Free The Good Life by Tony Bennett Page B

off, usually singing the dirtiest limericks you’ve ever heard in your life. The truck had a piano on it, and a little PA system. When we got to the site where the GIs were working, which was often out in the middle of a field somewhere, we got out our instruments and started playing and singing and the soldiers would gather around and listen.
    At that time I was singing a lot of blues, things like “How Long Blues,” “Don’t Cry Baby,” “Blues in the Night,” and Louis Jordan’s “I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town.” I also sang a blues tune that reflected the place and time we were stuck in called “The Non-Fraternization Blues.” We always went over great with the men; they were thrilled that we took the trouble to come out to entertain them. We’d play until it got dark. We never had any lights, so when we couldn’t read the music anymore, we’d pack up and drive off. Sometimes we’d play dances at an officers’ club, like the Starlite Club in Heidelberg, which General Dwight D. Eisenhower had recently dedicated, but most of our gigs were right in the trenches—literally.
    Because of the stress we’d been under in combat for all those months, the comic relief provided by being in the freewheeling regiment band was a welcome change, but we knew it couldn’t last. I was taken out of the band by midsummer. I was still an infantryman and had never been officially assigned as an entertainer. At the time, we all thought we’d be shipped to the South Pacific to participate in the impending invasion of Japan. But, as anyone reading this knows, we never did invade Japan. It turned out that the soldiers assigned to the planned Pacific invasion force wound up going home long before the rest of us, since Japan surrendered before ground combat began. So I was assigned elsewhere in Special Services.
    Up until 1945, the Special Services guys who put on shows for the servicemen were well-known performers who’d been drafted, guys like Mickey Rooney, the well-regarded screenwriter Alan Campbell (who was author Dorothy Parker’s husband), and Joshua Logan, the famous Broadway producer and director. But they’d all been at it long enough to qualify to go back home as soon as the fighting ended. So once again, I was a replacement, only this time for the musicianswho were sent home. Many of the guys in Special Services had been up-and-coming performers before the war started and were able to get a little more experience while they were over in Germany. It was in the Special Services unit that I met remarkable people like Arthur Penn, who would later go on to direct such great films as
The Miracle Worker, Little Big Man
, and
Bonnie and Clyde
.
    Arthur first got involved with the Soldiers’ Show unit of Special Services in Paris. When he got to Germany, Arthur became stage manager of a production of Clifford Odets’s play
Golden Boy
, which toured liberated Europe. Then in August, the
Enola Gay
dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and the Japanese surrendered. Now that the war was over in the Pacific as well, even more guys were shipped home from Europe and Arthur was promoted. Arthur himself was very new to show business then. He was just a few years older than me, and even though he hadn’t had much experience, he found that he knew more than anybody else over there, so he was officially mustered out of the service and put in charge of the whole Soldiers’ Show project as a civilian government employee. In order to really occupy the minds of the troops, Arthur arranged for the army to ship over one hundred American actresses to take part in these productions.
    The new unit was started in Wiesbaden, and that’s where I met Arthur. I was basically just hanging around the set sharpening pencils or doing any other little job I could until I got a chance to sing for him. Arthur told me that I bowled them over, and he immediately invited me to perform in a musical production he was mounting.
    Arthur had