Hello Darlin' (9 page)

I traveled with the show as producer, director, and coordinator—training I’d learned
from Sinjin in Florida. Through these trips, I met the people who ran the service
clubs, and they spread the word that the show was great, and soon I was bringing the
show to military bases in France, Germany, Italy, and Austria. It was a great scam.

I also came to handle all the NCO and officers’ clubs, too. I might have been only
an airman second class, or the equivalent of a PFC in the army, but I could take advantage
of a staff that included a major, a lieutenant, a captain, several sergeants, and
three civilian secretaries. I also dressed in civilian clothes most of the time and
lived in my own apartment. For the military, it was the good life. No one had a clue
what I actually did—nor, most of the time, did I.

For the most part no one bothered me, because I was successful, but there were a few
hard-asses who tried to put me in my place. One lieutenant, an escort officer with
a USO group, which I also handled, came on the base for a week and made my life miserable
by demanding one thing after another as if my sole purpose were to take care of him,
not the other way around. As soon as he left I had my buddies in Personnel Services,
the department in charge of the records, get even for me. They lost his pay records,
threw out his medical records, and arranged a transfer to Thule, Greenland, which
was the armpit of the air force.

*   *   *

As for my social life, I specialized in nighttime maneuvers. During my first year
in the service, I dated actress Joan Collins, who was then
seventeen years old and so breathtakingly beautiful I thought she made Elizabeth
Taylor look like a boy. I met her through Ted Flicker when he was going to the Royal
Academy of Dramatic Art. Almost twenty, I was a lark for her, since she normally dated
older men, in their twenties and thirties. But we had some fun. I also went out with
her sister, Jackie, who was just as stunning. I never got anywhere with them, but
boy, they were lots of fun.

Two years later I met Maj (pronounced
My)
Axelsson, a twenty-five-year-old Swedish girl who was a successful clothing designer
for a major wholesaler. She was my roommate’s friend, part of Henri’s cultured little
group that liked to meet at pubs and coffeehouses, discuss important social issues,
and attend the symphony. Henri told me she was a beautiful blonde, sharp, funny, and
sensible. I liked what I saw from the moment I looked into her blue eyes.

And Maj? She thought I was cute. She gave me that much. From what she later told me,
she liked a lot of things about me, including my sense of humor. Mostly she liked
that I was very different from anybody she’d ever met and that I seemed to make my
own rules.

“Almost everything is right,” she confided to Henri.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Larry’s an American. He couldn’t be more American.”

She’d lived in England for three years. During that time, she’d assumed the snobbery
of her clique, and all of them looked down on the American servicemen they saw in
Piccadilly. She quoted the popular saying at the time. “There are three things wrong
with them,” she’d say. “They’re overpaid, oversexed, and over here.”

But she thought I was different. She’d flipped when I played her a George Shearing
album, and she liked that my record collection also included Vivaldi and Gregorian
chants. She also liked that I was able to sell her black market cigars for her boss,
which incidentally helped pay for my rent. In any event, I seemed to have taste and
connections, so when I finally asked her out, she said yes.

For our first date, I took her to the Colony Club, a very posh night-club
on Berkeley Square. It was a freebie for me, since I was looking for acts for the
NCO clubs. Everything was comped, from champagne to dinner. Maj seemed to be very
impressed. Eventually we went out three or four nights a week to clubs around London,
always free. I was constantly searching for new acts, and I wanted to see Maj as much
as possible. It worked out well.

My travels to the Continent with
The Spotlight Review
often kept us out of touch for long periods of time. I let her know I was thinking
about her by sending her notes on the back of menus. She claims there were only three.
When I was around, we were almost inseparable and had a ball. We ran all over London
on my Vespa motor scooter. We hung out in coffeehouses and pubs, always running into
people we knew, as if London were a small town. I was pretty serious about her, but
I was constantly going away on trips and she worked hard.

About six months into our relationship, I went away on another long trip, this one
lasting three months, and during that time Maj rented my apartment from me. She cleaned
it up, repainted it, and slipcovered all the furniture. Clearly she improved my life.
When I returned we planned to celebrate my twenty-third birthday by going to the theater.
It was raining that night, a hellish downpour, and I waited for Maj in the NCO club
at Burdrop Park, about sixty miles outside of London.

She was late. Several hours went by. I figured she was having trouble in the weather.
The whole base knew she was late. When Maj arrived at the front gate, the guard told
her that I was waiting for her in the bar at the NCO club. Indeed, I was—having my
third or fourth martini. Finally, Maj pulled up in front in a little Morgan sports
car. The top and the windshield were down. She was drenched, but explained she could
see better with the top down.

With great difficulty, we put the top up, bailed the car out, and I got into the sopping
wet driver’s seat. I was intent on making the second act.

“I’ll drive,” I said, not thinking that as I put the sports car into reverse my blood
was higher proof than a Molotov cocktail.

Once outside the base, I made a wrong turn and drove onto a field that had been used
for practice by the British army’s Tank Corps. The ground had been churned into a
muddy quicksand. The little Morgan immediately sank up to its hubcaps in this muck.
We could not budge. I stared out the window, into the darkness, and then turned to
Maj, shaking my head in disgust.

“This is great. Just great,” I said.

Maj nudged my shoulder lightly.

“At least we don’t have to rush anymore,” she said with a laugh.

Suddenly our situation brightened. Nothing changed except my outlook. For the past
few months, I had mulled over the idea of asking her to marry me. I had gone from
debating whether or not I should ask to contemplating the perfect time and place to
pop the question. I had only one concern. What if she said no?

That was a possibility. I had no idea Maj had serious reservations about getting involved
with a guy from a show business family. She worried she was in too deep and was thinking
about ending it before she got in any deeper. In other words, she was in love with
me. But thank God I did not know, otherwise I never would have found the nerve to
say what I felt in my heart.

“Why don’t we get married?”

She didn’t say anything. She says she was too shocked to respond.

“I think it would be very hard to live without you,” I continued.

She was still silent.

“You know, if we got married, I’d get an off-base living allowance. And with your
salary, we could have a great life.”

Finally, she took a deep breath and said yes. It was the total reversal of what she’d
planned on saying to me. We kissed and steamed up the windows celebrating. When the
rain finally let up, I slogged across the field in mud up to my knees and stood by
the road until I flagged down a farmer driving along on a big tractor. I explained
that I’d just proposed and my girl had said yes, and he was only too happy to help
launch us into the next stage of our life as a couple. But some
help it turned out to be. He pulled the car out of the quagmire, yet in the process
he ripped the Morgan’s bumper off, causing Maj to gasp.

“Oh shit, now we’re in a jam,” Maj said, as if we weren’t before.

“Why?” I asked.

“The car’s borrowed.”

Since Maj was a Swede living in England and I was now an airman first class in the
U.S. Air Force, we had to wade through miles of red tape before we could get married.
After the official papers were finally sent to USAFE headquarters in Wiesbaden, Germany,
they were returned, refused. I was told enlisted men were prohibited from marrying
officers. They thought “Maj” was an abbreviation for “major.” It took another month
to straighten out that mess before we set our wedding date on December 8, 1955.

A week before the wedding, I got in trouble with the WAF captain. In my four years
of service, I did only two stints of guard duty. Ordinarily when you pulled guard
duty at night, they let you sleep in till noon the next day. I thought that was standard
operating procedure. So when I failed to report for duty until noon the next day,
she nailed me. I was sent before the squadron commander, who was brand-new and did
not know how to play the game, or at least my game. He restricted me to the base for
a week—the only seven consecutive days I’d spent on the base in two years.

It took me out of the wedding loop, forcing Maj to plan the whole thing by herself.
Actually, we had two ceremonies. The first was a civil ceremony witnessed by my best
man, Staff Sergeant Bill Bolmier, and his wife, Shirley, who have become our lifelong
friends. The second was a religious service at London’s Swedish church. Henri Kleiman
was my best man, and Maj’s younger sister, Berit (Bebe), and her father, Axel, attended.
Mother gave us an Austin-Healey as a wedding present.

Our honeymoon began the next day. We took a boat to Gothenburg, Sweden, unloaded the
Healey, and drove to Eskilstuna, Maj’s hometown. It was time for me to meet the rest
of her family, and there
were a lot of them, including her sisters Lillemor and Eva. I visited with her grandfather,
who was ailing, but I think he liked me, because after we talked, he told Maj, “You
got yourself a sturdy one.”

After Christmas, we said good-bye to her relatives and drove to Wiesbaden, Germany,
where I celebrated New Year’s by nearly killing myself when I climbed down three balconies
at our hotel—drunk, of course. We went skiing in Garmisch, in the Bavarian Alps, and
then traveled to Salzburg, where I knew of a gorgeous resort. It turned out to be
closed for the winter, but the owner, a former German U-boat captain, let us stay,
provided we fed ourselves (I had several cans of baked beans in the car) and didn’t
mind the lack of heat, and then he spent the night regaling us with stories about
how he’d blown Allied ships out of the water during the war.

Finally we ended up in Belgium, and with our last $10 we had what I think might be
the greatest meal of my life, a steak with perfect french fries. We returned to our
flat in London, at 82 Clifton Hill, St. Johns Wood, with nothing but coins, having
had the time of our lives.

We settled into married life as if it were a nonstop party. Our door was always open.
We bought a player piano for five bucks. As I’d promised, my air force salary combined
with the twenty-five pounds Maj earned each week by designing dresses made us feel
rich by British standards. At that time, a top private secretary got five pounds a
week, or $14. Lunch in those days would cost us a shilling and a half. We’d also go
to parties at NCO clubs, and as the party began to wind down, Maj would position herself
outside a window with a large bag and I’d shovel into the bag the hams and turkeys
and other food that was going to be tossed. English friends who couldn’t get that
kind of food waited for us to get home so they could feast.

About six months after we were married, Mother was starring in a Theater Guild production
of Thornton Wilder’s
The Skin of Our Teeth.
It also starred Helen Hayes, George Abbott, Lee Remick, and other luminaries. Mother
said there were two walk-on parts available, and it would be an ideal opportunity
to meet Maj. I took a two-week leave
from the war effort, loaded our Austin-Healey on the ferry to France, and booked
into what the American Express travel agent assured me was the cheapest hotel in central
Paris. The Star Hotel, right off the Etoile, lived up to its billing. It cost a thousand
francs, or about $2.80, a day—or an hour. But we had clean towels and hot water all
the time.

We’d timed our arrival to meet Mother, Richard, and Heller when they got off the plane
from New York. Mother and Maj adored each other. Maj was slightly in awe, but she’d
never seen Mother perform and didn’t understand the magic until the next day, when
all of us were invited to the ambassador’s residence for lunch. When the musicians
there spotted Mary, they began to play “Dites-Moi” from
South Pacific
and she walked up and sang. The whole place went gaga. At lunch, she sang more songs.

As for the play, it was Maj’s debut and farewell performance in the theater. Opening
night her knees were knocking so hard I literally had to push her onstage—just to
walk across in the background. I was secretly relieved that Maj didn’t want to make
the stage her career. Offstage, for the first time in my memory, both Richard and
I were on good behavior. There were no contretemps between us.

Those lovely two weeks included daily breakfasts at cafés on the Champs-Elysées with
Peter Stone and Art Buchwald, who’d write his newspaper articles at the table while
we talked. In fact, Art wrote one about Peter doing what he described as “the three-minute
Louvre.” You’d leave a cab running, sprint into the Louvre, visit the
Mona Lisa, Winged Victory,
and
Venus de Milo,
and return to the cab. When Art asked Peter for his secret, Peter replied, “Sneakers.”

I think his record still stands.

*   *   *

We spent our first anniversary dancing at the Savoy. Earlier that day, as Maj was
getting herself prettied at the Dorchester, I barged into her treatment room in the
beauty parlor, opened the curtain, and dropped a matching pair of .38 revolvers. As
I said, “Happy anniversary,
honey,” I thought the little girl tending to Maj was going to faint. Not even the
London bobbies carried guns. “It’s all right, darlin’,” I said. “I’m from Texas.”