A Jumpin’, Jivin’ Weapon From the Home Front

This is the GI jive, man alive. It starts with the bugler blowing reveille over your bed when you arrive ... --”GI Jive” by Johnny Mercer, 1943

Then as now, America was at war. At military outposts worldwide, GIs were being roused at 5:30 a.m. by the bugler’s harsh call. At KNX in Hollywood, a spunky young woman recently arrived from Denver was doing what she could to make the dreaded “rise and shine” less painful.

Six days a week, Jean Ruth would steer her aged Ford convertible through the predawn darkness to the CBS building at Sunset and Gower, settle into a tiny cubicle and--promptly at 5:30--start spinning the patter and the platters (78 rpms, of course). “Reveille With Beverly” was on the air.

For the next hour, Ruth was her alter ego, “Beverly.”

In a soft voice at once sweet and sexy, one that could convince every GI that she was speaking directly to him, Beverly would introduce the servicemen’s record requests with a friendly “Hi, fellas.”

They wanted to hear Harry James and Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey and Duke Ellington and Woody Herman. And, always, Artie Shaw’s “Begin the Beguine,” which she says may have been the most-requested number.

“Beverly was one of our secret weapons,” says the oft-married Shaw, now 91 and living in Newbury Park. “Our entire military forces should have married her.”

Her deejay spiel, always unscripted, typically went something like this: “We’re ready with the stuff that makes you swing and sway,” with “platters that are busting with bounce.” “Solid senders.” Tunes in the “jump groove” for “gobs” and “gyrenes.” To this day, she swears that people really talked that way during World War II.

It was the beginning of a career that would span four decades in radio and television, find her the subject of pieces in major news magazines and of a Columbia movie starring Ann Miller, and, in a strange twist of fate, it would lead to a friendship with the woman known as “Tokyo Rose,” a UCLA graduate who, during the war, broadcasted from Tokyo messages the Japanese hoped would demoralize American troops.

Here at home, Jean Ruth’s job, as she saw it, was “just to be close to the guys and bring them a little touch of home. You can’t imagine unless you lived through it the power of the music of that era.”

It was music that spoke to the yearnings of homesick GIs and to the promise of reunions with loved ones. Kitty Kallen, backed by Harry James, sang, “It’s Been a Long, Long Time.” Tommy Dorsey’s boy singer, Frank Sinatra, crooned “I’ll Be Seeing You.” And, of course, Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.”

The story of Jean Ruth Hay, now a lively 84-year-old living in Fortuna, Calif., with her attorney husband, John, and a cat named Samantha, begins in October 1941 when, as a 24-year-old college graduate and lifelong “record nut,” she marched into KFEL in Denver and pitched her idea for a cheerful wake-up show for men in the military.

The year before, the first peacetime draft had been initiated and she’d been hearing from friends stationed at nearby Ft. Logan how much they hated reveille.

Although she had virtually no radio experience, the station owner decided to give her a trial. Reflecting, she says, “I couldn’t ruin his reputation, no matter what I did at 5:30 in the morning.” Her engineer? Dick Whittinghill, later a prominent L.A. radio personality.

Jean Ruth decided to call herself Beverly because “it almost rhymed with reveille.” The gimmick worked. Soon she was getting a lot of local press as the new “Miss of the Mike” and “Buck Private Beverly.” Within a few months, she was catapulted--”boom, boom, boom”--from relative obscurity to feature stories in Life and Time magazines. Hollywood took notice, and before long her story would become a Columbia film, “Reveille With Beverly.”

Hay has only recently begun excavating her memorabilia, prompted largely by a request from the Museum of Television & Radio in New York. The memories are many. There was the time the men at Ft. Logan named her their basketball queen. Having made a date to meet the team at the base gym, she arrived wearing her new red knit dress and high heels, thinking it was to be just a photo op.

To her horror, “Somebody threw a basketball at me and said, ‘Dribble!’ I’d never had a basketball in my hands.” But, gamely, she circled the floor, dribbling, as the team followed and photographers clicked away.

It was that photo story, which made the front page of the Ft. Logan Press, that caught the eye of the local Time correspondent. In January 1942, her photo appeared in Time above the cutline, “Sharp as jailhouse coffee ... “ The writer, who shaved three years off of Ruth’s age to jazz things up a bit, described her as a “cheerful, blue-eyed little number” who is “directly responsible for the fact that 28,000 Army men at Ft. Logan and three other Army posts get up willingly before sunrise.”

A Life magazine spread on “Army Sweethearts,” featuring “Beverly,” appeared a month later and led to her being invited to New York to appear on radio’s “We, the People,” an episode she recalls as “silly” and “embarrassing,” with a titillating script about how hard it was to juggle all of her GI boyfriends. (In reality, she wasn’t dating anyone.)

After that, things happened quickly. Columbia Pictures dispatched Mitchell Hamilburg, a well-known Hollywood agent, to Denver to buy the rights. And KNX asked her to move her radio show to CBS in Hollywood at a salary of $45 a week.

Unbeknownst to her, “Reveille With Beverly” was being picked up by Armed Forces Radio and transmitted to troops on the front lines. In 1942, when Armed Forces Radio Services opened its first studio, on Vine Street, she became the first host of a copycat program, “GI Jive.” At one time, her programs were broadcast to 54 countries with a potential listening audience of 11 million.

Her style was decidedly breezy, intimate. “People in radio in those ancient days were quite stiff. They studied elocution and spoke properly because they were on r-a-d-i-o. I purposely was pretty slangy.”

Meanwhile, the movie was a go. With her good looks, she was offered a screen test but demurred. “I was no actress. It didn’t even occur to me that they could have made me into an actress.” So Ann Miller was cast and, Hay says, “She was terrific.” Hay did sign on as technical advisor. “I made $1,200. Supposedly, they spent $140,000. It was a B movie.” The plot, which had very little to do with real life, revolved around a hokey character switch, with some truly awful dialogue but a spiffy finale with Miller, in a brief military-inspired costume, tap-dancing inside a flaming V for victory.

Reached at her home in Sedona, Ariz., Miller, who at 78 can be seen in David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive,” recalled, “I was tap-dancing away and crying in that big number. We were in the middle of the war. It just hit me really hard.” The producer later told Miller that the film, pre-released early in 1943 to the troops overseas, was a big hit with Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who wrote him a letter of praise and said he was having the film shown over and over.

In her role as a consultant, Hay had insisted on two things. She wanted the orchestras, all big names including Duke Ellington--”the greatest”--to be on camera uninterrupted for their whole numbers, a departure from standard practice of using musicians as background for the action. “For them to be in a movie just as wallpaper seemed awful.”

Second, she wanted a young Frank Sinatra cast. “I was in love with his style, and he could be had for very little money.” He appeared in top hat and tails in a big production number of “Night and Day,” for which, Hay says, he made $1,500, a “big deal” considering he’d been earning $100 a week with Dorsey.

With the help of former broadcaster and old-time radio buff Dean Opperman, Hay has been gathering those memories. In the Library of Congress archives, he unearthed an original recording of “GI Jive,” which he had transposed onto a twin CD set that Hay is giving to the New York museum. A person who “hates to be idle,” Hay also has set up a “Reveille With Beverly” Web page and is honing her computer skills.

She brings out her pinup photos from the “Reveille” days. In one, she is wearing a prim little pinafore. “CBS was so strict and straight,” she recalls. “Then the Betty Grable swimsuit pinup came out” and CBS had Hay photographed in a slinky evening gown “with feathers in my hair and a big silver curtain in back.”

Some pinups became “nose art” on airplanes. Her image graced a barrage balloon, one of those released over Europe to entangle enemy planes. Though flattered, she wasn’t sure she wanted to be on something that big and bulbous.

Her autographed photos were sent to fighting men around the globe. And they wrote letters. Lots of letters. One week, Hay recalls, she received 3,000. She has saved some in a fat scrapbook. They are signed from “a bunch of lonely sad sacks here on night duty” at a naval hospital in California and from Seabees in the South Pacific. They are addressed to “Dearest, darling Beverly” and to “the world’s most beautiful wake-up girl.”

She says, “Some of the pictures were sent back to me, with no return address and no explanation.” She presumes they were found in soldiers’ pockets when someone was removing their dog tags.

At the time, Ruth knew of Tokyo Rose--Iva Toguri--only through newspaper stories. But recently, she’s begun communicating by letter and telephone with Toguri, now 85 and living in Chicago. They share a “unique bond,” said Barbara Trembley, an L.A. producer who owns the rights to Toguri’s story, although Toguri knew nothing of Beverly during the war.

Visiting an ill relative in Tokyo when war broke out, Toguri was unable to leave and was drafted from the Radio Tokyo typing pool to join a cadre of about 20 women who collectively became known to GIs as “Tokyo Rose,” though Toguri broadcast as Orphan Ann. The only American citizen among the 20, she was later convicted of treason despite her insistence that she was doing all she could to undermine the Japanese propaganda broadcasts directed at GIs. She served six years in prison and was later pardoned by President Ford.

To Hay, Toguri is a “heroine.” Hay says Toguri told her how she treasures Hay’s note in which she addressed her as “Dear Colleague.”’ Toguri, she says, has “overcome this horrible thing in her life, but she’s very wary, especially now” with media coverage of a possible treason trial for John Walker Lindh, the American captured fighting for the Taliban. “She’s absolutely terrified” of again being thrust into the spotlight after all these years.

While being host of “Reveille,” Hay recalls getting only one letter about Tokyo Rose, from a pilot in the South Pacific who’d told his co-pilot, “I want you to write to Beverly and tell her if she doesn’t play our records in the next few weeks, I’m going to turn the dial to Tokyo Rose and leave it there.”

Some bombardier cadets at Victorville Army Air Field voted Beverly the girl with whom they’d “most like to share the bombardier compartment of an AT-11.” She was crowned “queen of the Pomona ordnance base.” Some asked for dates.

In truth, she says, she had little time to date, what with the show and dancing with servicemen evenings at the Hollywood USO. She did love dropping by the 331 Club on Vermont Avenue, where Nat King Cole “would play ‘Off we go, into the wild, blue yonder,’ things like that, when I came or left.”

There were other gigs expected of her as the “Reveille” girl. “Every Saturday, I’d go down to San Pedro with Chet Huntley to christen another ship. He’d been brought in as a [CBS] newsman, but they didn’t put him on for a long time. He needed something to do, so they told me he was going to be my chauffeur.”

Among her admirers was Freddie Slack, a hot pianist and bandleader of the day who with his girl singer, Ella Mae Morse, had hit the charts big with “Cow Cow Boogie” and other boogie-woogie numbers. He began sending her silly telegrams and dropping by to take her to breakfast after she wrapped up “Reveille.”

As the war was winding down, she accepted his marriage proposal and signed off from “Reveille With Beverly” and “GI Jive,” which continued into the Korean War with host Jill Wilkerson as “GI Jill.” CBS invited her to join its comedy writing team, but she had romance on her mind.

With her mother, with whom she shared a house in Laurel Canyon, Hay went on the road with the Freddie Slack band, an arrangement dictated by propriety, as Slack was not yet divorced. Hay and Slack married in 1945, a union that soon became strained. “I kept saying, ‘You don’t have to drink so much just because you have to play in front of 1,000 people.’” They divorced in 1948, and he died in 1965 at the age of 55.

She returned briefly to Colorado before deciding in 1949 to come west with their toddler son, Barry, traveling in “an old Nash with a bed in it.” Santa Barbara was then a sleepy, low-rise town, and radio station KIST’s tall tower caught her eye. She walked in and was hired on the spot to host an early morning music show that ran until 1953.

The deal: She was to sell commercials and split the revenue with the station. “Things were very bad in this little town,” she says, and it took her six weeks to sell one spot--to a restaurant called the Copper Coffee Pot--for $5. But she soon had a following, helped along by her calling the station “Kissed,” which raised a few eyebrows and got her some press.

She began dating Hay, a young attorney who’d relocated from Michigan so he could golf and play tennis year-round. They’d met on the beach at the Miramar Hotel when he was corralled as a fourth for bridge and have been married for 50 years.

In the mid-’50s, Hollywood again came calling. KFWB radio made her an “amazing offer” to host a celebrity talk show from the Hollywood Brown Derby. “I was going to make $50,000 a year and all the extras. And then I got pregnant, and the manager said, ‘Sorry.’” So, she returned to Santa Barbara to host a Channel 3 show, “Beverly on 3,” that ran until 1956. In the ‘60s, Hay began appearing in commercials as the “national TV home economist” for Pillsbury, looking very official in a crisp white uniform. “That was before truth in advertising.” In 1965, she laughs, she was dumped for the Pillsbury Doughboy.

She says, “My voice was my greatest gift. I don’t know where it came from. I never could sing. It was so identifiable that many, many years later when I was living in Santa Barbara and called a plumber, he said, ‘Oh, this is Beverly.’”

The Hays’ two younger children, Bob and Diana, live in Santa Barbara. Until June 1999, the couple made their home in Montecito, and she worked tirelessly for Direct Relief International, a Santa Barbara-based charity that named her lifetime honorary chairman. She still is working for Direct Relief, which is sending medical aid to Afghan refugees in Pakistan.

The move to Fortuna was prompted by the Hays’ wish to be close to their son, Barry, a dentist, and their only grandchild, Miles, 13, who’s named for jazz legend Miles Davis.

At 84, Jean Hay still has some of the bounce of that “Reveille” girl. “We never know what’s ahead,” she says. “That’s what’s so much fun.”