of men were dead, missing, injured, or hypothermic, a toll that resounded all the more loudly because the 91st had decided to use that mission as the first-ever fly-along opportunity for half a dozen Allied journalists, each in a different plane. One of them was twenty-six-year-old Walter Cronkite, who called the time in his plane “a hell 26,000 feet above the earth” and described “Fortresses and [B-24] Liberators plucked out of the formations around us” and plummeting into the sea. But Cronkite also wrote of the extraordinary excitement of seeing bombs with inscriptions like “Nuts to Hitler—Love, Mabel” hit their targets. His impassioned account of the heroism of the bombardiers (“Talk about concentration!”), navigators, pilots, and gunners (“Kids in their early 20s who are now old-timers in air warfare”) helped to create a new breed of war hero as America’s focus started to shift from the Pacific to Europe, and Hollywood pictures like Howard Hawks’s Air Force began to capture their imaginations.
Wyler couldn’t wait to go up again; he was finally where he wanted to be. A week after he flew his first mission, the Academy Awards were held at the Coconut Grove in Los Angeles’s Ambassador Hotel. Mrs. Miniver led the field with twelve nominations and was heavily favored to win, but when Wyler thought of the movie at all these days, it was with a combination of pride in its reception and embarrassment. Just before he went to Bassingbourn, Beirne Lay had arranged a showing of the film for high-ranking British officers. Before the first hour was over, they were audibly affected by what they were watching. “It was a handkerchief job,” said Lay. “You could hear people sobbing and sniffing all over the room.” Wyler, sitting in the back, felt more than slightly embarrassed. “I made this picture and I didn’t know what I was doing,” he told Lay beforehand, in a futile attempt to beg off of attending the screening. “Now, with an audience like this . . . !” After the film ended, Wyler’s cheeks were also wet, but he dismissed his own work by saying, “Christ, what a tearjerker!”
The months Wyler had spent watching Londoners deal with the strains of the blackout and the Blitz, trying to go about their daily lives even as those lives were threatened, made him feel that he had sold the public a sentimental, glamorized version of life during wartime. “As soon as I went to England,” he said shortly after the war, “I began to see all the mistakes I had made [in Mrs. Miniver], small errors of emphasis, little details unimportant in themselves, but just enough to make it seem less than real.” By Oscar night, every one of those mistakes had become a mortification for him. “I was handicapped by dealing with places, periods I knew nothing about,” he said. “I had Greer Garson running out on an airfield in Britain to wave her son tearfully goodbye as he flew off in a Spitfire. Ridiculous!”
Wyler didn’t go home for the Oscars: Talli attended in his place. By now, it was no longer a novelty that the ceremony was filled with talk of the war and designed as a conspicuous demonstration of patriotism: Jeanette MacDonald opened by singing the national anthem, Tyrone Power and Alan Ladd appeared in uniform, carrying the flag, and Bob Hope cracked jokes about how the day was nigh when every last leading man would join up and romantic parts would have to be played by senior citizens. As the evening began, Walter Wanger read out a lette
r from President Roosevelt to an uncomfortably crowded audience. “It is a matter of deep satisfaction to me, as it must be to you, that we have succeeded in turning the tremendous power of the motion picture into an effective war instrument without the slightest resort to the totalitarian methods of our enemies,” Roosevelt had written. He went on to warn the audience that “in the months to come, war conditions may [require] the motion picture industry to play an even larger part in the war against Axis tyranny. . . . I know that you will not fail the American people and the cause of democracy.”
The Oscars that night unfolded so tediously, with so many long speeches and presentations, that when they finally wrapped up five hours after the guests had sat down to dinner. Academy cofounder Mary Pickford told reporters that she didn’t know who to blame for such a fiasco because “no one person could arrange anything this boring.” But in the end, Mrs. Miniver emerged triumphant with six awards; Wyler, on his fifth try, had finally won a Best Director Oscar. “I wish he could be here,” said Talli, who accepted the award from Frank Capra. “He’s wanted an Oscar for a long time. I know it would thrill him a lot, almost as much as that flight over Wilhelmshaven.”
A few hours later, a writer for the army paper Stars and Stripes arrived at Bassingbourn to interview Wyler. “Have you got a photograph of yourself?” the reporter asked.