Gregory and Jones's deaths in Egypt

Gregory and Jones’s deaths in Egypt mark the abrupt end of Dan Gregory and Fred Jones’s wartime lives abroad, while exposing the gap between their public reputations and the complicated allegiances surrounding their deaths. For Rabo Karabekian, the news also means that Marilee Kemp has disappeared from his reach: he wonders what has become of her, presuming that she is young and beautiful and might find a wealthy husband, while recognizing that his own low military pay leaves him unable to offer her a future.

Background in Italy

Before the United States entered the war against Italy, Germany, and Japan, Gregory, Jones, and Marilee arrived in Italy as prominent American visitors. Benito Mussolini presented them as evidence of an American endorsement of Italy’s supposed spiritual, physical, and economic transformation. Gregory was celebrated as America’s greatest living artist, Jones as one of its greatest aviators, and Marilee as an exceptionally beautiful and gifted actress.

The celebrity bestowed on the trio altered Marilee’s social position. The press and public events treated her with the respect of a famous actress rather than dismissing her as a floozy. Gregory and Jones had to treat her more respectfully in public, and she enjoyed the reversal. She learned Italian quickly, becoming more proficient than Gregory, who had studied it in New York; Jones never learned the language.

Deaths and Public Reputation

Gregory and Jones died in Egypt while fighting more or less for the Italian cause. The account does not specify the circumstances of their deaths beyond that description. Their deaths turned them into heroes in Italy, where Marilee’s continuing celebrity made her a beautiful and charming reminder both of their sacrifice and of the admiration many Americans supposedly felt for Mussolini.

The news reached Rabo while he was a master sergeant at Fort Belvoir. Because the United States remained neutral, Gregory and Jones were described as civilians, despite wearing uniforms, and received respectful obituaries. Gregory’s obituary called him possibly the best-known American artist in history. Jones was memorialized as a World War I ace, though Rabo notes that he was not one, and as an aviation pioneer. The obituaries’ honorific portraits sit uneasily beside the men’s deaths in service of Italy.

Rabo and Marilee After the News

The reports contained no mention of Marilee. Rabo wondered what had happened to her, imagining that she was still young and beautiful and might find a much richer man to care for her. He also knew he could not make her his own: even as a master sergeant, his military pay was low, and there were no purchasable Holy Grails at the post exchange. The deaths therefore register in his story not only as distant wartime news but as a personal separation, closing off the possibility he had once associated with Marilee.

Years later, Marilee’s account gives the deaths a wider frame. In Italy she had become a lasting public emblem of Gregory and Jones’s sacrifice and of American admiration for Mussolini, even as her own life continued beyond theirs. At their reunion she was forty-three, still beautiful, and had decades ahead of her; she would also become Europe’s largest Sony distributor. Their deaths ended the trio’s shared public story, but did not end Marilee’s independent trajectory.