An Arlington author and journalist has published a new book on a jazz musician’s harrowing experiences in World War II.
In the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, musician Artie Shaw joined up with the U.S. Navy to perform in a touring, morale-boosting band. He’d return home two years later, shattered by the Battle of Guadalcanal.
E&E News reporter Michael Doyle became fixated on Shaw after hearing about his story on the radio. Now, after three years of writing and research, Doyle has published Nightmare in the Pacific: The World War II Saga of Artie Shaw and His Navy Band.
“It was just one passing reference to the fact that he shipped out to the Pacific and had a nervous breakdown,” Doyle said. “That captivated me: going out to sea and going out to the battle. There was so much more to this.”
While Shaw wrote an autobiography, Doyle said part of his work was separating facts from some of the exaggerations by Shaw and his bandmates.
“Artie joined the Navy after Pearl Harbor,” Doyle pointed to as one example. “He later would tell people he immediately went down, but he actually took about five months to join.”
After signing up with the Navy, he and his band — a mix of all-stars and up-and-comers dubbed “Shaw’s Rangers” — spent months performing at parties in Hawaii before being shipped out on a battleship and near the frontlines of the war in the Pacific.
“I tried to convey in this book this sense of journey,” Doyle said. “A famous, rich civilian has it all, but chucks it all to go off to war and Guadalcanal.”
Aboard a battleship, Shaw went out to New Caledonia, the New Hebrides and other Pacific locations.
“[Guadalcanal] is the dramatic climax of the book,” Doyle wrote. “By his account, he just snapped. He was under constant fire, artillery nearby, biting insects, and they were close enough to the battle that Japanese aircraft would drop bombs.”
Doyle said Shaw’s autobiography contained “400 pages of bloviation” but Doyle was able to FOIA medical records and search other avenues for the facts.
“He walked off into the jungle and someone took him to a doctor; that’s his story,” Doyle said. “That he was lost, bereft, sick of heart and soul.”
Doyle said the medical records included a testimony that showed he was an emotional wreck, but it was harder to pin down specifics of the story about him walking into the jungle.
“At the heart of a project like this is piercing layers of myth and self-mythologizing,” Doyle said. “He was a self-mythologizer, as were the people around him. One of his bandmates wrote an entertaining book, almost none of which you can believe.”
Taking some inspiration from legendary biographer Robert Caro’s phrase “turn every page,” Doyle’s search for records led him from the National Archives to a private investigator tracking down divorce records.
“I tend to go down rabbit holes and get enticed by shiny objects,” Doyle said. “So a topic would come up, like the nature of his relationship with his fourth wife, and I went down a rabbit hole of their divorce.”
Doyle said he hired an investigator in Los Angeles to track down divorce records from 1944 on the off chance that they could offer some insight into his mental condition.
The result is a biography that crafts a portrait of Shaw beyond the public persona.
“I tried to pierce the veils of myth and fabrication by getting down to the groundwater,” Doyle said.
With the book published, Doyle said his next project is a screenplay about Shaw.
“I told a number of people about this and they said ‘it sounds like a good movie’ and I finally said ‘well, why don’t we write a script,'” Doyle said. “I worked with a friend and we finished a script, so that’s my current project: seeing if we can turn this wonderful project into a movie.”
