The Good Life (10 page)

We moved again sometime in June, this time to Seckonheim, a small town between Heidelberg and Mannheim. The band kept growing as we found more and more good musicians who wanted to join up with us. The most special to me was Freddy Katz, who played the piano. He would have a very meaningful impact on my life. By now we were a full-fledged “big band” and had worked out a regular routine. Late in the afternoon, just when it was getting to be quitting time for the troops, a big army truck showed up at our house to pick us up. The driver knew where we were supposed to be playing that day and we’d all pile into the truck with our gear and drive off, usually singing the dirtiest limericks you’ve ever heard in your life. The truck had a piano on it, and a little PA system. When we got to the site where the GIs were working, which was often out in the middle of a field somewhere, we got out our instruments and started playing and singing and the soldiers would gather around and listen.

At that time I was singing a lot of blues, things like “How Long Blues,” “Don’t Cry Baby,” “Blues in the Night,” and Louis Jordan’s “I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town.” I also sang a blues tune that reflected the place and time we were stuck in called “The Non-Fraternization Blues.” We always went over great with the men; they were thrilled that we took the trouble to come out to entertain them. We’d play until it got dark. We never had any lights, so when we couldn’t read the music anymore, we’d pack up and drive off. Sometimes we’d play dances at an officers’ club, like the Starlite Club in Heidelberg, which General Dwight D. Eisenhower had recently dedicated, but most of our gigs were right in the trenches—literally.

Because of the stress we’d been under in combat for all those months, the comic relief provided by being in the freewheeling regiment band was a welcome change, but we knew it couldn’t last. I was taken out of the band by midsummer. I was still an infantryman and had never been officially assigned as an entertainer. At the time, we all thought we’d be shipped to the South Pacific to participate in the impending invasion of Japan. But, as anyone reading this knows, we never did invade Japan. It turned out that the soldiers assigned to the planned Pacific invasion force wound up going home long before the rest of us, since Japan surrendered before ground combat began. So I was assigned elsewhere in Special Services.

Up until 1945, the Special Services guys who put on shows for the servicemen were well-known performers who’d been drafted, guys like Mickey Rooney, the well-regarded screenwriter Alan Campbell (who was author Dorothy Parker’s husband), and Joshua Logan, the famous Broadway producer and director. But they’d all been at it long enough to qualify to go back home as soon as the fighting ended. So once again, I was a replacement, only this time for the musicians
who were sent home. Many of the guys in Special Services had been up-and-coming performers before the war started and were able to get a little more experience while they were over in Germany. It was in the Special Services unit that I met remarkable people like Arthur Penn, who would later go on to direct such great films as
The Miracle Worker, Little Big Man
, and
Bonnie and Clyde
.

Arthur first got involved with the Soldiers’ Show unit of Special Services in Paris. When he got to Germany, Arthur became stage manager of a production of Clifford Odets’s play
Golden Boy
, which toured liberated Europe. Then in August, the
Enola Gay
dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and the Japanese surrendered. Now that the war was over in the Pacific as well, even more guys were shipped home from Europe and Arthur was promoted. Arthur himself was very new to show business then. He was just a few years older than me, and even though he hadn’t had much experience, he found that he knew more than anybody else over there, so he was officially mustered out of the service and put in charge of the whole Soldiers’ Show project as a civilian government employee. In order to really occupy the minds of the troops, Arthur arranged for the army to ship over one hundred American actresses to take part in these productions.

The new unit was started in Wiesbaden, and that’s where I met Arthur. I was basically just hanging around the set sharpening pencils or doing any other little job I could until I got a chance to sing for him. Arthur told me that I bowled them over, and he immediately invited me to perform in a musical production he was mounting.

Arthur had heard that there was a big hit on Broadway called
On the Town
about three sailors on leave in New York. He thought the plot was perfect for his group to perform, but he had no script and no score so he cobbled together his own
version, writing an original script and using whatever new hit songs and show tunes he could find. We didn’t even have sheet music for the songs—we’d simply pick up records or V-discs (records produced especially for American soldiers) and the piano player would learn them by ear. Arthur made the leads soldiers instead of sailors, but nobody knew the real story line anyway, so it hardly made any difference, I played one of the three leads in our very eccentric version of On
the Town
.

Everything about the show was like one of those Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland “Let’s-put-on-a-show-in-the-barn” movies. Most of the cast couldn’t sing, I didn’t have any acting experience, and Arthur, who couldn’t dance two steps, was choreographing the dance numbers. We staged it in the magnificent Wiesbaden opera house, which had miraculously been untouched by the bombing that had destroyed much of the city. The show ran there for several months.

I spent Thanksgiving of 1945 in Mannheim. The town was completely flattened. You could see clear to the other end of the city from any point. It was totally leveled except for the Ford Motor plant. It was really strange. I was out walking around Thanksgiving afternoon and I ran into my old friend Frank Smith, who had sung with me in our quartet back at the High School of Industrial Arts. I couldn’t believe it. Frank Smith, in Mannheim, Germany! I was thrilled to see a familiar face from back home after being surrounded by strangers for so many months. He took me with him to a holiday service at a Baptist church he’d found. We wanted to spend the whole day together—it just felt so good to be with a friend—and since I was allowed one guest at Thanksgiving dinner, I asked him to come along. We were going to get a real home-cooked meal and not the dreaded C rations.

We got as far as the lobby of the building when some bigoted officer came up to me and screamed, “Get your gear, you’re pulling out of here!” For a moment I didn’t know what he was talking about. Even though Frank was in the army too, he was Black, and therefore he wasn’t permitted into the white servicemen’s mess hall. It’s a sad fact that segregation was official U.S. Army policy during World War II, and obviously this officer was determined to pull rank on me. At some point during my career in Special Services I had made corporal, but that didn’t last long. This officer took out a razor blade and cut my corporal stripes off my uniform right then and there. He spit on them and threw them on the floor, and said, “Get your ass out of here! You’re no longer a corporal; you’re a private again!”

This was another unbelievable example of the degree of prejudice that was so widespread in the army during World War II. Black Americans have fought in all of America’s wars, yet they have seldom been given credit for their contribution, and segregation and discrimination in civilian life and in the armed forces has been a sad fact of life. The War Department believed that Black soldiers had to be separated from whites or all sorts of problems would arise. The type of “problems” they cited were standard-issue racial prejudices, and I don’t even like thinking about it after all these years. Blacks had their own units, their own mess halls, barracks, and bars. It was actually more acceptable to fraternize with the German troops than it was to be friendly with a fellow Black American soldier! I just hadn’t been brought up to think this way about people, and neither had Frank. Needless to say it was a terrible shock when this officer treated us both with such contempt. And this institutional racism continued until Harry Truman officially integrated the military after the war ended. In the meantime we all suffered because of it.

As a result of my inviting Frank to eat with me, we were denied Thanksgiving dinner and I was immediately reassigned to Graves Registration, which was just as horrible as it sounds. During the heavy battles that had been fought earlier in the war, there often hadn’t been time for the soldiers to properly bury the men who died on the battlefield. The surviving soldiers often had to wrap the bodies in the dead soldiers’ own mattress bags and bury them in common graves. Men like myself in Graves Registration came along later to retrieve them. I’d spend all day digging up dead bodies and reburying them in individual graves. They fed us horrible, starchy foods like rice and potatoes to dull our senses.

For a while the whole affair soured me on the human race. Frank was one of the sweetest guys I ever met. I couldn’t get over the fact that they condemned us for just being friends, and especially while we served our country in wartime. I’ve thought back to that incident so many times. There we were, just two kids happy to see each other, trying to forget for a moment the horror of the war, but for the brass it just boiled down to the color of our skin.

Luckily a certain Major Letkoff found out that I’d been assigned to Graves Registration and was able to pull some strings. Through the efforts of this man I was assigned to the American forces radio network in Wiesbaden, and that led to one of the great experiences of my life.

The 314th Army Special Services Band of the European Theater was the brainchild of Warrant Officer Harold Lindsay “Lin” Arison. Lin was the only one in either of my army bands who was a “lifer,” that is, someone who spent his whole career in the military and government services. He’d begun organizing army bands as early as 1941 and had been greatly influenced
by the most celebrated of all military orchestras, Glenn Miller’s Army Air Force Band. Miller’s AAF Band was a milestone in both military and musical history and had a huge impact on us all. Miller was in active service when his plane disappeared over the Atlantic in December of 1944, and it was a huge loss to the entire country. It was devastating. His band valiantly continued to perform without him for about a year.

After the AAF Band was sent back to the States the chief of Special Services of the European Theater asked Lin to put together another band to take its place, and that’s when the 314th was formed. It had been Lin’s dream to put together a new band with new music that was on par with what was happening back in the States, a first-class American pop-jazz orchestra, and he got the go-ahead.

It was crucial that the new band’s home base be in occupied Germany. It was obvious that the German people felt animosity toward the occupying army, and we saw the new band as an opportunity for us to raise morale and serve as unofficial goodwill ambassadors. So in late 1945, Lin set up shop at the Herzog Hotel in Bad Schwalbach and announced that he was holding auditions for first-rate musicians. He immediately landed some great players, many of whom went on to successful civilian careers in music after the war, among them sax player Dick Stott and trombonist George Masso. In addition to being a tremendous trombonist, George is one of the great orchestrators of all time. Whenever we played one of his arrangements, the whole orchestra applauded. His pieces were simple to play, and it just felt great to perform them.

I was originally appointed as the band’s official librarian, but when Lin heard me sing, he said, “For Chrissake, take care of the library, but I want you to sing a couple of songs a week with the band!”

Our duty was to do a weekly broadcast of a show called
It’s All Yours
over the Armed Forces Network, the title being our gift to American GIs stationed in Germany and to our former enemies as well. We broadcast from the Wiesbaden opera house every Sunday, and our theme song was a number I later recorded, “Penthouse Serenade.” Wiesbaden was one of the few German towns that was left comparatively untouched by the Allied bombing raids. The British and Americans had agreed not to drop any bombs on the town, since they wanted to use it as headquarters once Germany was taken. Unfortunately a British plane had once messed up a raid and dropped its payload over Wiesbaden, but by and large the town was still standing, which was more than you could say for most of the rest of Germany. The opera house was acoustically perfect, and sometimes we’d cram in as many as two thousand GIs. Once we even performed a special show that was transmitted back home to the United States via shortwave radio.