Articles from Collier’s Magazine
Two months after James Dean’s fatal car crash, photographer Sanford Roth (1906 – 1962) penned this reminiscence of his unique friendship with this actor so many years his junior:
Dean was what Hollywood loosely labels a nonconformist, an individualist in the Brando stripe. He wasn’t easy to know.
Those were the days when the talkies had taken over from the silent films and movie executives began a wholesale raid on the New York stage for promising young talent. It was fertile territory. In a comparatively brief period they signed Clark Gable, George Brent, Jimmy Cagney, Joan Blondell, Spencer Tracy Ginger Rogers, Humphrey Bogart, Francis Tone and a score of others. While I was in Broken Dishes I had been screen tested by Samuel Goldwyn for a feminine lead opposite Ronald Coleman…I reached Hollywood with my mother on December 13, 1930.
It was a clear day on a fast track for James Forrestal (1892 – 1949) when the U.S. Congress passed the Two Ocean Navy Bill during the Summer of 1940. At that time both Europe and Asia were engulfed in war and it seemed certain to many that the U.S was not going to be able to avoid it. Serving as the Under Secretary of the Navy, with Frank Knox (1874 – 1944) presiding as his senior, Forrestal was charged with the duty of building the U.S. Navy into something far more dangerous than it already was, and build it he did.
A ranking member of of the German embassy staff in Tokyo told me a few weeks before Pearl Harbor, ‘If Japan goes to war against America and Britain, our days will be numbered here, too. Japan will wage a race war in which we Germans will be regarded as enemies along with the rest of the white race. It is only a matter of time. They intend to conquer all of us, but they are smart enough not to tackle all of us at once.’
Imperial Japan had a great many reasons to dislike their Nazi ally and most of them were far more legitimate than this one. All of them are are laid out in the attached article.
1920s sportswriter Arthur Robinson wrote this profile of his pal Babe Ruth (1895 – 1948) for the editors of Collier’s:
For some years I have had a peculiarly intimate friendship with Babe Ruth…to the alternately and jeering millions who have watched this modern Beowulf at bat, driving out his smashes, it may have appeared that he was just a thick-skinned ballplayer, schooled to deafness on the field. The skin of my friend Babe Ruth is not thick.
The apathetic France of 1939 is dead. Collier’s correspondent, journeying across southern France, found high hope of unity and determination to punish all collaborationists. France, he feels, is reborn.
In an effort to put an end to worker absenteeism at defense plants, a fetching welder at the Albina Engine & Machine Works shipyard (Portland, Oregon), Jeannine Christiansen unhatched a sure-footed scheme to do just that. Recognizing that (most) men don’t find life worth living without rubbing noses with the females of the species, Miss Christiansen instituted the NO WORK NO WOO movement (I think you can guess what Woo means). The attached report states that it was effective and spread to other factories along the West Coast.
During the Autumn of 1944, when the great momentum was with the Allies and the German Army was in rapid retreat, the SS newspaper Das Schwartz Korps declared that an Allied-occupied Germany would not be a placid land:
The Allied soldiers shall find no peace. Death will lurk behind every corner. They might establish a civilian administration, but its leaders would not live a month. Nobody could execute the enemy’s orders without digging his own grave. No judge could pronounce sentences dictated by the enemy without being crucified in his own window frame in the dead of night.
This article goes into great detail concerning how the SS intended to make good on these words.
A list of five outstanding Britons (two women and three men) accompanied by a description of their selfless acts performed during the Nazi Blitz on their homeland.
Who dares to doubt when Britons sing that there will always be an England?
Similar to the one other piece of W.W. II historic fiction posted on this site, this short story is remarkably brief and to the point. Published weeks before America committed itself to the war, this little ditty was penned by Pat Frank (born Harry Hart Frank: 1908 – 1964) who wished to convey the inherit dangers of allowing the Nazi-sympathizing German American Bund to operate unchecked in the land of the free and home of the brave.
A tight little story succinctly told: print it out and read it.
The other short story is called Nesei Homecoming.
Click here to read about the origins of Fascist thought…
In their book about American soldiers in the war-torn Britain of W.W. II, Overpaid, Over-Sexed and Over Here
One evening in 1947, Henry L. Jackson, co-founder of Esquire Magazine, realized that his magazine alone was not sufficient enough in circulation for passing the word along to his fellows that the rules for men’s evening wear were rapidly being rewritten; knowing full-well that Collier’s was one of the preeminent American magazines of its day, he no-doubt must have pleaded the urgency of his case to their editors and, in so doing, saved the collective faces of the homo Americanus once more! We’re delighted that he did so, because now you will have a more thorough understanding as to how you might have dressed had you lived in post-war America.
In every engagement with the enemy during the Second World War, only 12 to 25 percent of American riflemen ever fired their weapons. This was an enormous concern for the brass hats in the Pentagon and they got right to work in order to remedy the problem. Five years later, when the Korean War rolled around, they found that the situation was somewhat improved: 50% of the soldiers were now able to return fire. This article tells the story of U.S. Army General S.L.A. Marshall (1900 – 1977) and his research in addressing this issue. A good read.
It was 1933 interviews like this one that made the studio executives at RKO go absolutely bonkers; what were they to do with Katharine Hepburn (1907 – 2003)? She simply refused to take all matters Hollywood with any degree of seriousness; although she hadn’t been a movie actress for very long at all, Katherine Hepburn was downright impious and goofy when reporter’s questions were put to her:
‘Is it true that you have three children?’ asked the interviewer.
‘I think it’s six,’ she answered.
Such responses served only to frustrate the members of the fourth estate to such a high degree and it seemed only natural that the fan magazine journalists would want to have the final word as to who Katherine Hepburn really was…
-But the Hollywood press did like her future co-star Carry Grant, click here to read it.
Unlike Reinhold Pabel, the W.W. II German P.O.W. whose story is told in the article posted above, the five escapees in this article remained at large long after the war ended. Five minutes researching their names on the internet revealed that every single one of them remained in the U.S. where they held jobs, paid taxes and raised families well into their golden years.
Here is a 1945 article about the Croatian-born American ballerina Mia Slavenska (1916 – 2002) and her popularity. The article divides its column space between telling us about the dancer and providing a brief history of ballet – and how it was once joined at the hip with opera.
These historic pen portraits were compiled and re-worked for publication some fifty years after the San Francisco Earthquake; together they serve to illustrate the collective, yet individual, acts of suffering and heroics that took place April 18, 1906:
On the front steps of an abandoned house she had seen a young Chinese mother nursing a baby. The mother’s face was besmirched, and drawn with weariness. Her own child slept in swaddling blankets beside her. The child on her breast was white.
