Girl of My Dreams Page 3

  3

  Assaulting Ibsen

  Early Saturday, two weeks after the demise of Joey Jouet, I lay on my living room floor confronting the ceiling’s jagged crack—sinister some mornings, today a bolt of lightning—and began the tantric exercises everyone was doing for digestion, muscle tone, eternal youth, the optimistic Southern California compound then and now. “I am monarch here,” I said aloud. “No one can top or stop me because I am the march of my generation. A monarch who rules his fate.”

  Such a fool. I am. Better to know or not know you’re a fool? I’m the sucker who tells the story because the rest are gone. Or, like Mossy, ageless, now refusing to read books, especially if they’re about him. Doing the exercises I wondered if Joey, motorcycling into the Pacific, had died of fright. No, that wasn’t Joey. He was dead on impact then, with a broken neck, as if he’d hanged himself? Or did he drown, like a fisherman swept off his lobster boat by a wave he hadn’t seen coming?

  I was catapulted into an obsession by Joey’s suicide as effectively as if he’d hurled flaming branches at my walled castle, igniting every chair and curtain inside. Because Pammy asked me for a favor I surmised I had her favor. The hope that plants a seedling of itself in a young breast is as much curse as blessing since it drains every moment of contentment. Potential is always rearing its greedy portentous head. The joke was that she hadn’t even made use of the favor I did, speaking no words at the funeral.

  My castle was a shack, tucked on Sumac Lane in Santa Monica Canyon. A closet of a bedroom, bathroom with a stall shower, kitchen with a card table in it, and the tiny, dark living room with two wooden chairs, an empty crate for a coffee table, and a secondhand couch I kept doilies on to avoid having to look at the stuffing that leaked from either end. It wasn’t as though I had visitors. Yet when I looked out at the sycamores and eucalyptus climbing the hill to where associate producers and car dealers lived who could afford much more than my prewar forty dollars a month, I was happy.

  By prewar I mean pre-prewar because in 1934 only the most prescient—Winston Churchill and a smattering of hypersensitive Jews—thought we’d ever be fighting the Germans again. The booming Twenties of my teens had passed quickly, hollow though the boom was, while the Depression Thirties were dragging ponderously. But for me at twenty-four, there was already a job in pictures, this compact shelter, and Palmyra. Mine was a love all the more precious for being unknown to its object.

  Nor was it only Palmyra. It looked as though I was getting on in the world. I’d been praised for my idea about two sets of robbers coming to knock over the same bank unaware of each other; Gable and Cagney, as polar opposites, would be perfect for the two gang chiefs, or try Eddie Robinson if we couldn’t get Cagney. I’d been invited to Mossy’s big party, I’d had lunch with Trent Amberlyn and Fred MacMurray, everyone had seen Palmyra Millevoix—yes!—blow a grateful kiss to me as I left the commissary, and I’d been assigned A Doll’s House, which four other writers had failed to lick.

  At this time, early 1934, I was disguised as a blank page on which other people wrote orders, urgent entreaties, or merely a list of chores. A writer, yes I was that, but a derivative, complaisant sort who wanted only to oblige, not to express a self at least as hidden from me as from others. Watch what I do with my treatment for A Doll’s House, I said to my estranged self, never mind Ibsen: I didn’t need approval from the dead. I’ll give them a Nora tougher and more lovable than he had.

  The kiss from Palmyra, blown across two tables and observed by a squadron of my betters, was the result of my providing her a stanza she meant to use in a song she was writing for a picture she wasn’t in and hadn’t even been set to score. Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields had been writing the melodies and lyrics for a musical with a kid in it who was always being teased by taller boys. The producer felt that if the kid, played by Mickey Rooney, had a song of his own it could literally beef up his character. When McHugh and Fields, who Hollywood said ripped up the Depression and threw it away with “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” returned to New York for a show that meant more to them than this movie, it was natural for Palmyra Millevoix to be asked to fill in with a couple of numbers. We were kind of a family at Jubilee—larger and more loving than our original families in many cases, if also more contentious—and it was just as natural for Palmyra, who was busy starring in two other pictures, to reach down and ask a junior writer if he had any quick thoughts for a song Rooney might sing. The next morning I handed her assistant these lines: “Please don’t call me Shorty anymore:/ I find it nasty and it makes me really sore;/ If you must talk about my height,/ Be prepared for me to fight/ Until the day comes when I’ve left you on the floor.”

  Why did Palmyra pick on me in the first place? Out of gratitude for my funeral oration she hadn’t used? Maybe she wanted to help an eager beaver or didn’t want someone more established whose work she couldn’t discard. She wound up using only my first line, but when she threw the kiss at me in the commissary, I levitated. Having seen her in a couple of places, I now saw her everywhere, including all the places she wasn’t. I became a fantasy factory, a miniature of Hollywood itself.

  Elsewhere on the lot I looked for approval from any quarter—an illiterate producer, lazy actors, a short-order cook of a director. If the approval, in other words, came from morons, I valued it just as highly. I didn’t consider the vacuum where my moral conscience was supposed to be any more than I did the desert where my creative impulses, such as they may have been, lay starved and gasping.

  I will meet a girl at Mossy’s party who will change my life tonight, I thought as I jounced along to work in my Essex coupe, and her attentions will entice Palmyra to take notice. This morning I’ll make A Doll’s House, my first shot at an A picture, accessible to the unwashed and, more important, acceptable to Amos Zangwill. Other writers will observe enviously when I deliver my treatment to Gershon Lidowitz, husband of the daughter of movie pioneer Abraham Fine. Mossy disdained the ungifted Lidowitz but he needed Abe Fine, still trusted in semi-retirement by the New York bankers who financed Jubilee. Mossy knew that Fine knew Gershon’s limitations and was grateful he was retained as a weak-handed Jubilee producer. Lidowitz, said to be the original butt of the quip that the son-in-law also rises, was known by his many detractors as Littlewits.

  We reported irritably for typewriter duty every Saturday morning at nine and tried to leave by one. The other writers on A Doll’s House had all listened to Littlewits and like leashed dogs had Nora decide to stay with Torvald in the end, destroying the play. Mossy knew this was wrong but he didn’t know how to get around the puritanical mood of the new Motion Picture Code that was beginning to be enforced. No more loose morals or broken homes. The Roaring Twenties, the Fatty Arbuckle sex scandal, onscreen flaunting of Prohibition, freewheeling lives of the stars themselves—all this offended the religious core of America, which called for theater boycotts. Hollywood trembled. Movie executives, often Jews yearning to be accepted by Christian America, decided to police their industry before the offended Bible Belt and the inflamed Catholic hierarchy declared total war on their products and, by extension, themselves.

  The early screen versions of A Doll’s House had been reasonably faithful to Ibsen, complete with the overacting that nineteenth century European theater brought into the motion picture’s silent decades. I knew Nora had to leave Torvald; the story was Nora’s coming of age, not her relationship with her stuffed-panda husband who deserves abandonment. Littlewits fretted a hint of divorce would annoy the censorious new Code-keepers, and he insisted the movie not end with the door shutting behind Nora. That last part had to be attacked this Saturday morning before my other triumphs could follow.

  “Where you been, Ownsie?” Mr. Royal said, welcoming me just before seven, long before any other writers had pulled onto the lot. “Don’t you know this third act needs more wrinkles before you can turn it in even to someone as dim as Littlewits? Can’t do it all by myself much as I’d like to.” “Shut
your trap,” I ordered, “let’s see if we can light the fuse.” “You think you can cold-cock this mess in a couple hours and then amscray?” That was the way even typewriters talked in those days. “Won’t get the girl if I don’t give her chocolates,” I said. “That’s all you know,” said the Royal.

  “Page thirty-two, third act,” the Royal warned, “we need eight pages to the mark Littlewits likes to see in his treatments. What’s Nora gonna do?”

  4

  Fame: A Lamentation

  “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-yay, here comes our Joel McCrea, his star shines night and day, Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-yay!” Mossy’s crier ushered special guests into the party as they descended the steps from the foyer to the long living room that had been turned into a ballroom by Jubilee’s prop department. “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-yee, let’s welcome Edward G., hope he’s not mad at me, ’cause if he is I’ll flee.” The crier, who accompanied himself on an accordion, was an assistant producer named Teet Beale. His face looked as if it had been stomped on yet he had clearly spent the afternoon in a Jubilee makeup room. High arched, plucked eyebrows, hair dyed the red of an ace of diamonds. Beale had the performed jolliness of a court jester who knows of an impending beheading that hasn’t been announced yet.

  This was my first big-name Hollywood festivity, the first time I’d been at Mossy’s house in the three years I’d worked, off and on, for him. The word “party” applied to the evening not as a merry gathering but as an ecclesiastical chain of command from the cardinal on down. The guests were less a cast of characters in any particular production than a directory of those who had caught and held and in turn craved Mossy’s attention. They looked as if they belonged on a Quattrocento canvas that included everyone who was anyone in Florence. Mossy himself had yet to put in an appearance at his own gala; he was said to be upstairs.

  With no one paying attention to me, I looked around. The place was lavish, of course, Spanish colonial for a grandee at least, perhaps a prince. Yet I had the sense of rooms that were the outcome not so much of furnishing as looting. The style was imperial arriviste, with everything, from pictures to couches, appearing to have come from boxcars that had been uncrated that morning. The walls held Van Ruisdale, Giorgione, Van Gogh, Renoir, Manet, each one plaqued with the artist’s name and dates as if it were in a museum but with an effect more aggressive than informative.

  Guests floated by me snatching canapés from the trays of Filipino houseboys, engaged not really in conversation but in ultimatum. “You’ll have to choose, Lansing, between this town and me because I can’t stand it here anymore, fetch me a martini.” “Get me Loretta Young and you can have anyone you want.” Two men in doublebreasted suits were trading movie stars as if they were playing cards or hog futures. “I’ll give you Shearer for Talmadge but you have to send her back eight weeks maximum. Thalberg will insist.” A sleek high-cheekboned woman cast a frozen look at her weary ascotted watery-eyed husband whose hand was in the crotch of the scared brown boy who was passing escargots. “Oh Roo Roo,” he said, “don’t be so Oyster Bay.” And the most familiar refrain: “I’ll never work with either of them again and that’s final.”

  The room was filling up with both failure and conspiracy, neither of which I could recognize on this Saturday evening in my yearning twenties. I was so surrounded by what I took for success I was blind to everything but what shone. I felt green and dumb, as if I’d been in Hollywood three days instead of three years. Guests were auditioning for other guests’ opinions as well as their absent host’s; here was where you found out where you stood on the weights and measures of the town, and on the scale covering the ballroom floor I weighed less than an ounce.

  “Where, for God’s sake, is our host with his gaze blank and pitiless as the sun?” I whirled at the basso voice to find Yancey Ballard, the writer of historical adventures like Spanish Armada and Caesar’s Curse. The lanky, cheerful, cynical Yancey was known to his fellow screenwriters and even to a number of producers as Yeatsman due to his affection for, and inclination to quote, the poet himself. He’d work Yeats into any conversation, usually without attribution. Yancey was one of the literary finds B. P. Schulberg made when he raided New York and Chicago after talkies began requiring writers to have a semblance of skill with dialogue and not merely the ability to type “THE BUTLER FINDS THE MASTER IN A COMPROMISING POSITION WITH THE UPSTAIRS MAID.” Originally from Alabama, Yancey worked for the New York Herald Tribune and had a hit novel, The Red Cloak, to his credit before Schulberg recruited him.

  Yancey read my mood and quoted his bard. “Feeling a bit lost, chum? Forget it. Your youth’s gone quickly here, leaving faith and pride to young upstanding men climbing the mountainside.” When we first met at Jubilee Yancey had wished me luck and said he’d once been in Hollywood for six weeks too, adding that that had been four years and a marriage ago. “But how do you tell,” I asked, surveying the ballroom, “who counts for what around here?”

  “Ah, that’s the trick,” he said, “in Hollywood both the best and the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

  “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-yah, comes Pammy Millevoix,” bleated Teat Beale. Elegant, sultry Palmyra proceeded into our midst on the arm of the forgettable actor Rolfe Sedan. Proud, not prideful, Pammy smiled and nodded at a few familiars as she advanced into the collective consciousness of the gathering. Her mane, the shade of melted butter, hung not quite to her shoulders, and her pale green shantung gown traversed her breasts in ripples, hugging the almost African curve of her hips and thighs. As for Rolfe Sedan, he was a date arranged by the studio, where someone was hoping he would become Jubilee’s answer to Ramon Novarro, who was already passé himself.

  When she disengaged herself from Sedan at the foot of the stairs, light from the nearest chandelier caught the slight downturn of Pammy’s eyes. This was her bone structure, really, yet it seemed a guide to what was always lurking no matter how she laughed, at herself and others. In her demeanor Pammy was an ardent child of the flapper age—excessive, elusive, playful, willful, idealistic but also skeptical. Her involvement in the songmaking repertory and the physical abandon in her singing does a hairpin turn when she appears rebellious and even scandalous one moment while in the next she becomes deeply romantic and traditional.

  She was not a mingler. She swept around the room greeting, detaching, accepting a martini, pausing for a moment’s intense exchange, moving on. I noticed, of all things, her eyebrows, wispy boundaries between her wide forehead and her hazel eyes. She used her brows to gesture, almost like hands. One would be up while the other was down, or they’d be spread in laughter, or they’d shade her eyes that transmitted, apparently with no reference to anything being said or enacted, the merest suggestion of cloud. Her one-sided smile curved up on the left while on the right her lips stayed closed and serious. That partially upturned smile is what never fades. Palmyra’s nostrils widened slightly, even flared in key scenes, giving her face a look of desire whether it existed or not.

  That was the thing about a star; she or he conveyed instantly something about themselves even if what was being conveyed, as with Trent Amberlyn, was utterly false. What made a star? Attitude and presence, an insistent energy, though what kind of energy varied from star to star. But looks. Looks are so often what we recall. Beauty, yes, yet imperfections, caricaturable badges, make as much impression as the soi-disant glories. Bette Davis’s foggy voice, Cagney’s features all gathered at the center of his face. The pouches under Bogie’s eyes. Crawford’s mile-wide slash of a mouth, Stanwyck’s sneer, you pick it, that singular feature setting a thirty-foot image apart from all others. That is what invaded our fantasies, a minute particular that was like no one else and became the skeleton key admitting its bearer to our unconscious.

  Palmyra Millevoix’s singularity was a small bend in her nose that began perhaps three quarters of an inch below the bridge and made the nose slightly steeper until it reached the famous flared nostrils. This bend was too small ever to be confused with a bump, but it d
id give Pammy a serious mien that the perfect little button noses, so cherished at the time, did not possess. The nose was made gentler by three or four freckles that often had to disappear for scenes in which any suggestion of cuteness would be a contradiction of mood or even class. It was her eyes, set apart like two cabochons, their greenish gray accentuated by the distance between them, that heralded Palmyra’s more perfect aspect. Their downturn, echoed in the sloping eyebrows, gave her even when she smiled the hint, the memory, or possibly the foretaste, of rue.

  I pushed forward into a throng of young studio people as anonymous as myself; we were what the trades called hopefuls. It was true, we did live on hope, and when we were out of work it was even what we ate. I strained to hear any buzz about A Doll’s House. Pretending to have as good a time as anyone, downing gins and tonic until the grand hall began to swirl, I was approximately a stage prop.

  What does fame mean? I wondered. These people have it—Spencer Tracy, Palmyra Millevoix of course, C. B. DeMille, sometimes it’s fame-by-affiliation as with Mrs. John Barrymore. A few flee from it but the rest seem to experience it as a form of immortality as well as an aid to mortal survival. Always falsity is present because they’re pretending to something greater, more extended, than they could possibly be. For Trent Amberlyn fame is two-edged because he does want to be famous—it’s all he has ever known he wanted—and he also wants to role-play, which is why he became an actor in the first place. But he hates being famous for what is in fact alien to him, and he hates living a lie, which makes him hate himself for not being what he is famous for being. Tonight his studio-arranged date is Palmyra’s young friend, Teresa Blackburn, who will have a major part in a new Jubilee picture. Studio talk had it that Mossy played with the idea of a well photographed romance with Palmyra herself. To Trent anything is better than being Bernard Gestikker from Otumwa, Iowa, which is who and where he began—but he’d prefer not having to sneak his real self around corners. Bernard Gestikker was a misfit in Iowa; Trent Amberlyn is fine in Hollywood, but not all of him.