FREE ARTICLE: WW2 & The Silver Screen

The many ways that movie stars spent the war years...

This article came about because I found a book in a French bookshop and launched myself down a rabbit hole. The book in question is by Philippe Durant and it’s punchy title is: Stars en Guerre 1939-1945: Des plateaux de cinéma, au théâtre des opérations, acteurs et actrices dans la tourmente. In it, he examines stars of the silver screen in America, Britain, France and Germany and how they navigated the Second World War. I’ve decided to stick a pin in five stories, and string them together for you to show how diverse the war experience was for the rich and famous…

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God Save the King

A number of actors had volunteered to serve immediately in 1939. John Mills was trying to get into the navy as early as 2nd September, 1939. He was too old (at 31!) and shooed away, but along the way he had noticed an advert for the Royal Engineers and became a sapper instead. Stewart Granger’s agent subtly tried to get him to join a theatre company on the outbreak of war, but likewise he was resolved to get into uniform and joined the Gordon Highlanders.

Theatre actor Alec Guinness de Cuffe was 25 when Britain declared war on Germany. He declined to join the air force, apparently to avoid other actors, and instead joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as an ordinary seaman. Having passed certain exams he was sent to HMS Raleigh, a training establishment in Cornwall.

‘With two or three exceptions, I found my fellow sailors - if we deserved that title at the time - friendly and generous. We came from all walks of life and professions; among us were butchers' assistants, a house painter, a piano maker, two schoolteachers - whose condescending manners made me intolerable - an aggressive and loud-mouthed postal worker from Manchester who would have been much more at home in Hitler's army, a Scottish aristocrat of great distinction and a dozen others. Most of them were heavy beer drinkers.’

Almost immediately he was found out, and officers began asking him to organise shows for his comrades. Soon, however, he was transferred to HMS King Alfred at Portsmouth. The culmination of his training was an oral exam before the Admiralty Commission. As he was about to take it, Alex recognised an aide-de-camp as a former set designer for several plays he had acted in. ‘He asked him for advice and received the only answer: "Don't panic. Just play the part.” …Alec has no trouble slipping into the shoes of the little sailor who dreams of becoming an officer.’

Alec Guinness pictured just before the Second World War at the Old Vic (Wikipedia)

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Soon, Alec found himself at Dijdeli, just west of Algiers commanding the crew of a Landing Craft designed for infantry. It didn’t take a rocket science to work out what was afoot. All of the Allied troops assembled for training were ordered not to fire on the odd German aeroplane that patrolled above, lest they give away their positions. One day, Alec, who by now had been commissioned, was summoned along with the other LCI commanders to study a set of photographs of a random stretch of coastline. Alec promptly got a book our and apparently deduced that they were for Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily:

‘About two weeks before this landing in Sicily, a Royal Navy captain was sent to Djidjelli to take charge of us. He harangued us standing on a crate, in the shade, while we, his officers, were lined up in full sun against the wall of the port. I felt like I was facing a firing squad. This captain was tall, handsome, peremptory and incapable of understanding us. He tried his very personal form of humour: "I'm not going to try to remember your names, because in two or three weeks, you will be much less likely to appear on the lists." It was not a great success.’

Alec’s LCI was instructed to disembark its passengers to the left of the lighthouse at Cape Passero, the most south-eastern point of Sicily.

‘The weather conditions were far from ideal. The sea was rough and the embarkation of the soldiers was complicated. In addition, communications were reduced to a minimum so as not to attract the enemy's attention. As a result, Guinness did not know that the assault had been delayed by an hour. At the end of the night, he rushed towards Passero, dragging other LCIs behind him. Finally, the beach was in sight. ”Crouched on the deck, the soldiers were ready to disembark," Alec would add, "but the ramps refused to work. There was no other solution than to lower them into the water using ropes. Soaked, miserable and silent, they waded towards the beach to take up their positions. They were not celebrating. Day was breaking and there had been no opposition so far. Then, suddenly, came from the sea a spectacular series of salvos that struck about 500 metres inland. According to my calculations, this artillery barrage should have started an hour earlier. I wondered what had happened. The soldiers disappeared into the bushes and olive trees.”’

Across the Water

Another actor enlisted for a three year stint in the US Navy, and saw action in the Pacific. Bernard Schwartz had every reason to run away to sea. The son of Hungarian/Slovakian immigrants, his mother was a schizophrenic and one of his brothers was also house in a psychiatric hospital with the same, and another had been hit by a truck and killed. Part of his childhood was spent in an orphanage because his parents couldn’t afford to feed he or his siblings. The Navy gave him the opportunity to leave the Bronx behind and see the world. The snag, at this point, however, was his age. He needed a parental signature to save, and was not convinced he could get one. He forged his father’s signature.

‘I came home and told my parents that I had enlisted and that I had to report the next day. I was right about their reaction: they didn't appreciate what I had done at all.’

Bernard had no particular skillset at his age, and so the Navy sent him to part of the University of Illinois to learn how to signal. Much flag waving and morse code followed, and he was diligent in his work. Once his training was complete, he was sent to a submarine base in Connecticut, and the standard required got higher, but he kept pace.

He arrived at Pearl Harbour to find evidence of the devastating Japanese raid everywhere.

“We could see the imposing wreckage left by the Japanese attack,” he will say. Oil was still leaking from the battleship Arizona, which had sunk. There was a certain tension at Pearl Harbor, where thousands of American sailors had died, as well as a feeling of shame that the American Navy had been caught off guard.

Bernard was destined for the USS Proteus, a submarine tender. He would also spend time on a submarine, USS Dragonet, ‘responsible for rescuing pilots of planes crashed at sea.’ His leisure hours, he spent watching one film, over and over again because it was the only one they had: Gunga Din. Sitting there watching Cary Grant on repeat apparently reinforced Bernard’s dreams of being an actor.

In September 1945, in Tokyo Bay General MacArthur formerly took the surrender of the Japanese  aboard the USS Missouri.

But Schwartz, by now 20 years old, was also watching through a set of binoculars from the bridge of the Proteus a mile away.  At this point, Bernard hadn’t acted a paid day in his life, and he was years away from adopting his stage name: Tony Curtis.

Stars Past Military Age

Spencer Tracy was 41, Humphrey Bogart, 42, had served as a teenage sailor in the First World War ("At eighteen, war was great stuff. Paris! Sexy French girls! Hot damn!) James Cagney was 42, and Gary Cooper 41. Clark Gable was 40. Riding on a high after Gone with the Wind, as opposed to blockade running like Rhett Butler, he would act as as president of the actors' division of the Hollywood Victory Committee: 'created on December 10, 1941, to ask artists of the stage, screen, radio and television not under the flag to contribute to the war effort.’ After the death of Carole Lombard in 1942, Gable would push hard to see active service and got a few combat missions in B-17’s in over Germany in 1943 before he was yanked from the line of fire after a near miss from some flak that nearly took his head off. MGM were determined to get their valuable asset out of the way of the Nazis, not least Hitler, who had announced a $5,000 dollar reward for the man that brought him his favourite actor unscathed.

Ronald Reagan was slightly younger than this crop at 37, and had been in the Army Reserve. He was willing to serve, but acute myopia ruled combat out. Instead, when Warner Bros. Lawyers stopped asking for deferrals, he put his career on hold to serve first at Fort Mason in California, and then doing PR for the First Motion Picture Unit, which produced propaganda and training material.

So what of John Wayne, who was 34 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour? America’s hero, ultimately the star of countless war films, had no intention of getting shot at for real…

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He’d already been around for donkey’s years by 1941, but his real breakthrough, Stagecoach, had only come in 1939. When he visited a recruitment centre in 1942, he cited his impending divorce as a reason to stay Stateside, as well as an old shoulder injury from playing college football, which Durant studiously points out, this came as a surprise to everyone watching him fight his way through endless westerns. He was eventually classed as 3-A, which exempted him for reasons of ‘family dependence.’ John Wayne might have literally dodged a bullet, or many bullets, but he was uncomfortable defending this fact in the years to come. ‘For these young men who were going to the front, I represented America,’ was one explanation he used. ‘They would take their fiancées to the movies on Saturdays and hold hands in front of a John Wayne western... So I put my big hat back on because I thought it was better.’ He raised money for the war effort, and he visited the wounded, but when these young men asked him why he didn’t serve, he often didn’t know how to respond. Occasionally he mumbled something about contractual obligations. Hollywood’s Richard Douglas Jensen, who dug right into this wrote:

"The most honest assessment of Duke's non-service is that he, tormented by the fear of poverty and by the overriding ambition to advance his film career, stayed in Hollywood to make movies. It was not cowardice that kept Duke from wearing the uniform. It was another fear: the fear of returning from the war and having to start over as a B-western cowboy or, worse, of having no career at all. For the rest of his life, Duke felt ashamed in the presence of those who had gone to war. When many actors he knew returned and resumed their careers, Duke felt he had done wrong by not serving."

John Wayne in "The Longest Day," 20th Century Fox,1962 (IMDB/20th Century Fox)

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En France

I picked the Durrant book up assuming that it would be entirely about the stars of French cinema, and it wasn’t, but he certainly didn’t leave them out. Maurice Chevalier was no stranger to war, having survived the horror of 1914-1918 from the very beginning, but in 1939 he was already in his fifties. His war started simply enough, as he travelled backwards and forwards entertaining troops and boosting morale.

‘Having unofficially become the "artistic representative of France", he even gives concerts in London. Where he sings in particular We're Going to, Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line, Maurice Chevalier, for his part, shines in the pantheon of his popularity. Acclaimed everywhere, he almost becomes a symbol. Here’s how he remembered the first part of the war:

‘An almost normal winter. Charity evenings. Concerts for the armies. Gasoline restrictions. [...] The Casino [de Paris] was always full. The prosceniums saw famous figures, political or military. From time to time, one had to concentrate to remember that Europe was at war.’

All of that changed, of course, in the spring of 1940, and here is where things got more complicated for Maurice. France fell, and in came the Vichy government and collaboration. IN August, 1942, Life magazine in the US caused a stir when it published a piece supposedly on behalf of the French Resistance:

‘Here are some French people condemned by the Resistance for having collaborated with the Germans. Some will be assassinated, others will be judged when France is free.’

Unsurprisingly, people like Philippe Pétain, General Weygand, and Minister Pierre Laval were at the top, but what caused the stink were the celebrities that accompanied them, including Maurice Chevalier.

‘This list has the effect of a bomb both in the Allied countries and in France, where it circulates under the counter. Life does not say on what basis it constructed it or what its sources are.’

Why did the Resistance allegedly have it in for Maurice? The resistance fighter René Lefèvre summed it up like this:

‘I am a little prejudiced against him. In Marseille, where we had dined together, he told me that he would not sing in Paris as long as the Germans were there. However, very shortly after this conversation, he was at the Casino de Paris. It is therefore likely that he had his contract in his pocket when he made this drunken oath.’

Can you blame a man for earning a living? There was more. Maurice called in sick a fair few times to avoid performing for collaborators. He was also married to a Jewish woman, but then he paid a visit to Germany in January 1942. However, he did so to visit and sing for French prisoners of war. He performed at the camp where he had been interned during the First World War, and his payment? The release of ten prisoners.

Also present when it came to casting judgement about, was the more general idea that the rich and famous were having rather too good a time considering France was under the jackboot heel of the Nazi’s, and Maurice was part of this scene.

‘No fewer than a hundred nightclubs open their doors every night in the capital. To which must be added the brothels, including the very posh One Two Two which is always full and where champagne flows freely. Some establishments are reserved for German soldiers, but the others are open to all. At least to all those who have money or connections... In these places are authentic "collaborationists", as they say at the time. French people up to their necks in the denunciation of Jews, in the fight against the Resistance, in economic collaboration, in trafficking of all kinds. The artists present… from Sacha Guitry to Maurice Chevalier, are not very particular about the clientele that surrounds them.’

Perhaps Maurice Chevalier’s crime was simply that he was weak, not a collaborator. Chevalier was  acquitted after the liberation in 1944. Did you earn money from the Nazis? He was asked.

“The Germans offered me considerable sums to tour the Reich, but I refused," he replies angrily. "In the last four years, I have earned only a fraction of what I could have earned in America and England.”

Despite remaining popular at home, he was denied a visa to enter the US until the mid-1950s.

Chevalier in the 1930s. (Paramount Pictures/Wikipedia)

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Hitler’s Muse?

That leaves the Third Reich. Zarah Leander, with a resting bitch face to die for, was a-list in Berlin. But in true Nazi hypocritical style, the woman used on many an occasion as the face of the regime was actually Swedish. None of the very paragons of womanhood held up by Hitler and his ilk were actually German. Lida Baarová was Czech, Kristina Söderbaum was another Swede, Marika Rökk was Hungarian and Ilse Werner was Dutch.

Zarah could arguable have been another Marlene Dietrich, but she opted not to go to Hollywood, wanting to stay closer to her homeland. That and her flawless German paved the way to the top of the German film industry.

She was a formidable businesswoman, and savvy enough apparently to have asked for some of the money she earned to be paid in Swedish krona because she had limited faith in the future of the Third Reich. What did Hitler think of her? She was pretty mesmerising, and one of his favourite screen stars, but she wound him up.

Zarah was that big a deal as an actress and a singer that she had developed quite the ego. Goebbels apparently only let her get away with her monstrous demands because of her popularity. But was she a Nazi?

Zarah was a mature woman in her thirties, and she was not stupid. She remained vague.

‘Where is it said that artists must understand anything about politics? I'm rather happy to be called a "political ignoramus!’

On occasion, though, she did not hold back with rhetoric that contravened the Nazis. On one occasion, she defended homosexuals:

‘I have always thought that homosexuals are human beings like any other. And think how many great figures in history have been homosexual. My Swedish morality tells me that we should not get on our high horses, we should not point the finger at people who live differently.’

Here’s Durrant’s take:

‘Zarah Leander does not seem to be either a Nazi or an anti-Nazi. She is only concerned with her own career. Some add that she is obsessed with her need to get rich. She, who grew up in a poor family, reveals an ogre's appetite when it comes to money. Some say that she stays in Germany because she earns more money there than she could have hoped for in Hollywood. The fact that the payment is provided by Nazis does not matter to her. She is a star, she wants to stay a star.’

There are rumours that she was a Soviet spy, which she always denied. In 1943, her palatial Berlin home in Grunewald was hit in an air raid. With the Nazi’s pressuring her to take German citizenship, she retreated to Sweden. Still under contract with UFA to appear in one more film, she procrastinated from carrying this out by continually rejecting scripts. She had to settle for a life on the stage in Sweden, though in later years she once again toured in Germany in Austria. She vehemently denied that she had sympathised with the Nazis’ ideology. She was, she said, just an actress performing for an audience in difficult times.

Leander as she appeared on the cover of the Nazi propaganda rag Signal.

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