Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1957)

honor. The smallest ones danced for him, the prettiest girls kissed him, the older women threw flowers at his feet. Suddenly there were tears in Audie’s eyes, and he was throwing kisses to the crowd and crying as he hadn’t cried when his mother died, or when his father deserted the whole family, or when his first wife, Wanda Hendrix, left him. On the surface, Audie is a quiet man. Too quiet. Or too flippant, using either extreme to mask his real feelings. For instance, when he visited Arlington National Cemetery recently, he covered up the deep emotion he felt, as well as his own self-consciousness at the realization that he, too, was one of the nation’s heroes who would someday lie there with her honored dead, by saying flippantly, “I ought to pick out my own grave while I’m here.” But then, a year or so ago, a change began to take place. Audie began to admit this over-quietness, this overflippancy, to himself. Just as, after the war, he had eternally walked the dark streets of Dallas, Texas, searching for he knew not what, so that winter he discovered that, despite his love of Pam, his love for his children, things were getting so dammed up in him that an explosion seemed inevitable. He had to find an outlet for all these troubled and troubling emotions. But how? Where? A different kind of fellow could have been helped by religion. Audie didn’t have a religious upbringing. He had to be helped by thinking it out. The change in him began one day when, in the midst of a trivial, fault-finding argument with Pam, Audie stopped, walked away, and asked himself, “Why do I demand so much of people? Who am I to demand — and expect— perfection?” Who was he, indeed? It was time to stand back and examine himself and his life as though he were a cool, impersonal stranger, called in to estimate and evaluate Audie Murphy. He had always been proud of his early struggles. They had made him strong, fiercely self-reliant. But what else had they done to him? Audie was born the second son of a Texas sharecropper, another seven children being born after him. The year was 1926, which made him seven when the Depression began, but Audie didn’t have to wait for any world-wide depression. The depression was always on for the Murphys, and after his father walked out on his mother and her brood, it was only Audie’s marksman’s eye, an old gun and a bullet a day that kept them eating. By the time he was seventeen he was in the Army, after the Marines and the paratroopers had turned him down because he was underweight. Within months, he was a decorated hero. Within a year he had put on five inches and twenty-five pounds, under the novelty of three square meals a day for the first time in his life. By nineteen, he was out of the Army and in Hollywood. Nowhere along the way had there been any time for fun, for just plain living. Nowhere had there been time or the opportunity to learn how to live, how to enjoy the good things of life for which he had worked and hungered. So, when they came, like marriage, they found him totally unprepared. Audie’s first wife, Wanda Hendrix, is now Mrs. Jim Stack, and Audie can honestly say, “I hope Wanda is very happy.” But the break-up of that marriage, for which neither he nor Wanda was prepared, was another embittering experience, because Audie was at that time far from emotionally mature enough to be able to blame himself and not others for what went wrong with his life. It was all wrong, their union, from the very day of its beginning. What did an emotion-starved boy like Audie know about giving or sharing love? He didn’t. Wanda tried. She tried valiantly, but she knew nothing about keeping a house, less about cooking, nothing about a husband. The fact that Audie would spend evening after evening in the little apartment they had rented, playing penny poker with his war buddies, was no help. Within fourteen months, they were divorced. Audie was so hurt and embittered that he gave away every stick of furniture and never went near the apartment again. Again, he had demanded too much, but he was a long way from being able to see how little he offered in return. Pam Archer, the pretty airline hostess, whom Audie married in 1951, was as different from Wanda as dawn from dinner. She was, in fact — and she still is — very much like Audie. She’s a Texan, an orphan. She’s stubborn, and she’s sweet, and her one ambition in the world is to make Audie Murphy happy. Just the same, she has no intention of being a martyr about it, or of putting up with more moods than the winds. And so, naturally, there were quarrels. There were even rumors of an impending divorce. This was during those dark days when Audie felt the forces within him slowly mounting, getting out of control, threatening to destroy everything he loved and valued. He saw his boys being small wild men, when he wanted them to be so polite. But he was afraid to discipline them for fear of losing their love. There were the hangers-on who either kowtowed to him too much because he was a star, or ignored him because he wasn’t the biggest star on the lot. He didn’t know how to cope with any of it, so he didn’t even try. He kept to himself more and more. And then one day, in the midst of this tormented self-searching and self-seeking, something happened that was so small, so trivial, really, that it almost went by unnoticed. And yet it was to change his life. Audie was out on location shooting for “The Guns of Fort Petticoat.” Going down into the nearby town one evening after the day’s work was finished, he saw a man brutally kicking a small shepherd pup. Audie walked up to him and told him to stop it. The man turned on Audie and said sullenly, “Why? He’s my dog, and if I feel like kicking him, I will.” Audie said, “How much do you want for him?” “I guess about fifty dollars.” “Fine. You’ve just sold a dog.” Audie picked up the cringing, quivering animal and put him into his car. When he got back to the hotel where the rest of the location crew was quartered someone asked him curiously, “With all the dogs you’ve got at home, Audie, why the devil did you go and buy another one? And who’s going to take care of him until you get him back home?” Audie grinned sheepishly, and patted the dog’s head. “Darned if I know,” he admitted. “I didn’t think of any of those things. I just saw somebody kicking him and I moved in and did something about it.” I moved in and did something about it. The words, and the impulsive thought behind the words, stayed with him. Yes, he found himself thinking, slowly, wonderingly, that’s the way it had happened and that’s the way it has been during the war, too. That’s why the fear hadn’t immobilized him. Someone had needed him and he had been able to overcome his own fear, his own problems, because there wasn’t time to think about them. That’s the way it had been in the early days, too, when he had had the specter of poverty and hunger to fight — not for himself so much, but for others. Always, all his life, there had been something to fight. And then suddenly, there had been nothing to fight. All the external battles had been fought and won — the war, the fight against poverty, the fight for fame. That’s when the fight had turned inward, when he’d begun to fight himself. That’s when he had begun to feel that he didn’t belong anywhere, that no one really needed him, and to set up those impossible standards. Without something to fight, he was lost. Because he’d never learned how to love. And yet, he loved this small, warm, happily whimpering dog who was snuggled down in his lap. He had been able to act quickly, spontaneously, when he saw the animal’s need of him. Then why wasn’t he able to act that way with his friends, his wife, his children? Why did he hold back, waiting for them to make the first move? The answer came along with the question, pinpointing his fear, dragging it out into the open where he could face it — and fight it. Living with the world and its people (above, Kathy Grant, George Marshall) was Audie Murphy's problem. His greatest victory came when he learned how to do it