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68 IT TOOK NINE TAILORS
full of a patriotic urge to fight for my country and for France, but the Army shoved me back in show business!
We opened at Reading, Pennsylvania, played a couple of weeks on the road, then moved into the Forty-eighth Street Theater in New York. The show was a big success so I was promoted to a captain.
I was still waiting for orders to sail in the fall of 1917 when my father fell seriously ill and was taken to the hospital for an operation from which he never recovered. When I reached the hospital in New York he hadn't long to live. Only Mother was with him, for at that time Henry was in China working for the Standard Oil Company of New York. Father was too weak to talk, but he looked at me in my tailor-made uniform and my silver bars and smiled approvingly. He always admired good-looking clothes, and I think I had as fine a fitting uniform with as highly polished puttees as any West Point captain. If he had spoken, I think he would have praised God that I had stopped making faces for a living.
It was not until May 6, 1918, that my outfit finally received orders to sail. To my complete disgust I discovered that we were going to Italy and not to France. I could converse in French like a Frenchman; but the Army sent me to Italy, so I had to buy an Italian grammar and learn a new language.
We landed in Genoa and were given a magnificent reception by the Italians. They cheered us and threw rose petals at us. It was wonderful, but it was a long way from the front. After three months I could talk Italian, but I decided that I would never hear the sound of shot and shell.
During those three months of waiting and pulling wires to get to France I began to suffer from severe attacks of indigestion. Since I was in the Ambulance Corps and in contact with many doctors, I had them look me over, individually and collectively. None of them could find out what was wrong. I was to learn a good many years later, and after considerable suffering, that I had one of the finest ulcers in captivity.