The Time of Their Lives
BY TOM JUNOD
Sixty years ago, millions of American men did extraordinary things in World War II. But you've never read anything like this.
That's it, that's right. McCarthy. That was the sergeant's name. He was an Irishman from Massachusetts. The Boston area. Justin McCarthy. His gun jammed. Funny things happen in war, and that's what happened. This was Normandy, July 26, 1944. They were running along the hedgerows, looking for Germans. Private First Class Lou Junod was following McCarthy. Then McCarthy's gun jammed. He had to go back and get another. He said, I'll be back. He didn't come back. Junod was lost and alone. There were Germans on the other side of the hedgerows. Junod couldn't see them, but he could hear them. He stood up, fired off a few rounds, ducked back down. He wasn't trying to be a hero. Then something came flying over. A little thing. Round. It rolled on the ground, right next to Junod's boot. Then it exploded. Or Junod guesses it exploded, because the next thing he knew, another soldier was shaking him awake. Junod was covered with blood. Do I still have my legs? he asked. You still have your legs, the soldier said, and pointed him to the field hospital. It was funny, because his gun was gone. He had to take a rifle off a dead man. He wandered around for a while with a dead man's rifle, but he found the field hospital. Then the artillery hit. The ground went up, then went back down. Junod woke up in a different hospital, with a haircut. But he didn't go home. He got his Purple Heart, but he recovered. He was one tough son of a bitch in those days. He was twenty-five years old. He weighed two hundred pounds. Back home, he drove rivets. He wound up getting shipped to a replacement depot. He was on his way back to the front as a replacement. He never saw Sergeant Justin McCarthy again. He always figured the son of a bitch got lucky. His gun jammed. Then Junod got hit. Twice in the same day. Twice in the same hour, practically. Christ, that was the kind of luck he had.
More than four hundred thousand American men died in World War II. This is a story about some of them--thirty of them--who didn't. They were spared. This is not in itself so unusual. Sixteen million Americans were mobilized for World War II. One in forty died. The instrument of salvation, though--well, that was unique. It would be easy to say they got lucky, but luck doesn't quite account for either their survival or the degree to which they enjoyed it. Anyone who lived through World War II got lucky. These men, however, did not just live through World War II; they had the time of their lives. In the crucible of war, some soldiers found out they were heroes, others that they were cowards. The soldiers in this story found out they were celebrities.
Basically, what happened is this: They put on a show. No, they weren't USO. They were GIs. They were in the infantry. They were artillerymen. They drove tanks. They'd landed in Normandy within a few days or weeks of D-day. Some had been in combat; a few had been wounded. They were all waiting to go to the front, and they were all pretty sure they were going to die. And then, at the moment each of them had been given his orders, at the moment each had been told to clean his rifle and get on that goddamned troop truck, an officer intervened and said, Get off that truck, soldier: The Army doesn't want you to kill Germans. It wants you to put on a show for Americans. It wants you to live.
The intervention was, as several of them would say later, a miracle. It was especially miraculous because, as all the men would find out, the Army didn't actually want them to put on a show at all. The Army still wanted them to kill Germans. The show, which was called For Men Only, was strictly the officer's idea. His name was Russell Thomas. Lieutenant Russell Thomas from Tulsa, Oklahoma. He was a military man who subverted military discipline in the thick of some of the heaviest fighting of World War II. He saved the lives of thirty men, and yet his reasons for doing so would puzzle them for as long as they lived.
"We were all technically AWOL," remembers Norton Cohen, who wound up surviving World War II writing jokes and imitating one of the Andrews Sisters. "We weren't getting mail, and we weren't getting paid. Nobody knew where we were. We didn't have any equipment, we didn't have any food. Anything we had, we got ourselves. During the day, we hid out in the hedgerows; at night, we'd do a show. Then we'd disappear. We were completely under the radar in the middle of France in the summer of 1944. I look back and still don't know how we did it."
It sounds like a movie--a kind of Schindler's List for American GIs with a little Bridge on the River Kwai vibe thrown in. It could be a movie. Hell, it was a movie, sort of, because the men who lived it thought of it in those terms. Think of it--and themselves--in those terms, still. NORTON COHEN: the gangly kid, the innocent, the "nice Jewish boy" from Louisville, Kentucky, who sometimes had to seek the protection of LOU JUNOD, six years older, the charismatic Brooklyn crooner with a streak of violence. DICK CROSBY: the wavy-haired cherub from New Orleans who knew he didn't have it in him to kill anyone--"I just wanted to chase girls and play my horn"--and so, through the auspices of LIEUTENANT RUSSELL THOMAS, wound up as a combination of the Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy and the Pied Piper. He spoke in sleepy jazzman's jive, "Hey man" this and "Hey man" that, so the rest of the fellows called him "Spook." He took his battered cornet to war and played it everywhere he went. Soldiers would be marching along some muddy/dusty road and they'd hear somebody playing American jazz from the back of a truck, above the din of battle. At least that's how one of them, Bob Bogart, remembered it when he told the story to his son Bob Junior:
"My dad had a whole story about how he joined the show. He always told it the same way. It began with him marching along some muddy road, so tired he couldn't raise his head. He was marching to the front. And then he hears, in the distance, somebody playing jazz trumpet. He's climbing a hill, and when he gets to the top, there's Richard Crosby playing 'You Made Me Love You.' It was something right out of a movie."
Of course, the soldiers who performed in For Men Only could say that their experiences were right out of the movies because theirs was the first generation of American soldiers who even knew what movies were. They grew up on movies. By the time they enlisted, the American war machine was helping rev up the American popular-culture machine, and vice versa. Indeed, by the time Spielberg made Saving Private Ryan and Brokaw published The Greatest Generation, the only surprise was the revelation that the men heretofore portrayed by the likes of John Wayne, Burt Lancaster, William Holden, Henry Fonda, and Steve McQueen were, in fact, reluctant heroes who didn't speak about war, much less glorify it. The revelation was surprising because, as any son of a World War II veteran knows, they never stopped talking about it. They told war stories to their sons and they told war stories to one another, and the war stories they told were often celebratory, if not of war itself, then of the camaraderie required to fight it. They watched the same movies their sons did, and if they knew the movies were bullshit, they rarely came out and said so--that's where they were silent. They didn't glorify themselves because they didn't have to. They had already been glorifled, to a level unprecedented and now impossible to repeat.
It was the Good War, at the same time that it was the Big One, and most Americans tend to think it was the Good War because it was the Big One: because something as large as, oh, human civilization was at stake and because American soldiers threw themselves so selflessly into the cause of human freedom. Well, obviously, there's something to all that, or else a war that stands unchallenged as the culminating cataclysm of all human history--the very apotheosis of human savagery--wouldn't have such a sterling reputation. It wouldn't be so immune to the corrosive effect of historical reconsideration, and it wouldn't have spoiled Americans for all wars to come, including the present one. It wouldn't have left the generation of men who fought it so relatively untroubled, and it wouldn't still sound like so much fun.
Sure, sure: The soldiers who starred in For Men Only are not exactly representative. They are, however, just as representative as the soldiers who, in the works of the World War II hagiographers, are supposed to stand for the rest: the Iowa plowboys who wiped out whole nests of German gunners with their teeth and then chafed at winning their Medals of Honor because all they wanted to do was go back home and work the farm.
The proof is in the pudding or, in this case, the culture: If World War II was all about stoic heroism, then the culture it spawned should have been stoical and heroic. It wasn't. It isn't. The culture it spawned was our culture.
There have been four Americas: the America before and after the Civil War, and the America before and after World War II. The Americans who fought the Good War were the first Americans to live in the big bad America we live in today. They invented our America, and they fought for our America, because what they invented and fought for was nothing less than the primacy of the American ego. What they invented and fought for was the perpetual presumption of American innocence. What they invented and fought for was the imperium of American popular culture. What they invented and fought for was the notion that what a man should do, if he was a man, was get laid, get ahead, get lucky, get off, even if he had to go to war to do it. They weren't squares, dammit; they were opportunists, and war was their opportunity. Sure, they fought in the Good War, so they had an opportunity to be good, even heroic. They also fought in the Big One, so they had an opportunity to be Big.
Lou Junod is a veteran of that war, that fight. He was big when he went off to the Big One, and he came home even bigger. They all did--Norton Cohen and Dick Crosby and Lieutenant Thomas. They got lucky once, they learned to live on luck, and damned if they're not still lucky. They were pretty much the first guys in For Men Only, and now they're the last. They watched their fellow soldiers die all around them during the war, and now they're watching time knock off their fellow soldiers at a rate of lethal efficiency unmatched even by the Germans--a thousand a day. The youngest of them, Norton Cohen, is eighty. Dick Crosby is eighty-one. Lou Junod is eighty-six. Russell Thomas is eighty-seven. And yet they still believe in the songs they played sixty years ago, the songs that made optimism an American entitlement. Though part of a generation that is disappearing from the face of the earth, they still think in terms of the most up-to-date prerogatives, which is to say they still think their story would make a hell of a movie, and Pfc. Lou Junod still thinks he'd make a hell of a star.
The movie starts with a song. You know, one of those World War II songs that promised the world as the world was ending--"I'll Be Seeing You." It's sung by Jo Stafford or someone like that, a "girl singer" whose chastely resigned voice splits the difference between an apprehension of doom and a faith in happy endings. "I'll be seeing you, in all the old, familiar places," she sings--but what we see on the screen is a Sherman tank, humping its way over the rubble in Normandy, France. The tank is drab army green, with a white star on the turret and the helmeted head of the TANK COMMANDER sticking out of the hatch. He looks to be in a precarious position, and he is: In an instant, his American face is in the crosshairs of the scope of a high-powered rifle, and the POV is that of a German sniper. A shot goes off; the music stops; in the sudden silence, the TANK COMMANDER slumps to the side. When another Sherman rolls into view, Jo Stafford starts singing again, from the top, but this time the TANK COMMANDER is never out of the crosshairs, and "I'll Be Seeing You" registers not as an assurance but as a threat. The process is repeated several times. Finally, we hear someone say, "Can't someoneget this guy?" and the screen turns dark, because we're with five American soldiers sardined inside one of the tanks, one of whom is PRIVATE NORTON COHEN. He's a gunner, so the sniper is his responsibility. He's eighteen, just out of high school, but his mouth twists into a gung-ho snarl, and he says, "Son of a bitch" as he presses the trigger and keeps on pressing it. Jo Stafford gives way to a hail of machine-gun fire as the camera stays on the profile of a boy doing a man's job, and the image on the screen dissolves to:
EXT. NORMANDY. NIGHT.
NORTON, helmet off, is crouching near a fire. A Sherman tank looms in the background. An OLDER GI, grizzled and dirty, pats him on the shoulder and says, "You did pretty good today, kid." NORTON keeps staring at the fire. He has been at war since he landed on Omaha Beach, D-day plus two. He is alive, but then a SERGEANT enters the frame illuminated by the fire, standing with a clipboard. "Listen up," he says, "and when I call your name, follow me." He begins calling out names; one of them is "Cohen." NORTON stands up resignedly, without taking his eyes off the fire, and stands next to the SERGEANT. "Where are we going?" he asks.
"In the interest of your personal and professional enrichment, the United States Army is going to train you to become a tank commander," the SERGEANT says.
"Tank commander?"
"Don't get too excited, kid," the SERGEANT says. "It ain't because you're valedictorian. The Army wants you to be a tank commander because the Army doesn't have any tank commanders left."
EXT. NORMANDY. NINE DAYS LATER. AFTERNOON.
In an open field bracketed by tall green hedgerows, NORTON is crouching in front of his helmet. He is stripped down to his undershorts, with just his dog tags hanging from his neck. The helmet is full of water, and NORTON is soaping his hands. The OLDER GI approaches and asks, "What are you doing?"
"What does it look like I'm doing?" NORTON says. "Tomorrow morning we're getting in a truck. The truck is taking us to our tanks, then we're target practice. I'm shining my dog tags for the Krauts."
He looks up and sees two SOLDIERS walking through the field. One is smoking a cigarette; the other is eating a candy bar. "Hey," the second says, "some guys are putting on a show six hedgerows over. Ain't much of a show, but they're giving away cigarettes and Hershey bars."
"A show?" NORTON says. "Here? What kind of show?"
"I just told you. The ain't-much-of-a-show kind of show. A couple of comedians and a singer. What you think of it depends on how much you like Hershey bars."
The SOLDIERS walk on, one of them whistling "You Made Me Love You." The OLDER GI crouches next to NORTON and says, "Put on your shirt."
"What for?"
"We're going."
"If you're that hard up for a Hershey bar," NORTON says, "you can have one of mine."
"I thought you were a smart boy," the OLDER GI says.
"I got dumb in tank-commander school."
"I thought you wrote gags for Jimmy Durante," the OLDER GI says.
"I want to write a letter to my parents."
"What, and tell them tomorrow you're gonna get your head blown off love Norton? No, we're going to walk six hedgerows over and whoever is putting on that show, you're going to tell them you're a star of stage and screen. Maybe he can do something for us."
"Us?" NORTON says. "What can you do?"
"Me? I can't even fucking whistle. But I come with you. We're a package deal."
EXT. NORMANDY. TWILIGHT.
They go, and now once again there is music. Indeed, the song we hear is "I'll Be Seeing You," except now it's being sung by a CROONER standing, in army fatigues, on a makeshift stage strewn with helmets, in front of a big homemade sign propped up on sawhorses. It says, PIED PIPERS OF FRANCE--FOR MEN ONLY. He's accompanied by a GUITARIST, a PIANIST, a GUY ON SAX, and a TRUMPET PLAYER, playing heartbroken obligatos to an audience of a few hundred GIs scattered in the field, all of them smoking cigarettes and eating Hershey bars. Not many are listening. "Jesus," NORTON says when the CROONER stops singing.
"Talk to him," the OLDER GI says to NORTON.
"And tell him what?" NORTON says. "The show stinks?"
"That they need your help. Our help."
NORTON shrugs. He approaches the CROONER and says, "Say, that was some pretty good singing." The CROONER brightens. He's a rough-looking guy, handsome and powerfully built, with eyes as green as Chartreuse, dark hair and dark skin and dark eyebrows, and a big schnozz. "A John Garfield type," is how he describes himself.
"You think so?" the CROONER says. "Well, then maybe you can help answer a question. Who has more hair, me or that guy over there?"
"Excuse me?" NORTON says.
"You heard me. Who has more hair, me or that comedian? Son of a bitch told me I was losing mine. I told him I have more hair on my arms than he has on his entire head."
NORTON stares at the CROONER, dumbfounded. In the distance, there is the low, stomach-turning rumble of heavy artillery. "Listen, I don't know if you're aware of this," NORTON says, "but we're in the middle of a war. I'm probably going to get my ass shot off tomorrow. Who gives a shit who has more hair?"
"I do, I do," the CROONER says. "Listen, kid, just tell me. It's important."
"What's your name?"
"Lou. Lou Junod. From Brooklyn. I'm big there. If you're ever in Brooklyn, mention my name. People will tell you all about me."
"You're crazy, Lou. But if it means so much to you, I'll tell you. You have more hair on your arms than that guy does on his entire head."
"Thanks, kid. Thanks."
By this time, the OLDER GI is standing next to NORTON, nudging him with an elbow. "Say," NORTON says. "Who runs this outfit?"
"That's Lieutenant Thomas," LOU says. "He put the whole thing together. Say, you have any experience in show business? If you do, you should talk to him."
"That's okay, Lou. I already have my orders. Tomorrow morning I'm getting in a truck--"
"He wrote gags for Durante!" the OLDER GI says.
"Then talk to him!" LOU says. "He's right over there, in that tent. He never leaves it. A little peculiar, if you want to know the truth. High-strung. He don't even watch the show, and he's the one putting it together."
"Can't say I blame him," NORTON says to himself on his way to the tent. He approaches the entrance and peers inside. LIEUTENANT THOMAS is oblivious to his presence. Finally:
"Lieutenant Thomas?"
Upon which LIEUTENANT THOMAS scrambles outside the tent and collects himself. NORTON salutes and is saluted in return. "At ease, soldier," LIEUTENANT THOMAS says. "What's your business?"
"Well, I wanted to talk to you about the show."
"The show?"
"Yes. Um, the show your men just put on. The Pied Pipers of France. For Men Only."
"Yes, yes, the show. What do you think of the show?"
"If I may speak honestly, sir: It's pretty bad."
"Yes, of course. You don't have to tell me that. It stinks! That's why I'm looking for soldiers with show-business experience. I want guys who can really wow 'em! Tell me, soldier, do you have any show-business experience?"
"Well, I wrote some gags for Durante."
"That so? Did he use any?"
"A couple."
"That so? What's your name, Private?"
"Cohen. Norton Cohen. Louisville, Kentucky."
"What does the Army have you doing, Cohen?"
"I'm training to become a tank commander. I go back to my unit and ship out to the front tomorrow morning."
"That so? Well, good luck to you, then, Private Cohen. Thanks for coming to see the show. Tell your buddies about it. And don't forget to take a Hershey bar."
EXT. A FIELD IN NORMANDY. NEXT MORNING.
A group of ten men are waiting for the truck, NORTON, the OLDER GI, and the SERGEANT among them. In the distance, a jeep is making its way toward them at high speed.
"I guess we're all going to fit in a fucking jeep now," the OLDER GI says. Then, as it gets closer, his face becomes animated as the identity of the officer in the passenger seat becomes apparent: It's LIEUTENANT THOMAS. "Cohen, get in!" he barks the instant the jeep slams to a halt.
"Private Cohen has his orders," the SERGEANT says. "As of this morning, he's a tank commander."
"You tell me one more time what Cohen's orders are and I'll have you court-martialed, Sergeant," LIEUTENANT THOMAS says. "Cohen, get in this jeep, and that's an order."
"I can't, sir," NORTON says. "I don't want to be AWOL."
"I'll tell you one last time, Cohen. Get in. Now."
"Sarge, what should I do?"
"Up to you, kid," the SERGEANT says. "The Army shoots deserters and the Germans shoot tank commanders. Either way, you're probably a goner."
NORTON throws his gear into the back of the jeep. As he prepares to climb in, he sees the OLDER GI looking at him pleadingly, tears in his eyes.
"Norton, say something. . . ."
"Lieutenant Thomas," NORTON says, "can you do something for my buddy?"
"Can he sing?" LIEUTENANT THOMAS asks. "Dance? Tell jokes? Write gags for Jimmy Durante?"
"I can drive," the OLDER GI says.
"I have a driver who can play the accordion!" LIEUTENANT THOMAS barks. "And now I have a show to put together. Driver!"
The jeep lurches forward, and NORTON, looking down an empty road at wide-open fields, with the sounds of war starting to pick up already in the bright morning sunlight, shakes his head and says to himself: "Poor bastard couldn't even whistle."
"I'm losing it," Lou Junod says one morning, in his car.
"Dad," I say, "you've been losing it for as long as I've known you, and I've known you all my life."
"Well, this time I'm not kidding."
"You don't look any different than you've ever looked."
"Easy for you to say," he says. "You don't have to look in the mirror. I do, and I'm telling you: It's gone, man."
What he is losing is, of course, what he has always been losing: his hair. He was losing his hair when he first met Norton Cohen on a field in Normandy in the summer of 1944; he was losing his hair back in 1962, when the young man who eventually married my sister first called our house and to this day swears that he heard my father roaring in the background about the terrible plague that had befallen his scalp. He hasalways been losing it, and moreover we--the members of his family--have always been encouraged to keep track of its vicissitudes the way the members of some families are encouraged to keep track of their stock-market holdings. Indeed, my family has always discussed my father's hairline as though its fortunes were inextricably related to our own, and so it's not really out of the ordinary for my father and me to be talking about it on a morning in the summer of 2004 when I'm behind the wheel of his car and we're driving to visit my mother, who is hospitalized with a rampaging kidney infection. I mean, you might as well talk about losing your hair when you're eighty-six years old and afraid of losing everything else.
"You know," I say, "I've been talking to Uncle John, and he told me a story about you and your hair from back when the both of you were in basic training." Uncle John: Johnny Orto, my godfather and one of my father's best friends. They met in basic, when my father woke Johnny in his bunk at three o'clock in the morning to tell him how popular he was back in Brooklyn. Uncle John served with Patton's Third Army and survived being upended by a mortar shell. He is the same age as my father, and now, as my father contended with the loss of his hair, Uncle John was contending with the loss of his eyesight due to macular degeneration.
"Oh, yeah? What are you calling Johnny for?"
"Well, I wanted to talk to him for that story I'm writing about you and the war," I said.
"You're still writing that story, eh? Well, don't talk to Johnny about it--he wasn't there. He can't sing a lick."
"But he always had great stories about you."
"Johnny has made a living telling stories about your father. I'll bet you he told you about me sticking my head in the oven."
"He did. He told me that you were all going out to a dance, and he went looking for you. Found you with your head in an oven. When he asked you why, you said that the soot would make your hair look thicker."
"Johnny makes it sound like the oven was on. It wasn't."
"It's still a pretty good story."
"It's not a good story. It's a demeaning story. It makes me sound very vain--like the only thing I care about is my hair."
"Well, Dad, I talked to Norton, too, and he--"
"Norton! What are you talking to Norton for!"
"I told you--I'm writing a story about the show unit. For Men Only."
"I thought you were writing a story about me. I thought you were giving the old man a big send-off."
"Well, I'm trying. But there were other guys in the show."
"I got Norton in the show. Did he tell you that?"
"Sure he did. But he also told me stories about your hair."
"Christ. You put 'em in your magazine, I'll sue."
"Dad, you can't sue if I tell the truth."
"Did Norton tell you the story about my widow's peak?"
"Your widow's peak?"
"I was known for my widow's peak. I had a lot of hair back then, but I already had a widow's peak--very dramatic. Well, one night, we were at a nightclub in Paris, and the other singer in the show was singing. His name was Victor Gerstenblatt. I never thought much of his singing, but on this night he sounded pretty good. A couple of the guys were trying to get me to leave, but I said no, I wanted to listen to the kid. Well, a fight broke out, and of course your father got in the middle of it. I was a rough customer in those days. Anyway, an MP came over and hit me in the head with the butt of his rifie. Knocked me right out. When I came to, I was covered in blood, and the first person I see is Norton. 'Ace, Ace,' he says. 'Are you all right?' And I say, 'Norton, what about my widow's peak?' The MP split my scalp right open. I still have the scar. That's how I know my hair is finally going, son--I saw the scar this morning. I haven't seen it in sixty years, but this morning I looked in the mirror and there it was. What are you laughing at? Christ, this is no laughing matter. This is a very serious situation! Look!"
I look, even though I'm driving. It is a very serious situation. Once upon a time, my father got wounded in World War II; then he got lucky, got spared, and the only further damage he suffered was to his widow's peak. Now he is fighting a war against the mortifications of old age and is surprised that luck is not going his way. My father still thinks he's going to get lucky, even though his big toe is chronically infected and the arthritis in his knees has stiffened his gait into a pugnacious Jimmy Cagney soft-shoe; even though he's taking blood-thinners and tends to bleed profusely from minor wounds; even though instead of wearing the custom-made suits he sported in his prime, he's wearing gray sweatpants with the elastic hems snipped with scissors so that his ankles won't swell; and even though, if truth be told, his hair seems sparser than ever before.
He still thinks that he is going to get lucky because all he has to do to prove that he is lucky is walk into a room. He is still, well, resplendent: no less the Ace now than he was when he was singing his way through Europe and people actually called him "the Ace." He is still very tan, his eyes still glow with green fire, he still wears his pinkie ring and his gold dog tags outside his shirt. He still threatens to get a nose job and a toupee; he still plays the lottery every day, with the intention not just of winning but of winning big--"and then I'll show you how to live." Hell, he is so lucky that he doesn't know how lucky he is, so lucky that he thinks himself unlucky, and so feels compelled to prove his luck in wars of his own choosing, against opponents he can never hope to beat: the lottery, his scalp, time itself. His luck has been his salvation, and also his scar, exposed now on his forehead like a ruin buried in shifting sands. "You see it?" he asks.
"Yeah, Dad," I say. "I see it."
"Well, don't. You're driving. Keep your eyes on the road."
"You're one to talk."
"What's that supposed to mean? I've forgotten more about driving than you'll ever know."
"That's the problem, Dad."
"Yeah, well, you just keep driving. That's all your poor mother needs now, both of us getting into a car accident because you're too busy looking at my widow's peak."
The story always went like this: My father got wounded after Justin McCarthy's rifle jammed. He went to a replacement depot. He was on his way back to the front. A lieutenant heard that he was a singer and asked him to sing a few songs in the officers' mess. My father sang "I'll Be Seeing You" and "My Buddy." The lieutenant put him in a show and he became a star. My father never mentioned Lieutenant Thomas, never said his name. There were no photographs of Lieutenant Thomas in any of the photographs of the For Men Only orchestra. To tell you the truth, I always figured that he had died.
It was something of a surprise, then, when about seven years ago Norton Cohen held a reunion for the surviving members of For Men Only and Russell Thomas attended as the guest of honor. Norton Cohen had gone on from being a prosperous man's son to a prosperous man in his own right, sporting a silver Vandyke and living in a home of high taste and style in Louisville. Dick Crosby had made his living in music, playing jazz in New Orleans and teaching at Holy Cross prep school and Tulane University. Lou Junod had done very well for himself, too, not just making a lot of money as a handbag salesman but managing to get through life without sacrificing his insistence that he is nothing less than a star. Which is why it's unsettling, how unsettled he is, when--on the videotape made of the reunion--a silver-haired gentleman brought in by Norton Cohen starts playing some chords on the piano, Dick Crosby begins playing the tune of "I'll Be Seeing You" on a muted trumpet, and my father starts singing. Lieutenant Russell Thomas is sitting a few feet away from him, listening intently, just as he did fifty years earlier. The reunion becomes a reenactment of a scene nearly as fundamental to my father's life as the scene of his birth. He had to prove himself in the officers' mess, and he did. Now, though, he seems intent on proving himself all over again, and he struggles. He looks nervous. His baritone voice is good, but he appears almost relieved when Norton Cohen taps the side of his wineglass and stands up to introduce Lieutenant Thomas.
"He saved all our lives" is what Norton says, repeating what has become an article of faith for the men, along with the question that dogs anybody who has survived a war in which so many perished: Why? It is a question Norton has asked for years, with awe and humility, and when Russ Thomas stands up to speak, there is an expectation that he might answer. He is a trim man, about five eight, with a sharp-featured, pinkish face and pure white hair. He is wearing glasses with square steel frames and a dress shirt buttoned all the way up to his neck with no tie. His voice is high, piping, cracker-barrelly, more Midwestern in timbre than Oklahoman. He seems to hail from a different America than the America that produced the other men of For Men Only, and when he starts speaking, he might as well be speaking a different language. "There might have been some questions about whether you guys were beating the draft," he says. "But the first thing you were, were soldiers. Good soldiers--as good as anybody. You never shirked any tough job. When I got called to the Battle of the Bulge, you all wanted to go with me. You wanted to follow! But I said, No, you do your job here. Because your job is important. So you stayed. But you all wanted to follow, because you were good soldiers. . . ."
Norton Cohen, Dick Crosby, and Lou Junod start sneaking looks at one another. For a half century they have been contemplating the enigma of the man who made sure they didn't have to be soldiers and didn't have to follow anyone into the Battle of the Bulge. Now he is finally talking to them, and they have no idea what on earth he is talking about.
The story of For Men Only does not exist in the vast library of World War II memoirs and texts; it exists exclusively in the memories of a few men whose memories are failing. For a long time, I wanted to tell the story as a way of finding out what really happened, but last year, when I called no less an authority than historian Paul Fussell--a former infantry lieutenant who has written extensively against the romanticism enshrouding the Good War--he told me that it couldn't have happened. I asked him if he had happened to hear For Men Only, or any of the other service bands that sprung up later, when he was at war in Europe, and this is what he said: "No, because they didn't exist. The media made them up. And even if they did exist, I would never have seen them, because they would have never dared show their faces around realsoldiers."
All right, you grouchy old bastard, be that way. But here's the thing: They did exist, and in the artifacts that prove their existence--photographs and diaries, a few clippings--they're not exactly hiding their faces in shame.
These guys were bold because they had to be. In the beginning, they had nothing but their own audacity, and the most audacious of all--the one who, in Dick Crosby's words, "was always driving into a quartermaster's depot in a jeep and driving out in a truck"--is Lieutenant Thomas. "Oh, he was a nervy bastard," Lou Junod says. "He had some balls. Big heavy brass ones." And so they went from being on the margins of history to showing up at history's really big parties. Paris was liberated on August 25, 1944, and there's a picture of Dick Crosby playing the "Marseillaise" under the Arc de Triomphe, surrounded by a whirling, swaying ecstasy of Parisians. The world is perched right there, between freedom and destruction--and so are the Pied Pipers of France. They start performing as close to the front as possible--that's the idea of calling the show For Men Only: Soldiers are putting on the show, so only soldiers are allowed to see it--until one day an officer at one of the replacement depots in Belgium catches a show and asks the obvious question: Why aren't these men killing Germans? So now Lieutenant Thomas has to hide his men in a barn belonging to a friendly Flemish family in a little town--Huy--near Liège while he gets Bruno Manni to drive him to headquarters in Paris in a jeep painted with phony authorization. The Midnight Run, the men wind up calling it--and somehow Lieutenant Thomas pulls it off, too. He somehow finds a major he knew from Special Service back in the States, somehow convinces him that he knows what he's doing, somehow gets official recognition from the Army. When he returns to Huy, the Pied Pipers are legal, but they're not the Pied Pipers anymore. According to the language on Norton Cohen's discharge, they've been designated "Special Service Platoon Fifth Headquarters Ground Forces Replacement Command Show 'For Men Only,' " or, simply, "For Men Only." In all, they stay in Huy more than a month, from September 11 to October 17, 1944, and now, according to Lieutenant Thomas, he's made sure "no one could touch them."
Now the story gets better because there is finally some documentation. Bob Bogart and Burt Kinzel keep itineraries, and while the unit is still in Liège, a reporter from the Associated Press catches five of the men taking over a nightclub "with tommy guns under one arm and musical instruments under the other" and subsequently giving what the article's headline calls JAM SESSIONS FOR BELGIAN JITTERBUGS. They play "Night and Day" and "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," and the reporter winds up using this quote from Pfc. Lou Junod: "It's like this. All us guys were wounded in battle and sent to a replacement depot. We sort of drifted together because we liked music and we'd have jam sessions now and then. The Colonel [sic] liked it and had us put on a show. Well, it went over all right, I guess, because now they've got us on the road entertaining the boys and the civilians. Today we played at the opera house. You shoulda seen those people. They went wild. They threw flowers and screamed and stamped just like at home, except they don't throw flowers at me back there. It was the first time they had heard swing music except on the radio in four years."
In November, they go back to Paris, where they give a broadcast on some early version of Armed Forces Radio. "For a band that really gets around, these boys take the cake," the announcer drawls, his laid-back elocution unmistakably 1940s American. "There's scarcely a replacement depot in these parts where they haven't played. Officially, the band is known as the Fifth Platoon of the GFRC Special Service. But to anyone who's heard their music, they're better known as the stars of the show--For Men Only. To prove there's more than jump tunes hidden in their bag of musical tricks, Bobby Day and the orchestra asks you to try a sweet number on for size. Pfc. Lou Junod sings, and the orchestra plays 'I Dream of You'. . . ."*
They play three more cities before winding up a month later in the French city of Givet, on the Meuse River. On December 16, a German counteroffensive breaks through the Allied front lines and keeps rolling until it nearly reaches the Meuse. The Battle of the Bulge has begun, and For Men Only is stranded across the river from the new front. By this time, most of the men have traded their rifles and tommy guns for officers' sidearms, which they think are more stylish--which makes them more popular with women. And so when the Army makes its desperate call for all available manpower, Lieutenant Thomas intervenes once again. His men aren't soldiers anymore, he explains; they're the stars of the show. He is himself called into battle but is instead, he says, hospitalized for exhaustion. On Christmas Eve 1944, For Men Only plays an outdoor concert near the front lines, in the cold and the dark, and Lou Junod's hushed rendition of "Silent Night," sung to a haunted crowd of exhausted men, will stand as the highlight of his performing life. Three days later, the show heads back west, to Le Havre, without Lieutenant Thomas, and though he goes on to organize another show, most of the men from For Men Only never see him again.
"Get in," Lieutenant Thomas said at the airport in Tulsa.
I'd been standing at the curb when suddenly an old man in a parked car began yelling at me--yelling at me--to get in. He'd recognized me immediately, though I'd never met him in my life. "You look just like your dad," Russell Thomas said, and off we went.
He was just as the rest of the guys said he was. He was excitable, he was in a hurry, he had a tendency to interrupt himself with an abrupt, shouting laugh. Now, though, he was behind the wheel of a car. "My commanding officer used to say that if Thomas gets a mind to do something, you better just hold on and go for the ride!" he announced as he was cutting across lanes of traffic. Lucky? I felt lucky when we made it to the home he'd built on the outskirts of town. Inside the house, Christiane Thomas, a gracious Belgian woman Lieutenant Thomas met and married while he was in Europe, prepared us a plate of cold cuts and crudités and showed us to the sweltering patio, where a gray-haired man sat at a table.
I recognized him as quickly as Lieutenant Thomas recognized me--recognized him, with instant sympathy, as the son of a man with a great story to tell. His name was George Thomas, and he was the first person I'd ever met whose father also participated in For Men Only. He spoke slowly and deliberately, as if in direct response to his father's impossibly hectic and scattered way of talking.
FATHER: In the beginning, we were not quite legal, you might say. We weren't official.
SON: What my father is trying to say is that they were all AWOL. They were all a bunch of mavericks.
FATHER: That's not what I'm saying, George. Let me tell the story!
SON: That's what you told me last night.
FATHER: You always try to tell the story, George. But you can't tell the story. You could never tell the story! Let me tell the story, George! It's my story!
This was four years ago, August 2001, and I'd come to Tulsa in the interest of the historical record. I'd come to Tulsa to find out whether the story of For Men Only, as I'd begun to hear it told by Norton Cohen and Dick Crosby and my father, was even possible. I was trying to learn about it as a reporter, and yet it was hard not to want to believe it as a son. So now we found maps. We found pictures. We traced the path of For Men Only from St.-Lô to the Meuse River. We talked about the show during the dinner Christiane Thomas served us, and we kept talking about it well into the night. We never, however, went much beyond the conflicting versions of the tale advanced, in turn, by father and son. The story George Thomas wanted to tell--George's story--was the story of a rebel improvising his way around military authority, hell, subverting military authority. The story Lieutenant Thomas wanted to tell was the story of a good officer who went to unconventional lengths to carry out his orders, and they were still arguing the point when Lieutenant Thomas finally said, "I'm very tired," and asked if he could go to bed.
Here's another story. It takes place in Paris. It takes place after V-E Day, after V-J Day, after the war. For Men Only has been together more than a year. Lieutenant Thomas is long gone, and the show has endured a succession of three different commanding officers. It doesn't really matter. The show is in demand. It's made forty stops, all over Europe. It's been in Rome, where it got a mention in The Stars and Stripes, and it's been to the opera house in Nuremberg, where the guys got a chance to horse around in Hitler's private box. It's traveled in a bus commandeered from a German show family, then painted with the For Men Only logo and outfitted with a galley. They're stars now, and my father, according to my father, is the biggest star of all. The servicemen love him. They squeal, "Frankie, Frankie" when he does a Frank Sinatra song, just as their women do, the women left to their own devices back home.
They love him because he loves them, because he loves being onstage, because the hair stands up on his arms when he sings a song, because he feels every song he sings--and because he doesn't take shit from nobody.
He's a rough customer, my father, during World War II. He's a dangerous man. He's not only the star of For Men Only, he's the enforcer, the knockout artist, "the Rocky Marciano of the unit," as Norton Cohen remembers him. Hell, Norton is one of the guys my father knocks out, while teaching him how to box. He also knocks out a palooka and comedian named Ga Ga Wieczerzak. He also decks Dick Ballou, a saxophone player and arranger, after Ballou picks on Dick Crosby and taunts Norton with anti-Semitic remarks. He catches a guy named Bill Heath cheating him at cards and threatens to kill him. He also starts a riot at a Paris nightclub when the guy at the door won't let him in because he's not an officer. They won't let him inside a nightclub in Paris? He owns Paris. And after For Men Only gives its last performance on October 9, 1945, and is absorbed into a larger, slicker show called the Rhythm Rations, my father hangs around in Paris, along with Dick Crosby and Bobby Day. Like a lot of adoring GIs, they go to a club called the Bal Tabarin to meet the great Gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt; unlike a lot of GIs, they actually play with Django. Not only that: Theyjam with Django at some after-hours garret in Paris, with my father and Django sitting on the floor, surrounded by an appreciative audience of beautiful Frenchwomen. Not only that: Django loves my father. Not only that: Django asks my father to stay on in Paris, where he will teach him French and make him into a star.
Why doesn't my father stay? Why doesn't he stay in Paris with Django Reinhardt and become a great international singing star?
"I was homesick," he tells me. "I'd been away a long time, and I wanted to get home. Besides, I missed your mother."
There are photographs of the show--of what these guys did to survive the war. There's one of a guy, Teddy Hyman, doing a puppet show. There's another of Irv Felderman, a piano player, dressed up in a tall wool hat for a bit called "The Mad Russian." There's Bob Bogart in blackface and Norton Cohen in drag. There's also some studio photographs of a sad-faced man wearing a zoot suit and then smoking a cigar in a pink tutu and a diamond tiara. His name was Dick Havilland. He joined For Men Only in the summer of 1945. He was a professional comedian and he was the star of the show--the only one who received individual billing. He wore the tutu for his big number, "There Are Fairies at the Bottom of My Garden," which was made all the more effective because he was, well, a fairy.
"Dick was gay," Norton Cohen remembers. "I was eighteen and I didn't really know what gay was, but he was gay all right. He came to us from another show after we became legal. He'd apparently been kicked out for having an affair with a saxophonist. He used his part of the show to solicit sex and drugs from the audience. He made some kind of coded references. He used to walk around with his marijuana in a Lipton tea can. He was something else, Dick."
But then, they all were. They were very advanced, these boys from For Men Only. They lived in a different world from the world American soldiers supposedly lived in--they lived in our world. They had our values. Because he spoke French with unaccented fluency, Dick Crosby scored dope for the other trumpet player, Jimmy Ille. Jimmy Ille performed oral sex, much to the alarm of some of the others, who didn't, and who would appeal to Dick Crosby to talk to him on their behalf. "They were worried," Crosby said, "that Jimmy was ruining all the girls for them." Some of the men were married. Most of them, however, weren't. They pretty much had sex all the time, sometimes singly, sometimes in group settings.
"We used to have to buy our instruments from the people in the towns," Dick Crosby says. "Or things would break down and we'd have to get them fixed. Well, I was the one who had to speak to the townspeople, since I spoke French. In one place, I got very friendly with the barber. He was a leading citizen. He invited a bunch of us over to his place one night. Well, we get there and he's the only man in the room. The rest are women--married women, the wives of all the other leading citizens, including the wife of the mayor. And there are mattresses all over the floor. We're looking around, drinking, talking to the women, and then, suddenly, the barber stands up and says, 'Now--time for zing-zing!' The lights go out, and it was time for zing-zing, all right. Man, that was some orgy."
And then they took their vices home. My father included. He was different from most other fathers I grew up around--in his looks, in his dress, in his stories, in his songs, in his cars, in his prosperity, and in his flamboyance, but also, fundamentally, in his habit of threatening people physically and, if threats didn't work, of beating them up. To the best of my knowledge, my father had his last fistfight at approximately the tender age of seventy-five; indeed, to the best of my knowledge, my father's eighties have been the only decade of his life in which he did not punch someone in the nose.
As for the star of the show: One night, around forty years ago, Norton Cohen was home with a houseful of party guests, celebrating the eve of the Kentucky Derby. The phone rang; it was Dick Havilland, saying that he was performing in Louisville and had to see Norton. "Where are you?" Norton said. Havilland answered by naming a notorious shithole, the sleaziest joint in town. Norton, nevertheless, left his family and went to see Dick Havilland, who then importuned him with an urgent request for $500--explaining only that he wouldn't explain what the money was for and begging Norton not to ask. Norton gave it to him and didn't hear another word from Dick Havilland. Five years went by until, on another Derby eve, the phone rang, and it was Havilland, calling from the same part of town. Again he begged Norton to see him, and again Norton left his guests, bringing a blank check. This time, though, Havilland paid back the $500. When Norton asked how he got the money, he rapped a fist against his leg. It was wooden. He had fallen off the stage of a club in Detroit, and the money he won in a lawsuit enabled him to pay back his debts. He wound up getting out of comedy altogether, and the next time Norton saw him, the star of For Men Only was parking cars in Miami Beach, hustling tips on his wooden leg.
Dick Havilland died in Miami, 1987. Bruno Manni died in San Francisco, 1990. Bill Heath, the guy who cheated my father at cards, died in Wichita Falls, Texas, 1999. Hell, they're all pretty much gone, all names on the Social Security Death File. That's where I found them when I went looking, although sometimes I found their sons and they filled in the details. Irv Felderman got wounded twice in World War II as a radio operator and then died after falling out of bed in Philadelphia and rupturing his spleen. Bob Bogart died of cancer that started in his appendix. Jimmy Ille died with Dick Crosby taking care of him. Gone, gone, gone, and their stories gone with them. Then I did an Internet search on an uncommon name and wound up calling Victor Gerstenblatt, the kid singer, the "popular tenor"--as he was listed on one of the bills--to Lou Junod's "song stylist." He didn't remember very much, though. He had no memory of how he got involved in For Men Only and no memory of my father, either: "Lou Junod, no, I don't remember that name," he said. "What did he do in the show?"
I wound up meeting him in a Chinese restaurant in Florida, where he looked just like any other genial retiree, with his white hair, his bowed belly and bowlegs, his approximately matched clothes, and his crepe-soled shoes. He wasn't retired, though, because he was out of dough. A few days a week, he worked as the host at a local restaurant. "All the customers say, 'Oh, you're just a nice Jewish boy,' " he said. "I tell them, 'Jewish, yes. But not so nice.' " And he wasn't. "I've been a bother all my life. I made a lot of money in my prime. A lot of money. Blew it all. Gambling. My bookie used to pay for my trips to Atlantic City once a month. I should have paid him; it would have been a lot cheaper. I used to come back and my wife would say, 'How did you do?' 'I broke even.' Bullshit. After I left home, I lived in Atlanta for a year. One night, I won $1,100. Poker. I said, I'm going to spend it on my daughter. I called her up back home. I said, 'Baby, you grab a girlfriend, come on down. I'm spending $1,100 on you.' That night, I went back to the table. Lost the eleven hundred, and another thousand on top of it. I called my daughter back. 'Baby, you can't come.' She said, 'Oh, Daddy, you've disappointed me so many times.' I have two grandchildren, eight and twelve. I've never met them. I haven't seen my daughter in thirty years. I don't know if my first wife turned her against me or what. Not that it took a lot of doing. I wasn't the greatest father. I left. I wasn't there for her. I didn't pay the child support. I gambled the money away. I was never a classy guy. But I could bullshit. Bullshit, I could do. I liked to smile. That's how I made my living. You wouldn't believe the living I made. Of course, I don't have any of it anymore. My brothers say, 'You don't have two dimes to rub together.' 'Yeah,' I say, 'but you never had the times I had.' So that's me, that's my life. Always with a smile on my face. No regrets. The only regret was losing my daughter, but what are you gonna do?"
Was he a lucky man? Had Victor Gerstenblatt been lucky in the war the way my father had been--the way all of them had been? Did the way he survived the war have anything to do with the way he lived his life? He didn't know. He couldn't say. He lived in the present and didn't care about the past. The only thing he remembered was getting laid: "Man, those French girls could really screw. And if you were an artist--forget it." The next day, though, when I met him again, I showed him some photographs of For Men Only, and the tug of a smile changed his face. "Oh, that's your father," he said. "Sure, I know him. Rough guy. Built like a brick shithouse. And good-looking. He wasn't married, was he? No, I didn't think so."
"Count backwards from a hundred by sevens, Mr. Junod," says the doctor at the geriatric clinic in Atlanta.
"One hundred, 99, 98, 97 . . ."
"No," the doctor says. "By sevens."
"Oh, by sevens," my father says. He pauses, seemingly befuddled. He has been living in Atlanta since December 2004, when my brother, my sister, and I moved him and my mother from Levittown, New York, to be closer to us. The advantage to the arrangement is that I or one of my siblings can take him to the Veteran's Hospital when he needs to go. The disadvantage--for him anyway--is that he has to put up with the indignity of me asking the VA doctor to test his memory when we go there. He is eighty-six, and sometimes he is, in his own words, so "out of it" that I'm sure he won't pass the test.
"Ninety-three," he says slowly, after a time.
"Okay," the doctor says, "what comes next?"
"Eighty-six," my father says.
"All right--"
"Seventy-nine. Seventy-two. Sixty-five. Fifty-eight."
"Very good, Mr. Junod."
"Not bad for a man my age," he says, feeling more and more cocky as he keeps managing to do everything the doctor asks him to do.
"Not bad," I say, "for a man who still gets partial disability for the head injury he suffered in World War II."
'"You had a head injury in the war?" the doctor asks.
"Sure," my father says, and then tells the story of the day he followed Sergeant Justin McCarthy in a hunt for Germans on the other side of the hedgerows and McCarthy's gun jammed and my father got knocked out twice.
"Tell the doctor what else you did, Dad," prompting another telling of a story I've been hearing my entire life--a story that I've absorbed as though it were mine.
"Wow, you were a singer," the doctor says, after my father tells the story of singing for Lieutenant Thomas in the officers' mess. "Are there any recordings? Did you keep at it when you came home from the war?"
I know the answer to this question, too, because it's another version of the question that has dogged me since as a little kid I first understood that the man standing at a microphone--in front of an orchestra, in shiny boots and army fatigues--in the framed photographs on the wall of our basement was my father. He was famous, I thought . . . but if he was so famous then, why wasn't he famous now? Why wasn't he a star?
"There had been a musicians' strike," he tells the doctor, "and it screwed everything up. I sang a little here and there, but I had to go out and make a living. You know, you have to get a break if you're going to make it in show business, and I never did. I wasn't lucky that way." In fact, he had his chances: He started singing with an orchestra led by Dick Ballou, the guy he knocked out in the war. Ballou paid for him to take singing lessons, but when the teacher grabbed his face in an effort to loosen his jaw, as singing teachers will, my father--or so the story goes--threatened to deck him and walked out. He didn't need singing lessons. He didn't have to learn to sing. In his mind, you either had it or you didn't, and having it depended on who you were rather than what you learned--you were either a singer or you weren't. And so the one time he sang with Ballou's orchestra on a radio broadcast in New York City, he happened to sing when he didn't have it, and was by his own admission so bad that the only person who admitted listening to him was his mother in Brooklyn. A few years later, he sang on Arthur Godfrey's talent show--the American Idol of its day--and although he sang well in the preliminaries, he didn't have it when he sang for Godfrey himself. And that was it. Throughout his life, he got in the habit of taking the stage at weddings and in nightclubs, when he was so intoxicated with the fact of being Lou Junod that he just had to sing about it, but he never got paid for his efforts. He never became a professional singer. He never became a big star.
Was he unlucky? He was unlucky to define stardom as a matter of luck, and so to be at its mercy. But he was lucky in other ways. In 1947, he married my mother, the former Frances Brandshagen, the belle of Brooklyn. In 1948, my brother and sister were born. Ten years later, so was I. We all live now within a few miles of one another, outside Atlanta. My mother has returned to health, and my father is still alive. Myfamily is still alive. Although my father does not live in the way a star might live, he lives in the way a father might live, and so should consider himself a lucky man. He does. He doesn't. And to the degree he does, that's the degree he's had to give up his older, bolder dreams. Indeed, if my father has any luck at all, it's that he's lived long enough to accept the kind of luck usually allotted to lesser men.
But then if he had been a lesser man, he wouldn't still be alive, would he? He might not have "had it" when he sang for Arthur Godfrey, but he had it when he sang for Russell Thomas, and that made all the difference. That's what I believe, anyway, because I believe it all: all the stories. Indeed, I believe that I owe my very existence to my father's stardom. And then to his refusal of stardom, because if he'd stayed with Django Reinhardt instead of coming home and marrying my mom, I wouldn't have been born. I have always believed all the stories, because like every other baby-boom kid, I grew up watching World War II movies, and my father's story was the movie that played over and over again in my house. On July 26, 1944, Lou Junod was out on patrol with Sergeant Justin McCarthy, and McCarthy's rifle jammed. McCarthy went back to get another, and Junod got knocked senseless by a concussion grenade. A week later, he saved himself by singing a song. And on August 13, 1944, Justin McCarthy was killed, in a very different kind of movie, near St.-Malo, France.
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