Michael Pressler

The Making of Above and Beyond

ROBERT TAYLOR HAS A PROBLEM. He is playing the role of Air Force Colonel Paul Tibbets in a movie. The setting is Colorado Springs in late summer of 1944, and Tibbets’s new CO, a fatherly major general named Vernon Brent (Larry Keating), has summoned him to his office, motioned him to a chair next to the desk, and handed him a small push-button buzzer like the ones Jeopardy contestants use on television. In this case, though, since the cord on the buzzer hangs unattached, we figure it is just for dramatic effect. Sure enough, General Brent explains: “Suppose I told you that if you pressed that little buzzer you might stop a war tomorrow. That you’d save half a million American lives and probably as many of the enemy ... but by pressing that buzzer you have to kill a hundred thousand people in one flash. What would you do?”
    Taylor/Tibbets looks down at the buzzer in his hand and furrows his brow, readjusting his weight in the chair before looking back at the general to be certain he really means business. “Take your time,” says Brent with paternal warmth from behind the desk, but then he adds gravely, “Be sure, Paul. From this point there’s no turning back.” Tibbets looks down at the buzzer again, eager to make the right decision and pass this hypothetical but obviously important test. His thumb begins to waver and his gaze shifts back and forth several times between the general and the button. He knits his brow more deeply. Steadies his thumb. Squares his jaw. Purls his brow. Then with sudden bold resolution, his eye fixed on the big picture and his mind set—confident, unequivocal, transcendent—he presses the button.
    This is not the actual decision to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima as recounted by eyewitnesses or historians, but the decision as dramatized in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film Above and Beyond (1953). In reality Paul Tibbets, thirty-year-old pilot of the Enola Gay, neither figured in the decision to use the bomb nor finally “pushed the button” that released it. As the roll-up following the opening credits of the movie has already revealed, in words gliding over a picture-postcard view of the Capitol building, “No one man was responsible.” Even so, the opening statement concludes, “it is hoped that the story told here ... can serve to illumine the combined achievement of all.”

1. ACTIVATION

        It was just another mission, if you didn’t let imagination run away with
        your wits.
        —Paul Tibbets, “How to Drop an Atom Bomb,” The Saturday Evening Post,
        June 8, 1946

    When Dore Schary assumed control of production at MGM in 1951, cynics quipped that he had become “Mayor of Rome while it was burning.” The immediate reference was to the studio’s blockbuster that year, Quo Vadis?, in which Peter Ustinov as Nero torched the Eternal City in hope of finding poetic inspiration, a tacit reference to the postwar situation of MGM itself, whose own empire seemed to be going up in smoke for lack of the same thing. And the victim of the pun, the outgoing Mayer, was Louis B., who—after three years of wrangling with Schary, his vice president in charge of production, and a final showdown with Nicholas Schenck, president of Loews, Inc., the MGM parent company—had left fuming, having been forced to resign. Schary was no Irving Thalberg, but since his arrival in 1948, with MGM fortunes at an all-time low, the studio had begun showing a profit and earning Oscar nominations again.
    The secret of Schary’s success was the well-made, low-budget picture with a message, and in his then ten-year career as an executive producer, war films had played a crucial role. His debut production as head of B films at MGM in 1942-3 was Joe Smith, American, featuring Robert Young as a kidnapped munitions worker who refused to reveal secrets to the Nazis. Joe Smith was followed in the next eighteen wartime months by Nazi Agent, Journey for Margaret, and Bataan. When Mayer denied him permission to make Storm in the West, an allegorical Western epic on World War II that Schary had cowritten with Sinclair Lewis, Schary left MGM and became head of production for David O. Selznick’s low-budget unit, Vanguard Films, where his first picture was I’ll Be Seeing You (1944), a love story about a shell-shocked GI (Joseph Cotten) and a convict out on parole (Ginger Rogers). When Schary moved to RKO as head of production in 1947, his first release was another disturbed-vet film, Crossfire. And when he returned to MGM in 1948 as production chief under Mayer, his first personal production was Battleground, which focused on a division of American troops during the Battle of the Bulge, and which, to the dismay of Mayer, who had opposed the project, was nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture.
    Schary’s fondness for war movies was not the result of military experience (he never served) nor was it due to hawkish political sentiments (in opposition to Mayer’s staunch Republicanism, he was a liberal Democrat who worshipped FDR and campaigned vigorously for Adlai Stevenson). The film of men at war was consistent with his vision of the Hollywood studio system, however. In Case History of a Movie (1950), a good-natured public relations book cowritten with Charles Palmer, Schary’s metaphor for film production was childbirth, but his autobiography, Heyday (1979), is rife with metaphors equating film production with warfare. In the battle of the big studios, executive producers, hoping to “steal a march,” issue “command decisions” to their “squadrons,” “forces,” or “ground troops.” Within the studios, “combat veterans” attempt to “secure their positions” by making “forays,” engage their rivals in “skirmishes” or “pitched battle,” launch “sneak attacks,” and march into the boss’s office with “heavy ammunition” and “flags flying.” Here is Schary on the MGM hierarchy:

        Mayer was commander in chief. The executives ... were field generals.         Producers and directors were colonels, majors, and captains, depending on their         credits. Writers were privates.

And on the relationship between studio and parent company:

        Each of the major studios was divided into two camps. There was a command         post in New York that, in effect, became the strategic and tactical arms         determining where the forces would be deployed. The California troops were         considered to be behind the lines. We trained and formed the units (the films),         and then sent them to New York for assignment.

Elsewhere in Heyday the studio head is “the commanding general”; the executive producer, “the CO of the outfit”; the director, “the field commander on the set [who] directs the charge but needs the troops to carry the day.” This embattled view of studio life, along with Schary’s record of turning to drama in uniform at key points in his career, makes it small wonder to read in his autobiography that, upon succeeding Mayer in 1951, he was once again “looking for a war film.”
    An opportunity arose when Colonel Beirne Lay, Jr., approached the studio with an idea for a picture about “Operation Silverplate,” as the Hiroshima mission had been code-named. Lay, a Yale graduate and highly decorated World War II bomber pilot, was in the middle of a prosperous postwar career selling military “secrets” to book publishers and Hollywood studios. Before the war he had cowritten a screenplay for Paramount based on his memoir of Air Force training school, I Wanted Wings; after the war he did an adaptation of his novel Twelve O’Clock High for Darryl Zanuck at Fox (released in 1949, it was nominated for Best Picture along with Schary’s Battleground). Tibbets reports in his autobiography (The Tibbets Story, written with Clair Stebbins and Harry Franken and published in 1978) that Lay had been talking to Curtis Lemay, head of the Strategic Air Command, about the high divorce rate among flight crews. Under Lemay’s command, SAC crews spent long hours on alert and were often stationed at advance bases overseas, where they remained for weeks at a time, separated from their wives and children. “Theirs wasn’t the kind of life that led to stability in marriages,” Tibbets recalled, “but SAC was convinced that, during this Cold War period, the training and discipline were vital to defense.” Accordingly, Lay persuaded Lemay that “it might help SAC’s problem and the morale of its men to do a film story about the atomic bomb project that would focus on the strain it put on family life.”
    Tibbets overestimated Beirne Lay’s interest in the theme of family strain. Production materials for Above and Beyond, which have survived in the MGM archives at the University of Southern California Cinema-Television Library, show that Lay’s original proposal, “The Story of Colonel Paul Tibbet [sic],” centered on “the human caliber of a man who carried out a mission,” a mission whose absolute secrecy demanded “that he work terribly alone in surmounting the series of peculiar and unprecedented obstacles that beset him, with huge stakes in the balance.” The vagueness of the hero, and Lay’s brief outline of obstacles (only one of which was domestic), would have been less important to MGM than his assurance of full cooperation by both Tibbets and the Air Force, which not only meant over a million dollars worth of free production values for a war film but was necessitated by military security at the time. In January 1951 Schary optioned the story and contracted Lay to write a treatment; the result, titled “Heaven High, Hell Deep,” was ready by spring.
    Lacing history with fiction, Lay’s hundred-page treatment used flashbacks to trace Tibbets’s life in familiar biopic style: Born in 1915 in the “average American small town” of Quincy, Illinois, Paul learns as a boy vital lessons in courage from his parents. As a young man and against his father’s wishes, he abandons medical school to become an Air Force pilot, then courts and marries Lucy, a “Georgia peach” with “animation and demonstrativeness in direct contrast to his quiet seriousness.” Following Pearl Harbor he whips a sad-sack flight crew into shape for combat and distinguishes himself on the European and North African fronts before being chosen to test the new B-29 bomber and eventually to pilot the first atomic strike against Japan. “Heaven High, Hell Deep” deals summarily with the moral question of the bomb (“War is immoral, not the weapon!” states an early studio summary) and after Hiroshima shows a ragged, teary POW blessing Tibbets for ending the war. By the end of Lay’s treatment, our hero is “like a dead man whose emotions are frozen and numb,” but from overwork, not conscience. The effects of top secrecy on his marriage are mostly limited to his wife Lucy’s becoming jealous when she hears rumors of his involvement with two “pretty and petite” WASP pilots.
    In the treatment, as in his story outline, Lay is less interested in family matters than in charting the boundaries of male courage under fire. In a letter dated April 20,1951, he concedes to Schary that “Heaven High, Hell Deep” has “far too much material for one picture” and suggests that the first-draft screenplay focus only on the final phases of Tibbets’s career, in keeping with what Lay cites as the story’s “central idea”—watching the hero “push beyond the barriers of effort at which most of us stop and tap those deeper reservoirs of strength which are latent in all men.”
    During story conferences with Schary in May, however, the center of gravity shifted. All but a few of the fifteen-odd pages of dictated notes surviving from these conferences (in the MGM collection at USC) are concerned with enlarging the role of Lucy and developing what Schary calls “an emotional line for the story.” In a new expository scene set in the Tibbets home, we learn that Paul and Lucy have had little time together as a couple, that their first child was born while his father was overseas, and that Lucy is sensitive to the dangers of her husband’s work and eager to have him home more often. Other fictional scenes are added—one set in a neighborhood playground, four more at home—to capitalize on Lucy’s frustration and heighten the domestic melodrama. Finally, “the growing irritation between Lucey [sic] and Paul” culminates in a “hard and angry scene” which leaves them “cool and distant.” To further serve the domestic angle, it was decided that the story—now titled “Eagle on a Cap”—would be narrated by Lucy as she looked back on the events preceding Hiroshima “from the viewpoint of her troubled marriage.” Schary’s fondness for war films did not dim his awareness of the MGM publicity department’s current slogan, “Sell the Women and You Sell the Tickets.”
    To write the screenplay and produce the picture, Schary turned to Norman Panama and Melvin Frank, longtime collaborators and close friends who often visited Schary’s Brentwood home on weekends to participate in family vaudeville skits. Panama and Frank had begun their professional careers together as radio gagmen for Milton Berle, Red Skelton, and Bob Hope. As contract screenwriters for Paramount between 1942 and 1946, they cowrote musicals and star-tailored comedies (notably the Bob Hope vehicles My Favorite Blonde and Monsieur Beaucaire, and the Hope-Crosby Road to Utopia). Following the success of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948), which they wrote and coproduced for Schary during his stint at RKO, they signed a contract with MGM to coauthor, coproduce, and codirect their films. “Eagle on a Cap” was their fourth project under this arrangement and their first attempt at serious drama.
    In weekly story conferences with Lay during August, and in whole and partial drafts submitted over the next two months, Panama and Frank hammered out a screenplay within the margins set in Lay’s conferences with Schary. Developing and plausibly motivating the conflict between Paul and Lucy Tibbets was a top priority. “We must find some things which show warmth between them and a basis for compatibility in the marriage,” worries an early conference note, and consequently Paul and Lucy became characterized by Panama and Frank as a typical American couple divided by, well, typical circumstances for married men in the Hollywood entertainment war. A compilation of excerpts from the conference notes indicates the direction of their thinking:

        “Lucy wants a normal relationship with her husband,” a “natural, human,
    relaxed life,” and “in trying to fight for Paul and the normal home life she does the     wifely things,” “determines to mother Paul, to get him back to normal.” But “Paul     has a strange dedication to work that even he doesn’t understand”; he “tries to     accept the normal life but he’s tense, restless.”
        Paul’s tension is job related, but “Lucy can get the wrong idea, particularly if
    Paul were expected home for an occasion; i.e., kid’s birthday party, christening,
    etc. and either didn’t show up or came in late.... Possibility of a scene on their     anniversary in which Lucy has set up an intimate dinner for the two of them....
    Paul comes home. Lucy has apparently been up all night. She is cold, wants to     know where he’s been. Paul lies.”
        Soon “Lucy begins to suspect that Paul is taking himself and his work too
    seriously ... turning into an automaton ... only a husband on paper.” He “isn’t the     man she married. He’s turned into a power-hungry, deceitful louse.” Paul is
    “almost at the breaking point because of his bad relationship with Lucy and the     increased pressure of his work,” but “Lucy doesn’t care about anything except the     fact that she and the children are with him.... This is her point of view as a woman     and mother.”

    As work progressed on the script, Robert Taylor and Eleanor Parker were cast in the lead roles of Tibbets and Lucy. Each had special qualifications. Taylor was a licensed pilot and had served as a Navy flying instructor during the war. After his discharge MGM presented him with a new twin-engine Beechcraft and put two of his service buddies, Ralph Couser and Tom Purvis, on the studio payroll as, respectively, his copilot and traveling companion. Subsequently Taylor became well acquainted with the strain that frequent flying could put on family life. Following her divorce from him in 1952, less than a month before production began on what would become Above and Beyond, Barbara Stanwyck took a cold backward look at the end of their twelve-year marriage: “It all began when he got that airplane,” she told Louella Parsons in an interview, “and when I realized he was always on some kind of hunting or fishing trip with his friends.” To another interviewer Stanwyck complained about having become a “long-distance telephone wife,” and her public announcement of their intention to seek divorce explained that she and Taylor had been “separated just too often and too long.” Eleanor Parker might well have understood. Having established her career playing long-suffering heroines, she had received an Oscar nomination for her role as the neglected wife of workaholic Kirk Douglas in Detective Story (1951) and was in the process of divorcing her second husband when cast as Lucy.
    In the final version of Panama and Frank’s screenplay, dated December 20, 1951, and now titled “Eagle on His Cap,” Lucy Tibbets narrates the story in retrospect, from the vantage point of August 1945, after the news has broken about the dropping of the A-bomb on Hiroshima. The flashback structure permits parallel treatment of the personal and the official stories, of home and business, with the wife as the central force in the home, the husband at work. The real war in the movie, in other words, is between breadwinner and homemaker, and each combatant has a key inner conflict: Tibbets must keep The Big Secret despite the enticements and obligations of domesticity, while Lucy must confront the threat that her husband’s absorption in his work poses to the traditional domestic values she represents. Since everyone in the movie theater knows the outcome of Operation Silverplate, Tibbets’s loyalty to his job is a foregone conclusion; what remains to be seen are the effects of that loyalty on his home and marriage.
    In March of 1952 “hush-hush” production began on location in Arizona, where, for some of the flying sequences, Variety reported, Melvin Frank—having graduated from screenwriter to director—was employing a converted B-25 “equipped with seven camera mounts, each wired to the cockpit and operated by remote control.” At Taylor’s request MGM flew Tibbets out for two visits to the set. When shooting moved to the studio soundstages and back lots, Schary, Panama, and Frank screened and discussed the rushes and rough cuts on Sunday evenings in Schary’s living room. After the film was edited, its title was changed from “Eagle on His Cap” to Above and Beyond and—following previews for test audiences, exhibitors, and the press—it was released to the general public in January 1953.

2. FISSION

        Perhaps the best way to convey a sense of the earliest days of what almost
        immediately came to be called the “Atomic Age” is not to impose too much
        order or coherence on them retrospectively. Out of the initial confusion of
        emotions and welter of voices, certain cultural themes would quickly emerge.
        —Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the         Dawn of the Atomic Age (1985)

    Fade in on Lucy Tibbets standing by the airport gate in Washington, D.C. Her husband Paul’s return flight from the Hiroshima mission is overdue, and she is worried about their reunion, not because he has just dropped the first atomic bomb but because of the trouble it has caused in their marriage. “Seems like I’m always waiting, waiting for the sound of a plane that will bring my husband home,” her voice-over sighs, “only this time I don’t know whether I still have a husband, whether he still wants his home, or whether this is finally the end of the road for Paul and me.... Where did it start? When did it start?”

    The starting point of a story, any story, from Humpty Dumpty to War and Peace, is     somebody’s idea, a germ idea which somebody considers promising enough to     justify the effort of filling and fleshing and building it out into a form ready for the     public’s judgment.
    —Dore Schary, Case History of a Movie (1950)

    Flashback to North Africa, 1943. Tibbets is leading a squadron of B-17s on a low-level bombing mission that his men are calling “murderous bloody suicide” when one of the pilots, under heavy flak, radios for a new flight plan. No sooner has Tibbets ordered him to “fly the mission as briefed” than the pilot’s plane is hit and explodes. Another plane goes down trailing white smoke. Back at the base, Tibbets is barely out of the cockpit when he is handed orders for another run that same day, right after lunch, and he storms off to see General Roberts, the base commander.

    You can’t pin down the creative process into a step-by-step routine in the germ     stage of a story; you take what your subconscious flips up to the surface and put
    the pieces together.
    —Dore Schary, Case History of a Movie (1950)

    At that moment Roberts is closeted with another general who even in uniform looks more like a college dean than a military man. His name is Vernon Brent, and he is visiting the base to recruit a test pilot for a new bomber some are calling a “death trap”—the B-29. Just as Brent is spelling out the job requirements (“a man with experience and guts—underline guts”), Tibbets strides into the office and argues for the safety of his men. Roberts in unmoved. “You’ll fly the mission as briefed,” he orders, bristling at such insubordination, and after Tibbets has saluted coldly and left the room, Roberts grabs the phone and cancels Tibbets’s upcoming promotion to colonel. Brent, meanwhile, has been watching the scene with deep interest. He admires Tibbets’s outlaw spirit. “I’ve always been a hunch player,” he reflects while Roberts simmers nearby. Within minutes Brent has arranged for Tibbets’s transfer, and soon the two men are boarding a plane for the States.

    The fact is, a movie is essentially a hand-craft operation, a one-of-a-kind custom     job—but it must be made on a factory basis, with production-line economies.
    —Dore Schary, Case History of a Movie (1950)

    Work [on the bomb] was so compartmentalized that each worker knew only his     own job, and had no inkling of how his part fitted into the whole. Some of the
    men, it was told today, could not be sure they were actually producing anything.
    —“Atom Bombs Made in Three Hidden Cities,” the New York Times, August 7,     1945

    As you see, this is an honest illusion. It merely brings two separate pieces of reality     into a new combination.
    —Dore Schary, Case History of a Movie (1950)

    During the plane ride, seated beside the general, Tibbets is describing coffee as his “main diet” when Brent asks him why he has a small brown paper bag tied up with a pink ribbon sitting on his lap. “It’s kind of a gag I have with my wife,” Paul answers shyly, opening the bag to reveal a bottle of Lucy’s favorite perfume. He confesses that the first time he brought perfume home for her he felt embarrassed, and ever since then he has kept up the tradition of the paper bag and pink ribbon, even though it must seem “a little corny.” Brent understands. “I know a lot of men who’ve had great difficulty revealing emotion,” he says, his mind sobering to business. “It’s a quality that’s sometimes indispensable.” Though Tibbets hasn’t seen Lucy in two years and has never seen their firstborn, Paul Junior, Brent tells him that after a half-hour reunion at the airport, he must leave for Wichita without them. “Sorry, Paul,” he says, a paternal hand on the young pilot’s knee. “Just tell her I’m the heavy.”

    Employers should know that transferring employees to ... distant communities     [without] taking the family along ... are doing their employees a serious disservice.     —Reuben Hill, Families Under Stress (1949)

    In the early years of the cold war, amid a world of uncertainties brought about by     World War II and its aftermath, the home seemed to offer a secure private nest     removed from the dangers of the outside world. The message was ambivalent,     however, for the family also seemed particularly vulnerable. It needed heavy     protection against the intrusions of forces outside itself.
    —Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era
    (1988)

    Lucy is a real trooper. She receives the perfume in the brown paper bag and the news of her husband’s immediate departure with equanimity. After all, there is a war on and women must make sacrifices too. “We have a lot of catching up to do,” she says wistfully as Paul prepares to reboard the general’s plane. “If I didn’t have you I wouldn’t have anything,” he says, then is off to top-secret work.

    Whether you are a man or a woman, the family is the unit to which you most     genuinely belong.
    —The Woman’s Guide to Better Living (1953)

    Days stretch into weeks, weeks into months, Lucy informs us on the soundtrack as we watch Tibbets putting the B-29 through a series of dangerous tests. Lucy flies to Wichita once but leaves the next day: “I’ll never forget the terror I felt as I stood there, unable to do anything but watch,” she recalls. Then one weekend she and Paul manage to steal a few hours in a rented cabin by a lake. “It’s so crazy,” she muses, nestling in his arms. “Here we are married five years, parents of a two-year-old child, and yet all we’ve really lived together is a total of about seven weeks.” The next day, though, Paul is back on the job, and six more months will pass before the B-29 is ready for combat and he can return to his now pregnant wife.

    Everyday living with no man about the house is essentially an unnatural way of
    living. Therefore make those few precious days of leave, above all, natural. Even     three days spent in the good old familiar way can almost wipe out the fatherless     months that have gone before.
    —Juliet Danziger, “Daddy Comes Home on Leave,” Parents magazine, October     1944

    After the B-29 passes its tests, Paul is allowed home for a brief visit. Lucy pauses from housecleaning to draw the drape back from her living room window. Paul, wearing a plaid shirt and smoking a pipe, is mowing the front lawn. She watches as he draws a huge lollipop from his pocket, and (after a quick glance around to be sure no spoilsports are watching) bends down to give it to Paul Junior. “Oh, it was wonderful,” Lucy remembers, “the way I’d always dreamed it would be.” That very night, however, just as they are packing for a weekend vacation in the mountains, a call comes for Paul to report immediately to Wendover Air Force Base in Utah for a new assignment. Lucy tries to put on a game face but cannot restrain her tears. “Someday I’m going to have a baby and you’re going to be there when he’s born,” she sobs as Paul cradles her in his arms. “Or she’s born,” he says in a weak attempt to lighten her up. “Well,” sighs Lucy, looking at Paul’s suitcase on the bed, “at least you’re packed.”

    Perhaps you’re right to start the project, perhaps you’re wrong; you won’t find out     for sure until later. At the idea stage, you think it’s good and you will of necessity
    go through the same steps with the same fervor for a great success as for a     resounding flop. Like raising a child.
    —Dore Schary, Case History of a Movie (1950)

    On his arrival at Wendover, Tibbets undergoes several ID checks before being admitted to the office of Major “Bud” Uanna (James Whitmore), security watchdog at the base. Uanna holds a file on Tibbets that reveals everything from the amount he paid for a lunch in 1941 to his arrest for speeding as a teenager. In his autobiography the real Tibbets remembered this meeting differently:

    As a college student of nineteen, I was interrupted by a nosy policeman with a     flashlight during a love-making episode while parked in a secluded spot on the     beach at Surfside, Florida. Since it was obvious that my questioner knew about
    this, I promptly acknowledged the incident, which was the nearest I ever came to     acquiring a criminal record.
    —Paul Tibbets, The Tibbets Story (1978)

    Having survived Uanna’s grilling, our hero is ushered into General Brent’s office, where he passes the test with the buzzer. After a thoughtful pause, Brent issues an order over the intercom and in stream all the bigwigs of the Manhattan Project—Parsons, Ramsey, Sloan, Van Dyke—who have been just outside the door waiting to give Tibbets a crash course in nuclear fission. During their presentation Brent keeps a close eye on his protegé to be sure he is up to grade. Alone in the hall after the briefing, Tibbets slides his cap back on his forehead and mutters “My God,” evoking an ominous orchestral sting on the soundtrack. Then, after phoning Lucy to say that he will be busy for a few months but home in time for the new baby, he begins organizing the mission.

    The distribution of the “okay scripts” set wheels in motion in varied departments
    all over the seventy-five acres. Now the heads of the key departments came     together for the official kick-off, the first of a series of meetings.
    —Dore Schary, Case History of a Movie (1950)

    “I’m referring to talk—women talk,” Uanna says sharply, looking up from under bushy eyebrows. Tibbets is smoking a cigarette as he listens, his hip resting on the office desk. “If enough women in enough places do enough talking,” Uanna worries, “in beauty shops, grocery stores, and bridge parties ... someone’s going to find out something we don’t want them to know.” He wants to bring all the servicemen’s wives to the base, where they can be wrapped in a blanket of security—all the wives, that is, except Lucy. “I think you’re gonna be too tough to live with,” he tells Tibbets. “Your wife can never be a part of you. She can never share what you know, what you think, or what you feel.” At first reluctant, Tibbets agrees to Uanna’s plan.
    “I guess that was my low point,” we hear Lucy recall over a montage of other wives watching their kids play on swings and seesaws in a makeshift playground at Wendover. “I felt lonely and unwanted and unattractive and pretty generally sorry for myself.” Small wonder: when she goes into labor, she has to leave Paul junior with Paul’s mother, Enola, and drive herself to the hospital. “What a funny name, Enola,” she reflects behind the wheel, between contractions. “Backwards it spelled ‘alone.’”

    It is the natural, wholesome way of living—having children and establishing a     home—that counts. Having a child makes a soldier realize that he has something     very real to fight for. With a home and family waiting for him, he has an incentive
    to give everything he has.
    —Carole Landis Wallace, “Should War Wives Have Babies?” Photoplay, December     1943

    Tibbets is giving everything he has at the shop when his wife calls to tell him she has had another boy. At first, mindful of Uanna’s warning, Paul balks at Lucy’s wanting now to join him at the base, but her enthusiasm softens him. After the call, unmanned by guilt and self-pity, he pulls a stale cigar from his desk drawer and toasts his second son’s birthday with a Dixie cup of water. “Congratulations, pal,” he says barrenly, as rain beats against the office window behind him, the tears a hero cannot shed. A few days later, Lucy and the kids arrive at Wendover.

    The studios ... don’t look particularly romantic: the massed ranks of the
    twenty-five stages look more like huge warehouses, their windowless walls rising     like gray stucco cliffs above the thirteen miles of narrow concrete streets enclosed     within the boundary fences.
    —Dore Schary Case History of a Movie (1950)

    “There’s no sidewalk,” Paul Junior whines when he sees their new house at Wendover. And not only that, there’s no lawn, just a drab stretch of sand in front of a barrack. The interior resembles a cardboard box, with nailed-up plasterboard, bare wooden floors, and an electric bulb with a paper lampshade hanging from the middle of the ceiling. “As long as we’re together, what difference does it make,” Lucy says gamely, but she is clearly grasping at straws. This shack makes the Honeymooners’ apartment look like a guest suite at Versailles.

    A war baby can be well cared for, happy and healthy, in spite of the fact that he
    and his mother have to go without many of the things that we thought babies and     mothers needed. Fathers who are in the service are doing without things too, and
    it is up to war babies and their mothers to face shortages with ingenuity and
    without unnecessary complaints.
    —Rosemary L. Donoghue, “Is the Wartime Baby Out of Luck?,” Parents magazine,     December 1944

    Lucy pursues happiness at the base, but life there does not allow much liberty. The kitchen faucets knock and spit. A blast from the testing grounds causes the wash line to fall while she is pinning up the family laundry. Overnight the clothes freeze on the line and in the morning hang like blank shingles above her lawn of sand. Meanwhile Paul’s work on the mission is going into high gear:

    There’s a wonderful atmosphere when a crew is keyed high and shooting fast: a     take goes in, the key men swing in for a quick huddle around the director, take his     instructions, and spread out again to jump for the new setup.
    —Dore Schary, Case History of a Movie (1950)

    One night, just as he and Lucy are sitting down for dinner, Tibbets gets a phone call to report immediately to work, and a vaguely familiar conversation ensues:

    LUCY: Not again. Can’t you eat one meal at home?
    PAUL: Sorry, dear, this is important.
    LUCY: It’s always important. Where are you going?
    PAUL: Lucy, I’ve told you before. Where I go and what I do outside this house is                 none of your business. So please don’t ask any questions.
    LUCY (coldly accepting his good-bye peck on the cheek) Sorry....

    Paul continues to sacrifice his private life to top-secret work. On the night Lucy has baked a cake to celebrate their wedding anniversary, he is ordered to report to a scientific briefing about a forthcoming testing of the bomb. While the scientists lecture obscurely about figures, measurements, and computations, our eye keeps drifting to a huge corolla of radiation sketched on the blackboard behind them. Alone with Brent after the briefing, Tibbets confesses feeling “pretty uncomfortable” with the idea of mass destruction. “I wouldn’t think much of myself if I didn’t,” he adds. “Neither would I, Paul,” says Brent, putting his hand on the younger man’s shoulder, like a scoutmaster comforting a boy whose nose was bloodied in a scrape.
    While Brent and Tibbets are reassuring one another about their essential humanity, Lucy and the children have fallen asleep on the couch. Arriving home too late for the anniversary cake, Paul helps tuck the kids in bed. As Lucy and Paul stand over the crib, she remarks that, every time she sees the children sleeping, she is saddened by the thought that “somewhere in this war bombs are being dropped and children are being killed.” Paul freezes in her embrace. “Don’t you ever say that again!” he explodes. “We’re in a war and innocent people are dying and that’s horrible. But to lose this war to that gang we’re fighting would be the most immoral thing we could do to those kids, and don’t you forget it!” Stunned by this unexpected outburst, Lucy stares at her husband as he walks away. That night they sleep in separate beds.

    Periodically, in this business, you ask yourself, “Why do you go through this, the     interminable hours and the hard work, the bitter disappointments and the kicks
    that you don’t deserve and the slams that you do, and all the rest of it, why do you     go through with it?”
    —Dore Schary, Case History of a Movie (1950)

    One morning as Lucy is coming out of the base’s ramshackle post office, her best friend Marge runs up in alarm—one of the neighborhood children has fallen off a swing and has a concussion, needs to be flown immediately to a hospital in Salt Lake City, but cannot be without Paul’s permission (since Brent has put him in charge of the base), and Paul has left orders not to be disturbed. Commandeering a jeep, Lucy rushes off into no-woman’s-land.

    Young women are rarely calm or detached concerning children. Following the     ancient biological law of the female, they are strongly moved emotionally. The     maternal instinct is the potent driving force.
    —Edward A. Strecker, “What’s Wrong with American Mothers?,” Saturday
    Evening Post, October 1946

    Lucy breaks past the guards who try weakly to restrain her and into the restricted area where Paul is working. Breathlessly she explains the emergency, and Paul dispatches a plane but also has the soft-hearted guards arrested, despite Lucy’s objection. “Go home, stay home, and keep your nose off this base,” he orders her. That night, when Paul reveals that he has been promoted to colonel, Lucy is noticeably chilly. Paul snaps at junior for not picking up his toys. The baby starts crying. “Congratulations,” Lucy says bitterly. “I’m working late tonight,” Paul grumbles, heading for the door. “I’ll eat at the office.”

    Ultimate perils, however great, have a less lively influence upon the human     imagination than immediate resentments and frictions, however small by
    comparison.
    —Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Atomic Issue,” Christianity and Crisis, October 1945

    “Can’t we have one meal in peace?” Paul shouts a few days later during dinner, throwing his silverware on the table. The kids are bawling again, and Lucy is tired of being a bird in a guarded cage: “You’re not the man I married,” she cries. “You’ve killed every ounce of affection I ever had for you and I want out!” Frustrated, tired, and indignant, Paul says that he will make the necessary arrangements. Later that night, as he leaves for Colorado Springs to give General Brent the final go-ahead for the mission, Lucy watches the plane from the window, the baby in her arms.
    Tibbets finds General Brent lying in a hospital cot, his midsection elaborately swathed in bandages, the victim of a freak plane crash. Unflinching in the fulfillment of duty, however, the general perks up when he hears that the bomb is ready to go. “Don’t you go drop that thing in some old rice paddy,” he says with mock authority, his face bathed in ethereal light. “God bless you, sir,” replies Tibbets solemnly.

    The decision that a picture is ready to go out entails the same anxious
    responsibility as the original, “We’ll do it.” Is it really ready? Are there things you     still haven’t thought of which would increase its appeal? As long as you keep the     picture in your own hands at the studio you can keep on improving it, but once
    you ship it that’s the way it’s going to be and you’ll stand or fall on it. Actually, I     suppose the feeling is akin to that of sending your child out into the world.
    —Dore Schary, Case History of a Movie (1950)

    Meanwhile at the base, Lucy pleads desperately with Uanna to tell her what is up with Paul, but all Uanna will say is be patient, and when she leaves the office, one of his agents sneaks along behind her like a butterfly collector. Later Uanna persuades Tibbets that the best thing would be to send Lucy back to Washington and spread the rumor that they have split up. And so, despite Lucy’s willingness to accept blame for their problems, Paul resists her embrace. He stands alone on the runway, watching the plane carrying his wife and family away.
    A short time later Paul and his crew leave for Tinian Air Force Base, takeoff point for the Hiroshima mission, where they receive their final briefing by Curtis Lemay and William Parsons, the Navy captain who will be arming the bomb in mid-flight.

    Parsons signaled the technicians to switch on the projector. Nothing happened.
    The operator fiddled with the mechanism. Suddenly, the celluloid became
    entangled in the sprockets, and the machine started to rip up the film.
    —Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan, Enola Gay (1977)

    Less than an hour before takeoff the next morning, Tibbets can’t sleep. He rises from his cot, pours himself a cup of coffee, and drifts to his desk, on which sits a triptych of photographs—Lucy, the kids, and a portrait of his mother. He picks up a pen:

    Dear Mother, |
        I’m writing you tonight because I’ve got something to say, and you’re the only
        one I can say it to.... Mom, I’m scared ...

    It is obviously true that we are an anthology of our dreams, sins, achievements,
    our failures, and our interaction with other people.... However, there may be a     central core around which all else spins-a centripetal force that holds all else     together. My mother was that core in my life.
    —Dore Schary, Heyday (1979)

    Maybe I’m scared of making a mistake. So many details, so much to keep in my
    head. Have I forgotten anything, left something undone?...

    Whenever I got in a tight spot in a plane I always remembered my mother’s calm     assurance. It helped.
    —Paul Tibbets, quoted by Joseph Marx, Seven Hours to Zero (1967)

    Maybe I’m scared of the idea of dropping one bomb that can kill thousands of
    people. It’s a hard thing to live with, but it’s part of my job and I’ve gotta do it...

    I feel better now, Mom. I’ll be all right.

    “You are about to witness the biggest explosion in history,” Tibbets informs his crew over the plane’s intercom. “Don’t look at the flash—get ready for the shock wave....”

    Each key man of the crew checks his own phase of the work, looking for the faults     rather than the good points, but hoping that nothing will have to be retaken. These     men absorb this confusing assortment of film in their stride, despite the fact that     everything is out of context and the same action appears over and over from     different angles.
    —Dore Schary, Case History of a Movie (1950)

    “God!” Tibbets mutters as he surveys the devastation through his cockpit window. First he radios in a strike report: “Results good.” Then, removing his flight helmet and wrinkling his brow, he repeats, heavily and with every indication of irony, “Results good...”

    I’m sure those dramatic words were not spoken.... Although sensitive at first when
    I found the moviemakers taking certain liberties with the facts, I soon came to
    learn that this approach is routine. When history is transformed into
    entertainment, it’s not unusual to jazz things up a bit.
    —Paul Tibbets, The Tibbets Story (1978)

    Almost before ink was dry on headlines announcing the crash of the first atomic     bomb, Hollywood had turned the event to good publicity. At the Metro-
    Goldwyn-Mayer studio, Miss Linda Christians, a hitherto obscure starlet, was     solemnly proclaimed the Anatomic Bomb.... So far she has been in no pictures, the     publicity role of the Anatomic Bomb being her first important assignment.
    —Life magazine, September 3,1945

    Flashbulbs burst like popcorn as Tibbets arrives at the post-flight press conference. “How do you feel personally?” asks one reporter. No comment. “You just dropped a bomb that killed 80,000 people,” the reporter insists. “My readers want to know how you feel about it.” “How do they feel about it?” Tibbets snaps back.

    When an August 1945 Gallup poll asked “Do you approve or disapprove of the
    use of the atomic bomb?” 85% of the respondents approved. In a September 1945     poll, 69% of those Gallup surveyed considered it “a good thing” that the atomic     bomb had been developed.
    —Lillian Wald Kay, “Public Opinion and the Atom,” Journal of Educational     Psychology, January 1949

    I can assure you of one thing. Nobody in my airplane ever had the least emotional     problem or lost a night’s sleep over the Hiroshima mission.
    —Paul Tibbets, “A-Bomb He Dropped Saved Lives,” U.S. News & World Report,     August 5, 1985

    Kneeling on the living room carpet in front of the family radio, Lucy looks a little like the RCA dog as she hears the news of Hiroshima being broadcast across America. She doesn’t say, “So that’s what it was all about” or “What a fool I’ve been,” either to herself or to Marge and the gang of reporters who have invaded her home. Instead she moves numbly to the bedroom, closes the door, sits at her dresser, and breaks down sobbing before a framed photograph of her husband, Paul, posing in uniform.

    KEY MAN’S WIFE NOT IN ON SECRET
    Washington, Aug. 6 (AP)—Maj. Gen. Leslie R. Groves, key man in the     development of the bomb, was so secretive that even his wife didn’t know what
    he was up to. Said Mrs. Groves: “I didn’t know anything about it until this     morning—the same as everyone else.”
    —the New York Times, August 7,1945

    Lucy is waiting at the airport gate in Washington, DC, just where she was at the beginning of the movie, the past having caught up with the present, the memories of 1943-44 with the reality of 1945. She spots Paul disembarking from the plane and approaches him hesitantly. They look into one another’s eyes, but neither speaks. He hands her a little brown paper bag tied up with a pink ribbon.

    Have you noticed the modern trend in verses this year? No more of this “Roses are     red, violets are blue.” I picked up one and it showed an atom bomb exploding, and     under it a verse that read, “Will you be my little geranium, until we are both blown     up by uranium?”
    —Bob Hope, NBC Radio, Valentine’s Day, 1946

    Husband and wife need each other more than ever before in the pressures of     modern living—not for a sort of desperate clinging together like frantic survivors
    in an atomic blast, but in a more elemental way—as man needs food and beauty
    and laughter.
    —Myrl C. Boyle, “Which Are You First of All, Wife or Mother?,” Parents     magazine, August 1955

3. AFTERMATH

        My own eyes drifted to a drab, unobtrusive object sitting on the curb.... It
        looked like an octagonal galvanized film can, battered and fringed with the
        shreds of old shipping labels, but actually it was a sort of jewel box. In it were
        the days and nights, the thought and sweat of a lot of wonderful people; in it
        were the hopes and fears and perhaps the careers of those people ... and in it,
        too, were the images which, when threaded through the projectors of the
        world, would bring entertainment and pleasure.
        —Dore Schary, Case History of a Movie (1950)

    In its first week of release on the West Coast, Above and Beyond was listed in Variety as the number one box-office attraction in the country, though second-week turnouts in L.A. were described as “light”; in Frisco, “tepid.” By the time the picture opened in New York in its third week out, it had fallen to fifth place on Variety’s weekly top ten list, and the following week it had dropped from the list for good. Despite this rapid fall from public grace, Above and Beyond still ranked respectably on the Variety list of top-grossing films for 1953, ranking twenty-ninth and earning MGM a two-and-a-half-million-dollar return, well below Singin’ in the Rain and Fox’s CinemaScope The Robe, box-office champs that year, but on par with other modestly budgeted pictures like Easy to Love, Off Limits, and White Witch Doctor.
    Critics responding to Above and Beyond divided sharply along the gender line. Most male reviewers praised the picture’s documentation of the A-bomb mission and panned its “love interest” as an overblown, petty chronicle of domestic woe. Their objections focused on characterization. John McCarten, in The New Yorker, found it hard to believe that an Air Force wife could be as slow as Lucy in catching on to the importance of her husband’s secrecy. Newsweek thought that Lucy’s anguish was “overstated” and “crucially interruptive.” Bosley Crowther, in the New York Times, blamed Tibbets for not clearing up trouble at home by saying simply to his wife, “Honey, this thing is bigger than both of us,” then getting back to business. And Arthur Knight asked skeptically in The Saturday Review, “Was the guy who dropped the bomb really like you and me? Like any other family man?”
    Women reviewers were not disturbed by any similarities between the fictional Tibbets and their real-life spouses. Eleanor Stierham, speaking for Today’s Woman, saw the film as “a wonderful modern love story, dramatizing sharply the emotional problems of our times.” In Cosmopolitan, Louella Parsons called it “a love story no woman will ever forget.” Vivien Todrin conceded in Better Living that the movie’s “love interest” was a bit overripe but felt that “women who have sacrificed for the man they love will understand.” Bouquets like these prompted MGM to claim Above and Beyond in its advertising as “the most endorsed Picture of the Year by women editors, writers, and columnists.”
    In the early fifties, when both marriage roles and film genres were more clearly stereotyped by gender than they are today, it is not surprising that the men and women who reviewed Above and Beyond had such different responses. Few dramas since Antigone have been as determined to force a choice between patriotism and family responsibility, between the public demands of the workplace and the emotional obligations of private life, between masculine and feminine, war film and weepie. Through hindsight we can see in the subtext of the film a catalog of the anxieties that pervaded Cold War cinema—the uneasy relationship of the personal to the political, the free man’s subservience to the technological bureaucracy, the rise of McCarthyism and the national security state, the threats of enemy infiltration, nuclear holocaust, and, closest to home and to the heart of the drama, a fundamental ambivalence about Mom. Although the picture ostensibly regards Tibbets as a hero, its sober hymn to male duty is compromised by a sentimental devotion to the postwar domestic ideology, which saw women as the guardians of public morality and which centered on motherhood, a force so powerful that it could be both sanctified and demonized. Tibbets’s work (under the auspices of father-figure Brent) keeps the family safe from an unseen enemy somewhere “over there,” but in the subtext of the film it also keeps Paul safe from Lucy, who wants him only as a family man, tied to her apron strings. In this symptomatic reading the release of the bomb at the conclusion of the movie marks the triumph of patriarchal authority over the domestic ideology.
    But that’s just the official story. By alternating focus between the global and the domestic, Above and Beyond also registers anxiety about the bomb’s consequences for what we now call family values. Since Tibbets’s commitment to Operation Silverplate is the dramatic block to his relationship with Lucy, the fictional “love interest” in the film works against or counterbalances the docudrama’s interest in justifying the bomb, and it does so by putting the family at risk. On the home front, keeping the secret of the bomb is not the real problem but rather keeping secret its threat to a vision of the American family long cherished by Hollywood and especially by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. As a writer in The American Mercury put it in August 1951, “middle-class, American domestic life is habitually viewed by MGM as a kind of earthly paradise in which the American people as a whole participate.” The landscape of that paradise was well groomed by the women’s magazines in which the studio heavily advertised, and the credo, as summed up by Dorothy Thompson in Ladies Home Journal (March 1949) was that “the homemaker, the nurturer, the creator of children’s environment is the constant recreator of culture, civilization, and virtue.” And so, while the official story in Above and Beyond ends with a bang, its love story ends with a whimper: the film applauds Tibbets for bombing Hiroshima, but it refuses to say whether his marriage and family can survive the fallout.

TWO WEEKS BEFORE the Hollywood premiere of Above and Beyond, Melvin Frank and Norman Panama formed an independent production company with Danny Kaye and announced their first picture, Knock on Wood, based on an original screenplay by Panama and Frank. Following a series of films with Kaye (including The Court Jester and White Christmas), their greatest postwar success was Lil’ Abner, in which Dogpatch, chosen by the government as the most useless place in the U.S.A. and therefore ideal for A-bomb testing, is threatened by atomic extinction and Abner by marriage to Daisy Mae. Dogpatch escapes; Abner doesn’t.
    The real Paul Tibbets divorced his wife Lucy in 1955 and retired from the Air Force as a brigadier general in 1966. Ten years later, at age sixty-one, he caused another shockwave in Japan by reenacting the Enola Gay mission as part of an air show at Rebel Field in Harlingen, Texas. When Hiroshima Mayor Takeshi Araki called the event a “blasphemy,” and Ichiro Mortake, president of the Japanese Congress Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, protested the repetition of this “historical crime to mankind,” Washington issued an official apology. Tibbets himself sided with the Confederate Air Force, the Texas-based flying organization that had sponsored the event. “We feel that this demonstration was altogether proper and presented in an appropriate manner,” read their public statement. Noting that the war was started by Japan and had cost thirty million civilian and military lives, the statement concluded, “We do not owe an apology to anyone.”
    When he was fired by MGM in 1956, Dore Schary turned to independent production and to playwriting, notably of Sunrise at Campobello, a profile of FDR’s courage in the face of polio, which Schary subsequently produced as a film for Warner Brothers. A lesser-known play, The Highest Tree, ran briefly in New York but never became a movie. The drama centers on Aaron Cornish, a pipesmoking, middle-aged nuclear physicist who learns that prolonged exposure to radiation has given him leukemia. His days numbered, Cornish renounces Cold War politics, joins his son (a geneticist) on a committee to abolish atomic testing, and finds love and companionship with a younger woman named Mary Macready.
    On the morning of June 11, 1969, California Governor Ronald Reagan delivered the eulogy at Robert Taylor’s funeral service in Forest Lawn chapel. Despite his dashing screen persona, Reagan observed, Bob was a regular guy who preferred wearing blue jeans and boots and who “loved his home and everything that it meant.” In closing, Reagan offered this consolation to the gathered mourners: “In a little while the hurt will be gone. Time will do that for you. Then you will find you can bring out your memories. You can look at them and take comfort in their warmth. As the years go by, you will be very proud.”

MICHAEL PRESSLER teaches in the English Department at Shippensburg University and resides in the village of Bowers, Pennsylvania, population two hundred and fifty. His essays on film have appeared in The Chicago Review, Cinéaste, Literature/Film Quarterly, and thrice in The Gettysburg Review.

“The Making of Above and Beyond” appears in our Autumn 2002 issue.

return to top