"One afternoon in the Odeon cinema I had an unforgettable experience. I saw 'The Glenn Miller Story'. The effect the film had on me was overwhelming.
First there was the music, those wonderful tunes I had been hearing all my life. Then there was the thrill of seeing Louis Armstrong and Gene Krupa for the first time. Then there was the story. It told of the lives of struggling musicians, of their comradeship, their hard life on the road, their breakthrough, their success and then of the final tragedy of Miller's death.At the end of the film I was in tears. James Stewart as Glenn Miller was totally convincing, but June Allyson as his wife took a twelve year old's heart and danced it away. She had the sexiest voice I had ever heard. I was in love!
Two scenes stayed with me. Miller had had a big house built for his wife and their adopted children. His father came to visit them and looked around in bewilderment at the palace his son lived in.
"Can you afford all this?" he asked. "How much do you make from each record"?
"Oh, three cents." Miller replied.
His father looked aghast. "And how many do you sell?"
" 'Moonlight Serenade' did eight hundred thousand."
His father did the mental arithmetic and smiled.
I wanted to give my father that moment one day. I didn't know how, but I mentally filed away the information that music could be a good living if you were lucky and worked hard.
The other, earlier, scene had the band sitting crestfallen around the kitchen table having worked out how much it would cost to launch them into a full-time life on the road. They were eighteen hundred dollars short.
"Oh, that's all right then," said June Allyson as Miller's wife, and she went to a drawer and took out a bankbook with just over eighteen hundred dollars saved in its account.
"Did you get this by taking all the small change from my pockets?" Miller asked.
His wife smiled and nodded. I knew then that I wanted a wife like that".