From They Were Expendable to Queens Die Proudly—Kurtz Story

[Re: “William Lindsay White: They were Expendable: The Back Story.”]

By David in TN
Tuesday, June 7, 2022 at 12:15:00 A.M. EDT

In, I think, spring 1964, I read a book William L. White wrote just after They Were Expendable (1942). It was Queens Die Proudly, which was about the B-17 airmen on the Philippines when the Japanese attacked, an airman's counterpart to They Were Expendable.

The main protagonist was Frank Kurtz, squadron commander of the B-17s. Kurtz was a famous man during the war, and of some prominence after the war. He named his B-17 the “Swoose,” half-swan and half-goose.

Frank Kurtz was the father of actress Swoosie Kurtz. He named her after his B-17.

N.S.: I love Swoosie Kurtz! Or at least I did when I saw her play "Bananas," the child-like wife in John Guare’s surreal, black comedy, The House of Blue Leaves, in a 1986 revival that I saw on public TV. She was winsomely pretty. She’s now 77.

I had performed in that play, in a student production at my school, Sullivan County Community College (NY) in, I believe, 1977. I played Bananas’ psycho son who has resolved to become famous by assassinating the Pope, when His Eminence would speak at Yankee Stadium. I got to give an insane monologue, which included pratfalls (failed cartwheels) that left me with a sore tailbone. (If memory serves, Bananas was hung with her nickname by her failure of a husband, because she was nuts, and had spent time in “the house of blue leaves” – psychiatric hospital.)

My mom and I had a subscription to an off-Broadway theater, where William “Billy” Atherton was starring in an erotic thriller of a play called Passing Game. I visited Atherton in his dressing room, told him I was assaying his old role, and his advice was just, “Go crazy!” Eventually, I learned how to turn a proper cart wheel, which I used to turn after finishing by shift as a “Hobart Engineer” (dishwasher) in the seafood restaurant The Harborside in the Martha’s Vineyard tourist trap of Edgartown, MA.