I was listening to NPR’s “Fresh Air” on Friday afternoon. It featured a 1997 interview with Hal David, an award-winning lyricist who died last week. And it included a reference to a bit of little known Hawaii history.
David is best known for his many collaborations with composer Burt Bacharach between the late ’50s and the mid-’70s; many of their songs were recorded by Dionne Warwick, who had a string of hits in the 1960s. They also wrote the songs for the Broadway musical Promises Promises, and won an Oscar for “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” from the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
He also penned lyrics for the TV themes of “77 Sunset Strip,” “Hawaiian Eye,” and “Surfside Six,” according to host Terry Gross.
In one part of the interview, David described his assignment in Hawaii during WWII.
GROSS: I think when you were in the Army, you ended up writing songs for the USO?
DAVID: No, not the USO – the Central Pacific Entertainment Section, which was an Army special service unit which was based in Hawaii, in Honolulu, at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu.
GROSS: So, you basically had a show-biz job in the Army?
DAVIES: Oh, that’s what I did.
GROSS: That’s great.
(LAUGHTER)
DAVID: I was very lucky.
GROSS: Yeah.
DAVID: I think the Army was very lucky to have me away from guns, too.
(LAUGHTER)
DAVID: And that’s what I did for about three years. I worked writing shows, musical shows, songs, sketches. And it changed my life because when I came out of that, I knew that’s what I wanted to do.
GROSS: So, did you have to write like morale boosting kind of songs?
DAVID: No, not really. We were writing entertainment for the Army camps all over the Central and South Pacific.
GROSS: So, remember any of the lyrics that you wrote for the Army?
DAVID: Well, my famous lyric – the one I’m most proud of – and it was a hit in the Pacific, though I’m sure it’s not known by your audience, was called, send the salami to your boy in the Army. It’s the patriotic thing that everyone should do. “Send the Salami to Your Boy in the Army.” Don’t just send him things to wear. Send him something he can chew.
(LAUGHTER)
GROSS: Oh, this is written by the son of a deli man.
DAVID: It’s written by the son of a deli man, and it was a hit. And I remember being with my wife at some function, and somebody came over to our table and said: did you write “Send the Salami to Your Boy in the Army?” ‘Cause he had been in the Pacific. And I said I had. And he just wanted to shake my hand.
GROSS: So, it really was well-known during the war?
DAVID: Well-known in the Pacific.
A quick online search failed to turn up any additional information about the Central Pacific Entertainment Section in Honolulu. Maybe someone else will have better luck.
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The Theater: Hamlet in Hawaii
Monday, Nov. 27, 1944
The Army, taking the Bard by the horns in Hawaii, has come up with a G.I. Hamlet. Moreover, it has come up smiling. With Major Maurice Evans bossing the job and playing the introspective Prince for the first time since 1940, the effect on the dogfaces has been, for Evans, “simply staggering.” They even rise above normal behavior by refraining from hollering or whistling when performers go into a clinch. Commented one G.I.: “They certainly must have done a lot of rewriting to bring that play so up to date.”
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,796892,00.html#ixzz2609HFgU1
http://www.aact.org/fest/participating_productions.htm
The Army theatre program in Hawaii began in 1942 when Major Maurice Evans, famous Shakespearean actor was commissioned by President Roosevelt to serve in the Pacific. It was informally organized after the war and produced shows on an intermittent basis. It has been under professional leadership since 1962 and now celebrates its 65th year.
ACT presents four major Broadway musicals, four Readers Theatre productions and the 4th of July Spectacular each year with 250 volunteers, one full-time employee, and a budget of $290,000. It has 1800 main stage subscribers and an annual attendance of 18,000.
http://www.honolulupulse.com/stage/stage-army-community-theatre-1942-2011
BY JOHN BERGER / jberger@staradvertiser.com
An era in island theater comes to an end on Halloween night when Army Community Theatre — a presence on the local theater scene since 1942 — shuts down with the closing night performance of “The Rocky Horror Show” at the Tropics on Schofield Barracks…………
http://www.ftmeade.army.mil/museum/archive_stars_part%201.html
Captain Maurice Evans also received a favorable response from the Army brass in his effort to organize GI dramatics. Upon the dissolution of the Army Specialist Corps, Evans accepted a commission as a captain in the regular Army and hoped to become the liaison officer between the Special Service Division (as the Special Services Branch was renamed in July 1942) and its British counterpart. Instead, he was placed in charge of Army entertainment in the Territory of Hawaii late in 1942. The quiet atmosphere and constant readiness played havoc on the nerves of the island’s residents. “The whole island of Oahu was in a state of siege for fear of a second Japanese attack,” Evans wrote in his autobiography. “All the beaches were ringed with barbed wire. Coastal guns were everywhere and military police much in evidence. Worst of all a total blackout was rigidly enforced and, since it was November when I arrived, the nights were to seem interminable.”
Evans tried to brighten those nights and provide relaxation with stage shows presented by GIs. At first, some generals in Hawaii scoffed at the selection of a Shakespearean actor to entertain GIs; but Maj. Gen. Ralph E. Smith, commanding officer of the New York Division troops in Hawaii, encouraged Evans and gave him access to his men and facilities. Following a procedure mentioned in the Special Service Unit Training Guide, Evans checked Maj. Gen. Smith’s personnel file and found only one serviceman with civilian theatre experience, Technical Sergeant Howard Morris. Morris and a composer friend in the same unit had outlined an original musical show entitled “Hey, Mac!” concerning GIs’ efforts to adjust to Army life in the Pacific.
Evans recruited and trained other GIs to produce and act in “Hey, Mac!” and other light and serious fare: “Five Jerks in a Jeep,” “Shape Ahoy,” “Macbeth,” and even “The Mikado.” For almost three years Evans and his troupe built sets, wrote scripts, rehearsed shows, and presented them before appreciative audiences composed of other GIs and civilians. Costumes, props, and stage equipment were borrowed, improvised, adapted from Army issue, and even scavenged from the sunken battleship Oklahoma. Evans imported civilian celebrities to co-star with his GIs, including Judith Anderson, who co-starred with Evans and the GIs in “Macbeth,” and Boris Karloff, who joined the GI cast of “Arsenic and Old Lace.” As many as six of Evans’ GI shows — comedies, revues, vaudeville programs and legitimate plays — simultaneously toured the Pacific islands.
When civilian entertainers sponsored by USO-Camp Shows began to arrive in Hawaii, Evans was responsible for booking, transporting, and housing them. Among the noted stars whom he escorted were comedians Bob Hope and Jack Benny, violinist Yebudi Menuhin, and playwright – actor Moss Hart. In his autobiography, Evans expressed his preference for GI entertainers, claiming that some big-name stars lacked rapport with the servicemen. Their visits were too brief, he complained, and celebrity performers were required to spend time with military brass that should have been spent mingling with enlisted men. Moreover, USO performers did not assume total responsibility for productions, a point Evans made in connection with the visit of Irving Berlin’s patriotic show, “This Is the Army.” “Unlike my own men,” Evans wrote, “who built and painted their own scenery…the New York visitors had no duties except to perform in their show.”
There was growing demand in Hawaii for the steady entertainment supplied by Evans and his troupe. “After a time conditions became more normal in Hawaii,” Evans wrote. “The blackout was terminated and the barbed wire removed from the beaches. A new and in some ways more potent enemy began to take charge — sheer, unadulterated boredom.” He added to the ranks of the Entertainment Section such talented GIs as Carl Reiner, later a television comedy writer and actor, and Hal David, later a popular music lyricist.
Evans, now a major, was writing and producing lightweight GI shows with titles like “Shoot the Works,” “Campus Capers” and “Mainland Follies,” and he was growing as contemptuous of them as he was of “B” grade movies that churned out of Hollywood and into Army theatres. In 1944 he and his island troupe presented a condensed version of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” starring Evans and his GIs. It became Evans’ last hurrah as an Army officer. On June 30, 1945 he turned over his Hawaiian command to Allan Ludden, who was later host of television’s “G.E. College Bowl” and “Password,” and returned to the mainland.
Evans summed up his Special Service experience in his autobiography: “The American soldier remained very much an individual throughout the war, and the only way to get him to respond favorably was to treat him as an individual … We gave him a chance to laugh at things that he, in particular, found amusing, or to get a lump in his throat about things he found sad, thereby doing something obliquely to relieve the intellectual desolation that was the companion of life in the Army.”
In 1953 Evans produced the hit play “The Teahouse of the August Moon,” a satiric comedy about the Army’s occupation of the Pacific island of Okinawa. In 1955 he produced the equally successful play “No Time for Sergeants, “another Army comedy-drama that brought actor Andy Griffith to prominence.
Two other graduates of the seventh course at Fort Meade’s School for Special Service assisted Bob Hope on overseas tours during World War II. When Hope arrived in England for a performing tour, Capt. Edward bowling had newsreels made of him for distribution to the U.S. Army bases in advance of Hope’s visits. Capt. Michael Cullen escorted Bob Hope and Frances Langford on a tour of North Africa and Sicily. In one of his memoirs of the war years, I Never Left Home, Hope credited Cullen with finding the entertainers places to live and prepare their radio broadcasts as well as notifying them of the time and place of each stage performance for GIs. Cullen also helped Hope and Langford through German bombing raids at Bizerte, Tunisia and Palermo, Sicily. At Palermo, Hope heard the Nazi planes over his hotel, the Excelsior, and watched them dive-bomb the city’s docks a few blocks away. Langford’s room was showered with fallen plaster during this attack. Fortunately, none of the troupers were hurt in these incidents.
The motion picture industry immortalized the Army’s Special Service escorts in a 1944 movie entitled “Four Jills in a Jeep,” a comedy dramatization of an actual USO-Camp Shows tour in England and Africa by Martha Rage, Carafe Landis, Mitzi Mayfair and Kay Francis. In this motion picture, comedian Phil Silvers played the Army Special Service sergeant who accompanied the four entertainers on their trek. Coincidentally, in the late 1950s Silvers achieved his greatest fame as the scheming Army Sergeant Bilko on television’s “The Phil Silvers Show.”
From the cream of Hollywood came other motion picture and radio stars who toured overseas for USO-Camp Shows: A] Jolson, Bing Crosby, Adolphe Menjou, Pat O’Brien, Martha Tilton, Clifton Fadiman, Danny Kaye, Edgar Bergen, Ingrid Bergman, Ray Bolger, Stubby Kaye, Frank Sinatra, and Phil Silvers. Some of these unpaid performers were recruited by the Hollywood Victory Committee, whose chairman, motion picture actor-dancer George Murphy, had turned down a commission as a lieutenant colonel in Special Service in order to take the civilian post.
The popularity of live variety shows had been on the wane since the advent of talking pictures and network radio in the early 1930s, but personal appearances by entertainers encouraged GIs and reminded them of happy moments of relaxation and family entertainment back home. From a base office in New York, USO-Camp Shows sent almost 5,000 lesser-known performers to U.S. Army camps, outposts, and areas of operation in 42 nations to try to meet the widespread demand for entertainment. They presented musical revues and variety shows reminiscent of vaudeville shows of the 1920s, as well as songs, plays, band music and monologues. They presented their shows on board troopships and on improvised stages in jungles and deserts, at isolated posts and beachheads, and within yards of battle fronts. Seventeen USO-Camp Shows entertainers were killed in accidents and other tragic circumstances during the war.
Parts II and III of this article, dealing with the training of enlisted men in Special Service activities, and Special Service programs for the enjoyment of servicemen and women at Fort Meade, will appear in subsequent issues of History Notes.
Thanks! That was a side of the war in the Pacific we don’t hear about.
I happen to have two copies of the playbill for Karloff in Arsenic And Old Lace as performed by the Special Service. Did you know that the gentleman playing Dr. Einstein was none other than Pvt.Werner Klemperer, who went on to play Col. Wilhem Klink in Hogan’s Heroes?
http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0872494969/ref=dp_olp_used?ie=UTF8&condition=used
Katz’s Delicatessen had a program that is still in effect today that encourages people to send a salami to the troops. It was on either the Food Network or Travel Channel that I saw it mentioned. Wikipedia does mention it and the Katz’s website has it listed on its homepage.
Thanks, I enjoyed reading all of that.
Oh, how I love the Hal David lyrics and Burt Bacharach melodies! So catchy!
“Send the Salami to Your Boy in the Army.”
Reading that NPR interview, I could not help but remember an old palindrome… “Slap a ham on Omaha pals.” [try it backwards.]
“I malasada salami” almost works! Or “A manapua Panama?”