Winds of War (19 page)

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Chapter
10

GERMAN ARMY ATTACKS POLAND;

CITIES BOMBED, PORT BLOCKADED;

DANZIG IS ACCEPTED INTO THE REICH

The
New York Times
, raising its voice to suit the occasion in its eight-column once-in-a-generation italic headlines, topped the sprawl of newspapers on the desk under Hugh Cleveland’s stocking feet. The other papers had headlines far larger and blacker than the Time’s genteel bellow. Tilted back in his shirt-sleeves in a swivel chair, a phone cradled between his head and left shoulder, Cleveland was making quick red crayon marks on a sheaf of yellow typing paper and sipping coffee as he talked. Eight years in the broadcasting business had made him deft at such juggling. Though he looked the picture of busy contentment, his voice was angry. His morning show, called
Who’s in Town
, featured interviews with celebrities passing through New York. The war crisis, suddenly roaring into the Columbia Broadcasting System, had snatched off Cleveland’s secretary to the newsroom for emergency service, and he was protesting to the personnel office, or trying to. He still could not get through to the manager.

A short girl in a flat black straw hat appeared in the open doorway. Behind her, in the big central offices of CBS News, the hubbub over the war news was still rising. Secretaries were rattling at typewriters or scampering with papers, messenger boys ran with coffee and sandwiches, knots of men in shirt-sleeves gathered at the chattering teletypes, and everybody appeared to be either shouting, or smoking, or both.

“Mr. Cleveland?” The girl’s voice was sweet but shaky. Her awed round eyes made her look about sixteen.

Cleveland put his hand on the mouthpiece of his telephone. “Yes?”

“The personnel office sent me up to you.”

“You? How old are you?”

“Twenty.”

Cleveland appeared skeptical, but he hung up the telephone. “What’s your name?”

“Madeline Henry.”

Cleveland sighed. “Well, okay, Madeline. If you’re in the pool, you must know the ropes. So take off that cartwheel and get started, okay? First get me another cup of coffee and a chicken sandwich, please. Then there’s tomorrow’s script” - he rapped the yellow sheets - “to be typed over.”

Madeline could bluff no further. She was in New York to buy clothes. The outbreak of the war had prompted her to walk into CBS to see if extra girls were needed. In the employment office a harried woman wearing yellow paper cuffs had thrust a slip at her, after a few questions about her schooling, and sent her up to Cleveland. “Talk to him. If he likes you, we may take you on. He’s screaming for a girl and we’ve got nobody to spare.”

Stepping just inside the door and planting her legs apart, taking off her hat and clutching it, Madeline confessed that nobody had hired her yet; that she was visiting New York, lived in Washington, had to go back to school, detested the thought of it, feared her father too much to do anything else, and had just walked into CBS on an impulse. He listened, smiling and surveying her with eyes half-closed. She wore a sleeveless red cotton frock and she had excellent color from a sailing weekend.

‘Well, Madeline, what does it add up to? Do you want the job or not?”

“I was thinking - could I come back in a week or so?”

His pleasant look faded. He picked up the telephone. “Get me Personnel again. Yes, you come back sometime, Madeline.”

She said, “I’ll fetch you your coffee and sandwich right now. I can do that. I’ll type your script today, too. Couldn’t I work for you for three weeks? I don’t have to go back to school until the twenty-second. My father will kill me when he finds out, but I don’t care.”

“Where’s your father? In Washington?”

“He’s in Berlin. He’s the naval attaché there.”

“What?” Hugh Cleveland hung up the telephone and took his feet off the desk. “Your father is our naval attaché in Nazi Germany?”

“That’s right.”

“Imagine that. So! You’re a Navy junior.” He threw a five-dollar bill on the desk. “All right. Get me the sandwich, Madeline, please. White meat, lettuce, pepper, mayonnaise. Black coffee. Then we’ll talk some more. Buy yourself a sandwich too.”

“Yes, Mr. Cleveland.”

Holding the bill, Madeline rushed into the outer hall and stood there dazed. Having heard the
Who’s in Town
program a few times, she had at once recognized Cleveland’s peculiarly warm rich voice; a real broadcaster, with his own program, and all at once she was working for him. That was wartime for you! A girl swishing by with a bag of food told her where to buy sandwiches. But twenty chattering girls swarmed at the takeout counter of the luncheonette off the lobby. She went out on Madison Avenue and stood blinking in the warm sunshine. The New York scene was normal. Crowds marched on the sidewalks; cars and buses streamed both ways in a stench of fumes; people carried packages into and out of stores and looked in windows. The only novelty was that the news vendors with fresh stacks of afternoon papers were crying war. Madeline ran to the big drugstore across the street, where the soda fountain was jammed with secretaries and shoppers, talking and laughing over bowls of chili or soup. The usual sort of people were wandering through the aisles, buying toothpaste, lotions, aspirin, candy, and cheap clocks. A fat old blonde woman in an apron and cap quickly made up her sandwiches.

“Well, honey, who’s going to win the war?” she said sociably as she peppered the chicken.

“Let’s just hope Hitler doesn’t,” Madeline said.

“Yes, isn’t he something?
Sieg Heil
! Ha, ha. I think the man’s crazy. I’ve always said so, and this proves it.” She handed Madeline the sandwiches. “Well, honey, so long as we keep out of it, what do we care who wins?”

Madeline bought an evening paper that offered gigantic headlines but no fresh news. Just to scan such a dramatic front page was novel fun. Though the war was happening so far away, Madeline felt a springtime quickening in her veins. A scent of freedom, of new action, rose from the headlines. The President had announced at once, very firmly, that America was staying out of it. But things were going to be mighty different from now on. That was inevitable! All her thoughts were about the letter she would write to her father, if only she could get this job.

Cleveland, feet on his desk again, a flirtatious smirk on his face, was telephoning. He nodded at Madeline and - as he went on coaxing some girl, in his warmly rumbling voice, to meet him at Toots Shor’s restaurant - he wolfed the sandwich.

“Why don’t you eat the other one?” Madeline said. “I’m not hungry.”

“Are you sure? I don’t want to rob you.” He hung up and unwrapped her sandwich. “Ordinarily I don’t eat much during the day but with all this war talk -” He took a great bite and went on talking. “Thanks. I swear I’m as hungry as I get at funerals. Ever notice how famished you get at a funeral, Madeline? It’s the sheer delight of being alive, I guess, while this other poor joker’s just been buried in a dirty hole. Now listen, you want to work for me for three weeks, is that it? That’ll be fine. It’ll give me a chance to look over what’s around in Personnel.” He flourished a brown envelope at her. “Now then. Gary Cooper is at the St. Regis, Room 641. This is a sample
Who’s in Town
script. Take it to him. We may get him for Thursday.”

“Gary COOPER? You mean the MOVIE star?” Madeline in astonishment zoomed words like her mother.

“Who else? He may ask you questions about the show and about me. So listen and get this rundown in your head. We work without an audience in a little studio, very relaxed. It’s a room with armchairs, books, and a rug, really nice, like a library in a home. It’s the same room Mrs. Roosevelt uses for her show. We can do the script in extra big type, if he needs that. He can take five minutes or fifteen. The whole show runs an hour and a half. I started this show in Los Angeles back in ‘34 and did it there for three years. I called it Over the Coffee then. Maybe he heard it. Of course he may be too busy to go into all that. Anyway, act as though you’ve been with the show for a while.”

Too dazzled, and excited to talk, Madeline held out her hand for the envelope. Cleveland gave it to her, saying, “All set? Anchors aweigh. For Christ’s sake, don’t ask him for his autograph. Telephone me if there’s any holdup. Don’t fail to reappear.”

Madeline blurted, “You must have had some very stupid girls working for you,” and hurried out.

A maid opened the door of the hotel suite where Gary Cooper in a gray suit, sat eating lunch at a wheeled table. The star rose, immensely tall and slim, smiling down at Madeline. He put on black-rimmed glasses, glanced over the script as he drank coffee, and asked questions. He was all business, the farthest thing from a bashful cowboy; he had the manner of an admiral. When she mentioned the
Over the Coffee
show he brightened. “Yes, I remember that.” Almost at once, it seemed, she was out on the sunny street again, overwrought, thrilled to her bones. “
England mobilizes! Hitler smashes into Poland!
” the news vendor at the corner hoarsely chanted.

“Bless your little heart,” Cleveland said as she came into the office. He was banging rapidly at a typewriter. “Cooper just called. He likes the idea and he’s in.” Ripping the yellow sheet out of the machine, he clipped it with others. “He remarked on what a nice girl you were. What did you say to him?”

“Hardly anything.”

“Well, you did a good job. I’m off to interview him now. There’s tomorrow’s script. Do a smooth copy of the red-checked pages, then get the whole thing to mimeo instanter. Room 3094.” Cleveland stepped into his shoes, straightened his tie, and threw on a rust-colored sports jacket. He scratched his heavy blond hair, and grinned at her, raising thick humorously arched eyebrows. She felt she would do anything for him. He was charming, she decided, rather than actually handsome. There was something infectiously jovial about him, a spark of devilish amusement in his lively blue eyes. She was a bit disappointed to see, when he stood up, that though he could not be more than thirty-one or so, his stomach bulged. But it didn’t matter.

He paused at the door. “Do you mind working nights? You’ll get paid overtime. If you come back here around eight-thirty tonight, you’ll find Thursday’s rough on my desk, with the Cooper spot.”

“Mr. Cleveland, I haven’t been hired yet.”

“You have been. I just talked to Mrs. Hennessy. After you get that script to mimeo, go down and fill out your papers.”

Madeline toiled for five hours to finish the script. She turned it in, messy though her work was, hoping it would not end her radio career then and there. At the employment office she learned she was starting at thirty-five dollars a week. It seemed a fortune. She took her aching back to the drugstore, made a quick dinner of a chocolate drink and a bacon and tomato sandwich, and walked back to CBS. Over the tall black Madison Avenue buildings, checkered with gold-lit windows, a misty full moon floated in a. sunset sky. This day when Hitler’s war began was turning out the most delightful in Madeline Henry’s life.

On Cleveland’s desk the interview with Garry Cooper now lay, a mass of crude typing, quick scrawls and red crayon cuts. The note clipped to it said:
Try to copy it all over tonight. See you around ten
. Madeline groaned; she was terribly tired.

She put in a call to Warren at the bachelor officers’ quarters of the Pensacola flying school. He wasn’t there, but an operator with a Southern accent like a vaudeville imitation offered to track him down. In the smoky newsroom, girls kept crisscrossing with long teletype strips or paper cups of coffee, men were talking loud and fast, and the typewriter din never stopped. Through the open door Madeline heard contradictory rumors: Poland was already collapsing, Hitler was on his way to Warsaw, Mussolini was flying to Berlin, the French were pressing England for another Munich deal, Hitler was offering to visit Chamberlain.

The telephone rang at ten o’clock and there was Warren on the line, with music and laughter in the background. He was at the beach club, he said, at a moonlight dance on a terrace lined with palm trees. He had just met a marvelous girl, the daughter of a congressman. Madeline told about the CBS job, and he seemed amused and impressed.

“Say, I’ve heard
Who’s in Town
,” he said. “This fellow Hugh Cleveland has an interesting voice. What’s he like?”

“Oh, very nice. Do you think it’s all right? Will Dad be furious?”

“Matty, you’ll be back at school in three weeks, before he even knows about it. Where will you stay? . . . Oh, yes, that’s an all-women hotel, I know
that
one. Ha! Little Madeline on the town.”

“You don’t object?”

“Me? Why, I think it’s fine. Just be a good girl, and all that. What’s the word at CBS, Madeline? Is the war on? The scuttlebutt down here is that England is chickening out.”

“Nothing but rumors here too, a dozen an hour. Is your date really the daughter of a congressman?”

“You bet, and she is a dish.”

“Tough life you’re leading. How’s the flying coming?”

“I ground-looped on my second solo landing, but don’t write Dad that. I’m doing much better now. It’s great.”

“Good, you’re still here,” Cleveland said, walking into the office a few minutes after this conversation. With him was a tall beauty in a black straw hat much wider than Madeline’s, and a gray silk dress. Her gardenia perfume was too strong for the small office. Cleveland glanced at Madeline’s typed pages. “Need a little practice, eh?”

“I warm up as I go along.” Her voice trembled. She cleared her throat.

“Let’s hope so. Now look, do you by any chance know of an admiral named Preble? Is he some high mucky-muck?”

“Preble? Do you mean
Stewart
Preble?”

“Stewart Preble, exactly. Who is he?”

“Why, he’s the Chief of Naval Operations.”

“That’s a big job, eh?”