Mister Roberts
Page 18
In the play, Mr. Roberts (who was really Thomas Heggen, with one large exception) threw the trees over the side as an act of defiance.
On Virgo, Heggen did the same thing, not once, but twice. The captain had ordered working parties ashore in the Leyte Gulf to bring back some palm trees he'd seen on the beach. He spotted them in five-gallon paint cans and set them in places of honor on his bridge.
After the first trees were dumped, CO Randall even posted Marine guards over the next pair; but Heggen outwitted the Marines to lure them away from their charges and, presto, these trees were "deep-sixed" too. On another occasion, when Virgo sailed into San Francisco in late 1944, Captain Randall refused to allow liberty the first few days back. Heggen the author turned this incident into one of the play's most hilarious scenes, when the entire crew of the Reluctant goes ashore for a rousing liberty on the fictional paradise island of Elysium. Yet another humorous "Mr. Roberts" scene was vintage Virgo stuff, when the women-starved crewmen turn voyeurs and trained their binoculars on showering nurses ashore. Heggen did that too, except he looked through the cross-hairs of the sighting telescope on Virgo's 5-inch gun. (She also mounted four 3" 50 caliber guns.)
Thomas Heggen the person and Doug Roberts the fictional character had one thing in common: they both though they were getting a raw deal by not being sent to fighting ships, and both put in countless requests for transfer. In the play, it is only because Roberts agrees to withdraw his latest request that the Captain grants the infamous Elysium liberty for the. Reluctant crew.
The one exception I mentioned earlier is this: while Heggen never got past Virgo, Roberts does, when a crewman forges the Captain's approval on another transfer request. He goes on to a destroyer in the thick of the action, and is killed in a Kamikaze attack.
As for Thomas Heggen, he survived Doug Roberts, but not for long. His novel "Mr. Roberts" was the rage of 1946, and then followed the play (written in collaboration with Joshua Logan) which opened to rave reviews on Broadway on 18 February 1948. Then the creative well dried up, and a despondent Heggen took his own life the following year, not even thirty years old.
But thirty is old for a ship, and that's how long Virgo lived, the ship that started it all. After the war, she made numerous trips between the West Coast and American Pacific bases. When the Korean War broke out, she made three round trips to that theater, carrying mostly ammunition for ships bombarding the Korean coast, including the carrier Valley Forge (CV-45) and the cruisers Juneau (CA-119) and Saint Paul (CA-73).
From 1954 through 1961, Virgo was a Pacific workhorse, based at Guam. Deactivated in 1961, she came back into service in 1965, but with a change she lost her attack cargo designation and became an ammunition ship, AE30. The Virgo went to Taiwan scrap yard in 1973. That's a place the USS Reluctant will never go.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Thomas Heggen began a literary career, which was as promising as it was disappointingly brief, at the University of Minnesota in 1937. There Heggen (christened Orlo Thomas Heggen), born in Fort Dodge, Iowa, but reared in Oklahoma and Minnesota, served his writing apprenticeship as a reporter for the Minnesota Daily and for Ski-U-Mah, the campus humor magazine, devoting himself, according to a classmate’s report, much more to his journalistic activities than to the demands of the classroom. He nevertheless received his B.A. degree from Minnesota in 1941, and with it he traveled east to secure a job on the editorial staff of Reader’s Digest.
His initial tenure with Reader’s Digest was short-lived, for soon after Pearl Harbor he enlisted in the United States Navy, serving in World War II until October, 1945, and spending the greater part of his tour of duty in the Pacific observing and experiencing at first hand the actions and reactions to shipboard life that he began transforming into sketches and short stories.
The war over, he returned to Reader’s Digest, but again his stay was short. At the advice of his cousin Wallace Stegner, he fashioned several short stories based on his Navy experiences into a novel, which he planned to call “The Iron-Bound Bucket.” In 1946, the novel was published to universally strong reviews as Mister Roberts; it was praised for its portrait of a naval officer who fights the tedium and pointlessness of war with compassion, understanding, and a comic subversiveness drawn from Heggen’s own personality. The novel was excerpted in The Atlantic Monthly, and its author became an overnight success.
Heggen’s four-year marriage to Carol Lynn Gilmer ended the same year. With the success of the stage adaptation of Mister Roberts, which he wrote in collaboration with Joshua Logan in 1948, Heggen seemed to have embarked upon a promising career in the theater, but he never completed another work during his final tempestuous months in New York.
He was found dead by drowning in the bathtub of his apartment following a barbiturate overdose on May 19, 1949, seven months before his thirtieth birthday.