Donna Reed: A Pinup So Swell She Kept G.I. Mail

[Guest Iain C]

It was July 1944, and America was at war. From bases and battlefields in Europe and on Pacific islands, soldiers, sailors and airmen were sending streams of letters to their favorite actresses in Hollywood, asking for pinup photos and commenting on life on the front lines.

 

Almost all of that mail, which studios usually answered with a glossy shot showing the star in a saucy pose, has been lost. But the actress Donna Reed, later famous for her roles as Mary Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life” and the middle-class housewife Donna Stone on “The Donna Reed Show” and who won an Oscar for “From Here to Eternity,” saved some of the correspondence. After nearly 65 years in a shoebox inside an old trunk long stored in the garage of her home in Beverly Hills, Calif., the letters have at last been read and made public by the actress’s children. Ms. Reed died in 1986 at age 64.

 

All told, Ms. Reed held on to 341 letters, some typed but many written in the kind of elegant Palmer method cursive script rarely seen today. Taken as a whole, the correspondence offers a candid glimpse of a vanished era, a time when six hard-bitten Marine sergeants could write that “we think you’re swell” and mean it in something other than an ironic sense.

 

“The boys in our outfit,” Sgt. William F. Love wrote on Aug. 18, 1944, from the jungles of New Guinea “think you are a typical American girl, someone who we would like to come home to!!!!!” On March 28, 1944, Sgt. John C. Dale of Tennessee, a tail gunner on a B-17, told Ms. Reed, then 23, that he wanted her “to be the girl back home that I am fighting for.”

 

Cpl. Bob Bowie wrote of how seeing Ms. Reed in “The Human Comedy” made him long to be back home in Los Angeles and wishing “I could see my Mom.” He added: “I don’t know how it affected the other fellows, we never discuss our feelings with one another.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/arts/25donna.html?_r=1

 

At first I thought it was just a pretty funny story about wank-starved soldiers desperate to find some grumble fodder, but as I read on I found myself pretty moved. How brave these men were! I'd never heard of Donna Reed before, but it sounds like she was a really nice woman.

[Guest Benedict Cumberbatch]

were men really ever this innocent and nice? have we degenerated so much since then?

[Guest Iain C]

No, not really. Men in the 40s were rude, sexist, homophobic, violent, heavy drinkers, etc. etc. we've all seen Mad Men. They just had to be polite when asking for titty-shots because their society expected it of them. However, they were also fragile, scared and human at the same time as being basic male arseholes, like soldiers and all men today. I think it's nice that they found an outlet for that as well as their sexual urges.

[Guest Benedict Cumberbatch]

yeah roll on season 3 in july(?)

[lumpenprol]

I dunno, while I'm guessing on the whole you're right Iain, when I talk to my grandfather - who took part in the battle of Okinawa and saw men turned into mincemeat - he has a much more chivalrous and "innocent" attitude towards sexuality - for example he's fond of telling what he considers to be dirty jokes, that are rather tame by today's standards. Though you could argue that geeks are geeks no matter what era, and you might not be far off - I know my grandfather had "bad boy" friends who were more sexually aggressive than he was.

[Guest Iain C]

She was a pretty sweet gal: