Heart of the City (9 page)

The cousin, one Blanche Kurowski, and her family had taken Joey in. They had already found her a job in the factory where Mrs. Kurowski had worked.

Willis had one last question for Worden: was there a phone number for this Mrs. Kurowski?

WHEN MRS. Kurowski put Joey on the phone, Willis could hear the quiet sobs.

“You found me,” Joey said, sniffling. “How I’d hoped it.”

“I was so worried about you,” Willis said.

“Are you still at sea?”

“Never got farther than Philadelphia.”

“Oh, how I felt you were near.”

“Are you with good people, Joey?”

“Oh, yes. Blanche is swell. One daughter, Phyllis, is my age. You’d like the whole family, Willis. They’re already keen on you.”

“I’d like to meet them.”

That weekend, his first leave, Willis went to Philadelphia’s Thirtieth Street Station and boarded a New York-bound train.

Blanche, an attractive thirty-six-year-old, opened the door to their small home, in Clifton, New Jersey, and threw her arms around Willis. “Oh, sweetie, we’ve heard so much—read so much—about you,” she said. “Here, sweetie, come to the table, have some peach cobbler. Joey’s still getting fixed up.”

One of the youngest of Blanche’s six children, Rosalie, a flirt at three, dashed over to Willis and hugged his knees. “Will you be
my
boyfriend?” she asked, looking up.

“You might be better off with someone your own age,” Willis said, winking at Blanche.

When Joey stepped into the living room, Willis scarcely recognized her. She wore a crisp white calf-length dress, bright lipstick, and a relaxed smile. More than anything, she looked like she’d had a good night’s sleep—perhaps several.

Willis stood up from his plate. As Blanche and her children looked on adoringly, he clasped both of Joey’s hands. They stood there, fingers laced, for several minutes, studying each other’s faces, grinning, and swaying slightly, as if dancing to a melody only they could hear.

Willis caught a late Sunday train back to Philadelphia but came back each of the next three weekends. With little money, they spent nearly all their time in the Kurowskis’ apartment, gabbing with Blanche, playing games with her children, or snuggling on the couch. Joey is “with swell people now,” Willis wrote to his
mother in an October 15, 1941, letter. “They are her ‘Mom’ and ‘Pop’ in the real sense of the word and she calls them that. Mrs. Kurowski is thirty-six—a nice looking Polish woman. She treats everyone that will let her like they were one of her children. And she and the whole family are really swell to me, even the kids.”

In another letter, to his cousin, he wrote that Joey “is beautiful and is a tomboy if ever there was one. She has a half-Nelson on my heart—all she has to do is put on a little pressure and who knows what might happen.”

On a Saturday in early November, in the feathery evening light, Willis and Joey were talking near a washtub on the back porch. Willis leaned rakishly against the side of the tub, and Joey pressed her body against his, running her hands up his chest.

“Bill?”

“Let’s get married, Joey,” he said. “I know it’s right.”

“We’ll make a family, okay?”

“Yes.”

She gazed up into his eyes, searchingly, and, with her thumbs, smoothed away the creases on his brow.

Despite the sleep and the new clothes, Willis saw just how vulnerable she still was. He knew only that he wanted to protect her. “Yes, a family, Joey. A big one.”

WHAT THE young couple couldn’t yet see was the approaching hurricane of publicity. Worden’s story had landed on desks of important people on both coasts. In a country surfacing from the Great Depression and hungry for hopeful, all-American stories, the tale of the homeless waif and dashing sailor was irresistible.

David O. Selznick, the legendary movie producer who had recently won Academy Awards for
Gone with the Wind
and
Rebecca
, read the story in Hollywood. He saw it as a perfect match for a film he was planning, an anthology of shorts he called
Tales of Passion and Romance
. “It’s a perfect episode as it stands,”
Selznick told the
World-Telegram
that October. “Jewel-like. Tiny, but complete. It seems to me to have some of the quality of O. Henry, some of the drama of New York.” He didn’t know when the movie would go into production, he told the paper, but he already had Gene Kelly in mind for the sailor and Ginger Rogers for Joey. Worden wired Willis a telegram with the good news.

In the meantime, the CBS radio show
We, the People
paid them fifty dollars each for an interview. The bandleader Harry James asked if Joey was available to appear with him on stage.
Life
magazine planned a two-page pictorial, with the couple reenacting their romance for a photographer.

When word leaked of plans for a November 20 wedding—Thanksgiving—news reporters worked themselves into a purple-tinged lather. Glamorous portraits of the good-looking couple appeared in papers from the
Los Angeles Times
to the
Washington Post
.

“Sailor Prince Charming to Wed N.Y. Park Waif in Story-Book Romance,” screamed the headline in
Philadelphia Inquirer
.

“Park Cinderella Weds Her Hero,” the Associated Press said.

“Love Found a Way Today,” said the United Press.

“Sailor, Park Bench Waif Marry Today.” “Marriage Is Sequel to Previous Drab, Unhappy Life.” “She’ll Marry Her Bill, to End Modern O. Henry Yarn.” “It’s Like a Fairy-Tale.” And for a few days, it was. For a few days, it felt as though the whole world were toasting their happiness.

More than three hundred people—among them celebrities and news photographers—crammed into the Garfield, New Jersey, City Hall to watch the “park bench Cinderella” and the “husky tar from the Philadelphia Navy Yard” exchange vows. The thirty-two-year-old mayor, John Gabriel, who had already played host at a wedding feast at the nearby Swiss Chalet, officiated. The Montauk Dress Shop of Passaic, Joey’s hometown, donated a gauzy white wedding gown with Hungarian peasant touches and a fingertip-length veil (Willis wore his dashing dress blues).
A Philadelphia jeweler donated gold wedding bands carved to resemble interlacing orange blossoms. Tom’s Flower Shop of Garfield contributed the wedding decorations and a pom-pom bouquet of white chrysanthemums. David Selznick sent a sixty-two-piece silver dinner set.

Blanche stood beside the bride as the matron of honor. With Joey’s father gone and her mother conspicuously absent, Joey was given away by Joseph P. Luna, the mayor of Lodi, New Jersey. Someone in the audience thrust a stopwatch in the air when the couple fell in for a kiss. The length of the “clinch”—eleven seconds—would be reported in all the papers. Outside, hundreds of well-wishers pelted the bride and groom—and the police who had to carve a path through the crowd—with rice. An accordionist played “Anchors Aweigh.”

The New Yorker Hotel donated its bridal suite for a three-day honeymoon. When the couple entered the lobby that evening, the bandleader Benny Goodman struck up
Here Comes the Bride
. In the hotel’s Terrace Room, flashbulbs crackled as the couple shared lollipops and big bowls of ice cream. Willis toasted Joey as “the most wonderful girl I’ve ever met.” Joey said, “I’m the happiest girl in the world.”

NOWHERE IS there evidence that their sudden fame changed them. If anything, it reinforced in them the fragility of existence. They saw, perhaps more clearly than most, that the road was never sure. They saw that as a guide to the future, the past was faithless.

The media glare, the movie interest, the crowds—it might have gone to some people’s heads. But Joey and Willis made no new plans. They did not seek further attention or money for their story. Nor did they show any sign of higher expectations. “I was never one to make plans ahead of time, because they never come out,” Willis told a reporter who’d caught them at breakfast at the hotel the morning after their wedding.

When the honeymoon was over, she was still a broke eighteen-year-old with a dead father and an estranged mother; he was still the son of impoverished Texas farmers, earning enlisted men’s pay.

For Willis and Joey, it seems, it was enough to have found each other.

They rented a small two-room apartment on Fortieth Street in Philadelphia. And they used money from the radio show to furnish it. “She and I are determined to have a very happy life together,” Willis wrote to his grandmother. “She wants a home of her own where she can have something she had never had before. A sense of security.”

But security would be a long time coming. A reminder of life’s inconstancy came less than two weeks after they’d left the New Yorker’s bridal suite.

On Sunday, December 7, in the afterglow of their honeymoon, they slept in, reading the newspapers in bed and listening for hours to music on the radio. At around 2:45 p.m., the radio went suddenly silent. Then, in a moment, a news announcer’s grave voice. Scores of Japanese warplanes had mounted a surprise attack on U.S. Navy battleships in Pearl Harbor. The damage was too great to tally, but authorities feared hundreds—if not thousands—dead.

Willis leapt out of bed, threw on his uniform, and raced to the Navy Yard. A commanding officer ordered him at once to the Delaware River. With sledgehammers and spikes and rope, he and the other sailors worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week, for nearly a month, draping a net across the river to repel submarines. Friday nights were his only liberty. Because of the travel time, that left just four hours with Joey—10 p.m. to 2 a.m.—before he had to start back for the river.

With the country at war, the sailor and his wife saw little of each other. In April 1942, Willis joined the crew of a PC-485 submarine chaser that landed troops on the Aleutian Islands. Joey cleared out of their Philadelphia apartment and moved in
with Willis’s family for a few months. Bereft without her husband, she moved to Seattle, to be as close to shore as possible when her husband’s ship came in. She waited until the summer of 1943. They spent about a year together in Seattle before he was shipped out again. Their first child, a daughter, was born while Willis was at sea. He saw the baby for just three days, when she was nearly a month old, before shipping out for another year.

Their love story had vanished from the headlines as precipitously as it had appeared. A war was on, and the mood of the country had shifted. News reporters moved on to other, more pressing stories. Harry James never followed through. Selznick never made his movie.

Over the course of a nearly sixty-three-year marriage, they never returned to New York.

Collision

THE STREET