Some Faces in the Crowd (29 page)

Well, I thought, you knew Duggan, knew him pretty well. Surprised? I had to admit I wasn’t. But it made me stop and think. About that Bissell thing, about the Duggan outfit, and how we all happened to get together.

The first time I met Duggan, and Bissell, too, for that matter, was back in the summer of ’41 when I was the
Journal’s
second-string drama critic, which, in my case, was a euphemism for glorified legman. This particular evening, for instance, I went backstage to interview Duggan for a Sunday feature. Duggan was an impressive character, of course, then as now, one of the few big talents in show business, an actor who could direct, a director who could write better stuff than most of the guys along the street who called themselves playwrights.

I had first seen Duggan when I was a kid, in a play called
My Brother’s Keeper,
on which Duggan had collaborated with Laurence Stallings or somebody like that, pretty good stuff as I remember it, pretty daring for those days. After that I guess you might have called me a Duggan fan, for I went along with all of his hits, and even his flops were good flops.

So it was with considerable awe that I sat down in Duggan’s dressing room. Duggan was sitting at his mirror, wiping the make-up off his face. He was a powerfully built man, with a dark, rugged face, restless, humorous eyes, and a mouth that looked as fascinating off stage as it did on. As I think back on it, it reminds me of Goering’s mouth, with its quality of warm good nature that can change so suddenly to a hard line of anger and repressed cruelty. It was the quality that made Duggan able to play heroes and scoundrels with equal effectiveness, make you weep for his gentleness in one play and seethe against his villainies in the next.

There was almost always someone in his dressing room to interview him, usually a schoolgirl. This evening was no exception. In fact, there were two girls. They watched admiringly as he took off his make-up, and he responded to their admiration exactly right. I sat and smoked until the girls left.

“Glad to see you, Cumming,” Duggan said to me then, pronouncing my name with an accuracy to which I was not accustomed, since everyone always insisted on adding an
s
on the end. The real Duggan seemed to have none of the blackhearted, ingrown, sadistic characteristics of the evil old sea captain he had just portrayed so convincingly on the stage.

Everything went along fine and easy. He is one of those fellows who interviews himself. He knew what he wanted to say, the points he wanted to make, and if my questions didn’t bring them out he’d lead the conversation his way. He was a man of profound conceit, but egotism never disturbs me in a man who is really as creative as he feels himself to be, and Duggan’s egotism had become such a tradition that you were inclined to accept it as one of the facts of theatre life.

I don’t remember much about the professional side of our conversation that night, except maybe the phrase that I dutifully copied into my notes and that I happened to run across the other day when I was disinterring the remains of my prewar civilian career: “I became a director” (Duggan said) “because I was sick and tired of incompetent directors getting between me and my characterizations. I became a playwright because I became sick and tired of trying to delineate the stereotyped, foggy characterizations of stupid and incompetent playwrights. I became an actor because I was born that way.”

We batted back and forth for a while the subject of why Duggan was the only authentic, dynamic voice left in the American theatre, a subject Duggan was well known to discuss with considerable intelligence and inexhaustible enthusiasm. And then, somehow, we got talking about the war. I think I must have asked Duggan how long he expected his current hit to run. Duggan turned around and gave me a long, deliberate, soul-searching look. “These days,” he said slowly, with just a touch of that projection that made him so popular with the fans in the second balcony, “in these days,” he repeated, “when the world balances on a bayonet, you begin to wonder just how important your own personal success is.” He held me again with that famous Duggan look, and then, with a movement few men could make so significant, he picked up a copy of
Life
that had fallen on the floor. “Look at this,” he said, with eloquent understatement, and I saw pictures of “the onrushing, blitzkrieging German panzers, driving the disorganized, panic-stricken Russian army out of Orel,” and with the disorganized, panic-stricken
Life
editors Greek-chorusing, “Hitler will be in Moscow in three weeks.” Duggan turned the pages tragically. “And on page 32,” he said, “Rommel races for Suez.” He took a long, thoughtful breath. “Cumming,” he said, “this is absolutely off the record, man-to-man, but I’ve got it from—well, I can’t tell you his name, but he’s pretty high up on Marshall’s staff—that we’re liable to be in this thing sooner than most people realize.” He slammed his great hand down on the dressing table. “And damn it, it can’t be soon enough for me. Are we just going to sit around and worry about good notices and box-office successes while French actors and British actors and Russian actors and Jewish actors are ground to mincemeat?”

It may sound a little tired and corny now, but as I remembered it that night, against a backdrop of Nazi triumphs, congressional torpor, and general complacency, it sounded pretty exciting. Especially the last part, when he stood up and shouted: “The Duggans come from a long line of roughnecks and saloon fighters. I’m going to give you a real story, but you can’t break it until I get the word from Washington.”

“From Washington, Mr. Duggan?” I said.

“Just call me Josh,” Duggan said. He rolled the copy of
Life
into a tight club. I wondered if it could be an unconscious gesture of rearmament. Then he wrinkled his brow and stared at me with a searching objectivity that was as disconcerting as it was intended to be. “Can you keep a secret?” he said.

“Why, sure I—”

“I don’t mean the ordinary, Broadway secret. I mean a—military secret.”

Later on, of course, the average “military secret” got to be a gag. But I still remember how it hit me that night, just the ordinary Broadway guy for whom military discipline and official secrets were strictly melodrama. The way Duggan said it, the way his mouth lingered over the phrase, the way his eyes challenged mine as he paused, made this a moment of great meaning. “I wouldn’t trust you with this,” Duggan continued, “if you didn’t strike me as an all-right Joe.”

Later I would have laughed. In fact, later I did laugh, plenty of times. But that night there was no getting around it. I was pleased. I was impressed. I was ready to step forward like Nathan Hale, to guard Joshua Duggan’s secret with my life if necessary, my very life, as they say in the pulps.

“Well,” Duggan said, dropping his voice an octave as if to make it difficult for enemy agents, “I’ve been asked by the top brass to form a psychological-warfare outfit. I don’t know if you realize just how important that is. The Nazis have won some of their biggest battles with psychological warfare. We have to beat them at their own game. That’s why the army needs the best brains in the country in that department. And not just intellectuals. Men with guts. Because we’ll have to be right on the front line with the infantry. Sometimes even behind enemy lines.” Duggan paused and looked at me again, his behind-enemy-lines look.

“In times like this,” Duggan went on, “personal values do one of these.” A thick but expressive hand flipped over the other. “The playboy big shot with his hatful of dough becomes a bum. The little guy you wouldn’t think of looking at a second time turns out to be the man you depend on. For instance—” Duggan drew me closer—”I’ll give you a tip. Maybe you noticed the doorman when you came in. Maybe you didn’t. The old codger with the specs who looks like he’s half-asleep all the time?” I nodded, though I doubt if I could have picked him out from a dozen other doormen all around town. “Well, that’s Luther Bissell. You may not believe it, but Luther’s record in the last war was just as good as Sergeant York’s. Stormed a Boche machine-gun nest with three slugs in him. When his ammunition ran out, he kept on going until he finally took care of the Heinie gun crew with his bayonet. He came out of the war with every combat medal there is. He doesn’t know it yet, but if I can get him past the physical—he’s practically blind in one eye—I’m going to take him into the outfit. Just the man to make soldiers of you Broadway guys.”

Duggan was wiping the make-up base-off his neck as he spoke. But in his mind he was already a soldier of democracy storming the fascist bastions. Looking into his large dressing-table mirror as he talked to me, he warmed to his subject. “There’s the man you really ought to be interviewing: Luther Bissell. One of the troubles with this country is that we forget our heroes. We honor them for a brief moment like star football players whose names are lost in the next season’s shuffle.” Duggan rose, impressively, a big man who knew how to carry his weight, and moved toward me as I had seen him so often sweeping upstage toward the apron for a thunderous curtain speech. “Yesterday’s hero may only be today’s doorman, but how do we know that destiny hasn’t singled him out for greater deeds in the struggle that lies ahead?”

As I say, it sounds a little overboard now, even for Duggan, who can get away with that sort of stuff. But those were the fever days when the press was talking about the invincibility of the Wehrmacht and the air was charged with the fear and excitement of approaching hostilities. Anyway, to a newspaperman, there did seem to be a story in Bissell. So I stopped to have a talk with him at the door. This was the first time I really got a good look at him. He was sitting on a chair near the stage door with his spectacles halfway down his nose, apparently absorbed in something he was reading. He was around fifty, I would have guessed, a mild-looking man with thinning hair and round, pink cheeks, a curious combination that gave me the impression of a perennial adolescent encased in the fatty frame of dormant middle age. As I drew closer to him I saw that the magazine in his lap was the
American Legion Magazine
and that his apparent absorption was informal slumber.

He awoke as I approached, however, nodding and smiling in an absent-minded, humble way. “Evenin’, Mr. Cummings, didn’t recognize you there for a moment. These old peepers of mine ain’t gettin’ any sharper.”

“We were just talking about you, Luther,” I said. “You seem to have quite a booster in Mr. Duggan.”

Bissell pressed his lips together and shook his head reverently. “There’s a wonderful man, sir, a wonderful man.”

“Known him a long time?”

“Met him in France in the Great War—the first one, I mean. But I didn’t see him again until ‘22, when he came to play a benefit in the hospital I was convalescing at. Mr. Duggan, he’s been mighty good to me. If it wasn’t for him, I’d never have no good job like this. And every Christmas it’s: ‘Here’s ten dollars, Luth. Go out and get yourself ten good cigars. None of those cheap ones, now. Ten dollar cigars.’” Bissell chuckled. “That’s Mr. Duggan for you. Never forgets Luther.”

When it came to talking about what he had done in the war, Bissell wasn’t one of those shucks-it-was-nothing fellows. He talked freely enough about the achievement side of it, the prisoners he had taken, the enemies he had killed, the honors he had won. He remembered it all the way a man remembers something he never succeeds in achieving again, with the dates of the battles, the obscure French places pronounced with surprising correctness, and the names of officers and comrades sharply retained and alive for him after more than twenty years.

“What about this time?” I said. “Feel like doing it again?”

“You bet,” he said. “I’d like to get another crack at them Huns. But I don’t know. I ain’t as young as I was. The army might take one look at me and say, ‘Luther, go on back to the old soldiers’ home.’ The mizzuz tells me I’m a darned fool even to think about it. But I don’t know, it’d feel pretty good to be back in again. Mr. Duggan, he’s goin’ in, and maybe he can fix it for me. It sure would be a privilege to go along with a man like that!”

I did the story about Luther, the old-fire-horse angle, the kind of thing we all would have upchucked at the year before, but it went pretty good now, for war isn’t only man’s most ruthless activity but his most sentimental. I guess without the schmalz it would be just so damned painful and vicious that we couldn’t take it. Smear a nice soft salve on the wound and it doesn’t look so bad. Sprinkle a lot of Luther Bissells around, look back at them through a gauze of pain-absorbent years, and a war doesn’t seem so bad at all.

I didn’t hear from Duggan again until my piece on Luther appeared. Then, to my surprise, he telephoned. His voice was crisp and efficient and pitched a little differently. “Hello, Cumming,” he said. “Duggan here. I’d like you to come to my dressing room tonight at seven-thirty. Don’t say anything about this to anybody. See you then.”

When I went through the stage door, a little early, Bissell stood up and greeted me, a little excited, I thought. “Good evening, sir,” he said. “Glad you came, sir.”

“Listen, Luther,” I said, “don’t give me this sir treatment. I’m a country boy myself. And anyway you’re old enough to be my father.”

“That doesn’t matter, sir,” Luther said. “One of my best officers at Catigny was a young man just out of college. Lieutenant Alvin Sabath. He was a fine soldier. Would of been a fine man if he had lived.”

I passed on through to Duggan’s dressing room, feeling as if I were all ready to be laid beside young Sabath in some distant burial ground. I didn’t realize until I got inside the door that I was attending a meeting. Lou Ross, the press agent, Jack Woodridge, the young playwright, Tom Lovell, the stage manager, and three or four others were sitting around stiffly and expectantly, looking at Josh Duggan in his brand-new tailored major’s uniform. Duggan was striding up and down, with the kind of military bearing most generals would like to have. Four ribbons on his tunic gave him the appearance of an old war dog. He wore the World War I Victory Ribbon, the First German Occupation, the Brazilian Cruz de Sol, and the Mexican Âguila Azteca. He waited stiffly until all of us were settled. As on stage, he had the ability to make his silences momentous.