More Than Fame Trivia Quiz

Answer: Josephine Baker

Baker (1906-1975), a black woman, had far better opportunities in France than in her native USA, and she took full advantage of them. She packed Paris nightclubs with her commanding stage presence and her sensual dance moves -- to say nothing of her scandalous banana skirt. Neither the Vichy government nor the Nazi occupiers took her seriously, and so she moved more or less freely around the country, wherever her shows and parties took her.

At the same time, she listened closely to what the elite said over cocktails, and passed invisible-ink messages among her music sheets.

Her postwar medals were hard-earned.

Answer: David Niven

Before arriving in Hollywood, Niven (1910-1983) had served in the British army, which in peacetime did not suit him. He resigned his commission as a lieutenant in 1933, after some difficulties with insubordination, and set about making himself a movie career. Before the war, his biggest roles were in "Wuthering Heights", "Bachelor Mother", and "Raffles" (all in 1939).

When war broke out, most British Hollywood stars stayed in the US, but Niven returned at once. With the Army Film Unit, he made propaganda films to buttress the Allied war effort, and assisted with work to deceive enemy intelligence. After D-Day, he commanded a squadron of the Phantom forward reconnaissance unit. On the cusp of battle, he is said to have assured his men with the marvelous line, "Look, you chaps only have to do this once. But I'll have to do it all over again in Hollywood with Errol Flynn!"

Niven ended the war as a lieutenant colonel, and returned to Hollywood as a leading man. "Around the World in Eighty Days" came in 1956; in "Separate Tables" (1958), he won an Oscar for Best Actor. His turn as James Bond came in 1967's satirical "Casino Royale", which was emphatically not part of Eon Productions' famous "Bond" series.

Answer: Carole Lombard

Lombard (1908-1942), who had starred in movies like "My Man Godfrey" (1936) and "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" (1941), raised more than two million dollars in one night in Indianapolis -- remember that this was 1942 money! War bonds were an investment in the war effort: the money went to the government, which promised to repay the bondholders afterward.

Air travel was much riskier in 1942 than it is today, even on domestic US flights where no one was shooting. Lombard's plane crashed into a Nevada mountain soon after a refueling stop. She was 33, and had been married to Gable for almost three years. The US government declared her the country's first female casualty of the war.

Answer: Harold Russell

Born in Canada, Russell (1914-2002) moved to the U.S. as a young child. He joined the Army immediately after Pearl Harbor and became an expert in demolitions. In 1944, he lost both his hands to TNT with a faulty fuse, while training new recruits in North Carolina.

That couldn't stop him. He became so proficient with his hooks that the Army asked him to show off his skills in a training film for disabled veterans. That film inspired William Wyler to cast him in 1946's "The Best Years of Our Lives", which followed the tragedies and triumphs of three veterans as they re-entered civilian life. He was nominated for an Oscar in the category of Best Supporting Actor, but the awards committee -- worried that he had very little chance of winning -- gave him a special Oscar for "bringing aid and comfort to disabled veterans through the medium of motion pictures." When he won as Best Supporting Actor, he became the first person ever to collect two statuettes for the same performance. After all that, though, there wasn't much demand for an actor with his disabilities; he didn't act again until the 1980 movie "Inside Moves".

Answer: Tyrone Power

After signing up with the Marines, Power (1914-1958) was briefly sent right back to Hollywood to make a war movie - "Crash Dive" (1943) - that the government hoped would be useful for recruitment. Only then could Power report to officer candidate's school and to flight training.

As a transport pilot, Power served in the 1945 battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa: he flew supplies in for the US Marines' invading force, and ferried wounded soldiers out. In 1946, the Marines released him from active duty, and he once again took up the role of Hollywood leading man.

Answer: Julia Child

Child (1912-2004) had initially tried to join both the US Army and the US Navy (or rather, their women's divisions - the WACs and the WAVES). Rejected because of her height - she was more than six feet tall - she joined the OSS instead. Her work there took her first to Washington, DC, then to Sri Lanka, then to China. Along the way, she helped research shark repellents.

Fatefully, she fell in love with another OSS officer, Paul Child. After the war and after their marriage, he joined the Foreign Service and was assigned to France. His wife decided to take cooking lessons there, and then got involved in running a cooking school. She and two co-authors published "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in 1961, and in 1963 she followed up with a television show called "The French Chef". Over its ten-year run, the show won both a Peabody and an Emmy; after it finished, she segued naturally into several other cooking shows. American cuisine would never be the same; she had such a phenomenal impact that the Smithsonian National Museum of American History acquired and displayed her kitchen.

Answer: Hedy Lamarr

Lamarr (1913-2000), born in Austria, had been married to an arms dealer in Europe, and she'd picked up quite a lot of information about ordnance over the course of their marriage. As the Nazis tightened their grip on Germany in the 1930s, she fled her homeland and her husband, changed her name, and renewed her movie career in Hollywood.

Her spread-spectrum communications technique, co-developed with composer George Antheil and prototyped with parts from a player piano, impressed the US Navy but wasn't adopted until many years later. For some time, she was known only as the bombshell in movies like "Samson and Delilah" (1949) -- not as the formidable brain that she also was.

Answer: Jimmy Stewart

Stewart (1908-1997), already an Oscar winner for "The Philadelphia Story" (1940), had to push to be allowed to see combat. He feared that his fame would limit his service to recruitment drives and instructional films, when he badly wanted to fly planes for his country. He pled his case up the chain of command, received the transfer he needed, and flew his first combat mission in December 1943.

Stewart began his service as a private, but was promoted to colonel by the end of the war. Even afterwards, as his movie career took off with movies like "It's a Wonderful Life" (1946) and "Harvey" (1950), he continued to serve his country in the Air Force Reserve.

Answer: Marlene Dietrich

Dietrich (1901-1992) achieved worldwide fame with German pictures like 1930's "The Blue Angel" ("Der blaue Engel"), but as a staunch opponent of fascism, she eagerly accepted when the American movie studio MGM offered her a way out. From the US, she often spoke out against Nazism, and during the war she went to the front lines to boost Allied morale. (When asked why she took these risks, she famously replied, "Out of decency.")

Of her demoralizing tunes, the best remembered is "Lilli Marleen", a song of a soldier's love left behind. It is of course impossible to know how much these broadcasts may have hastened the end of the war; they were a small piece of a large strategy.

Answer: Audie Murphy

Murphy (1925-1971) was born into a terribly poor family in Texas; he left school around the age of 10 to help support his family. He enlisted in 1942, at the age of 17, but first saw combat in 1943 with the invasion of Sicily and then of mainland Italy. In the late summer of 1944, Murphy's company was sent to France. It was there, in January 1945 at Holtzwihr, that Murphy earned the highest military honor of the United States, by climbing atop a burning and abandoned tank destroyer and using its machine gun to stop a German advance. He later explained his bravery by stating the one fact that had been relevant to him: "They were killing my friends."

Discharged after the war as a first lieutenant, Murphy went to Hollywood, where his career picked up after the publication of "To Hell and Back". He acted mostly in Westerns, but also starred in several war movies, including the 1955 film based on his own autobiography. In the 1960s, he branched out into country-music songwriting. His frank discussion of his struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder brought new attention to the problem, helping millions of veterans and other sufferers.