The Big War, my Dad and Donna Reed

By DENNIS ANDERSON, LCSW

Licensed Clinical Social Worker

When I think about it, it feels like my family life in the Army and the Hollywood studio system have been criss-crossing with Donna Reed for more than three-quarters of a century.

I remember “The Donna Reed Show” as an integral part of my post-war Baby Boom childhood. She played the wise, wistful, warm-hearted and strong mother in a postwar household. The show ended in 1966, about the time that I was entering teen years, and the age of reason, just about the time the Vietnam War would blow up so many of our notions about the cheerful, suburban nuclear family.

I also recall from earlier childhood a documentary TV show from the early 1960s called “Battle Line,” and it would describe where one soldier would encounter one from the other side, for just one moment in time.

That is kind of how it turned out with my father, former Army Tech Cpl. Carl Richard Anderson, a “Greatest Generation” veteran of World War II, and Donna Reed. My own personal memories wander all over the ground they traveled in the real and Hollywood landscapes of war and peace.

She was born Jan. 14, 1921 as Donna Belle Mullenger, of sturdy Iowa stock, according to her Film Reference biography. Her talent and ambition carried her to California, where her performances in community college theater soon won her the attention of Hollywood casting.

The Encyclopedia of Film Actors states that MGM changed her name to “Donna Reed” because of World War II prejudices against German-sounding names. That underlines some of the ironies of shifting prejudices in America over time. Donna, by whatever name, was as Midwest wholesome in life and world view as it is possible to be.

My father and Donna Reed were raised Methodist, and that also may account for some of their similarities in sturdiness and world view. Like those old episodes of Battle Line, my father and Donna Reed’s times and places would overlap in interesting ways through the period of Hollywood’s changes from World War II through the Vietnam War.

My father returned from World War II in Europe where he was an Army Signal Corps film editor. He departed for the war with a cadre of thirtysomething Hollywood professionals drafted by the Army, leaving his studio, Columbia Pictures. In wartime London, and later in Paris, he would go on to edit virtually all combat camera film from the European Theater of Operations, including concentration camp footage that ultimately would be used in the war crimes trials at Nuremberg.

That, and the unnerving bombardment he and his film crew comrades sustained during the V-1 and V-2 rocket blitzes on London in 1944 formed the wellspring of his personal wartime trauma.

He was released from service with honorable discharge on Oct. 17, 1945 upon return from Europe at Ft. MacArthur in San Pedro, Calif., his discharge papers reading, “Male over the age of 35, released at the convenience of the service.”

In other words, for World War II terms, my father counted as an old man, services rendered, no longer needed. But my mother, Charlotte, and my older brother, Phillip, certainly needed him. Little Phillip was 10 months old before my father got to see him for the first time. Phil had been born on Christmas Day, Dec. 25, 1944, while the Battle of the Bulge raged in Europe. My dad worked on the combat footage film for that one, not on the frontline. But Hitler’s last gasp battle lunge in the West, in the Ardennes Forests of Belgium was unnerving for everyone on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Americans beat back Hitler’s legions at “The Bulge” shortly after Christmas 1944, and my big brother was launched in life, with my mother waiting anxiously for my father’s return, like every other service wife and mother in America.

In any event, dad was released from service at Ft. MacArthur, which would be used in shooting key scenes of Donna Reed’s greatest film triumph, “From Here To Eternity,” the 1953 film, which saw her awarded the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Among the eight Oscars the film received, her co-star, Frank Sinatra also won Best Supporting Actor.

Scenes of the “Pineapple Army,” the pre-war Army stationed in Hawaii before the Pearl Harbor attack of Dec. 7, 1941, would be filmed at Ft. MacArthur a few years after my father’s return to work at Columbia Pictures, which produced of 1953 prestige film. “From Here to Eternity” about the Army in Hawaii before Pearl Harbor is a classic that earned eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and ranks in the American Film Institute’s 100 greatest movies.

Honestly, I cannot confirm it as a fact, but my father probably worked on “From Here to Eternity.” He was what was called “a title artist,” a fine brush-work calligrapher who made up the title art in nearly 200 feature movies. Along with a couple of pals named “Boyd” and “Smitty,” he was part of the trio in Columbia’s “paints and pots shop.” Their film work was un-credited, but ironically, it was the first thing anyone saw in a Golden Age of Hollywood movie’s opening minutes.

I recently revisited the title shots of “From Here To Eternity,” and cannot affirm with certainty, but it certainly looked like my father’s “hand,” the unseen signature of his work, the “how” of how an artist does his calligraphic art.

In a profile article for one of my dad’s fine art exhibits, he said, “Hollywood was the lure for all of us, and we joined the army of creative people swept up in the newest, liveliest art. At my own

studio, Columbia Pictures, I was to create hand-lettered art for 185 feature films, ranging from the great to the ghastly. Those films included low-budget howlers like ‘The Three Stooges’ comedies, as well as classics like ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘The Caine Mutiny.’” And perhaps, “From Here to Eternity.”

Donna Reed’s performance was against her wholesome “type,” and succeeded because of the complexity she brought to the role as a “hostess” who befriended the Army’s luckless boxer, Private Robert E. Lee “Prew” Prewitt, played by Montgomery Clift.

Clift’s character provides the principal conflict and drama in the story as he resists a brutal and unjust Army disciplinary regime. In the novel, Reed’s performance as “Alma Schmidt,” AKA “Lorene” was that of a woman with a checkered past, a prostitute determined to scale a social ladder. For Motion Picture Code purposes, Reed was described as a “private hostess,” but she played her part to the hilt and earned critical and formal accolade, the Oscar.

Another AFI Best 100 film role for Donna Reed that had a bearing on the personal life of my father, and every other returning G.I. was “It’s a Wonderful Life,” directed by Frank Capra in 1946, who left Columbia Pictures to go independent at RKO after completing his “Why We Fight” documentaries for the War Department in World War II.

Donna Reed played “Mary Bailey,” the patient, suffering wife of Jimmy Stewart’s suicidal “George Bailey,” but the dramedy fantasy classic about an angel earning his wings by bringing George back from the brink of suicide really was a tribute to every G.I. who returned from the war. Also, to every good faith citizen who supported them on the Home Front. In that way, Donna Reed delivered another iconic performance.

Jimmy Stewart channeled his own as yet undiagnosed PTSD from his service as an Army Air Corps bomber pilot into every moment of George Bailey’s anguish in believing he failed at life in Bedford Falls.

In persuading Stewart to take the part, according to “Five Came Back” author Mark Harris, Capra told the movie star turned bomber pilot that the film was about their miseries from the war, and Stewart responded that he was all in for it. Now,

I understand that my father, stalked by U-Boats in convoy to Europe, bombed by V-1s and V-2s, and editing everything from bomb damage assessment to slave labor camp aftermath carried home his own duffel bag of PTSD. The camp films haunted his dreams for years, my mother told me, late in both their lives.

Donna Reed described "Wonderful Life" as the hardest work she ever did, for the most demanding director, Fred Zinneman. But it was a career-building performance.

My bit of overlap with Donna Reed was a forgotten World War II service comedy she made called “See Here, Private Hargrove.” It was about an Army goofball private like Beetle Bailey, and it was filmed at Camp Roberts near California’s central coast.

It happens I found the “See Here, Private Hargrove” poster in the Camp Roberts Museum. From 1941 through the war, Camp Roberts was the biggest training camp for troops on the West Coast. And 60 years later, after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, it became the training camp for California National Guard headed to the Iraq War.

I was embedded with those troops, and we had our own Private Hargrove, every bit as amiable and awkward as the Hollywood version. Thank goodness he made it home from Iraq in one piece, and we stay in touch. But my travel out and back from Iraq was where I learned about how PTSD destroys a soldier’s peace of mind, and that journey sent me on my trajectory from career journalist covering war, Hollywood, and lots of things for the Associated Press and newspapers, to a new career as clinical therapist working with veterans.

But, there she was at Camp Roberts, my jumping off point for Iraq, Donna Reed on another film poster, in another Army camp that impacted the Anderson family’s military and professional travels.

Donna Reed, and my father shared something else long after World War II. Homespun Donna Reed of “The Donna Reed Show” successful TV run from 1958 to 1966 was as much a Midwest Republican as my father was an Eisenhower Republican. But the unending and directionless Vietnam War meant changes for both. They feared for their grown children.

Reed, like my father, supported Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election, but went on to co-chair “Another Mother for Peace." My father shared the same fears about my older brother, Phillip, being sent to Vietnam.

My dad and Donna Reed encountered each other, not on a “Battle Line” moment at the front, but rather, a stairwell on the studio lot at Columbia. She was carrying an armload of grocery bags as if she were Donna Stone, matriarch of the family Stone on “The Donna Reed Show.”

My dad, ever the gentleman, helped her with the bags, and she was as grateful and cheerful as the lovely woman she portrayed on Baby Boom years television.

“She was a lovely person, so polite, so gracious,” he recalled fondly.

So was my father. Graciousness was the greatest quality common to both, the enduring Hollywood star, and the Hollywood studio artisan, each carrying the burdens and embodying the grace of the earlier and utterly challenging times in which they lived and worked.