He made one-night appearances at the Three Six Five in San Francisco, Rudy’s Rail in New York and Kin Wa Low’s in Toledo. He played plumbers conventions and bar mitzvahs and bowling banquets.
And he learned.
He did four and five shows a day at small theaters named the Gem and the Odeon and the Empire and the Star.
And he learned.
And, finally, one of the things that Toby Temple learned was that he could spend the rest of his life playing the Toilet Circuit, unknown and undiscovered. But an event occurred that made the whole matter academic.
On a cold Sunday afternoon in early December in 1941, Toby was playing a five-a-day act at the Dewey Theatre on Fourteenth Street in New York. There were eight acts on the bill, and part of Toby’s job was to introduce them. The first show went well. During the second show, when Toby introduced the Flying Kanazawas, a family of Japanese acrobats, the audience began to hiss them. Toby retreated backstage. “What the hell’s the matter with them out there?” he asked.
“Jesus, haven’t you heard? The Japs attacked Pearl Harbor a few hours ago,” the stage manager told him.
“So what?” Toby asked. “Look at those guys—they’re great.”
The next show, when it was the turn of the Japanese troupe, Toby went out on stage and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a great privilege to present to you, fresh from their triumph in Manila—the Flying Filipinos!” The moment the audience saw the Japanese troupe, they began to hiss. During the rest of the day Toby turned them into the Happy Hawaiians, the Mad Mongolians and, finally, the Eskimo Flyers. But he was unable to save them. Nor, as it turned out, himself. When he telephoned his father that evening, Toby learned that there was a letter waiting for him at home. It began, “Greetings,” and was signed by the President. Six weeks later, Toby was sworn into the United States Army. The day he was inducted, his head was pounding so hard that he was barely able to take the oath.
The headaches came often, and when they happened, little Josephine felt as though two giant hands were sqeezing her temples. She tried not to cry, because it upset her mother. Mrs. Czinski had discovered religion. She had always secretly felt that in some way she and her baby were responsible for the death of her husband. She had wandered into a revival meeting one afternoon, and the minister had thundered, “You are all soaked in sin and wickedness. The God that holds you over the pit of Hell like a loathsome insect over a fire abhors you. You hang by a slender thread, every damned one of you, and flames of His wrath will consume you unless you repent!” Mrs. Czinski instantly felt better, for she knew that she was hearing the word of the Lord.
“It’s a punishment from God because we killed your father,” her mother would tell Josephine, and while she was too young to understand what the words meant, she knew that she had done something bad, and she wished she knew what it was, so that she could tell her mother that she was sorry.
5
In the beginning, Toby Temple’s war was a nightmare.
In the army, he was a nobody, a serial number in a uniform like millions of others, faceless, nameless, anonymous.
He was sent to basic training camp in Georgia and then shipped out to England, where his outfit was assigned to a camp in Sussex. Toby told the sergeant he wanted to see the commanding general. He got as far as a captain. The captain’s name was Sam Winters. He was a dark-complexioned, intelligent-looking man in his early thirties. “What’s your problem, soldier?”
“It’s like this, Captain,” Toby began. “I’m an entertainer. I’m in show business. That’s what I did in civilian life.”
Captain Winters smiled at his earnestness. “What exactly do you do?” he asked.
“A little of everything,” Toby replied. “I do imitations and parodies and…” He saw the look in the captain’s eyes and ended lamely. “Things like that.”
“Where have you worked?”