Timebends (50 page)

I realized now that Lester had put him up to talking to me. We were not having an idle conversation. My future on this project was the subject, and my work of months suddenly hung in the balance.

Stallings said, “They are never going to make your script the way it is.” I was shocked. Why would they not make it when Lester seemed so enthusiastic? “He should be enthusiastic, it's very well done. But all war movies, Arthur, are the same movie. There is a big guy and a little guy; they are different sizes so you can recognize them quickly in the smoky battle scenes. There is a girl whom one of them gets, but it's the other guy she loves, and she finally gets
him.
In the end they have to leave her behind because she's a foreigner, and it breaks your heart. One of them can get shot, preferably in the arm, or a wound that requires a head bandage.”

The car halted before my rented house. Stallings touched my knee. “You could fix it. Try.”

I watched the car drive into the darkening blue night. Standing there in the rising sexual damp of Hollywood, I was embarrassed at having wasted so much hope and effort, for there was no wish in me to remake
The Big Parade,
which was essentially what he
had been describing. If nothing else, I had a commitment to Ernie Pyle not to glamorize him or the men he loved in precisely the kind of film Stallings had outlined.

The film rights to
Here Is Your War
had been sought by all the big companies, but Cowan, an independent, bad won Pyle's agreement—provisional, as I soon learned—because he alone had pledged to feature not Pyle but the soldiers. Pyle had a singular position in the public mind; far more than any other correspondent, he was trustingly read each day by soldiers' families desperate for news, because he always gave the names and addresses of the men he ran into overseas. In fact, he not only shared their dangers but saw more combat than almost any soldier, moving from unit to unit to remain in battle when troops were withdrawn for recuperation.

Pyle did not seek out colorful characters or men of great patriotic consciousness. The killing was a human catastrophe for all sides. Before the war he had toured the Midwest with his wife beside him in his little Ford, talking to Main Street people, gathering the most common stories and ordinary emotions to share with his readers. The atmosphere of his daily column was benign, warmly humorous, small-town. The war was simply Main Street with sudden death added.

I had no idea until I arrived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to visit him that Pyle had declined to sign a contract with Cowan until he could see a script of the film. But at that point, a few months before my fateful talk with Stallings, there was nothing more to show him than some sequences and detailed notes of scenes I had not yet written. Sitting with him in his Albuquerque living room, I realized only gradually that I had been sent to convince America's best-loved reporter of Cowan's integrity and the film's high intentions. As the picture's reigning innocent, I had first beguiled the army brass, and now it was Pyle's turn—a much harder job when the very word “Hollywood” meant fraud to him.

The C-47 on which I had flown in from Hollywood landed with a load of vomit, not only from me but from about two dozen navy fighter pilots on leave from the Pacific. An electrical storm over the Rockies had sent the plane screwing through the air, dropping and rising several hundred feet in a matter of seconds, wings flapping visibly and at one point scraping treetop level along a mountain slope. The sole undisturbed passenger was a woman in her late
sixties who sat in the single-seat righthand row with her legs crossed, reading a paper while nearly upside down and eating Hershey bars with almonds. So severe had our punishment been that the pilots were sent onward by train. Once on the ground, I, like them, kept turning my ankles as I made my way to the interior of the simple airport building, where I sat and waited to be picked up by a taxi Pyle had sent. On my hotel bed I lay on my back only to find my legs rising straight in the air. I sat myself up and then lowered down on my back again, but up they swung out of control. Finally I lay on my side and let them rest extended at right angles to my body. A week later, when I was in the airport waiting for a plane back to New York, Ernie introduced me to the woman who tended the souvenir counter, and she recognized me. “I really thought you were having an attack last week and was just about to call an ambulance when the taxi man came. I couldn't believe you could get up and walk out. You looked dead.”

As is so often the case with American heroes, Pyle was a tortured man, uncertain of himself and ridden with guilt. Slight of build, with sandy hair thinning to baldness, gentle and self-effacing, he seemed the last man in the world to bring himself willingly into battle. He lived with his wife, who was at the moment in the hospital being treated for—he insisted on uttering it—alcoholism. Their home was a small tract house, one among twenty or thirty recently put up at the outer edge of the town. The place seemed somehow airless and unhappy, but when one stepped off his stoop and faced the mesa, the endless scope of New Mexico spread out in all its marvelous painterly colors, always changing, always new. On our after-dinner walks the main street was empty by sundown, an occasional passing car only emphasizing the amazing silence of this small city. One evening we saw a lone Indian man standing on a corner with a bundle under his arm, staring straight ahead toward the setting sun. I thought he was waiting for the traffic light to change, but when it did he remained motionless. Many years later I wrote him into
The Misfits,
but John Huston, impatient with this symbol of the American displaced person, swept the camera past him without really registering him. I guess the man's symbolism was too personal to mean much to others.

It was on these blue-lit evening walks that I came to realize that Cowan was using me to get Ernie to sign the contract, so I informed him that I had no control over the final script and that he shouldn't base his decision on a favorable impression of me. But such was his desire to immortalize the American GI that he convinced
himself my presence guaranteed the script would not be cheapened. I was so flattered that I convinced myself likewise, and we embraced this happy illusion together.

One evening I told him the story of my play
The Man Who Had All the Luck,
which had been optioned for production the next year. Facing the fire in his sparsely furnished living room, I acted it all out for him, revising as I went along, and discovered a look of amazement and baffled awe forming on his face. When I was done he asked, “Where'd you get that story?” I had invented it, I said, based on my wife's relative. “That's the story of my life,” he said.

As he described himself, he had been too modest and shy to imagine becoming the star reporter he was now. Indeed, it was his inwardness that had moved him to invent the greatly successful idea of touring the small towns with his wife, thus avoiding major stories and the journalist's usual need to impose upon people. He had managed to create the public image of a romantic pair of comrades savoring the everlasting truths of the unsung American majority. Luck had been his lifelong companion, he thought, and he had never understood why his professional life had been so successful. In the back of his mind disaster waited for the moment when it was least expected.

We were drinking and warming to our unexpectedly interesting lives when, staring into the fire, he began a long story about an experience in Italy. Not many months before, he had come upon “a pile of dead Italians and some German troops. They were just stacked up and must have been killed at about the same moment, because
rigor mortis
had set in and they nearly all had enormous erections. Some of their cocks were popping through the buttons. Must have been nearly two hundred of them facing up to the sky.” I recalled reading the column, but he had of course not mentioned the erections. And then, hardly glancing at me, “I had this accident as a boy …” He broke off before adding the unnecessary.

It was my turn to confess now, and I surprised myself by talking about the woman in Washington whose husband had been lost at sea, but he was ahead of me and cut me off. “Don't, don't do anything like that ever. The marriage is everything. That sex stuff is no good, it won't get you a thing. … You think you have to do it, but you don't. Your wife sounds like a wonderful woman …” What amazed me suddenly was the depth and innocence of his caring, and what I imagined was a certain envy for my good physical luck.

But the main news he gave me on that and the other nights was his refusal to hate the enemy soldiers, men trapped as ours were in this killing. Through that respectful and suffering vision of his, of a human disaster transcending politics, I saw his tragic nature for the first time. It bound me never to betray his hopes for a valid film, one that could certainly not be about a big guy and a little guy and a girl.

Back in Brooklyn a few days later, I got a call from Lester announcing that Ernie had signed the contract and the film was now “definite”—quite as though he had ever informed me it wasn't—and that United Press was having a celebration to which I was invited by Lee Miller himself, the head of the organization of which Ernie, of course, was the star. I got on the subway trying to forget Stallings's realism of some weeks before and looking forward to seeing Pyle again.

It was after ten o'clock in the evening when the drinking in the UP office paused long enough for ten or twelve of us to escape to 21 for some dinner. There, in the dining room already half empty, seated alone at a table chewing on crumbs from a broken piece of bread, was another American hero, John Steinbeck. He turned out to be an old friend of Miller's, who had sent him to Russia and elsewhere as a correspondent. Nothing would do but that we join him.

I had never seen Steinbeck before, and it struck me that like Ernie Pyle, he could easily blush, but unlike Pyle, he seemed to want to expand himself physically, to present a strong and able and heartily Western image, his basic sensitivity and sentiment covered by an aggressively cynical wit that could move over the edge into cruelty. He had written—in
The Red Pony, Of Mice and Men,
the story “The Daughter,” and of course
The Grapes of Wrath—
scenes that were engraved on America like the Indian's profile on the nickel, and I felt a faint disappointment to find him idling in this decadent place. I sat, as was natural, at the foot of the table and had no conversation with him. Pyle was neither eating nor drinking, and I imagined that he had for some reason lost the desire to celebrate. When the check came Steinbeck grabbed it, and only when Lee Miller protested that UP would pay did he relent enough to toss a coin for it. He lost the toss and paid whatever hundreds of dollars it all came to. It seemed an excessive gesture and left the others feeling some awkwardness as he did the business with the waiter.

On the sidewalk Pyle took me aside and said, “I hope you stick
with this. Don't let them ruin it, will you?” I promised to do all I could, and he said that he probably wouldn't be seeing me again till the picture was finished because he had decided to return overseas—this despite Lee Miller's pleading that he had risked himself enough and could stay at home and do anything he liked for UP for the rest of his life. But his unhappiness here was sunk in his eyes, the more so now at the end of a night of false gaiety. We shook hands. In 1945, during the invasion of a tiny island off Japan called Ie Shima, he died in a foxhole, a bullet through his head. He had had enough of having all the luck. Maybe he could not bear surviving his dead or his time.

I walked with Steinbeck up Sixth Avenue toward his apartment. Something almost frenetic betrayed his anxiety and discontent with himself. His drinking wife had recently fallen off a balcony of their apartment, and he bore the special conflict of the celebrated—the desire to confide and the distrust of all confidants. He seemed an ungainly small-town fellow out of his element, grabbing the check like a provincial—a New York writer would not have thought to pay for ten people he had not invited for dinner, it smacked more of inner uncertainty than confident noblesse. It was cold but he wore no overcoat and enjoyed breasting the sharp wind as we walked toward the park. He seemed a shackled giant of a man fit for sun, water, and earth and not sidewalks and smart people. His face was no longer blotched with embarrassment, and he had ceased to guffaw sardonically at some bitter truth about people—in the restaurant he had been all laughing irony—but he was still jumpy and unhappy and restless. I did not know then that he had just broken up with his wife. That the author of prose so definite and painterly could be so personally unsure was beyond my experience.

I said good night to Steinbeck and walked on to the subway station. Waiting in the nearly empty train for the doors to close, I saw an old Orthodox Jew enter, clutching the inevitable bundle wrapped in brown paper and twine. A long white beard and broad-brimmed black felt hat, the traditional sidelocks and all the anxious energy of the survivor. Such men had always seemed like atavisms, fossils of a long-dead past. My father had run into Orthodox Jews in the garment industry and showed some irritation with their way of life; they were either collecting alms or were too sharp as businessmen, a charge I found hard to listen to.

The man seemed in a sweat of anxiety as he glanced up and down at the few passengers. Finally he chose me to sit next to. The
redness of his cheeks reminded me of Steinbeck's flush in the restaurant. An evening full of anxious men. Suddenly he leaned toward me and, putting his lips close to my ear, asked, “Are you Jewish?”

“Yes.”

“You're Jewish?” he repeated, wanting some added assurance, balanced on the knife edge of trust.

“I said yes.”

His eyes widened with apprehension as he took the plunge: “Does this stop at Canal Street?”