There was the year we covered the South Pacific. Jayne Mansfield was along, a girl it’s impossible to dislike, who’s kind, anxious to please, and willing to do anything but cover herself up. Mickey Hargitay came, too. In the plane I peered over at the two of them in the seat behind me. He was painting her toenails firehouse red. “She’d do the same for me,” he said.
Her fan letters followed her all through the Pacific. She’d read a fresh batch before she’d eat, then gulp down a stone-cold meal perfectly happy—her fans had fed her. On Guam seven thousand GI’s stood up, cheered, and took pictures of her when she walked on stage, parading her monumental shape. Then, at my suggestion, Bob introduced Mickey. I should have kept my mouth shut. All seven thousand GI’s booed him to the echo.
Twelve thousand marines on Okinawa marched downhill in formation to sit on the ground in a great natural bowl and watch the show. Jayne kicked off her shoes and stood barefoot for an hour and a half because she looked cuter that way, posing with everyone who wanted a picture taken with her. She signed every autograph book, too, drawing a little heart instead of a dot over the “i” in “Mansfield.”
“Who’s going to pay to see it,” I asked Bob, “when she gives it away?”
Years later Jayne came up with a yarn about being stranded off Nassau in allegedly shark-infested waters, which I can testify are so shallow she could have walked to the mainland. I examined her later for mosquito bites; nary a dent on her back or legs. “They’re higher up, Hedda,” she whispered.
I had a special reason for feeling mighty privileged to join Bob on the South Pacific tour, and I used to explain it in talking to our fellows. It made me the only woman in the world able to follow the route her son took journeying from island to island to fight the Japanese.
Bill Hopper, not a bit like his father, is a shy one. The fact that he reached his full growth and height of six feet four when he was fifteen may have something to do with it. He won’t talk about the war, won’t let me write in my column about playing Paul Drake on the “Perry Mason” show or the movies he makes. “If I can’t make it on my own, I don’t want to make it” is his theme song.
In the war he made it strictly on his own as a skin-diving member of the Navy’s Team Ten, Underwater Demolition. Their job was first to sneak in under water and survey the best spots for our landing craft to put ashore on islands held by the enemy. Then their mission was to blast clear paths through the coral, swimming through the reefs with eighty pounds of dynamite apiece on their backs.
One Christmas my family and friends sent off to Bill and his buddies packages with such silly, homey things as miniature bottles of scotch and bourbon, a sniff of his wife’s favorite perfume. Also included was a little bag of earth, a publicity gimmick from one of the studios, labeled “The latest dirt from Hollywood.”
Bill, who doesn’t lack a sense of humor, took the last item along when he and his nine teammates crept ashore on one island. He left behind the tiny sack as a kind of calling card. Team Ten chuckled for weeks imagining the face of the first invading U. S. marine who found it on the beach, asking himself: “How in the name of all that’s holy did this get here among these Japs?”