Free The Gay Metropolis by Charles Kaiser

of ‘the boys.’
    â€œWe did all the front line work for the British army—
all of it
. We had the highest casualty rate of any organization in the Second World War. We were small, but we had the most captured and killed and wounded. My great friend Arthur Jeffries wallpapered his ambulance. It had all kinds of roses in it. He was part of a group affectionately known as the Taffeta Twelve. We wore uniforms, most of them custom-made. Many of us wore two or three gold identity bracelets. It was somewhat outrageous. That nut who wrote
Auntie Mame
was in: Patrick Dennis was his name. He was kind of boring. He got married to a very nice girl and then he ran off with a Mexican boy. He died in Mexico City, I think. That’ll give you just a rough idea.”
    In the desert, there was terror and loneliness—and, Reynolds believed, something in the food to suppress the passions of troops cooped up in foxholes. “One day Cecil Beaton came out to photograph the troops. As he got out of the staff car, someone heard him remark,
    â€œMy dear! It’s beige!’
    â€œWe ate bully beef in vast quantities,” said Reynolds. “I don’t know how I lived through that sleeping in a foxhole in the desert with fleas and rats. The first day we got to the desert I modestly inquired about the lavatory facilities and they threw a shovel at me. We were allowed one pint of water a day, with which we had to wash, make tea, shave. You shaved in tea is what you did.”
    But then there was also rest and recreation in Cairo.
    â€œWhen we were on leave, we lived like princes. You could stay at Shepherd’s Hotel for $5 a night in Cairo. And then drinks were cheap. There were twenty thousand troops in Cairo who were not allowed to sleep with the women because they would get syphilis—it was an army order!
You cannot!
Twenty thousand men would walk around two or three blocks—clomp, clomp, clomp. And it was like selecting a necktie: you just said,
’That
one.’ We were terrible. There was a restaurant called Le Gavroche. It was a very good French restaurant. And the bar was adrift with guardsmen—Coldstream, Irish. And you’d say, ‘What do you want?’And for one pound—which was $5—you could have anything you want. My God! We had a very good time. We laughed and screamed. I was miserable some of the time. I was terribly lonely. I was away too long.
    â€œI had a lot of Egyptian friends. And the Egyptians all entertained every night. They had dances and parties and champagne and caviar. When you think the Germans were less than fifty miles away and the Egyptians lived as if they were on the edge of the volcano! You’d see Farouk, the king, all the time. He was a fat slob. He had an American girlfriend and I’m told he used to screw her in the swimming pool. I think that’s probably true. I remember there was a woman called Princess Latfellah. She gave a huge dance—about three hundred of us—and she had a big tent. Suddenly she threw a switch and on every bloom in this huge garden there was a lightbulb. You would have thought we were in Paris. Caviar! You would have never thought there was war.”
    One of Reynolds’s best friends in Egypt was Burt Shevelove, who later wrote the book for the Broadway musical
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
. “He was the loveliest man who ever lived. He had a sensational sense of humor. We used to call Hitler ‘Helen.’ And we’d be in the desert, and there’d be a lot of German planes, and we’d say, ‘Helen’s angry today. God, she’s mad!’ I remember one night we were walking down the streets of Cairo. And the king of Greece came toward us. He was plastered with medals, had a red band around his hat, and he had a fly whisk, which many of us did. And as we passed by, Burt said, ‘Too much! Back to wardrobe!” *
    Later, Reynolds would serve in