I wasted no time ambushing Carl Muscarello, who insists he’s the famous kissing sailor in a very famous photograph.
“This guy here,” I said, pointing to a photo of George Mendonsa, “says you’re a liar. Any comment?”
Muscarello, a distinguished looking gentleman at 91 years old, lean and smartly dressed in a colorfully patterned sweater, never skipped a beat, as though he had been waiting for my sucker punch all day.
“Ask him how much he’s made,” Muscarello responded, in the lobby of the State Veterans Home in Tilton. “I respect him as an ex-World War II veteran, but I’m not interested (in what he says).”
Thus began my discussion with a man who claims he’s in a photo most of you have seen. The one from Life magazine showing a sailor in a dark uniform and white sailor’s hat, kissing an angelic-looking woman, her crisp white nurse’s dress, white stockings and white heels shining in an other-worldly glow.
Muscarello, a retired New York City cop, lives in Florida with his second wife. He’s here staying at a friend’s time share. He agreed to stop by the Veterans Home to tell his story, one he’s told many times to major media outlets through the years.
We know the scene was captured in Times Square in New York City on Aug. 14, 1945 by Life’s Alfred Eisenstaedt. We also know it ran in Life on Aug. 27 of that year, and that it captured the mood of the nation in the immediate aftermath of World War II.
But to this day, we still don’t know the name of the sailor, nor the nurse. Not officially.
Muscarello gives a convincing argument that he’s one of the individuals now immortalized forever.
He looked me straight in the eye, clutched my arm and told me: “The only action I ever saw in the war was this.”
He pointed to a folder of autographed photos, the photos, each one signed with black magic marker.
“Best wishes Carl S. Muscarello Aug. 14, 1945.”
He says he was 19 at the time, fresh from boot camp in Sampson, NY, before his assignment in Staten Island, where he learned ship repair.
“When I was a young man I learned how to weld and deal with metal,” Muscarello told me. “So I went into the Navy and that’s where they sent me and I was proud to serve.”
His retelling of events on the day President Harry Truman announced that Japan had surrendered are rich with details. He was serving on the USS Orion. He and his shipmates were given a 72-hour pass upon hearing about what is now known as V-J Day, or Victory Over Japan Day.
He and a buddy named Eddie Leskie went ashore and partied in Times Square.
“You tell a 19-year-old sailor with 40 bucks in his pockets and he has 72 hours and there is the New York skyline across the bay,” Muscarello told me. “So we went to Broadway and a guy poured me a couple of beers. I’m feeling pretty good.”
So good, in fact, that Muscarello says he kissed more than one woman that day. Several, in fact.
He lowered his voice during this part of our conversation, since his wife of 25 years, former flight attendant Shelly Muscarello, stood just a few feet away.
Six months later, Muscarello says he called his mother, who told him she’d been at her doctor’s office and thumbed through an edition of Life. She was sure her son was in the photo.
“Don’t you know that if you kiss a strange woman you get a disease?” Muscarello says his mother told him.
“I told her that she was a nurse and she said that’s the worst kind because they’re always around sick people.”
Since then, several men and women have come forward, claiming they were the ones captured in Eisenstaedt’s picture.
Each has achieved some fame. None have been confirmed by the critical and skeptical eye of history, since Eisenstaedt, frantically shooting to stop time during a titanic moment, never asked for names. He died in 1995.
A Google search reveals that either George Mendonsa, who’s still alive, and Glenn McDuffie, who died three years ago, is the most likely kissing sailor. Or Muscarello. The nurse, it’s been said, was Greta Zimmer Friedman, who died last year, or perhaps Edith Shain, who died in 2010.
As Muscarello tells it, a friend helped him connect with Shain in 1995, 50 years after the smooch. By then, Shain, living in southern California, had been acknowledged in some circles to be the kissee, and Muscarello believed it. She called him, and that conversation, he told me, went something like this:
“You’re the 10th guy to claim to be the sailor, and you know what? I don’t believe you.”
“You know what? I don’t care if you believe me.”
My sense here, though, is that Muscarello did care, because he followed up that phone conversation with a letter.
“She told me the letter was impressive,” Muscarello said. “She told me she still didn’t believe me, and I said I still didn’t care.”
Still, Muscarello flew to see Shain at her home in Santa Monica, Calif. He told a remarkable story about Shain, old and bent from osteoporosis, closing the front door and returning in heels and a wig, then trying to trip him up with questions that had no answers, about the restaurant they had eaten at after the kiss, and the name of the hotel they had stayed at after the kiss, and what he had said to her after the kiss.
“She was screaming and hollering and knocking over furniture screaming, ‘Oh my God, you’re the guy,’ ” Muscarello said. “That is exactly what happened.”
Next, after Shain got Muscarello booked on a local access talk show, he says major media outlets like the New York Times began calling. He said he appeared on Larry King Live and Good Morning America.
In 2005, Muscarello and Shain posed for photos in Times Square, next to a sculpture based on the classic picture.
What it all meant was that certain sections of the media and public accepted Muscarello’s story, while others remained skeptical. To this day, no one really knows the identities.
Marilyn Johnson of Gilford doesn’t care. She read in the newspaper that the man purported to be the kissing sailor was coming to Tilton, so she went, too.
“I love World War II history and our veterans,” she told me as a small entourage followed Muscarello around the Veterans Home on an official tour. “He told it in such detail, and his memory was so sharp. Yes, I believe him.”
His wife, of course, trusts her man. “It doesn’t matter to me, I believe in what my husband does,” Shelly Muscarello told me. “He does nothing but give to charity. He emails and pays postage for the photos and he processes the packages, because it’s something he really believes in.”
This is where Muscarello separates himself from George Mendonsa, the man most often credited with being the real McCoy. Muscarello, unlike Mendonsa, says he’s never accepted a dime for his alleged fame. He says he’s had offers to endorse products.
“Six of my dearest friends were killed in World War II,” Muscarello told me. “I can not in good conscience make money off this picture. I can’t do it. Anyone who does that is a male prostitute.”
He tried to convince me that my opinion is meaningless, that no one’s opinion really matters, that he’s comfortable in his own skin.
But he also wanted me to look closely at his right hand, at the darkened skin he called a birthmark, then compare it to the marking on the right hand in the photo.
He wanted me to look carefully at the hairline of the young man in the photo. The nose, too.
“You can see the resemblance, and I don’t have anything to prove to you,” Muscarello said, politely. “Whether you believe me or not, I don’t really care.”
The world may never know.