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| Capt. Laurence Stallings, USMC |
Laurence Tucker Stallings, Jr., was born 25 November 1894, in Macon, Georgia. In 1916 he graduated from Wake Forest College where he had edited the campus literary magazine. His first job as a reporter on the Atlanta Constitution began in 1915 before he received his diploma.
In 1917, he joined the United States Marine Reserve. On 24 April 1918, he left Philadelphia aboard the USS Henderson for overseas duty in France. Stallings served in France as a platoon commander with the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, during the fighting around Chateau-Thierry. On 26 June 1918 at the Battle of Belleau Wood, Stallings was shot in the right leg and its knee cap blown off while leading a successful assault on an enemy machine gun post. He was promoted to captain, awarded the Silver Star and the Croix de Guerre by the French government. He talked the military doctors out of amputating his leg
Once home, he married his college sweetheart. Helen Poteat was the daughter of the Wake Forest president, William Louis Poteat. The wedding was on 6 March 1919, at the campus in Winston-Salem. After the wedding, the couple moved to Washington, DC, where Stallings joined the Washington Times as a reporter while earning his M.A. from Georgetown's School of Foreign Service.
Stallings had never fully recovered from his combat injuries, and in 1922 a fall on ice led to the amputation of his right leg. About this time he began writing a semi-autobiographical novel about his war experiences.
On Broadway
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| Original Playbill |
By 1924, Stallings was writing book reviews three days a week for the New York World. He was tapped by executive editor Herbert Bayard Swope to be on the “Op. Ed” page with notable journalists Franklin P. Adams, Heywood Broun, Frank Sullivan, and Alexander Woollcott. He shared an office with Maxwell Anderson, at the time a fellow editorial writer. They collaborated on their first play, What Price Glory? for the powerful Broadway producer Arthur Hopkins. With What Price Glory? Stallings was able to share his real-life experiences about the trauma, humor and heartbreak of Marines in combat. It was a hit at the Plymouth Theater, 236 West 45th Street, and ran for more than a year. Two movie versions of the play were eventually produced.
But he was not finished with the Great War. His novel, Plumes, was a contender for the 1925 Pulitzer Prize. As our reviewer Bryan Alexander described it: "The plot follows the life of Richard Plume, a college student who signs up to fight Germans. We're actually first introduced to his ancestors, a long line of Plumes who fought and suffered for every American war back to the revolution. In that tradition Richard finds some success in France but is then badly wounded and invalided home. This shatters his life, altering his hopes and career, while traumatizing his wife. Plumes concerns his struggles to survive and rebuild."
His novel was adapted for the silent movie epic The Big Parade that same year. Directed by maverick filmmaker King Vidor, The Big Parade played to sell-out crowds across the nation and became the biggest grossing silent film of all time.
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| Film Versions of Stallings's Early Works |
Stallings and Anderson went on to co-write two more plays—The First Flight and The Buccaneer, both of which premiered in 1925—before going their separate ways. Stallings continued to work in theater. He wrote the book and lyrics for the musical Deep River, which ran briefly in October of 1926. He co-wrote the book for the 1928 musical Rainbow with Oscar Hammerstein, adapted Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms for the stage in 1930, co-wrote the book for the 1937 musical Virginia, and he wrote a WWII play, The Streets Are Guarded, which premiered in 1944. Meanwhile in 1933 he produced the first of his two very popular World War One historical works, The First World War: A Photographic History. Stallings—through his selection of photos—was quite candid about the brutality of war and was identified as "anti-war" by reviewers.
Hollywood Calls
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| Some of the Best Known-Films with Screenplays by Laurence Stallings |
In the late 1930s, Stallings gave up his extensive library and home in North Carolina and moved to Santa Barbara, California, and never returned to the South. In Hollywood he most notably served as a key influence for several of John Ford’s greatest films, having wrote or co-wrote 3 Godfathers, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and The Sun Shines Bright. He is also credited for contributing to the screenwriting of Vidor’s Northwest Passage, as well as Leslie Fenton’s The Man from Dakota and On Our Merry Way.
When the U.S. entered World War II, Stallings went back on active duty with the Marines in 1942. He eventually served as an intelligence officer at the Pentagon and attained the rank of lieutenant colonel.
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| Lest We Forget: The WWI Titles (All are hard to find, but worth the trouble) |
He later lived in Pacific Palisades and continued working in the film industry as his health deteriorated. Doctors had to remove his left leg in 1963, the same year he published a stirring account of World War I, Doughboys: The Story of the AEF 1917-1918. Stallings died of a heart attack on 28 February 1968, at his home. He received a military burial with a Marine Corps honor guard. Stallings is interred outside San Diego in Ft. Rosecrans National Cemetery.
Sources: The Algonquinrountable.org; Georgetown University Walsh School of Foreign Service; Review of Plumes by Bryan Alexander HERE; Wake Forest University Library; Rootsweb
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