Hollywood helped kill time during the long wait. It was primarily addressing itself to GIs; during the war 982 movies were filmed and 34,232 prints sent overseas. The pictures were also available to civilians, and theaters were jammed nightly. These were the years of H. M. Pulham, Esq. (Robert Young), The Man Who Came to Dinner (Monty Woolley), Woman of the Year (Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy), My Gal Sal (Victor Mature), This Above All (Tyrone Power, Joan Fontaine), The Song of Bernadette (Jennifer Jones), Going My Way (Bing Crosby, Barry Fitzgerald), Double Indemnity (Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson), The Outlaw (Jane Russell), For Whom the Bell Tolls (Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman), Saratoga Trunk (Cooper and Bergman again), The Lost Weekend (Ray Milland), Casablanca (all the immortals), Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, and Bambi. As usual, show business had some bad moments, including one when press agents joyfully announced that Lassie had given birth to a litter of puppies—whereupon a veterinarian revealed that Lassie was male. Still, the level of screen quality remained high, an exceptional achievement when it is remembered that many reviewers were testing not only excellence but partriotism as well. Dorothy Thompson faulted Lifeboat because she thought Hitchcock made the Nazi more competent than his fellow passengers, and Bosley Crowther of the New York Times agreed that it was “a strangely undemocratic film, excusable on no basis, even in our enlightened society.” Hitchcock protested that he had been producing a thriller, not a message; his demurrer was filed in wastebaskets. Even so professional and detached a critic as the New Yorker’s Wolcott Gibbs wrote that John Steinbeck’s The Moon Is Down evinced “a curious tenderness toward the Germans.” Audiences were more tolerant; they had come for other reasons. More than ever, with so many people so far from home and family, movies offered brief asylum and tranquillity.
In these years the mass media were also a bond between those who were separated, continents apart, for years. The media gave the lonely something in common when they had little else. Some of it was cloying; “White Christmas,” America’s first hit tune of the war, was a bleat of self-pity, and “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” was even worse. Some was just obnoxious. There were times—as when Jimmy Savo and the rest of the country were singing, “You gets no bread with ONE meatball”—which were almost unbearable for people with sensitive eardrums. “Makes No Difference Now” and “You Are My Sunshine” fell in the same category, and it is a depressing fact that throughout the war Nelson Eddy was the highest-paid singer in the United States. But Broadway promised a brighter tomorrow. Bloomer Girl, I Remember Mama, The Voice of the Turtle, and Harvey were entering their lusty youth. In the summer of 1942 two men down on their luck, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, had begun experimenting with a dog-eared script called Green Grow the Lilacs. As a play, it had closed in 1931 after only sixty-four performances. “The RH factor,” as Life later called it, transformed the turkey into Oklahoma! It opened at the St. James on March 31, 1943, and before it closed in 1948 it had played 2,248 performances—then a record for musicals. Meanwhile a twenty-six-year-old musician named Leonard Bernstein had composed On the Town, another rollicking musical. For the first time in fifteen years ticket scavengers were lurking in Broadway alleys.
Americans on the home front were reading more. Crossley and Hooper raters reported that radio was still the country’s prime source of entertainment, with Fibber McGee and Molly and Town Meeting of the Air leading the pack, but the biggest audiences gathered at news time. In radio, as in bookstores and libraries, the great swing from fiction to nonfiction had begun. The Pentagon was the world’s biggest publisher; in 1945 alone it distributed over sixty million copies of its armed services editions, covering every conceivable topic, and while their double-column format was irritating, they were read hungrily and often sent home. New titles were: Marion Hargrove See Here, Private Hargrove, Major Alexander de Seversky Victory Through Air Power, Ilka Chase Past Imperfect, Elliot Paul The Last Time I Saw Paris, William L. White They Were Expendable, Richard Tregaskis Guadalcanal Diary, John Hersey A Bell for Adano, Willkie One World, and Ernie Pyle Here Is Your War and Brave Men. Two clues to a major postwar issue, Richard Wright’s Black Boy and Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit, were hardly noticed by social scientists, though they sold well.
The biggest sellers were magazines. Every popular periodical in the United States increased its sales during the war; in 1944 advertisers invested a hundred million dollars more in them than in 1942. Here again, as Eric Hopkins observed at the time, “Their percentage of nonfiction has… been steadily rising; for one thing, facts since 1939 have been outrunning fantasy.” (They would continue to do so; by the 1970s serious fiction would be nearly obsolescent.) Magazines for women were of special interest. To countless numbers of their subscribers the war was a four-year bore. Of the 16 million volunteers and draftees who wore a uniform between 1941 and 1945, only 3 quarter-million were female. At any given time the size of the military establishment was 12 million males—the fittest 12 million—withdrawn from a population of 131 million. So great an imbalance inevitably meant masses of frustrated women.
On blind dates with servicemen, girls had about them an air of enterprise if not of aggression; they weren’t wholly jesting when they called their cosmetics “war paint.” Older women were more subtle. Lacking counsel from the high priests of Paris, Manhattan’s couturiers copied military uniforms—a giveaway to where feminine thoughts were. One popular evening gown was adorned with a huge swooping Air Corps wing of gold lamé, beginning at one hip and curving upward across the bosom to the opposite shoulder. Eisenhower jackets were models for evening wraps or blouses with drawstring waists. Imitations of British commando berets made very dashing hats for daytime wear, and girls who had no intention of joining the Women’s Army Corps wore copies of WAC hats decked out with sequins. Even the cloth shortages were exploited; the “Dido,” a sort of outsize romper suit, became a playsuit by day and pajamas at night.
Putting horns on overseas GIs was just about the most unpopular thing a soldier’s wife could do, and she wasn’t often tempted anyhow; as a popular song of the day put it, “They’re Either Too Young or Too Old.” Doomed to purdah, married women in large numbers took to wearing slacks. The home front wasn’t much of a life for them. The younger wives were prey to secret misgivings. Many weddings had been held just before the troop transports left, and the lonely brides wondered whether lasting marriages could be built upon impulse. The tough ones turned to booze; by 1943 the ratio of male to female alcoholics had jumped from 1-to-5 to 1-to-2. Others buried themselves in Emily Post or Dorothy Dix, or lived vicariously with Oona O’Neill, who, to the disgust of her playwriting father, had been named debutante of the year by the Stork Club. Once again, however, the multitude turned to magazines—in particular to three of them created during the war with a feminine mystique in mind: Street & Smith’s Mademoiselle, Condé Nast’s Glamour, and Walter Annenberg’s Seventeen.
Here another wartime phenomenon appears: the emerging adolescent. The end of the Depression had restored interest in nubility. At the same time, high school students whose mothers were working for Lockheed or Boeing came home to a key beneath the doormat, and with so much cash around they either received allowances or earned money themselves. Lester Markel, editor of the New York Times Magazine, began trying to work the word “teen-ager” into articles, but the country wasn’t quite ready for it yet. High school boys, intent upon military service, seemed more grim than carefree. The girls were gayer and more spirited, and because they all wore short socks they were called bobby-soxers.
The fashions of the swing generation were dead or dying; saddle shoes had been replaced by flat-soled loafers, cardigan sweater sets by Sloppy Joe sweaters, and convertible raincoats by the steady’s parka, worn with—another omen—blue jeans. For a while jeans were accompanied by a vogue for men’s white shirts (with the shirttails always flapping loose); after V-J Day fathers and older brothers would return to find the closets empty. Beer jackets were
still around, but scarcely recognizable to aging jitterbugs; bobby-soxers had decorated them with the divisional insignia of boyfriends, real or imagined, in the service. Another rage was the wearing of rings of black jet symbolizing absent GI friends, and bobby-soxers congregating after school for a bull session (not yet a rap), if asked what they were doing, would reply, “Just messing around.”
Yo-Yos, slumber parties, mismatched shoes and socks, striped football stockings—their capacity for fads was no more tasteless or greater than that of middle-class youth of the 1930s. But there was a difference. The country had changed. Older Americans were more inclined to watch them, listen to them, and indulge them. On some issues the generations were united. One was organized labor. They were against it. Looking at labor’s wartime record, one wonders why. General Brehon Somervell, the Army’s chief of supply, told a Senate committee, “Make no mistake about it, no one has suffered from a lack of supplies. The boys at the front have had everything that could possibly be moved to the front.” But the United Mine Workers’ ill-timed demands for overtime and extra pay seemed almost designed to wreck labor’s reputation, and James C. Petrillo, czar of the musicians’ union, was just as inept. Petrillo was a special bogey for bobby-soxers. He demanded royalties for bands and orchestras whose records were played over radio stations, and for twenty-seven months he kept most popular music from the public. Youth seemed to feel that a strike was directed at it, though the real victims were the big swing bands. Between Petrillo’s ban, rationing, the cost of road trips, and changes in public taste—bobby-soxers preferred sentimental ballads—the great bands broke up, and the swing era that the GIs had loved quietly died.
Parents beamed. They had favored ballads all along. They were proud of their children’s participation in the rubber and paper drives and delighted by much in the new youth culture. In 1944 the country’s top song hit was a novelty song for bobby-soxers, “Swinging on a Star.” With almost no male college students, there were hardly any college athletes (an exception was West Point, which built its great point-a-minute team around Doc Blanchard and Junior Davis). Attention was thus diverted to high school teams, and revisions of rules made basketball for the first time an exciting spectator sport. Dads and sons could go together, just as moms and daughters could pore over the same features in Glamour. Youth is always excited by innovation, and in the summer of 1944 adolescents were among the first to adopt the invention of a Hungarian refugee in Argentina, a pen which used a ball bearing instead of a point. It was imported under the brand name Stratopen, but users simply called them ball-point pens. Approving adults began buying them, too. On everything from politics to writing instruments, it seemed, the generations on the home front were at peace.
Then a huge gap yawned. The guilty party was a frail, pallid, bow-tied, hundred-and-thirty-five-pound crooner with jug-handle ears and a starved look. He was Francis Albert Sinatra, last seen in this narrative tagging along behind the Harry James band. To his worshippers he looked vulnerable, innocent, and in his teens. Actually he wasn’t any of them. Born in a cold-water Hoboken tenement, the son of a Sicilian bantamweight prizefighter, he was a tough, profane loner who believed his patent-leather lungs would carry him to stardom; of any rival he would snarl, “I can sing that son of a bitch off the stage any day of the week.” Far from being in high school, he was in his mid-twenties. His explanation for the illusion was, “I’m twenty-five. I look maybe nineteen. Most kids feel I’m one of them—the pal next door, say. So maybe they feel they know me. And that’s the way I want it to be. What the hell, they’re nice kids.”
Sinatra wasn’t healthy enough for the Army—he had an occupational handicap, a punctured eardrum—so he overcompensated with fierce drive. His real appetite was for fame. Swing sidemen were often adept at sabotaging crooners, but when Buddy Rich taunted Sinatra by playing little drum riffs during tender moments in his songs, Rich wound up with a mouse and a fat lip. Frankie’s obsession with success meant that he couldn’t remain in any bandleader’s shadow very long. After six months with James he switched to Tommy Dorsey. He attracted some attention with his versions of “Fools Rush In,” “Night and Day,” and “White Christmas”; then he bought out his Dorsey contract and hired a press agent. He was ready to make it alone. On the night of December 30, 1942, he was singing with all he had on the stage of New York’s Paramount Theater when something happened in the audience. A girl in the twelfth row who hadn’t eaten lunch fainted—or “swooned.” Another girl, startled, stood up and screamed. No one knows exactly what happened in the next few seconds, but Sinatra continued to sing—nobody was going to scream him down—and by the time he had finished the theater was a charivari, with every girl in the theater on her feet, shrieking.
The screeching spread like the plague. He became known as the Voice. Wherever the Voice appeared, pandemonium followed. His weekly mail rose to five thousand letters, and two thousand Frankie fan clubs were organized across the country. Autograph hunters chased him through drugstores, restaurants, department stores, and his home. They climbed his roof to peer into his bedroom. If he walked in mud, they dug up the earth and dried it to preserve his footprints. They weren’t all kids and they weren’t all nice. Twice he was almost strangled by hoydens tugging for possession of his bow tie. They tried to tear his clothes off, with considerable success, and one harpy in her forties cornered him in the Waldorf, ripped open her blouse, and insisted that he autograph her brassiere. By 1944 his reappearance at the Paramount for a three-week engagement was greeted by thirty thousand wailing adolescents; controlling them required 421 riot policemen, twenty policewomen, and over twenty squad cars.
In less time than the GIs needed to capture Sicily, the Voice—alias Frank Swoonatra, alias the King of Swoon—was rich. He had signed contracts guaranteeing him a weekly appearance on the Lucky Strike Hit Parade, an annual RKO movie, and unprecedented royalties from Columbia Records. His annual income was over a million dollars. Despite wartime controls, he seemed to be spending most of it. In Hollywood he built a pink house with every known convenience and some that had previously been unknown; to spare himself the trouble of rising to close the drapes on one wall he installed a gadget which cost $7,000. His tailored clothes were gaudy and enormous in every dimension, from the floppy bow ties and high-waisted slacks to the bulging padded shoulders. His friends, and by now he had accumulated a lot of them, gathered around him like barons doting on a king. They felt privileged just to be in his company, but he made them happy in other ways; among his idiosyncrasies was handing out 150-dollar gold cigarette lighters as casually as Major Bowes distributed Mars Bars. His feminine confidantes were changing, too. Before the war he had married his childhood sweetheart, Nancy Barbate, and early in his celebrity he answered all matrimonial questions with “Nobody comes before my wife Nancy. That goes for now and all time.” Then he stopped answering the questions. Ahead lay Ava Gardner and, much later, Mia Farrow.
Frankie’s talent, or lack of it, had become a burning issue, like General Patton’s slapping of a soldier. “Sinatra’s voice,” Time said, “has become a national feature comparable to Yosemite Valley,” but Life, Time’s sister publication, thought that the “swooner-crooner” made “every song sound like every other song” because he knew only one rhythm: large alla marcia funebre. The New York Herald Tribune quoted a congressman as saying, “The Lone Ranger and Frank Sinatra are the prime instigators of juvenile delinquency in America.” Elsa Maxwell accused the Voice of “musical illiteracy” and suggested his fans be given “Sinatraceptives.” Even his old boss Harry James conceded that Frankie’s new wardrobe made him look “like a wet rag.” Someone told Bing Crosby that “A voice like Sinatra’s comes only once in a lifetime.” Bing replied, “Sure, but why does it have to be in my lifetime?”
Parents were angry and confused. The hero of the hour was supposed to be a strapping, steel-helmeted GI in full battle array, leaping through surf to storm an enemy shore. Frankie, in the idiom of the time, looked a
s though he had been strained through a condom. Adolescent refugees from Europe thought him a noisome freak. A fugitive from a German concentration camp, herself seventeen, inquired, “Is there no way to make those kids come to their senses? The time they are wasting outside the Paramount Theater could be used for other purposes—for instance, to help win this war.” Her American peers went right on shrieking, and speculation over the source of his magic grew. “As a Visible object of female adulation,” Newsweek observed, “Sinatra is baffling.”
Psychiatrists and psychologists denied being baffled. They recalled the medieval dance craze and spoke of “mammary hyperesthesia,” a “maternal urge to feed the hungry,” “mass frustrated love,” and “mass hypnosis.” Some of Frankie’s flip critics said the same thing more pointedly: “It’s as if he had musk glands instead of vocal cords,” and, “Let’s face it—Sinatra’s just about the only male left around.” The last seems the likeliest. Girls might sing of boys absent in the New Guinea bush—“He’s 1-A in the Army and he’s A-1 in my heart”—but a male in hand was worth two of them. Besides, it wasn’t like dating a 4-F. That would have been treacherous. This was merely a bobby-soxer rite.
If older civilians didn’t understand that, the GIs he was replacing did. It is not too much to say that by the end of the war Sinatra had become the most hated man in the Army, Navy, Air Corps, and Marine Corps. Like the bobby-soxers, Frankiephobes in uniform saw in the Voice a symbol; to them he stood for all available civilians. Frankie made just one USO tour in Italy, and that was after V-E Day, when the Axis guns had been spiked. Then he flew off sneering that the USO was strictly for cheap hacks. The Stars and Stripes commented that “Mice make women faint, too,” and Marlene Dietrich, who had performed near the front, observed that, after all, “you could hardly expect the European Theater to be like the Paramount.”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 46
