Pages of Promise (5 page)

They danced for a while, keeping to themselves. The band played “Younger Than Springtime,” and Jerry whispered, “That’s an old one.” Then they started with “Far-Away Places.” He kissed her again and said, “That’s the first tune we danced to. Do you remember?”

“Of course I do. Only it wasn’t that one. It was ‘I’ll Be Seeing You in All the Old Familiar Places.’”

“That one, too,” Jerry said with a smirk.

Across the room, Richard was approached by his cousin Mona, who walked right up and said, “If you’re going to be a marine, you’ve got to become more aggressive. You’re just standing here. Ask me to dance.”

Richard grinned abruptly. “Be glad to. May I have this dance, Mona?” He was a bit dazzled by this beautiful older cousin’s attention.

The two moved out on the floor, and Mona made light talk for some time, then she raised her large eyes and said, “You’re awfully young, Richard. Why didn’t you wait a while? This war may be over by the time you’re a little older.”

“I’ve got to do my part. All the Stuarts have fought when they had a chance.”

Mona shook her head. “They certainly have; even the women have served. Did you know our cousin Wendy and I toured with the USO? And now you join the marines and Phil runs off to the air force!”

The music picked up as the band started playing “Don’t Sit under the Apple Tree,” and Mona laughed. “That’s a little bit too fast for me!”

“Let’s go get some refreshments,” Richard suggested. He put his hand on her arm, and they made their way to a long table.

After that song, the musicians took a break, so Richard and Mona sat down and chatted. As they sipped on colas, Richard asked, “Are you feeling like a Hollywood native yet?”

“Do people ever feel like they really belong here?”

“I grew up here in L.A., close to Hollywood but not part of it. It’s home to me. Dad mentioned you’re working on a movie for Aunt Lylah. What’s that like?”

Richard hadn’t been around the movie business and was interested in what Mona told him about the process.

“My dad did some flying in a movie once,” he said. “That’s all I’ve ever heard about it.”

“There’s so much competition for parts—that’s difficult and makes it hard to have friends in the business.”

“Don’t you feel like you’ve made friends here, Mona?” Richard asked, looking directly at her.

“Not real friends. But I’ve never been good at making friends anywhere.”

Richard frowned. He always wanted to fix things—and people—and his impulse was to give Mona advice about how to make friends. But as he looked at her he had another thought and said, “I bet they’re all jealous because you’re the prettiest.”

His comment surprised her, and she reached out and put her hand on his arm. “Why, Richard, what a sweet thing to say!” The admiration Mona had always had from men had been a barrier in her friendships—girlfriends were always afraid she’d take their boyfriends, and she had certainly done so on a few occasions. But there was something so matter-of-fact about Richard’s statement. It wasn’t made with any hidden agenda. As they sat talking, she found herself pouring out her frustrations with her lack of success in, it seemed, every area of her life. She felt like a second-rate actress; in her relationships with men she felt she was never seen for her real self—just for her beauty.

The young man listening to her felt overwhelmed by all of these adult revelations, but he looked at her and said, “Mona, I can’t do anything about any of this, but I can be your friend.”

She put one arm around him and hugged him. “That’s a lot to do, Richard. Thank you. I’ll hold you to that.” By now the musicians were returning. “I guess we should get back to the party.” Adam was coming over to ask her to dance.

When the party broke up, soon after midnight, Mona made a point of saying good-bye to Richard. “Keep safe, Cousin,” she said, “I need all the friends I can get.” She kissed his cheek, and they parted.

“What was that all about, Streak?” asked Bobby. “Something going on between you and the movie star?” He grinned at his brother and winked.

Richard elbowed him and said, “You’re just jealous ’cause you wish it was you!”

Mona lay awake into the early morning hours. She hadn’t faced a lot of things about her life, about how unhappy she was, how lonely, how disappointed. Thinking about another new year made her feel depressed, and it had gushed out in her conversation with Richard. She smiled, through tears, thinking how she must have shocked the poor kid.

Darkness was just giving way to early morning light when she fell asleep, saying, like a mantra, “I’m a Stuart. We never give up.”

Richard’s concern that the war would be over before he could get to Korea was clearly unfounded in the early months of 1951. The Communists reoccupied Seoul on January 4. United Nations air forces continually attacked communication centers and airfields north of the battle line. Seoul was retaken on March 14. On April 11, Truman relieved General MacArthur of command of the UN forces for publicly disputing administration policies and replaced him with General Matthew B. Ridgway.

Soon after, fresh Communist troops launched a general offensive toward Seoul. By April 30, although UN lines had been pushed back south, they held three miles north of Seoul.

On May 16, Chinese Communist divisions launched an attack down the center of the Korean peninsula along a seventy-five-mile front, but by May 20, the day after Richard and Bobby’s graduation, the attack had been contained, the Communists suffering heavy casualties.

Entering the marine corps recruit depot at San Diego was like stepping into another universe. All comfort was left behind, and the intangible mystique of the marines began to work. Richard and some other boots had been picked up at the bus station by truck. Their marine driver shouted, “No _____ talking! No _____ smoking! No _____ gum chewing! Sit up straight!” They dismounted from the jolting truck and formed a motley rank in front of a sand-colored receiving building. The base’s buildings were a hacienda style with wide archways and flat or red-shingled roofs.

A drill instructor greeted them with a piercing scream and turned the air full of more profanity, then shouted, “Fall in!” Gunnery Sergeant Sterken, one of their three drill instructors, was a southerner with a contempt for anyone not born in Dixie. He considered California part of the North since it had not been part of the Confederacy. Sterken was a huge man, some six feet four inches and 230 pounds, and his voice was even bigger.

Private Richard Stuart stumbled along in clumsy civilian fashion to the mess hall, to a breakfast of bologna and cold lima beans.

The boots began to lose their individuality at the quartermaster’s, where they had to strip naked. When not a stitch or a thread was left, each was given underwear, socks, a bill cap that came down over their ears, green pants, and a yellow T-shirt with the emblem of the marine corps in red. They mailed their civilian clothes home. The discard of the garments meant the death of the old life. Looking over at another recruit, Jack Smith, Richard said, “A man doesn’t have much personality when he’s naked, does he?”

Smith, a tall, black-haired man of about twenty, shook his head. “And I hear the fun’s just beginning.”

As Richard emerged from the quartermaster’s building, he thought,
Twenty minutes ago I was a human being surrounded
by sixty other human beings. Now I’m just a number—
193153 USMC.

The next stop was the barber’s, and the cry “You’ll be sorry!” began to greet them. The barber made five strokes; as the last one completed a circle, he said, “That’s all, Private.”

Richard laughed as the barber asked Smith, the next in line, “Would you like to keep your hair?”

“Sure would,” Smith answered quickly.

“Then you better get a sack.” A laugh went up for the old joke, and Smith’s head was as bald as the other recruits when he stepped out of the chair.

As day followed day, Streak Stuart forgot that he had any life outside of the marines. The boots were insulted, shouted at, pushed down with their faces in the mud while they did push-ups, and, endlessly, they drilled. Always the marching, always the running. Station parade every Friday. March to the mess hall, march to the sick bay, run to draw rifles, run to the obstacle course. March and run. Feet slapping cement, treading the ground. Always the voices of the drill instructors, “Column right, march. . . . Forward, march. . . . Left oblique, march. . . . Platoon halt.”

It seemed like madness, but it was a discipline. A recruit couldn’t address a drill instructor without a “military” reason. Sergeant Sterken was a strict man and was capable of commanding a boot to clean out the head with a toothbrush because he called his rifle a gun. “Stuart, you burr-headed idiot,” he bellowed once to Richard, with a grim smile, “you are the most fiddle-footed excuse for a private I ever saw! You’ll shoot yourself in the foot before you get out of here, clown!”

Quonset huts served as barracks. The boots were allowed no radios and got a newspaper only on Sunday. They couldn’t smoke except at times permitted by the drill instructors. Richard and his squad stuck close together and laughed at each other when the drill instructors were not around. While there was the camaraderie of suffering among the boots, Richard made no close friends, for everyone was aware that the unit would be broken up as soon as boot camp was over.

The war rolled on while they trained. In June, the Soviets put out a statement considered a “peace feeler,” and a long summer of wrangling and negotiations got peace talks haltingly under way. But the boots were barely conscious of it.

Richard grew hardened to the profanity. It was in the air like oxygen, and though he himself never swore, almost everyone else did. The talk was much about women, and on this also Richard had nothing to say. This didn’t pass unnoticed, and he acquired a nickname of “Preacher,” which did not stick long, for he made no protest. He was known as Streak to everyone, and in the dashes that they were commanded to make with full field packs, he so far outdistanced his nearest competitor that even the drill instructor had a good word for him. “Make sure you’re runnin’ toward the fight instead of away from it, Stuart,” he snarled.

The hikes were grueling. Once one of the socks Richard used to pad the straps of his pack slipped out of place, but his whole body was so numb he didn’t feel the strap cutting into his shoulder until, back at the barracks, someone told him he was bleeding.

The recruits spent three weeks at Camp Matthews living in tents, learning to shoot. Marines are above all things infantry, and it was the goal of every recruit to qualify with the M-1 rifle. All of the southerners could shoot, Richard noticed. Try as he might, he could never equal them. Still, he qualified as a sharpshooter. An expert rifleman’s badge is to shooting what the Medal of Honor is to bravery. It even brought five dollars a month extra pay, not an inconsiderable sum to one earning only twenty-one dollars.

Painfully, Richard became a marine. He spoke of soldiers as dog faces and sailors as swab jockeys and referred scathingly to West Point as “that boys’ school on the Hudson.” After twelve weeks of boot camp, he was sent to Camp Pendleton for four more weeks of training in weaponry and small-unit tactics. The war seemed very far away, and it was sometimes difficult for Richard to keep his mind on the voice of the gunnery sergeant.

B Company was like a clan or a tribe, of which the squad was the important unit, the family group. Like families, each squad differed from the others because its members were different. Richard observed with some interest that no racial or religious bigotry existed, and the squad in no way resembled the movies put together by Hollywood where each squad had a cross section composed of Catholic, Protestant, and Jew, rich boy, middle boy, good boy, white, black, Asian. His squad looked more like an all-American football team.

Mona approached Lylah and Adam on the set. “I’d like to talk to you when you have time. It’s about an idea I have.”

“All right. Now is a good time,” Adam said. “We were just going up to the office. Come on up.”

Once in the office, Mona said, “I know what you two need most is some amateur telling you how to run Monarch Studios.” She saw them both smile, and she shrugged, “I know you get that all the time.”

“Good ideas sometimes come from the ranks,” Lylah said. “What is it, Mona?”

“Have you thought of doing a war picture?”

“We’ve done several,” Adam said, a puzzled look on his face. “What did you have in mind?”

“As far as I know, there are no movies out about the war in Korea. They’re not even calling it a war,” she said in disgust, “but it is, isn’t it?”

“It certainly is.” Adam nodded grimly. He looked over at Lylah and said, “Have you thought about this, Mother?”

“No, I haven’t. Not yet.”

“But if you make one now while the war’s still on, you’d be the first,” Mona said.

Lylah suddenly smiled at her. “You didn’t have any idea of starring in it, did you, Mona?”

Caught off guard, Mona flushed, then faced Lylah. “I’m available,” she said, “but I’m not asking for anything more than just a chance.”

“You know, I think she’s got a good idea,” Adam said. “I don’t know why it is that movies about wars always come out afterwards. There were very few good movies about World War II until the war was almost over.” He cocked his head and looked at Mona and said, “I’m pretty busy teaching those fellas how to fly airplanes. Why don’t you and Frank Haviland get together on this?”

“He wouldn’t listen to me.”

“Frank always listens to good ideas. If it’s no good, he’ll shoot it down, but you won’t know until you try.”

“Thanks, Adam,” Mona said. “I’ll do that.”

“And I’ll tell you, Stephen, Frank is really excited about the idea. He thinks it has real possibilities.”

Stephen had come to see Mona on one of his business trips to Los Angeles. He smiled. “Sounds like a good idea.” They were having lunch at a fine restaurant. Just then some men Stephen knew entered and were seated nearby, and he introduced them to her.

Stephen and Mona finished their lunch. “I’ve talked myself dry,” she said. “What do you think, Stephen?”