My Happy Days in Hollywood (5 page)

I worked hard all four years at Northwestern and finally made dean’s list my senior year with three As and a B. I always knew I was a late bloomer when it came to school. There were some ups and downs along the way as well. My junior year my band played late at a nightclub and I slept through an economics final. I begged the professor to let me retake it. He agreed and let me take it later in his office. In those days we all smoked cigarettes, so I was smoking one as I took the makeup final. Unfortunately, I set the professor’s desk on fire. He smelled smoke and came running in. “Marshall, you are done! You get a D and you are done!” he shouted. So that was the only D I ever got at Northwestern.

Going to the Medill School for four years taught me an invaluable lesson: how to write on a deadline. Sometimes we attended three-hour newswriting labs. We would sit at typewriters trying our
best to write our stories and the professors would throw obstacles in our way. A typewriter would break. A siren would occur. A bell would go off. A new person would be murdered in our story assignments. I loved that class because it helped me learn to write under extreme pressure. From graduation onward I could pretty much write any place, any time. I was trained to be a reporter. It didn’t really matter that I was not going to be the next great investigative reporter. It was an asset to be able to write quickly and concisely, whether it was a joke, a line, or a comedy skit. I wasn’t going to stare into space and struggle with writer’s block. I could put paper in the typewriter and deliver the goods. But my professors were always scolding me for putting jokes in my leads. When Eisenhower was president I wrote, “Rumors were flying around the White House like golf balls today.”

My parents came out for my graduation in 1956 along with Penny. It was the first time my mother was ever on an airplane. It was a hot day, with hundreds of graduates and their families crammed into the school’s Dyche Stadium. Despite the heat and the crowds it was a special day for me. I was getting my diploma, and my mom and dad and sister were there to see it. Ronny was with her fancy friends, who congratulated me, but Penny (still in high school) got bored and cranky. She climbed up to the top of the stadium and hid in the last row—always causing trouble, my mom would say. But it didn’t take away from my special day. My best friend Joel Sterns and I posed in cap and gown, still with the two worst East Coast accents in school.

After graduation I filled out an application to go to graduate journalism school at Northwestern. I was accepted and sent in my down payment of fifty dollars. I thought at the time that it would be a good thing to do. School was fun, plus I was still making money with the band. I left for the summer planning to return that fall. During the summer months Fred and I wrote for a USO show called
Take a Break
. We created skits for the show, which was performed on army bases around America. They couldn’t afford to pay me as a writer to travel with the show, so they paid me as a drummer who did writing on the side. We did an eight-week tour and had a
wonderful time. I made friends with a young singer-dancer named Tom Kuhn, who would later play an important role in my life, and some people who would go on to become Broadway actors, such as Ken Mars
(The Producers)
and Nancy Dussault
(Do, Re, Mi)
.

During our time on the road I worried a lot about being drafted. Although the war in Korea was over, they were still drafting soldiers, and we were all on the list. Fred decided to serve in the army reserves and volunteer for two weeks a year for the next six years. Some of my other friends were exempt because they were the sole males in their households, or had a minor health problem that made them not eligible. Not me. Even with my illnesses, the army said I was in perfect shape. So, I had to make a decision for myself.

If I waited for my number to be called, I would have to serve for three years. However, if I offered to go right away, I would only have to serve two years. So that’s what I did. Instead of going back to graduate school at Northwestern in the fall of 1956, I went to New York and joined the army. I lost my fifty-dollar down payment at Northwestern. My career in journalism was put on hold, and I became a soldier in the United States Army. The recruiter said I would first do basic training and then head on a boat to Korea. My mother worried, “You know how nauseous you get on boats!”

Welcome to the United States Army, Mr. Marshall

O
VERNIGHT I WENT
from being a college student to a “Fighting Machine.” I had a degree in journalism that I could do nothing with because for the next two years my full-time job was for the United States of America. I was sent to Fort Dix in New Jersey for a day, and to Fort Knox for basic training. In Kentucky we spent eight weeks learning routine soldier tasks like marching in place and loading a gun. My dad had helped me fill out my application, and he wrote down that I was a television cameraman. I had done some camera work in college, but the claim was mostly fiction. But Dad said, “Don’t put ‘writer,’ put ‘television cameraman,’ because television is going to be big.” Dad was notorious for doing this kind of thing. Even though I wasn’t a cameraman, he knew that if I stretched the truth, I would get a better assignment. He excelled at inflated résumé writing. I guess he also had confidence that I was smart enough to learn how to be a cameraman on the fly. Dad was right. That title qualified me for service in Astoria, Long Island, where I worked in a division that made army instructional films.

The films we made were about everything from how to read a map to how to detect venereal disease. I acted in one movie about dogs and ended up getting bitten by the dog. It left me with a fear of dogs for the rest of my life. The head of our unit was a lieutenant named Richard D. Zanuck, whose father was Darryl F. Zanuck, a famous producer and head of 20th Century–Fox. Richard would later become a producer and studio executive himself. In the army,
however, he was a little aloof and not very friendly to enlisted men. Then, I didn’t consider moviemaking a profession I was destined for. It was just a nice way to pass my time in the army.

I worked in the film department for two months. The best perk was that I could go to Broadway shows for free if I wore my dress uniform. You had to stand up for most of the show, but it was worth it. The bad news was that I had to live with my parents and Penny, which was a bit of a letdown after being so independent at college. But the time flew by as I awaited my foreign assignment. Most of my friends and I had put down that we wanted to go to Germany. But it turned out the U.S. Army was launching a series of radio and television stations in Korea, and because I’d listed myself as a cameraman, they thought I would be an asset to their broadcast division.

Before leaving I called Fred Freeman, my writing partner from Northwestern, and told him I was heading to Korea. Because he’d signed up with the army reserves, he could stay in New York and do two weeks of service each year.

“I have plans for us,” Fred said when I called him.

“What kinds of plans?” I said.

“Someday we are going to move to Hollywood. But first we need to make some contacts.”

“Hollywood? Freddie, are you crazy?” I said. “Who would hire us to work in Hollywood as writers?”

“Just get your stint in the army finished,” he said. “And call me when you get back.”

Before I shipped out I spent a week in Chicago so I could play one last job with my band. That band at the time was called the Bob Owens Trio and had gathered a lot of interest because of our front man, piano player Bob Owens. We were headlining at the Compass Room, which was a big deal for me because most of the time I was the opening act, not the headliner. Before we went onstage I watched from the wings as our opening act performed. It was a group of young comedians doing improvisational comedy routines in a style I had never seen before. They didn’t seem to have prewritten routines but instead appeared spontaneous, which was unique for the time. They were doing situations instead of jokes. There were four
performers, and their names were Andrew Duncan, Shelley Berman, Elaine May, and Mike Nichols. I didn’t know who they were, but it was obvious to me that they were incredibly talented. I was startled by their innovation and creativity. I was just days away from going to Korea, but my mind began to fill with possibilities. I wondered if I might be able to either perform or write that style of humor, too.

I must admit that when I shipped off for Korea I was a little scared. I boarded the ship with seventeen hundred other soldiers and sailed from Tacoma, Washington, for Seoul, Korea. I had never been to a foreign country before, let alone one that was so far from America.

While on the boat I met Gordon Belson, a round-faced soldier with a deep voice who worked as a professional radio announcer in his hometown of El Centro, California. When I told him I was a comedy writer, he mentioned that he had a younger brother named Jerry who liked to write comedy, too. Gordon also liked music and played the trumpet, with more joy than skill. So we formed a band and started looking for other members. Charlie Camilleri, a hippy, rebellious type and superb musician who played seven instruments, including piano and trumpet, joined us. Charlie got a few of his other friends to play, too. For the two weeks on the ship we entertained the troops and officers in the mess hall.

I also volunteered to write for the ship’s newspaper and some of the skits that soldiers performed each night. One of my more popular comedy routines which I rewrote from comic Harvey Stone went like this: “They call this ship a floating city. Well, I live in the sewer. We get six meals a day. Three go down and three come up. You should see what it looks like when a hundred guys are leaning over the ship’s railing getting sick. It looks like Niagara Falls in Technicolor. One day I went to take my tray of food to throw it overboard. Another officer asked what I was doing with the tray. I said I was eliminating the middleman.”

One night I met a corporal with a shiny personality, and I typed him up a skit to perform. But I noticed during rehearsals he was having trouble finding his way with the dialogue. I worked with him for a few minutes and he was still speaking gibberish. That was
when I realized he was illiterate. I was pretty naïve back then, and I had never met anyone who couldn’t read. But I worked with him and he ended up doing a great job with the skit.

After the ship crossed the Pacific it made a stop in Okinawa, Japan, to unload soldiers who were assigned to serve there. I went out to the deck to wave goodbye to them, and as they stood on the dock they took their instruments and played the Dixieland song “When the Saints Go Marching In” especially for me. It must have pained them to play it because they all preferred jazz music, but it made me smile big. I discovered that day that the army was a place where you met people, found true friends, and soon had to say goodbye. I would not see Charlie again for four years.

Gordon and I, however, were both headed to Seoul to work in the radio and television station together. They made us disembark in the middle of the night. We had to climb down army ropes hanging from the side of the ship in the pitch black. Then we got into little boats like the ones I had seen in pictures of Normandy from World War II. As we were climbing into the boats, I approached my commanding officer.

“Why do we have to arrive in the dark when there is no one here who will shoot us?” I asked. After all, we were no longer at war with Korea.

“Who said so?” said my officer.

I hugged my duffel bag and snare drum and wondered what exactly I had signed up for.

I knew only one other person who had ever served for the United States in Korea. His name was Sandy McMillan, and he was a counselor at Camp Greenkill, my YMCA camp. Sandy had shipped off for Korea while I was still in high school, and within a year he was dead. So I guess in the back of my head I knew that danger was always a possibility.

The corporal in charge of our radio station was a somber, no-nonsense man named Mark Smith. He looked at my résumé the day I arrived.

“Says here you are a TV cameraman?”

“Yes,” I mumbled. “Correct.”

“We have no TV station here yet,” he said.

My father was right about the future of TV, but he was a little ahead of the army.

“Says you are also a writer. What do you write?”

“Jokes,” I said.

“Jokes?” he asked.

“You know, skits, little bits, funny things,” I said.

“We don’t need jokes here,” he said seriously.

“Okay. What do you need then?” I asked.

“We need you to write serious material about the country of Korea. Radio documentaries,” he said.

For the next twenty months I would try to write seriously about Korea for my radio station—the Armed Forces Korean Network.

A typical day for me involved a combination of guard duty, meals, marching, and work at the radio station. Eventually I became the head of the six-station radio network, and I was in charge of picking the songs and the shows. I taught them how to do comedy shows. In between meals and work we sometimes had to go to classes and listen to presentations about things the army was introducing, such as new weapons, equipment, and strategy. I mastered taking apart a gun while blindfolded, a skill I had never imagined a stickball-playing kid from the Bronx would need. What I was very good at was shooting while resting on the ground. I had talent as a resting sniper, not a standing or kneeling one. So the army gave me a certain confidence and feeling of success.