A smile freezes on Lou Rawls’ face halfway between the door and the stage that has been constructed in the gigantic aircraft maintenance hangar at Yokota AB, Japan.

Like a slap of after-shave on a wounded face, Rawls awakens to the fact that the temperature is hovering slightly above freezing in the hangar. He is not enthralled.

Yokota is Rawls’ last stop on the first leg of a three-country, Defense Department-USO holiday tour. Korea and the Philippines are yet to come.

It is a trail that Bob Hope traveled for nearly four decades, entertaining troops overseas during a season when home is a week-old letter or a wallet-depleting phone call away.

Rawls has already played to a packed house at Yokosuka NB and a good but duty-depleted crowd at MCAS Iwakuni. But right now, he’s in the pits. It is the first snafu since starting this Far East tour. It won’t, however, be the last.

Inside the hangar at Yokota, Rawls is steaming despite the cold. Within an hour, he is scheduled to perform in this icebox.

It has not been a good day for Rawls. He woke up to overcast skies, which later brought a drizzle that has lasted all day. Rawls missed an earlier autograph session and he is running late for the customary sound check before a performance.

A paunch peeks out from beneath Rawls’ black leather jacket as he stalks the remaining 20 yards to the stage where the band has been trying to warm up for the past 35 minutes.

Impatient, he waves them silent. The smile has long disappeared. "It’s too damn cold to be messing around so let’s get it right! The sooner we do, the sooner we can get to someplace warm!" he shouts through teeth that are trying to decide whether to stay clenched or just give it up and chatter.

Two false starts later, he is shaking his head. The music is bouncing around the hangar like a pin ball. "This isn’t going to work," he says flatly. "I’m not going to insult the people who show up here tonight ... and I’m not going to insult myself."

As a last resort, he has the band’s microphones cut off, hoping to salvage something — anything — out of an impossible situation.

The music begins again as Rawls launches into what will be his opening number, "You’re .onna Miss My Lovin’." It’s better. Not perfect, but better.

Then it happens. A banshee-like wail cuts through the early evening air, shaking the hangar and drowning out Rawls and the band. Outside, a C-141 cargo plane is taxiing toward the runway.

Rawls slices his hands through the noise, bringing the music — and the sound check — to a close.

Cold and angry, he clutches his microphone like the neck of a chicken bound for beheading, and says to the smattering of GIs and civilians setting up, "I don’t know who’s responsible for this, but I just want to tell anyone listening that this whole idea stinks. And that’s with a capital S."

With that, he jumps off the stage and storms up the stairs to the waiting room and some heat.

———

Sitting on a gray-metal folding chair, a subdued and slightly thawed Rawls explains, "No, there was never any doubt that I would go on. I’m not going to I let the people down. It’s not their fault that these dudes got orders from DoD or somebody to hold this show in a hangar."

Hangars were recommended, according to Bob Bovitch, area coordinator for the Armed Forces Professional Entertainment Office at Yokota, because of the expected turnout. "There’s just no other place on base that we could accommodate enough people in just one showing," he explained.

But, says Rawls, "What the guys here didn’t tell DoD was that there would be airplanes flying in and out of here between tunes.

"We came over here with the impression that when we got here, everything was going to be cool (fine, that is)," he says. "We would come in, set up, do our thing, entertain the people, say Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, give ’em a little touch of home and then be on our way."

But, somewhere along the way, he says, "Somebody said, ’To the rear, march,’ and somebody else thought they. said, ’Left flank.’

"It’s standard operating procedure," adds Rawls, a paratrooper with the 82nd airborne infantry in the mid-’50s. "I know it well."

The military is apparently not the only culprit. The autograph session that Rawls missed was on a schedule that, Bovitch says, had been given to Rawls’ manager.

"If somebody’s got a schedule for this trip, I wish they’d give it to me. Nobody told me anything about an autograph party," Rawls says. He will, he says, sign autographs on stage after the show.

Korea doesn’t look any more promising. Rawls says he has been given a hand-written schedule that includes a trip to the Demilitarized Zone near Panmunjom.

"I’m supposed to go there in a three-seater helicopter so it’s only going to be me, the pilot and one other person making the trip," he says. "Well now, am I supposed to go and lip-synch or what?"

But he’ll go, he says. There are fans waiting, and that, after all, is why he’s here in the first place.

"I’ve been in the service myself," he says. "I know what it is to be away from home over the holidays. It’s something I thought was necessary."

———

Despite his misgivings, Korea goes well, leaving Philip Wayne, staff director of music and theater activities in Korea, exhausted but none the worse for wear.

The DMZ, it turns out, is a handshaking tour, one of two he holds while in Korea.

"It (Rawls’ tour) was a large-show unit which required more technical and logistics support than most DoD shows ... the demands were not impossible to meet," Wayne says after Rawls leaves for the Philippines.

Rawls has been to the Philippines before, but it was in 1968 and he was a lounge act.

"I didn’t get into things like meeting the base commanders and generals and all that stuff," he remembers with a laugh. "All I got to meet were lieutenants and corporals."

This time, he finds an entirely different situation.

After playing before 1,300 people at Clark AB the night before, Rawls finds that only 424 people are on hand for his 7 p.m. performance at Subic Bay. Capacity is 720.

Lt. Col. Richard Malone, chief of the AFPEO, is accompanying Rawls on this tour and blames the dismal turnout on a requirement (announced "weeks before the event and regularly thereafter," a Subic spokesman says) that sailors who attend must wear summer dress uniforms.

Navy officials at Subic say that the uniform requirement "depends on the time, place and style of performance. In the evening, with a show staged primarily for sailors off the ships, a uniform requirement is not unusual."

The Navy also tells Pacific Stars and Stripes Philippines bureau chief, Pete Maher, that uniforms were required on this occasion because of an understanding that the show would be videotaped for airing in the United States. The videotaping, however, never occurs.

Eighty-five percent of the available tickets are offered to shipboard sailors, the Navy says. The remaining tickets are distributed on the basis of ration-control numbers: one number, one free ticket. The move is designed to allow as many card holders as possible to see the show — but, because all family members share the same number, families wishing to see the show must have other card-holders obtain tickets.

Both requirements are waived, however, when at 7 p.m., the size of the crowd becomes apparent.

"By the conclusion of the show," a Navy spokesman says, "upward of 650 people were estimated to have been in attendance. Fleet participation was less than anticipated and it was decided to expand the audience to include those not in uniform and civilian employees."

Malone says after the show that he is not satisfied with the attendance, adding that the local restrictions contributed to the poor turnout.

"It was insulting to Mr. Rawls," he says.

Admitting that DoD, as a matter of long-standing policy, leaves the uniform requirement up to the area or unit commander, Malone says he still feels that the show was .a victim of "over-regulation."

———

There are highs and lows, and Bob Hope weathered them for 40 years. Rawls doesn’t intend to take up where Hope left off.

"You can’t take over Hope’s _ place," he says before the show at Yokota. "I’m just trying to update the stuff GIs were entertained with.

"I figured I could come over and lay some ’Dead End Street’ and ’Tobacco Road’ on ’em. Songs they could relate to."

Showtime at Yokota is at hand. Rawls stands and starts toward the door and the nearly 2,000 people who have braved the elements outside and inside the cold bay of the hangar.

The earlier anger has disappeared as he turns and says, "I’m happy, man. And you know why? ’Cause I’m making some people happy.

"You know, people will tell you it must be great being successful and making all this money. But it doesn’t mean anything unless you’re making someone else happy.

"That’s what it’s all about."

It is then that a messenger whispers something to Rawls.

"You ain’t gonna believe this," he says. "They tell us we can do our show from 7 to 7:41. 1 guess somebody talked to the base about all these airplanes taking off and landing. Well, they’ve put all of ’em in a holding pattern over the base to cut down the noise.

"But they got to let one down at 7:41. If they don’t; the dude’s gonna run out of gas." Laughing and shaking his head, he leaves. A draft of cold air rushes into the room. Lou Rawls is on.