by Carl Reiner
I bought a copy of Show Business, a theatrical newsletter that listed the names of shows that were casting, and the only casting that day was for a musical, The Merry Widow. I learned too that they were auditioning singers for the chorus. I was due to report to the draft board in a week and had little time to look further. In discussing it with Estelle, we agreed that being a member of Chorus Equity, while not as prestigious as being a member of Actors’ Equity, would be better than having no theatrical credentials.
Armed with the knowledge that I had successfully sung the “Ballad for Americans” at Allaben Acres, I auditioned for and secured a role in the chorus of The Merry Widow. I loved the Franz Lehar operetta, as did my father, who often played the recordings of its great songs on our phonograph—a crank-winding RCA Victrola.
By not informing the producers that I had received my “Greetings” from the US government, I was hired as a second tenor. I rehearsed for one week before saying farewell to Estelle and starting out on what was scheduled to be a sixteen-week cross-country tour.
On the third week of the tour, while performing in Philadelphia, the draft board ordered me to report for a physical examination. My need to sing in the chorus of The Merry Widow’s fictional country of Moravia was superceded by our non-fictional country’s need for me to train as an army air force radio operator.
The army’s accelerated plans gave Estelle and me no opportunity to say a proper farewell. A few unsatisfying phone calls were all we could manage before I was shipped to Fort Dix, New Jersey.
After a few days of indoctrination, the army decided that I could best serve my county if I were sent to Miami Beach, Florida. There, three times a day for two weeks, while waiting to be assigned, a platoon of fellow inductees and I marched up and down Collins Avenue. We started from the hotel where we were billeted and marched ten blocks to the mess hall where we were fed.
It was here along the Florida coast that my training as an actor was first put to use. Somehow—probably because I told him—our sergeant in charge learned that I had been a performer and chose me to bark out the cadence for our ten-block march to the mess hall. Three times a day, as we strode proudly to and from our daily chow, I sang out at the top of my lungs, “Hut-tup-threep-forp, hut-tup-threep-forp, hut-tup-threep-forp!”
After two weeks of marching and eating in a sunny resort town, the army brass ordered our platoon transferred to a bleak army base in Missouri. It was at Camp Crowder, the historic Southern installation where, while in the process of learning to become a telegraph operator, I collapsed and lost all contact with my family, my old buddies, and my new best friend, Estelle.
PART 8
A YEAR OF SPARSE CONTACT
The week before my collapse at Camp Crowder, I had little time to do anything but eat, sleep, study, shower, shit, and memorize Morse code. To become a member of a two-man communications team, I had to learn to use a telegrapher’s key and how to operate a portable generator. By cranking the two handles of this hundred-pound, compact generator, I created the electricity needed to tap out our coded messages.
My partner and I took turns being telegrapher and power maker—while one tapped the other cranked. To keep our operation hidden from the enemy, we were instructed to lie face down while we did these jobs.
My fateful day started at seven o’clock on a bright, sunny morning. Over the barracks’ loudspeaker we heard: “Temperature sixty-five degrees! Uniform of the day: summer khakis and windbreaker!”
A windbreaker was a light, zippered jacket, commonly known as an Eisenhower jacket. When we started our five-mile trek to the training area, the sky was cloudless, and a balmy breeze was at our backs. Most of us chose not to wear our windbreakers and had tied them around our waists. By two o’clock, the temperature had dropped precipitously, and the pleasant, balmy breezes turned into bone-chilling gusts of icy wind. In seconds, my taut, hundred-sixty-pound body had gone from profuse sweating to teeth-chattering chills.
I had started this day dragging a portable generator though a craggy field and ended it dragging my fever-racked body to an infirmary. There, I was handed a washcloth and a bar of soap and was ordered by a disembodied voice to “Take a shower!”
I remember standing in a large, multi-nozzled shower room and trying to undress. I remember staring at the washcloth and the soap that I held in my hands and wondering what I was supposed to do with them—and that was all I remembered.
Sometime later, I was told by an orderly that I had fainted under the shower while trying to take off my pants.
I do remember waking up disoriented and lying in a bed that was not in my barracks but in a place that looked much like a hospital ward. I had no idea how I had gotten there or how long I had slept. I recall wondering why I was in a hospital and thinking, Who was that man in white reading from a clipboard that is hanging from my bed?
The man left before I could question him, but I thought I might clear up the mystery if I could read what was on the clipboard. I managed to scoot down and retrieve the chart. Through bleary eyes, I made out my name and the words, “Pneu, Right Lob,” which I took to be my medical problem. The word Right conjured up an image of Britain’s wartime prime minister, who was addressed as “the Right Honorable Winston Churchill.” I thought, I have pneumonia of my Right Honorable Lob!
I laughed when I realized that it was not my right “Lob” that had pneumonia but my right lobe—a lung lobe. I learned from the male nurse that what I had was a severe case of pneumonia and that I had been unconscious for two weeks.
When the haze cleared, I thought about my mother and father and wondered if they were worried about having received no mail from me. Fortunately I wrote to them only once a week, and in my last letter, I informed them that I was training to be a radio operator. I expected that this news would make my parents happy. My father was a radio buff, and in 1927, he hand-crafted our first radio.
I could hear my mom saying, “It is good that Carl is a radio operator. Radio operators don’t shoot at people, so why would anyone shoot at Carl?”
Estelle and I had little contact during my stint with The Merry Widow and less after my induction. We met to say our farewells, and while our summer romance was memorable, there was a danger that our relationship was, as a Cole Porter lyric once suggested, “great fun but just one of those things!”
PART 9
DRIFTING FURTHER APART
After I successfully concluded a three-week physical recovery program at Camp Crowder, Missouri, some army functionary determined that I was well enough to ship to the army base at Laramie, Wyoming. It was here that my military skills would be re-assessed, and I would be re-assigned to a job that would better serve our nation’s war effort.
During a three-week stay at Laramie, I had an experience that provoked me to write and post a letter that could easily be the stupidest, most thoughtless, hurtful, selfish, ill-advised, and potentially life-altering thing I ever did.
I remember very little about my new buddies at this Laramie base, but I do remember one of them saying that a couple of girls at the university had invited him for an afternoon of horseback riding and asked if he would like to bring a friend. Rather than dozing on my cot or sitting in the day room, reading magazines, I opted to go horseback riding.
The closest I had ever come to riding a horse was when I was a very young boy and “the pony man” came to our Bronx neighborhood. For a nickel, he allowed us to sit on his pony and have our picture taken. For a dime, he let us stay on him while he walked us down the block and back.
The two things I remember clearly that sunny day in Laramie were the white horse I was to ride and the girl with black hair who was to be my date. The horse’s name was Whitey, and the girl’s name was Lois, and both were beautiful. Whitey was tall and broad; Lois was of medium height, and until she invited me to follow her to the corral, I was unaware of what an
extraordinarily broad derriere she sported. It was firm and mesmerizingly attractive—as was her ample bosom.
Lois was obviously a skilled horsewoman, who, with no effort, mounted her brown steed and waited for me to do likewise.
She assured me that Whitey was “the gentlest horse in the stable” and bid me to “mount up!”
She smiled while I impersonated the cowboy star, Randolph Scott, and attempted to mount my steed as I had seen him mount his—and miraculously, I did.
So far so good, I thought, as Lois led our party of four out of the corral and onto a rocky trail. Whitey and I brought up the rear, and from the way I handled the reins, Whitey knew that he had a novice sitting on his back.
While Lois and the group went up a steep hill, Whitey and I went around it. The harder I pulled on the reins, the more resolute he became. I shouted up to Lois, but not loud enough to be heard over the sound of clopping hooves. Whitey had something in mind, and after minutes of unsuccessful pleading and tugging on the reins, we came to a stop beside a small, black watering hole. The watering hole was ostensibly a mud hole that still contained a shrinking pond of water some twenty feet from the bank. Whitey’s thirst had brought us to the mud hole, and as he stepped into it, his hooves started to sink into the mud. By the time he arrived at the shallow pond, his legs were half submerged. As he lapped at the water, he kept sinking further and further. All I could think of was a movie I saw where people got caught in quicksand and were sucked under—I was terrified of meeting that fate. Whitey must have seen that movie too, because he suddenly stopped drinking and tried to pull his legs out of the mire. The sucking sound Whitey’s legs made as he tried to free himself was my cue to “abandon horse!” To save my life and maybe his, I relieved him of my weight by dismounting. I started for the shore and, for the first two or three steps, I struggled mightily, but with each succeeding step, it became easier to pull my feet out of the mud.
When I finally made it to the shore, my shoes, socks, and khaki pants were covered in black, oily mud. I had no idea where Lois and the rest of the party were, and I shouted for their help. It was Lois who deduced that Whitey had taken control of my life, and she returned to rescue the two of us. Lois actually waded into the mud hole and was able to grab Whitey’s reins and coax him out. Whitey was now a half-black horse with a white mane, and I was a red-faced soldier with black khaki pants. Lois was very sweet and actually apologized for choosing Whitey to be my mount. She thought that because he was old and docile, he would give me no trouble. She had no idea how inept I was. I had fooled her by mounting Whitey a la Randolph Scott.
My buddies and I spent almost two weeks in Laramie, waiting to be re-assigned. During those fourteen days, I saw Lois almost every night. I had told her that I had a girlfriend, and she said that she did not have a boyfriend, but she would like it if, while I was in town, we could be friends. And that is ostensibly what we were—until a couple of days before I left Laramie.
Lois being very proper and I being guilty about having feelings for someone other than Estelle, kept Lois and I from starting any kind of physical relationship—until one moonlit night when we kissed. It was a goodnight kiss and not a very long or passionate one, but it did engender enough feelings to keep me awake that night. Lois was unlike any girl I had ever met, and I started to think that I might be in love with her. The feeling persisted and grew to the point where I felt that she was the one and only for me. Physically, we behaved ourselves and did nothing more than teenage-type petting—but I was smitten!
Never having had the capacity to have more than one girlfriend at a time, and tortured by the fact that I was now in that predicament, I acted! I did the heinous thing I described in the first paragraph.
I sat on my bunk and wrote the stupidest, most thoughtless, hurtful letter I ever wrote or ever will write to anyone—and I mailed it! Estelle’s response on learning that I had fallen in love with someone else was embodied in a cold, curt note. It contained no anger, no vitriol, but it managed to summarily dismiss me from her life. As I illustrated earlier, Estelle had a knack for using a minimal amount of words to get maximum effect. In a few short sentences, she managed to make me feel like the shit that I was.
I fought to regain my equilibrium, as Lois and I had but a few more days together before my unit was shipped out. Some of us were assigned to Georgetown University to attend their School of Foreign Service. We were to study French and hopefully become interpreters.
On the train ride to Washington, DC, my guilt about Estelle abated, and my thoughts returned to Lois and what a lovely person she was. In particular, my thoughts returned to her mesmerizingly attractive derriere. I was planning to write her a letter, but instead I wrote her a poem that was inspired by her broad backside. I titled it “Ode to the Buttocks Bountiful.” I did not save a copy of it or remember anything but the lines, “You will ere remain, ‘Queen of said terrain.’” Not my best work.
I sent the ode to Lois and learned by return mail that she was flattered and thrilled that I would write such a humorous and loving poem about what she considered her worst feature. This made me like her all the more.
Lois and I corresponded for a short while, and with each letter, I realized more and more how little we had in common. Her letters were about her love of horses and the open plains, and mine were about New York, Broadway, and its theaters. I felt that she may have had deeper feelings for me than I for her, and she proved it by traveling from Laramie to the Bronx just to visit my parents. I learned of this from my father, who told me that a very pretty girl named Lois had dropped in on them just to say hello and tell them what a good son they had raised. My father said, “She seemed like such a fine person. Your mother and I had quite a nice chat with her.”
Lois and I never wrote about the visit she paid to my folks, but it may well be that it gave her closure to a relationship she knew had ended.
Writing this may have done that for me.
PART 10
CANCELING THE CLOSURE
The day after settling into the lower bunk of a double-decker bed in the Georgetown University dormitory that I shared with three of my closest strangers, the privates first class, Charley Straight, John O. Benson, and Phil Wool, I started to think about Estelle Lebost, and the more I thought about her, the greater was my desire to see her. Not knowing how she would receive a letter from me, I decided to find out. I figured that the worst that could happen is that she would tear it up, and the best, she would read it and answer it. My letter was a friendly, straightforward one, telling her that I was now in Washington, DC. My writing that letter turned out to be one of the best decisions I would ever make.
Estelle answered my letter, and after a few more written exchanges and many long phone conversations, she agreed to my visiting her in New York as soon as I was eligible for a weekend pass.
Our first meeting was in her mother’s four-room Bronx apartment, and it was a blissfully joyful one—as was our second meeting and the next half dozen. It was during one of these visits, while cuddling on the living room couch, that I said simply, “I love you, and what do think about us getting married?”
And she said, “I love you, and I think it’s a good idea.”
Two weeks later, we were joined in matrimony by the preoccupied city clerk at New York City’s Town Hall, and we spent an idyllic night in the Honeymoon Suite of Manhattan’s elegant St. Regis Hotel.
For the next seven months, while I was at historic Georgetown University on O Street, learning to be a French interpreter by day, at night I was in a sublet apartment on P Street, learning to be a husband.
Corporal and Mrs. Carl Reiner
Each morning as I left my honeymoon haven to return to the university, our wizened, old Jewish landlord, Mr. Jacobs, reminded me to lock the front door and then instructed me on how to lock it properly.
“Listen,” he’d say, “after you
lock it, prove it! Always prove it!”
He would jiggle the doorknob to show it was locked and then jiggle it again and say, “Lock it and prove it! Always lock it and prove it after you lock it!”
I do not think there was a luckier or happier soldier in the whole US Army than I—until the day I was called into the captain’s office and threatened with a court-martial for “flagrant disobedience.”
The night before my captain threatened me with a court-martial, our platoon had been remanded to quarters because a soldier had disobeyed the order that forbid alcohol to be brought into the dormitory. Estelle was due to leave Washington that following day, and I could not see myself spending my last honeymoon night with the boys instead of with my bride.
That night, when the officer came to my cot to do a bed check, he found not me in my bed but my blanket covering a stuffed barracks bag. Earlier, I had slipped out the back door of the dormitory, traversed the university’s soccer field, scaled a wrought-iron fence, raced to our apartment on P Street and into my wifes arms.
It was a short but lovely night, and before dawn broke, I made my way back to the dorm, only to learn from a bunkmate that my dummy did not fool the bed-checker.
Our captain ordered me to his office and asked questions that, for the most part, I answered truthfully. I told him that it was the last day of my honeymoon and how anxious my new wife and I were to see each other that night. I told of my sneaking out of the dorm, traversing the soccer field, and scaling the fence. Here, without changing tone, I lied and said that I had second thoughts about scaling the wall. I knew that had I been caught, I might never get to see my wife. I also knew I would never be able to sleep, so I just kept walking around the soccer field until it got light.
“You’re telling me, that you didn’t spend the night with your wife…you spent it walking around the soccer field?” the captain asked, looking me squarely in the eye. “Are you asking me to believe that?”
