A recurring series on iconic scenes from the city’s storied culture.
Late summer, 1945. In the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, more than 100,000 people lay dead, casualties of the United States’ decision to drop a pair of atomic bombs. But in Times Square on Aug. 14, a much different vibe prevails: Japan has surrendered, and the victors are celebrating — drinking, shouting and dancing in the streets.
An American sailor named George Mendonsa spontaneously takes hold of a complete stranger, 21-year-old Austrian-Jewish refugee Greta Zimmer, bends her backward, plants a kiss on her mouth and continues on his way. Unbeknown to either, famed photojournalist Alfred Eisenstaedt has captured the encounter. The resulting image, published soon after in Life magazine, came to symbolize the exuberance of that moment, in a country overflowing with vigor and youth, at a time when anything seemed possible.
Japan did not make its surrender official until Sept. 2, when a formal ceremony aboard the US Navy battleship Missouri signaled the end of World War II. Today marks the 71st anniversary of V-J Day, and Eisenstaedt’s photo still stands as the one of the definitive images of that time.
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“People tell me that when I am in heaven they will remember this picture,” the longtime Life staff photographer wrote in his 1985 book, “Eisenstaedt on Eisenstaedt: A Self-Portrait.” He shot more than 90 covers for the magazine over the course of his career and was renowned for his telling snaps of Sophia Loren and other celebrities, but “The Kiss” is undoubtedly his best-remembered photo. “I turned around and clicked the moment the sailor kissed the nurse,” Eisenstadt wrote. “If she had been dressed in a dark dress I would never have taken the picture. If the sailor had worn a white uniform, the same. I took exactly four pictures. It was done within a few seconds.”
The photo has also remained the subject of intense scrutiny. Who were these two individuals, who made history with a fleeting encounter in Times Square? Their identities were unknown, and the subject of debate, for years. Both have survived long enough to see that matter settled. They have also seen their story re-interpreted in the context of a contemporary perspective, as something far more complicated, perhaps even sinister.
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George Mendonsa and Greta Zimmer both arrived at Times Square that day having been affected by the consequences and casualties of the war. Mendonsa, a sailor from the fishing community of Newport, R.I., was stationed near Okinawa in the Pacific, serving as helmsman for a ship called The Sullivans, a missile destroyer named for five brothers who perished in the war.
On May 11, 1945, a pair of Japanese kamikaze planes attacked the Bunker Hill, an aircraft carrier deployed nearby. Mendonsa, now 94, retains a vivid memory of the day. “About 90 planes that were on the Bunker Hill had all been refueled and reloaded with weapons that were to be launched around sunrise,” he recalls in a telephone interview. “The (Japanese) crashed into the flight deck of the Bunker Hill, and all them planes with all that fuel — every one of them started to explode and burn, and the Bunker Hill was in total flames.”
More than 350 crew members of the Bunker Hill died in the attack. Later in the day, a hospital ship arrived to treat the wounded — and, it turned out, to impart on Mendonsa an image that he would never forget, and which would later inspire him to grab Greta Zimmer and kiss her.
“He’s there on the helm looking down, and he sees these nurses going to work on these men, and he is touched by it,” says Lawrence Verria, author of the 2012 book “The Kissing Sailor: The Mystery Behind the Photo that Ended World War II.” “It’s like a freeze-frame moment for him. Hours ago, he was trying to shoot kamikazes from the sky. Now he is watching these women trying to save these men, nurturing them and bringing them comfort.”
Adds Mendonsa: “Those nurses went right to work on these guys, and I mean those guys were hurting. And when I saw what those nurses did that day, it stuck with me, I guess, for most of my life.”
Flash forward just over three months later, to Aug. 14, and Mendonsa is home on leave. He’d met a young woman from Long Island, Rita Petry, at a family cookout, and he has taken her on a date in Manhattan. They decide to catch a matinee movie at Radio City Music Hall; afterward, Mendonsa must head to the airport and report back for duty.
Midway through the film the lights go on in the theater. “All of a sudden they stopped the show, and they said, ‘The war is over. The (Japanese) have surrendered,’ ” Mendonsa says. Overjoyed, he and Petry leave the theater and duck into a nearby bar, where the room is raucous. “I’m poppin’ the booze, and everybody’s half bombed,” Mendonsa recalls.
When he and Petry leave the bar, they walk a few blocks west to Times Square, where Mendonsa notices a few nurses, and suddenly finds himself overcome by the memory of the hospital ship, after the attack on the Bunker Hill. “When I saw the nurses in Times Square…” he says, before briefly trailing off. “Well, the war being over, and I had quite a few drinks, and that’s why I grabbed the nurse.”
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The nurse in question was actually not a nurse at all. Greta Zimmer was a dental assistant in a white uniform. On Aug. 14, she had reported to work at the office of the Burke brothers, siblings who shared a dental practice on Lexington Avenue. All morning, patients had been buzzing with rumors that the Japanese were surrendering, so in the afternoon, Zimmer wandered west to investigate.
She was relieved that the war appeared to be over, but also deeply scarred by its impact. Seven years earlier, Zimmer had been living in Austria with her family. As Hitler continued moving ever more aggressively against Jews, Zimmer’s parents secured passports and papers for their three daughters to travel to the U.S., with plans to follow at some point. Greta, who was then 15 years old, was tasked with caring for her younger sisters during the journey from Austria to New York.
They were taken in by relatives, and received letters from their parents during their first couple years abroad; then, word from home ceased. As she strolled into Times Square on the afternoon of Aug. 14, 1945, she did not know if her parents were dead or alive. In fact, details remain fuzzy to the family, all these years later.
“She left Austria in 1938, and other than the letters initially in that first year or two, there wasn’t much in the way of contact,” says Zimmer’s son, Josh Friedman (Greta Zimmer, now Greta Friedman, is 92 years old and resides in an assisted-living facility in Virginia; she declined through her son to be interviewed). “It was tough for her to make adjustments, to learn a new language. When you’re 14, 15, 16 years old, to go through all those changes, it’s hard.”
By the time she was 21, Zimmer had developed a bohemian streak and was dabbling in theater, while supporting herself in the dental office. On the day in question, she walked through Times Square, read on a news ticker about the Japanese surrender, and surprisingly found herself swept up in the strong embrace of a stranger. Then, as suddenly as the sailor grabbed and kissed her, he was gone, and Zimmer kept walking.
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Mendonsa later married Rita Petry, who always said that she had no problem with the Times Square kiss, fueled as it was by alcohol and elation. The couple returned to coastal Rhode Island, where they still live.
In the years immediately following the war, Zimmer studied costuming at the New School’s Dramatic Workshop, where she met young actors like Harry Belafonte and Rod Steiger. She forged a lifelong friendship with the comedy writer Lucille Kallen, who worked on Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows,” and on whom Rose Marie’s character on “The Dick Van Dyke Show” was partly based. In 1956, she met a doctor, Mischa Friedman (who went by Mitty), while on vacation in the Poconos, married him, and moved to Maryland to raise two children.
As Friedman recalled in a 2005 interview with the Library of Congress’ Veterans History Project, she came across the image for the first time in the 1960s, in a book called “Eyes of Eisenstaedt.” Recognizing her outfit, hairdo and body, she wrote to Life and requested a copy. The magazine obliged, but was not interested in identifying her as the nurse, according to Friedman. She moved on.
Mendonsa did not become aware of his role in history until 1980, when Life put out an issue requesting that the subjects of the photo come forward. A friend showed it to Mendonsa, who recognized himself and contacted the magazine. But Mendonsa wasn’t the only person to identify himself; dozens of readers — both men and women — claimed to be one one of the famous figures. Life consequently declined to name any as definitive. Eisenstaedt, who died in 1995, had little to say about the matter.
Enter Verria, a high-school history teacher in Rhode Island, who took it upon himself to solve the mystery. With curiosity born in the mid-1990s from local accounts of Mendonsa as the man in the photo, Verria set about investigating all of the most prominent claims, and interviewing many of the surviving candidates, including a California schoolteacher named Edith Shain, Houston native Glenn McDuffie, and Carl Muscarello, a former NYPD detective.
Their stories crumbled under scrutiny, while several revelations made a seemingly airtight case for Mendonsa and Friedman, most notably, a birthmark on the sailor in the photo that matched one on Mendonsa’s right arm, and the presence of a woman in the background of one of Eisenstadt’s four snaps who was clearly Rita Petry. Friedman made a convincing claim, and her height, hairstyle and uniform were among the elements that helped to verify her identity.
Verria’s book received widespread coverage when it was published in 2012, leading to general acceptance that he’d identified the Times Square kissers.
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To some contemporary commentators, however, identifying the subjects is hardly the main issue of this famous image. In 2012, a London-based blogger who uses the pseudonym Leopard wrote a provocative post on Crates and Ribbons titled “The Kissing Sailor, or ‘The Selective Blindness of Rape Culture,'” arguing that Mendonsa’s actions should not be idealized as romantic. To the writer, the kiss represented nothing short of a sexual assault.
The post highlights a series of comments from Greta Friedman’s 2005 Veterans History Project interview, which addresses the issue of what we would now call consent. “It wasn’t my choice to be kissed,” Friedman said at the time. “The guy just came over and grabbed!” adding, “That man was very strong. I wasn’t kissing him. He was kissing me.” Leopard also cited a CBS News interview in which Friedman said of Mendonsa, “I did not see him approaching, and before I knew it, I was in this vice grip (sic).”
After Verria’s book was published in 2012, Friedman’s accounts were quoted in three news reports, none of which explicitly acknowledged the “problematic nature of the photo that her comments reveal,” the blogger argued, noting that what Eisenstaedt captured “would be considered sexual assault by modern standards.”
“(Mendonsa) is perfectly entitled to celebrate,” Leopard added. “However, this entitlement does not extend to his impinging on someone else’s bodily autonomy.”
Leopard’s take went viral, and was hotly debated across the Internet. Josh Friedman says that his mother is well aware of the discussion, and has expressed a nuanced reaction. Greta Friedman has become friendly with Mendonsa over the years and her son says she considers him to be “a lovely person.” When CBS News reunited the two in Times Square for the interview cited on Crates and Ribbons , Friedman appears to be at ease with the former sailor. She has declined to fault Mendonsa for his actions — taking into account his overwhelming admiration for the nurses on the Bunker Hill — though she is not unsympathetic to the contemporary critique.
“My mom always had an appreciation for a feminist viewpoint, and understood the premise that you don’t have a right to be intimate with a stranger on the street,” Josh Friedman says. “(But) she didn’t assign any bad motives to George in that circumstance, that situation, that time.”
Asked if he thought his actions would be considered appropriate today, Mendonsa said, “Well, sure. I was out there in the war for two years. And the Bunker Hill, she’s all aflame, and then I come back.”
As Josh Friedman notes, gender equality is still a ways off. Opinions have evolved since 1945, and some men have learned to weigh perspectives other than their own, but the broader culture is still nowhere near enlightenment. The issue continues to loom large every time a prominent man like Roger Ailes, the embattled former boss of Fox News, is accused of sexual misconduct.
“Times have changed, and I think there was no sense of empowerment 70 years ago that a woman could do anything about harassment, at work or on the street,” Friedman says. “And even today…we’re still not able to handle equal standards.”
