He lived an intense emotional life which appeared, at casual inspection, to have been structured upon the films made by these two actors. Actually, it was the other way around; American life in those years was so clear-cut, the national values so well agreed upon, that films mirrored the consensus-type of life Holt led. Instead of his aping Tracy and Bogart, they were copying him. Art thus followed life, which is the preferred sequence; today art, especially popular music, invents new patterns which students follow in enthralled obedience.
Because Tracy and Bogart summarized the best that America was producing in those middle decades, Holt remembered almost every picture they had made and considered it appropriate that they had never appeared in the same film. ‘They wouldn’t have fitted,’ he said when I asked him about this. ‘Completely different men.’ He did not say, ‘Their styles were different.’ He said that as men they would have clashed, for he saw them not as actors but as living men who happened to be thrust into evocative situations.
Bogart represented the man Harvey felt he was; Tracy, the gentleman he would have liked to be. At his frontier stations he had ample opportunity to watch his favorites in their best films, for construction firms provided their men with five films a week, and the oldies from 1940 to 1960 predominated. Once, when a woman dressmaker in Hong Kong had to go out of business because a Yugoslavian adventurer had stolen her cash, Holt sat morosely listening to Glenn Miller tapes and reflecting the matter. ‘I keep thinking of the way Humphrey Bogart saved that newspaper for old Ethel Barrymore. A woman in business ought to have someone she can rely on.’
I said that Holt remembered almost every film made by his heroes, but when he told me they had never worked on the same picture, I was bothered, for I seemed to remember a still photograph showing them together in a movie about a prison riot. When I asked about this, Holt growled, ‘Impossible. They’d destroy each other,’ but I could not get that old photo out of my mind, so I wrote to a film magazine and received confirmation: they had played together in Tracy’s first film but never thereafter. I forwarded the letter to Holt in Burma, and he wrote back: ‘Must have been a terrible picture. I’d like to see it someday.’
Whenever Holt returned to the States for leave or instruction on new machines, he would hole up in a motel and sit before the television night after night, looking at the old movies. He was pleased that the people at home were able to enjoy the same old films that he had been enjoying in places like Chengmai and Kandahar. It was after one such visit home that Holt interrupted my sales pitch in Sumatra to say, ‘Over in Pakanbaru the English people are showing a movie. I saw it years ago and again on television in Seattle. You ought to see it.’
We drove forty miles into the steaming town, where an English engineering firm had provided a coconut shed with an improvised screen and a flickering projection machine. Since there was only one projector, we had to sit around in pale electric light drinking gin while the projectionist changed reels. I sat next to a rubber expert from Germany and behind a Swiss who was trying to sell the Sumatrans a complicated machine for making glass. There were about fifty of us, come from all over central Sumatra, but none enjoyed the night’s movie so much as Harvey Holt.
Perhaps enjoy is not the word. He lived each moment of the film with terrible intensity, giving me the impression that for him this was something more than another in the distinguished chain of Bogart movies. I had not seen it before nor even heard of it, and in subsequent weeks when I spoke of my experience in other camps I found no tech rep who had heard of it either. It was excellent. Bogart was a film writer in Hollywood, accused of murder and trusted only by Gloria Grahame. As the first spasmodic reels unfolded, you got the idea that it was just another murder mystery and that Miss Grahame was certain to save Bogart from the electric chair or gas chamber or whatever it was that California used. In the long intervals between reels we discussed this probable development with the German rubber man, who said approvingly, ‘It takes the Americans or the French to put together a really good policier.’ I asked if he thought Bogart had been involved in the murder of the young woman, and he said, ‘Never. Not in an American film. In a French film, yes.’
This type of opinion held through the first four intermissions, but I noticed that Holt did not react to the guesses. He was the only one present who knew how the film came out, and he took quiet satisfaction in eavesdropping on our wrong guesses, for during the fifth intermission the German and I confessed that we had been mistaken. This was something more than a mere policier. It was a character study of the film writer in conflict with the likable girl who was befriending him. ‘I have the curious feeling,’ the German whispered as we looked out toward the jungles that encroached upon Pakanbaru, that Mr. Bogart is not going to get the girl this time. He’s truly psychopathic … something like your friend Holt.’
And in the last reel Bogart did become the archetype of a tech rep—lonely, embattled, obstinate, totally incapable of understanding a woman—so that in the final shot he stalked off-camera, a defeated, bitter man taking his battle to some other terrain populated with other actors whom he would be incapable of understanding or adjusting to. It was a shocking end, and when the watery lights come on, and the night sounds of the jungle closed in upon us, a sense of loneliness pervaded the coconut shed. When the German said goodnight he added, ‘Sometimes we get surprises, even in American films.’
On the long drive back to Holt’s camp I said, ‘I didn’t catch the name of that movie.’
‘In a Lonely Place,’ he said. He rarely used the names of movies. In future conversations this would be spoken of as ‘that time when Humphrey Bogart kicked away the love of Gloria Grahame.’ He thought that Bogart should have received an Oscar for this film. ‘Miss Grahame, too, for that matter, but she got one that time when she was Dick Powell’s wife.’ This missed me, but before I could query him, he added reflectively, ‘Funny, Powell was a screenwriter too. I guess Miss Grahame goes for screenwriters.’
On the impulse of the moment I asked, ‘When you tracked down the tiger, did you imagine yourself to be Humphrey Bogart?’
He turned away from the steering wheel and looked at me in astonishment, saying nothing. I pointed to the road and he returned to his driving. After some minutes of silence he said, ‘So far as I know, Humphrey Bogart was never in Sumatra.’ Later he added, ‘Miss Grahame … in some of those last scenes … she looked like Lora Kate.’ I supposed that Bogart in his domestic chaos had looked a good deal like Harvey Holt, but I kept my mouth shut, and when we got back to the camp out of which Holt was working, he asked, ‘You like to hear some music?’
He threaded his machine with a tape he had built up patiently through several years, one that held all the songs and ballads of the golden age when the great bands carried frail and beautiful girls with them, some with surprising voices, and we sat in the darkness of the jungle as those wispy voices came to us from Frank Dailey’s Meadowbrook, Glen Island Casino and Station WOR, laden with lush sentiment: ‘That Old Black Magic,’ ‘Falling in Love with Love,’ as sung by Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald’s ‘Love for Sale,’ and ‘Night and Day,’ sung by three different soloists. When ‘Green Eyes’ unexpectedly appeared, Holt apologized for the Spanish intrusion. ‘Normally I don’t go in for this gook spook, but this one was a great favorite of Lora Kate’s.’
‘Where’d you meet her?’
‘College. Colorado Aggies at Fort Collins. Grew up in Fort Morgan.’
‘What happened?’
The tape had come to one of the songs that Holt liked most, ‘Sentimental Journey.’ ‘I heard this for the first time in camp on Iwo Jima. I was a kid eighteen. I wondered if I would ever know any beautiful women like the ones I had seen singing with the big bands. You know, Helen Forrest and Martha Tilton. Or Bea Wain, for that matter.’ He hesitated. ‘It wasn’t that I was afraid of being killed. I’d seen so many men get it that I knew this was pure chance. Like Humphrey Bogart when he was fighting Sydney Greenstreet for
the statue.’
He rewound and reversed the tape so that he could hear ‘Sentimental Journey’ again, and said nothing till it played through, heavy with the longing of old nights. When the tape passed on to ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin,’ he turned down the volume and said, ‘So when I got home safe and saw this really terrific girl in chemistry … we got married … I wanted to work overseas … to hell with Wyoming and Colorado …’ He laughed. ‘You ever try to make a woman from Fort Morgan, Colorado, happy at Yesilkoy?’
We played music till dawn: ‘Just One of Those Things,’ ‘I’ll Never Smile Again,’ ‘Symphony.’ When Ella Fitzgerald sang ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin,’ Holt repeated the tape three times, and as we went to bed he said, ‘I’ve never been much with the black people, but they sure can sing.’
Holt got good pay. When you were a tech rep you could pick up extra money if you volunteered for what they called hazardous duty. Holt always did, for although he was instinctively afraid of the towers on which communications were based, he had schooled himself to climb them.
‘I was stationed at Gago Coutinho …’
‘You lost me.’
‘Moçambique,’ he said impatiently. ‘Coutinho flew the Atlantic years ahead of Lindbergh. We had finished putting in a Big Rally II and the others had gone back home. This typhoon was blowing across the Indian Ocean—heading away from us but still with a powerful sting in its tail. Snapped off the top of our tower four miles outside of Gago Coutinho—but not all the way off. One girder refused to break loose … kept the steel mass hanging there … thrashing hell out of what was left. So somebody had to climb up there and cut it away. You face these things. It’s like Humphrey Bogart driving that truck when he left Ann Sheridan’s restaurant.’
Later, when I was surveying Moçambique for an industrial project we had in mind, the Portuguese weatherman at Gago Coutinho told me what had happened that night. ‘Such winds. Maybe ninety miles an hour. One stubborn girder refused to let loose. We could see it with binoculars. The manager of the station yelled, “Somebody has got to go up there and cut that junk loose.” You could hear it crashing against the tower. If it hit a man it would crush him in an instant, so the manager kept yelling for volunteers, but he certainly made no move of his own and none of the Portuguese or the natives wanted any of it. He looked at me and said, “You’re the weatherman. It’s as much your tower as anybody else’s.” But I walked away. Then Harvey Holt drove up, and when the manager began yelling at him, he said, “Get me a torch,” and the manager, who had worked in England, started yelling to all of us to find a flashlight, but Holt said, “Acetylene.” And believe it or not, he climbed that tower in that storm with that mass of steel slamming against the struts. We could see him from down here … the white, flickering light at a great height … a ghost … a ghost.’
Holt lashed himself to the girder, whose twisted top refused to break loose, and with his torch began cutting through the contorted metal, but as he worked, the rest of the top, thrown about by the gale as if it were balsa wood, kept crashing into the pylon, so that he had constantly to withdraw his hands and feet lest they be crushed by the steel. He worked for nearly half an hour in this way, cutting a little whenever a lull in the wind permitted but most of the time dodging the flying steel.
When the girder was almost cut away, a savage arm of the typhoon roared inland from the ocean and carried away not only the flapping top but also the girders below, including the one to which Holt had lashed himself. The weatherman told me, ‘We watched in terror as the top part plunged to the earth, wiping out wires and wooden buildings. We thought Holt was on this portion, but his girder must have been very tough, for again it refused to break, although all the others did. So for at least ten minutes this new length of steel flapped back and forth in the gale … with Holt lashed to part of it. We were sure he would be either crushed or thrown loose.’
‘I hung on,’ Holt said later.
When the invading gale retreated, having done its damage, Holt gingerly unfastened the lashings which had saved him, reached out and climbed from the flapping steel onto the lower reaches of the tower, from which he calmly proceeded to cut away the girder. When I asked him how, through all that tossing, he had managed to hold onto the acetylene torch, he said, ‘If your job is to cut steel, you sure as hell don’t drop your torch.’
The highlight of Holt’s life had been his service with the marines, and the apex of this service had been not Iwo Jima or Okinawa or Korea, at each of which he had won decorations, but rather his boot training at Parris Island, where he fell into the hands of a drill sergeant named Schumpeter. ‘He took me a boy and sent me out a man,’ Holt said. Obviously he worshiped Schumpeter the way he did Humphrey Bogart and Spencer Tracy, but he rarely said much about him except that he owed Schumpeter both his life and his scale of values.
During the early years when I was becoming acquainted with Holt, I supposed that in the training at Parris Island, Schumpeter had interceded in some accident to save him, but that was not what Holt meant. The salvation had been spiritual and had come through the iron drilling Schumpeter had given in the fundamentals of man-to-man warfare. ‘A lot of fellows older than I was thought they knew it all,’ Holt said cryptically. ‘A fat belly like Schumpeter couldn’t tell them anything. They’re dead.’
‘What was it he told you?’
‘Lots of things … useful things … like special ways to care for a gun … or use a bayonet.’ Holt refused to talk of his war experiences, but he did add this: ‘Any good drill sergeant could teach you that, of course. What Schumpeter added was a philosophy of war. To him it was two things. Something you damned well better win. And something you damned well better live through.’
Several times I tried to press Holt on these points, but he refused to say anything except that Schumpeter may have been a fat belly, as the others said, but when the marines shipped him out to Okinawa for having slugged an officer, he performed on the battlefield even better than he had in the drill hall. ‘A lot of man with a lot of belly,’ Holt said grimly. ‘He was no loudmouth.’
It was by chance one night in Baghdad that I learned about Holt at war. A marine colonel on detached duty with the Iraqi army happened to sit next to me at the bar of our hotel and we got to talking about one thing and another, and when he heard that I did a lot of work with tech reps, he said, ‘You ever run into a fabulous guy named Harvey Holt?’
Turned out he had been Holt’s platoon lieutenant on Okinawa. ‘Just turned eighteen, with stars in his eyes. He was sort of beautiful, so straightforward and gung ho, but he damned near drove me nuts. Every time I gave an order, he’d say, “Sergeant Schumpeter told us to do it this way,” until I demanded that he be ticketed to some other outfit. The captain called us in and said he was sure we could get this straightened out, but I said I was sick to my gut of hearing about Sergeant Schumpeter, so the captain asked Holt, “What about this, son?” and Holt said, “All I know is that on Iwo Jima, I did things the way he said and I’m alive. The smart alecks are dead.” The captain repeated that he felt sure I would be able to bring Holt into line, so I said, “Isn’t Schumpeter that loudmouth who was broken last month because he slugged the officer at Parris Island?” and when we looked into it, we found that he had been sent to Okinawa as punishment.
‘Well, Holt went all apeshit running around the island till he found Schumpeter, and that afternoon the Japs struck, as you probably read. It was one hell of a go, and right at the point where they hit us hardest were Holt and Schumpeter, a two-man army. It was really something to see … sort of beautiful. I was about a hundred yards behind them, totally pinned down. It was murder that afternoon … murder. And these two characters stayed there inside the three walls of a shattered hut and you would have thought they were Napoleon and Ulysses S. Grant. They made not one false move. Christ, they even sortied at one point, right into a machine gun that couldn’t be swung around in time to hit them. I’m convinced the Japs thought t
here were at least fifty men in that hut. It was really sort of poetic, like the way Homer might have described a couple of Greeks, say, Achilles and Ajax—a young boy and a busted sergeant with a huge gut.’
The colonel began laughing, and I said it was funny to think of Harvey Holt as a Greek, but he said, ‘I wasn’t laughing about that. It was Schumpeter. That night after he and Holt rejoined us and everybody was telling them what a hell of a show they had put on and they ought to get a Silver Star or something, some Japs took a position from which they could bang-bang right into us, and I asked for volunteers to gun them from the rear—not too difficult a job—and I happened to see Schumpeter making himself real small in a corner, and after the team had gone out I said half-jokingly, “Schumpeter, you look scared,” and Holt barked at me, “Of course he is. You would be too.” I turned to this bright-faced kid and started to ask him who …
‘He broke in very fast and said, “In boot camp Schumpeter taught us that a man has only so many chances each day, and when they’re used up, lie low. He also taught us that a man is a horse’s ass ever to get mixed up with the troubles of another outfit. He’ll have enough pain with his own. This isn’t his outfit and he’s afraid to try to get back. Because today he’s used up his chances.”
‘I suppose these days the smart boys would construct some fantastic theory about Holt and Schumpeter to prove their relationship was latent homosexuality. Anyway, Holt appealed over the captain’s head and got transferred to Schumpeter’s outfit, where—as he probably told you—he won all sorts of medals.’
‘He told me nothing.’
‘Back there I said a two-man army. It was really a one-man army, with Schumpeter doing the coaching. Holt was one of the real heroes of Okinawa. They gave him a battlefield commission. He was scheduled to lead one of the units ashore when we invaded Japan. He asked for Schumpeter as his sergeant, but the fat guy said that his luck was used up and he went home. He’s a drill sergeant again at Parris Island. When the marines get a good man, they keep him.’