ONE

When I tell you this story, I’m going to sound like a stalker. You have to trust me that that’s not the case.

I was only sneaking around the side of the building that night because the back door of the Hollywood Canteen—the one volunteers entered through when we arrived—was locked, and I was heading around to the front of the building. There was a concert going on. In between all the jitterbugging with movie stars and the endless supply of free sodas and sandwiches, the Hollywood entertainers put on all kinds of wonderful shows for the servicemen at the Canteen. Nearly every evening in that converted old nightclub, you could see someone there you’d have to pay big money to see anywhere else. Sure, you had to stand packed like sardines with six hundred buck privates, but who cared when Frank Sinatra, Duke Ellington, or Dinah Shore was your entertainment?

July 25, 1943, was no exception. Victor Durand was there, playing the solo in Henry Hilbert’s piano concerto. I had heard him play on the radio before and never thought too much of it, but something about that live performance had enraptured me. The full-body effort it seemed to take, the pain of it. The only problem was that I had neglected to fill out some of my volunteer paperwork, so I’d been banished to an unfinished room upstairs, experiencing the work of our greatest living composer played by our greatest living pianist through a thin sheet of glass. It simply wouldn’t do. So once I finished filling out the forms, I headed downstairs.

I came out the stage door into the alley and tried to go back in through the volunteer entrance just a few yards up, but like I said, it had been locked. I could have gone around the block, but the concert was almost over. I decided cutting between the buildings would be faster. It was nighttime and it was dark—the streetlights having been turned off completely due to the war—but enough light was coming out of the window from the Canteen kitchen that I thought it would be okay.

So it wasn’t that I wanted to “see the fruits of my handiwork” or whatever else the papers printed about me. In fact, I’d do anything to unsee the image I saw through the window that night. When I close my eyes, I can still see the three of them, posed like some sick mockery of a Renaissance painting—Jack doubled over, wailing; Terry’s wide eyes, her arm outstretched, calling for help that was already too late; and Fiona Farris, a cup of coffee tumbling from her hand, her eyes seeing nothing—bathed in the warm, patriotic light of the building that stood for how good and selfless we in Hollywood could be.