Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show (4 page)

Detachment X was the USO with helmets. The army wanted a company it could send to the front lines, just behind the invading force, to put on a show and create an illusion of safety, a veneer of civilization. “It was an experimental thing. All the little islands they hit in the Pacific and the South Pacific, they wanted to have something for the morale, to get the soldiers to relax a little bit,” Al Checco recalled. “We were in the forward areas, often only a day or two after they were invaded.”

Don dutifully polished his ventriloquism act, but he envied the comedians, and he yearned to join their skits. He was sitting with the guys one night, having a beer, when he noticed Red Ford, one of the pros seated at another table, staring at him and laughing. Eventually, Red walked over and said, “You know something? You're a funny little son of a bitch.” Red began to teach Don some of his jokes and coached him on the finer points of deadpan comedy. “Before I knew it, I was onstage playing Red Ford's second banana,” Don recalled. This would be Don's theatrical boot camp.

In March 1944, the men boarded the troopship
Sea Witch
and zigzagged across the Pacific, ever alert for enemy subs. Forty tense days later, they arrived at Milne Bay, an expanse of hard-won mangrove swamp. The scene that greeted Don there sounds in hindsight like a set from
Apocalypse Now
: “It was raining when we dropped anchor in the harbor. We could see the steam rising from the jungle, and the air was hot and humid. As we looked on from the harbor, the jungle looked beautiful but forbidding.”

The performers sat in their ship with nowhere to go, awaiting orders. Finally, the company disembarked. “We were a motley crew as we sloshed through the mud and climbed into two waiting trucks, struggling with duffel bags and drums and horns and props,” as well as rifles and gas masks, Don recalled. “We were driven to a desolate-looking camp where we were dropped off at a structure laughingly called a barracks. It was actually no more than a long roof covering two rows of army cots.”

For days, the men sat in the barracks beneath ceaseless rain. Finally, a commanding officer arrived with a performance schedule. The men would pile into trucks every night and head out into the swamp to play for groups of soldiers stationed at spots around the bay. “We performed on whatever we could put together to be a stage,” Al Checco recalled. “Sometimes it might be just the backs of [the] trucks.” There were no seats, so soldiers sat on boxes or crates, often in pouring rain. “If you wonder why they would sit on a box in the rain to watch a show,” Don recalled, “bear in mind that there was
nothing
to do in New Guinea, and I mean absolutely nothing.”

The shows were meant to distract the men not just from their miserable existence but also from the constant threat of violent death. “The Japanese kept bombing us at about the same time every night during the first act, just before I was supposed to sing a song,” Al recalled. When the barrage began, “the sirens would go off, and we'd have to stop the show, jump into our foxholes or whatever, and then come out and finish the show.”

One song was called “Pinup Girl,” Al recalled, “and Don was always the closing of that number. He'd come out at the end with hardly any clothes on, and he was the pinup girl.”

Outrageous then, the routines sound comparatively tame now. In one skit, Don and Mickey Shaughnessy are fishing. Mickey's lips are pursed.

“Whaddaya got in your mouth?” Don asks.

“Worms,” Mickey replies.

Don grimaces. “Well, why don't you just hold them?”

“Too nasty.”

As much as Don was learning onstage, the long hours offstage proved unbearable. “The constant rain was maddening,” Don recalled, “and our clothes never seemed to get quite dry. Malaria was a constant threat, so we had to sleep under mosquito nets, and they fed us atabrine tablets every day.” The pills turned Don's skin yellow. “We usually wore leggings, but the mud still slipped into our shoes and slithered down our socks. Some guys grew a fungus on their feet the GIs called jungle rot. Of all things, I began to get it on my hands.”

The tour filled Don's head with a View-Master reel of horror. He once watched the capture of a Japanese soldier. “He was frothing at the mouth,” Don recalled. “He was so full of rage. He was like an animal. They kept saying, ‘Keep back,' like he was a rabid dog.” Don watched American soldiers rip the gold teeth from a corpse. And then there was the unsettling performance Detachment X gave for survivors of the Bataan Death March, beaten and starved on a sixty-mile trek through the Philippine jungles. “They filtered in to watch us,” Don recalled, “but they didn't laugh once. They barely applauded.”

In time, Don began to fear for his sanity. One day, he wandered into the jungle to get away from the miserable barracks. Farther and farther he walked. Suddenly, he was gripped with terror: Don thought someone was chasing him. He began to run, faster and faster. Then he stopped and turned around. No one was there. He thought to himself, “This is it: I'm going crazy, just like my father.”

From that day, Don thought he was hiding a terrible secret: he was going insane. That fear made Don reluctant to speak, feeding an essential shyness that would define him for the rest of his life.

Several months into the tour, the company took a five-week leave in Brisbane, Australia. Don's jungle rot cleared up in the hot, dry sunshine, and the dance-hall girls buoyed his spirits. He felt that his sanity was restored.

After the leave, the company moved up the coast to the provincial capital of Hollandia, and then to Los Negros, and thence to Biak and Manus, where the performers gazed upon a vast armada set to invade the Philippines. The men performed on battleships and aircraft carriers. When the Allies invaded, Detachment X followed.

Don's comedic ambitions had outgrown Danny the dummy. He yearned to be a comedian, and he was learning from some of the best, playing second banana to Red Ford and Mickey Shaughnessy. He appealed to the senior officers to let him drop the ventriloquist act and focus on the comedy pairings. They insisted he continue with Danny. When the company sailed from Manus Island, Danny mysteriously vanished. “Out of the clear, blue sky, that suitcase was gone,” Al Checco recalled. “When we asked Don about it, he just shuffled back and forth and sheepishly said, ‘Well, I don't know. I don't know.' ” Don was free to be a comic.

Don was in a Philippine jungle in August 1945 when someone came running up to the troupe and cried, “The war is over!” The performers were speechless, then incredulous. How could the war be over? “No, it's over,” the breathless messenger said. Then, a sense of relief and euphoria washed over Don, like nothing he'd felt before. He had thought it distinctly possible he would be out in the jungles, covered in rot, for the rest of his life.

Most of the entertainers from
Stars and Gripes
had endured what amounted to a two-year setback in their professional careers. For Don, the military had the opposite effect, honing his skills and restoring the confidence he'd lost in that first, demoralizing visit to New York.

Don returned to West Virginia University intent on continuing his studies and eager to keep busy—if only to ward off the demons that still haunted him after that delirious run through the jungle and the recurring visions of madness. Don was an extrovert again, performing in university plays and resuming his variety act with faithful friends Jarvie Eldred and Richie Ferrara. The Radio Three could now command fifty dollars a night. Don's solo act, newly polished, electrified fraternity parties. He had returned from Detachment X with dozens of stage-ready characters, some of them prototypes of the Nervous Man. One of the best was a harried football announcer who spewed spoonerisms, deliberate slips of the tongue. “Everybody was in stitches with that,” recalled Jim Allen, a fraternity buddy. “Even sober, you had to lay down on the floor and laugh.”

When summer break came, Don took to hitchhiking the eighty miles to Pittsburgh and calling on booking agents with his stand-up act. He struck out again and again. He shared his frustration with Richie. Richie offered to go along the next time. Don and Richie made the rounds together, to no avail. They visited one last agent, climbing the steps to her third-floor office. Richie knocked. A woman answered, “It's five o'clock; we're closed.”

Richie cut in, “Wait a minute, it's not for me. I'm a medical student.”

Suddenly the agent took interest. “Do you know anything about irritable bowel syndrome?”

“Sure, I just learned about it.”

“Come in.”

Richie did, and Don snuck in behind him. Richie listened as the agent bemoaned her irritable bowels, nodding empathetically. Finally, Richie directed the agent's attention to the man sitting quietly in the corner: “He's a great comedian, and he needs a job.”

The agent asked, “What can he do?”

“Don, do one of your routines.”

Don launched into his spoonerism routine. “And she died laughing,” Richie recalled. Don had an agent.

All that summer and the next, Don worked dates across Pennsylvania, playing clubs in Meadville, Oil City, and Wilkes-Barre. His effect on an audience was immediate and electric. “He would just stand up in front of a crowd and he'd say one word, and they would laugh,” Richie recalled. “He had something about his nature that was funny. Not for what he said. It was just his expressions, his style, his person, his spirit. There's something in it that's indescribable.”

Don earned ten dollars a night, twenty-five dollars on weekends, plus bus fare. “In most cases,” Don recalled, “I would pocket the bus fare and hitchhike. Even so, I rarely came out ahead.” Once he played a stag show, a realization that dawned only when the first performer turned to Don and said, “Stand by the piano, honey, and I'll hand you my clothes.” It was his first glimpse of a naked woman.

Richie Ferrara proved a charming and resourceful friend, and not just with theatrical agents. “When we got back from the army, he was in school and I was in school,” Richie recalled. “I didn't have time to arrange a date. . . . So, I'd call up this sorority house that I knew and say, ‘Is there anyone available?' I would date one of them, and Don would date the other.” One Saturday that spring, Richie brought Don to a campus sorority mixer. When the party ended at five o'clock, they lingered, and soon they found themselves competing with several other young men for the attention of Kay, a petite freshman with arched eyebrows and an angular beauty that vaguely suggested a young Debbie Reynolds. By the time they went home, Don was in love.

Kathryn Metz was a woman of substance, the daughter of a Northern Baptist minister from Wheeling, a West Virginia city so far north that it was almost Ohio. She was studying speech and English. She knew Don as “the fair-haired boy in the drama department. He was often the lead in the plays that they did.” And Kay knew of the vaudeville act Don, Richie, and Jarvie played around town.

The university campus was flooded with returning GIs. Kay had many suitors, and Don immediately found himself vying with another boyfriend named Kent. But Don was relentless, and Kay kept saying yes. Don would keep Richie up past midnight moaning and groaning “about how much he loved her.”

Don had many fans at the university. Random people kept approaching Kay, unbidden, and urging her to pair off with him. “He was very charismatic,” she recalled. “I recognized that almost immediately. He was funny and outgoing, and we could talk. He had a lot of depth of character, and that was interesting to me.”

Given Don's stature on campus, Kay was surprised when, about a year after their first date, he took her home to the threadbare rooming house on University Avenue. They would go there for lunch. Elsie would prepare a full meal, with two desserts, a cake and a pie. Then, the three would sit and watch Elsie's favorite soap operas, and Don would poke fun at the characters and the lines until Kay and Elsie couldn't stop laughing. Kay had a warm, encouraging laugh, just like Don's mother.

Kay and Don dated for two years. One summer in that span, Don drove Kay to a seasonal job at a hotel in Beach Haven, New Jersey. He intended to drop her there and go off in search of stand-up work. But when they arrived and Don sized up the romantic competition at the inn, he abandoned his own plans and took a job as a dishwasher. He wanted to keep Kay close.

Don married Kay in December 1947 in a ceremony at her father's church. He graduated from West Virginia University the following spring.

Having finally won the girl, Don struggled mightily to support her. He sold shirts for a time. Then, frustrated by the lack of jobs, he enrolled in a graduate theater program at the University of Arizona. Don's successful older brother, Bill, owned property there. But Don and Kay stayed only a few months because Don's GI Bill records were lost and he wasn't receiving his student aid. They returned to Morgantown in winter. Don took a holiday job selling toys at a department store. In quiet moments there, Don would chat up the man playing Santa Claus in the Christmas display. A theater buff, Santa urged Don to return to New York. “Go for it,” Santa would say. “You don't need any more college.” In later years, Don would tell nightclub audiences that the man's advice had launched his career: “Don't tell me there's no Santa Claus!”

Santa's urgings surely put New York in Don's mind. But the final straw came one day in the university drama department. Don was sitting with some fellow thespians when a young man walked in and cried, “Guess what? Next week, I'm leaving for New York!” At those words, “something snapped inside of me,” Don recalled. “ ‘Dammit!' I said to myself. ‘I'm going to New York!' And just like that, I made the decision.” He rushed home and told Kay. She was ready.

Don had twenty dollars to his name, so once more he hit up brother Bill, who loaned him one hundred dollars for the trip. It was the last time Don would have to borrow car fare.