Over Here by Edward Humes

Author:Edward Humes [Humes, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, Veterans, Education, Educational Policy & Reform, Federal Legislation, Political Science, American Government, Legislative Branch, United States, 20th Century
ISBN: 9781626812574
Google: RhoKAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2014-03-09T02:42:13+00:00

When the war ended in Europe five months later on May 8, 1945, Penn’s unit moved into Germany as part of the occupation, a chaotic time in which many soldiers felt little in the way of relief. Penn, like hundreds of thousands of other troops amassed in Europe as the war continued in the Pacific, expected at any moment to be dispatched to an armada of ships to join an all-out ground invasion of Japan—a second, final, and terrible D-Day. Many who had hoped for discharge after Germany’s surrender were kept in service. The Army began searching for ways to mollify increasingly restive citizen soldiers longing for home. Arthur Penn’s life was about to take a dramatic change of course.

One day a soldier Penn knew from boot camp, Lester Shurr, appeared and asked if he’d be interested in joining the Soldier Show Company, an Army entertainment project. Shurr worked in civilian life as a talent agent; his older brother, Louis “Doc” Shurr, was a Hollywood legend, representing Bob Hope, Betty Grable, Ginger Rogers, and a host of other top-tier stars of the era. The younger Shurr had been assigned to review Army personnel records, searching for soldiers with experience in theater, music, or film, and he had remembered Penn from basic training in South Carolina. Shurr had been among the soldiers who frequented the community theater in Columbia, along with Penn.

Penn had only one question: “When can I start?”

A few days later, orders arrived transferring Penn to Paris, where Captain Alan Campbell and an Army intelligence officer named Joshua Logan ran the Soldier Show Company to rave reviews and with little in the way of Army discipline. Campbell was an accomplished Hollywood screenwriter before the war, the husband of author and Algonquin Round Table doyenne Dorothy Parker. Logan, already a successful director and writer when he joined the service, would go on to even greater fame after the war, directing a string of hit plays and films, then receiving a Pulitzer Prize for cowriting the Oscar and Hammerstein World War II musical blockbuster South Pacific, which he also directed.

Given their connections and credentials, Logan and Campbell had attracted dozens of actors and writers from their original Army units to the program, along with one hundred actresses flown in from Broadway. Penn, who could hardly believe he was mixing with such characters, left his first meeting with Campbell as the new stage manager for a production of the Clifford Odets play Golden Boy that was touring Europe featuring the stage and film stars Constance Dowling and Billy Halop, one of the original Dead End Kids.

“I had no idea what I was doing,” Penn would later say. “I just did it.”

He soon learned that stage managing in the seat-of-the-pants world of the Soldier Show Company meant scrounging for equipment, staff, and just about everything else needed to keep the wheels on the new production, along with mollifying cast and crew, setting up the next stop on the tour, and cleaning up after the last.

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