Ever since I was a boy, I have collected American flags. As an adult and historian, my study of these artifacts has led me down fascinating paths of history.
Making its Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Opera House debut on June 4, The Eyes of the World tells the story of four of the most fascinating and charismatic witnesses to the 11 final months of WWII in Europe: Ernest Hemingway, Vogue-model-turned- photojournalist Lee Miller, war photographer Robert Capa, and a young American soldier. Their experiences come alive through their personal letters and stories, music from the period performed by top Broadway stars (from Aladdin, Hamilton, Mean Girls, Dear Evan Hansen), and the 58-piece Orchestra of St. Luke’s, conducted by Hamilton’s Ian Weinberger.
“It is very dangerous to write the truth in war and the truth is also very dangerous to come by….”
Ernest Hemingway, 1937
Ever since I was a boy, I have collected American flags. As a child, my acquisition of them was craftily orchestrated by my mother to keep me quiet and distracted while accompanying her on shopping trips and to flea markets. As an adult and historian, my study of these tangible artifacts — or material culture — has led me down fascinating paths of history.
What began as a few words to family and friends in our living room about a specific flag each year on Flag Day grew into lectures at the New-York Historical Society, a history series at Carnegie Hall, and an upcoming production at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Opera House on June 4. Looking back, it all came about very organically and unexpectedly — you might even call it serendipitous. This was especially the case for the upcoming production.
I had long hoped to add a flag from WWII to my collection, and finally, I found one. Just about two feet long and weathered and tattered, it was flown on D-Day on the back of a Higgins craft, like the ones you see in the first scene of Saving Private Ryan. It was part of the Allies’ invasion of Normandy, in the dark and wet early hours of June 6, 1944, as the Allies fought courageously to save the world from Hitler and fascism.
I never thought I would spend five years developing The Eyes of the World. But as I followed that flag, each story opened a new door. Each figure introduced me to the next, with one surprise after another.
The Eyes of the World is informed, and narrative-driven, by the journey of that flag — the lives it touched, the tragedy it saw, and the victory and peace it came to symbolize.
Among the boys who landed on — or near — the Higgins boat that carried that flag was Jerry, a 25-year-old American Intelligence Officer. A fledgling writer, Jerry traveled with a portable typewriter in the bottom of his jeep, recording the War’s most deadly battles through his letters home and short stories. How lucky for me to have Jerry’s letters and writings as resources.
I fully expected to focus only on Jerry’s journey into Germany, a tale in and of itself. But, as I followed his travels, irresistible detours quickly presented themselves. When Jerry meets Ernest Hemingway, a reporter embedded with his unit, they connect in the most unexpected ways — including talking literature in a Paris bar (the location being no surprise for Hemingway).
Later, they will meet in a small house not far from the frontlines of the Hurtgen Forest. Passing the time between War actions in the Hurtgen, Hemingway ghostwrites love letters for a GI to send home, pacing and reading them aloud. Imagine, somewhere in an attic, somewhere in the United States, there is a pile of love letters, written by one of the greatest writers in the world, just waiting to be discovered.
Jerry and Hemingway’s special relationship will continue for many years.
At the urging of his wife, a journalist who thinks covering the War will help heal their troubled marriage, Hemingway left his beloved Havana home in 1944 to report for Collier’s magazine. He was partying with assembled journalists in London, anxiously awaiting word that the Allied invasion was a “go.” Among the revelers, is the great war photographer and party host, the dashing Robert Capa. Hemingway and Capa will witness and report some of the War’s most dangerous days. Again and again, the paths of these three figures — Jerry, Hemingway, and Capa — will cross, as well as that of Capa’s old friend, Lee Miller. We meet Lee in London, in the Battle of the Hedgerows, and later while she is visiting her old friend, Pablo Picasso in Paris, in August 1944.
Lee’s life is the stuff of legend, borne in trauma — both physical and emotional. She was raped by a family friend at age seven, sent abroad for high school, and after she returns home, is discovered on a New York City street corner by none other than Condé Nast. Struck by her beauty, he enlists her as a model, and she becomes a Vogue “cover girl.” At the height of her modeling career, she decides to become a photographer. Lee’s story interested me from the start, and the more I learned, the more engaged and curious I became. She was an unrelenting independent thinker in a world that belonged to men. Her combination of courage and her exceptional eye for detail and nuance produced photography that exposed some of the ugliest — and sometimes most subtle — atrocities of the War. And, despite making her home abroad, her voice and her spirit remained quintessentially American.
The fate of these characters – whose paths would criss-cross over and over — became deeply personal to me.
In this production, Lee, Capa, Hemingway, and Jerry serve as the eyes for the world, finding themselves in some of the War’s darkest places in their pursuit of the truth. They almost always get their stories, which go on to shape history. But there’s a cost that comes with what they saw and felt during the final months of the War. Lee will suffer for it. Capa, unable to stop rolling the dice, will eventually die for it, becoming the first American reporter to lose his life in what will become the Vietnam War.
Hemingway will have nightmares about the Hurtgen Forest for the rest of his life — haunted by the suffering and the isolation. In his 1954 Nobel Prize (in Literature) acceptance speech, his description of a writer’s life offers some clues to the pain of those terrible days and nights: “…Writing, at its best, is a lonely life…For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer, he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.”
For all four figures, it will be impossible to leave the War behind.
It has been an incredible experience seeking the truth, as Hemingway called it, about what these four figures experienced during those final, dangerous last months of WWII. We will honor them at the nation’s capital on June 4, just two days before the 78th anniversary of D-Day, along with unsung heroes like 102-year-old Private Cresencia Garcia, a member of the all-female, all-Black 6888 Central Postal Directory Battalion. Private Garcia got the mail to the troops like Jerry, who were anxious for news from home. Private Garcia will be there to take a hard-earned and long-awaited bow, on behalf of all the veterans and their families who have sacrificed for our freedom.
John Monsky, lawyer, historian, creator, narrator, writer of The Eyes of the World: From D-Day to VE Day, and periodic lecturer at the New-York Historical Society and Carnegie Hall.
