Aplomb: Some have it, some don’t

ROBERT GARDNER

* EDITOR’S NOTE: The Daily Pilot has agreed to republish The Verdict,

the ever-popular column written for many years by retired Corona Del

Mar jurist and historian Robert Gardner, in exchange for donations to

the Surfrider Foundation. This particular column was originally

published on March 13, 1993.

Aplomb is something you either got or you ain’t got. Aplomb can’t

be taught, bought or borrowed. I’ve always imagined that David Niven

had lot of it, although that may have been only his stage persona. In

private life, he may have been downright hysterical. However, I did

know one man who had aplomb -- Lt. Col. St. Clair McKelway, United

States Air Force.

Before World War II, St. Clair McKelway was a well-known writer. A

longtime staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, he was at one time

its editor. A certified member of the pre-war New York

intelligentsia, he was a member of the justly famous Vicious Circle

of the Algonquin Hotel and rubbed elbows with the like of George S.

Kaufman, Clifton Fadimon and Dorothy Parker.

Came the war and he became a lieutenant colonel on the staff of

General Haywood Hansell, commanding general of the 21st Bomber

command -- the B-29 program.

Through a peculiar set of circumstances of interest to absolutely

no one, I, a naval officer, found myself assigned to General

Hansell’s staff, which at that stage of the proceedings was located

on the recently invaded island of Saipan. St. Clair McKelway was my

counterpart on that staff, and he and I lived in the same tent for

several months and became close friends.

St. Clair McKelway was a tall, blond man with serene, mild, blue

eyes and a completely unflappable personality. His job was to write

communiques describing B-29 raids on Japan. His communiques were

masterpieces: vibrant, full of color and life. With all due deference

to my boss, Adm. Chester Nimitz, his communiques describing naval

actions were as colorless as stock market quotations.

As was usual in the Pacific war, as soon as the island of Saipan

was secured, the Navy opened a Navy Officer’s Club. It was divided

into two parts. The one for junior officers was a nightmare. You

stood in a long line for a drink. When you got to the head of the

line, you bought your drink then dashed back to the end of the line

with the usually futile hope that you could get to the head of the

line again before the club closed. On the other hand, the senior

officer’s part was pure luxury: tables, waiters, chairs ... the whole

schmear. In my next war, I’m going to be a senior officer.

As an Air Force officer, McKelway wasn’t eligible to belong to the

Navy Officer’s Club. As a naval officer, I was. Unhappily, I was but

a lieutenant commander and thus a junior officer. Mac, as a

lieutenant colonel, qualified as a senior officer, so he worked out a

nice scam. I would invite him as my guest and we would both sit in

the senior officer’s section. This we did with some regularity.

And so it happened that one afternoon we left the Navy Officer’s

Club and started back to our tent in McKelway’s jeep. We were feeling

no pain. War wasn’t hell ... war was fun.

We came to the end of a B-29 landing strip just as a Japanese

plane from Iwo Jima was finishing a strafing run on the strip. Mac

stopped the jeep and we leaped out. To be more accurate, I leaped

out. Mac ambled out. We crouched in a shallow ditch.

The Japanese pilot, having just finished a run, was in the process

of turning around for another. Then I noticed that our position made

us prime targets.

“Mac!” I screamed. “You idiot! You’ve stopped exactly in his line

of fire! This run, he’s going to kill us deader than hell! He’s going

to stitch us right into the ground!”

McKelway just looked up at that plane which had finished its

turning pattern and was starting its next run. He said to me in that

serene voice, “Picky, picky, picky.”

Fortunately, one of our planes arrived in the nick of time and

blew the Japanese plane out of the sky. But I’ll always remember St.

Clair McKelway looking up at that plane with those mild, blue eyes

and answering my hysterical complaints with just three words --

“Picky, picky, picky.”

Now that’s aplomb. David Niven couldn’t have done it any better.

* ROBERT GARDNER, a Corona del Mar resident and a retired judge,

is a longtime observer of life in Newport Beach.