Girl of My Dreams Page 4

  Shadows darted past, ignoring me. Was that Miriam Hopkins, George Arliss, Basil Rathbone? A fan might have felt he’d died and gone to Heaven; I thought I had vanished. They were not the shadows; I was.

  The emergence of Hana Bliner and Wren Harbuck through the French doors leading to the Zangwill’s fabled garden grabbed all eyes. They had thought to slip back into the party unnoticed, the starlet Hana and Mossy’s assistant production chief Harbuck, but everyone spotted them. Hana was still fastening a strap while Wren, known for his polish and manners, was trying desperately both to knot his tie and re-part his oiled hair. He coughed explosively, as if that would disguise his recent errand from his wife and the other guests.

  When the laughter and scattered applause died down, I walked over to the French doors to look at the famous garden, as brightly lit as a stage. Mossy and Esther Leah planned it after a voyage to England; they had seen the Chelsea Flower Show and then gone north to the Thane of Cawdor’s lush estate in the Highlands. Peering into Mossy’s garden yielded little of its rumored excesses, which were blocked by arbors and hedges, but I could tell it stretched for acres. Amos Zangwill was as particular with his plantings as with his stars. When he saw the garden and the mansion it ringed, George Bernard Shaw’s comment was that he wished he could rewrite Heartbreak House.

  Next to me, Wilma Ockenfuss of Variety, chubby as a strawberry, asked if I thought the Harbuck indiscretion with Hana Bliner had to be a blind item or if the presence of so many guests as witnesses made it possible to write a straight account of their emergence through the French doors and what had undoubtedly preceded it. “Heh heh,” I said through all the gin I’d gulped, “shall we sally forth to see the garden’s charms for ourselves?” Shrugging, she moved off in the direction of Tutor Beedleman, one of Jubilee’s more genial writers but also one who disliked the press. I heard the silly woman say to Tutor, gesturing in my direction, “How can someone be so young and already out of date?” Then she asked him the question—blind item versus using names—she had asked me. “Water, Wilma, seeks its own level,” Tutor said, “and so does slime.”

  Taking my arm, Tutor guided me to the safety of other writers. Guests clustered around the room according to hierarchy, vocation, or ideological preference, as the fugitive Alabaman Yancey Ballard described them to me. He unfurled his collective nouns as a banner of disillusion. “See the blush of Reds,” he said, “hugging the bottom of the stairs to proselytize newcomers. A cloudburst of actors have spread themselves throughout, drenching us in fragile ego. Over there at the buffet table a hazard of agents gabs while across from them is a threat of producers. And wouldn’t you know it, under the fanciest chandelier stands an ostentation of directors while around us, never straying from the bar, hovers the grumble of screenwriters.”

  The little Red cell, next to a potted palm Esther Leah had draped a pearl necklace around, had their satisfied zeal and camaraderie. “In Russia there’s time only for struggle, one said, “not like this country where we waste our breath arguing over the best highway to Hell, this country where we haven’t had a revolution since the eighteenth century.” “It’s coming soon,” said another. “Then we’ll see,” said a third, “what people can do with their own bare hands to make the new society.”

  Power stalked the premises. Without bothering to waste one of his famous glares at the Reds, Edgar Globe was working the party, the burly entertainment lawyer wading into any conversation he wanted to dominate. Globe was with his slinky long-lashed Texas wife, Francesca, who swept her eyes over the important men in the room and held a director’s hand a half beat too long when she shook it. The couple was up to no good.

  Photographs in the Zangwill den, where I wandered alone, paired Mossy with Charles Lindbergh, with Mrs. Roosevelt, with Noël Coward, Bobby Jones, Dempsey, Tunney, Babe Ruth, Barney Baruch, and so on. These were composites tricked up for Mossy by Jubilee’s art department in the early days when the studio, and Mossy, needed status by association. Years later, when he met one of these people and an actual photograph was taken, as with Lindbergh and George Bernard Shaw, Mossy replaced the earlier composites he’d had made unless he preferred the fake ones, which he often did.

  I was assailed by a vision of Mossy as the Chinese emperor who, to cover his tracks, had all those killed who had built his monuments—in this case Jubilee’s movies. Everyone in the photographs, at the party and in Jubilee’s pictures, would be destroyed by Mossy, none left to redress his wrongs or tell his secrets. He was so far only a ghost at his own party, a commanding absence. Perhaps he planned to—

  “A thousand a week for your thoughts, Wallflower,” Sylvia Solomon said as she tapped me on the shoulder. The highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood had decided to spy on Mossy’s den herself.

  “Apparently my thoughts are worth less than a third of that,” I said.

  “Then for your delusions,” she said. About a dozen years older than I, Sylvia made the most of not being particularly pretty or even pretending to be. Everyone at Jubilee confided in her, and no one went far trying to get the better of her, including two refined, thirsty and constitutionally unemployed husbands who had more or less lived off her until she threw them out. Sylvia was never without a lighted cigarette in her ebony holder, which she wielded like a baton. Her hair flew as if it were wings, and a small mole by the side of her nose made her look serious even when she was joking. When she trained her owlish brown eyes at them, producers found themselves blabbering nonsense in story conferences just to avoid her look, and Sylvia could win approval for a plot point by asking, with faux innocence, “Can you think of a better way to do this?” riveting the executive until he stammered, “Ah, really, no, I can’t.”

  “It’s the dues of youth,” Sylvia said, “that’s all you’re paying.” I told her I’d been sure I could at least mix a little with people here, but I honestly didn’t know how to be one of them. “No one,” she said, “is one of them until they notice you and they don’t notice you until you do something noticeable, good or bad. Just the fact you’re here means Mossy has seen something about you. That’s enough, Wallflower.”

  We both left the den and Sylvia rejoined her date, the infamous drunk and puffy braggart Jamieson McPhatter. “Thought you’d stood me up have another drink will you look at that fairy in his tights did you know Selznick wants to see me,” I heard the pompous McPhatter spew as I wondered why Sylvia Solomon, engaging enough in her way, wasted her time with that bullfrog. When I knew her well enough to ask what she saw in Lord Jamieson, Sylvia said she wanted to collaborate on his next script since they wouldn’t let a woman write Nelson at Trafalgar all by herself and he’d already muscled his way onto the project. She also knew McPhatter would fall into a stupor and she wouldn’t have to sleep with him, only drive him home and call a taxi. But that was later. For now, I was discarded.

  In the center of the room, the directors resembled a clot of playground bullies, bullies wearing gold cufflinks engraved with castles or racehorses. They told each other stories about the vanity of stars, the stupidity of producers, who they’d bring out from Broadway to be in their next picture. The more pensive ones were out-blustered by the others. Although they couldn’t begin their work until we finished ours, I did not hear them mention writers. I liked pictures better before these guys became the dictators. That’s why I’m an irrelevant discard.

  In the midst of the clot was a tall slender man, youngish but with a creased high forehead from which close-cropped hair was beginning to recede. Nils Matheus Maynard had come to Jubilee more recently than I, but unlike me his reputation preceded him. Listening to Largo Buchalter, a particularly noisy blowhard, Nils reached into his pocket and pulled out a brass ball. Making no show—I noticed him only because the blowhard’s voice attracted my attention as he broadcast his conquest of a rising actress—Nils placed the small ball between the thumb and index finger of his right hand. Without a word, as if he were fidgeting for his own amusement, he made the ball become two,
three, then four balls, each held between a different pair of fingers.

  “Attaboy Nils, let’s see what you’re up to,” said handsome, dark Frank Capra, interrupting Largo Buchalter’s monologue. Buchalter glowered at Capra, understood he had held the floor too long, and yielded resentfully. “Oh sure, Houdini, wow us,” he said.

  “No,” Nils said, “I could never be confused with the incomparable escape meister, but once upon a time, as some of you know, I was myself the sorcerer’s apprentice.” As he spoke, Nils had pulled a deck of cards from his jacket pocket and had each of the other directors pick a card.

  “What’s the secret of magic, Nils Matheus?” someone asked Nils, who was often referred to by both his first and middle names. Others had now swelled the group.

  “Stupid question,” said the bloviating Largo Buchalter, unwilling to cede the floor entirely. “What he does is go around fooling people, that’s all.”

  “Not fooling,” Nils said quietly, “I hope amazing and delighting them. Same in magic as in pictures or stories. First, please them. After that, you can do anything.”

  “What pulled you from magic to pictures anyway?” another director asked.

  Nils Matheus Maynard was an established headlining magician before he ever made movies. He began his training with Harry Houdini himself (or the rabbi’s son Erich Weiss, as the cognoscenti preferred) when Houdini was in the last weary spiral of his illustrious career. He had done everything from swallowing needles to falling into Boston harbor while handcuffed and locked in a safe to an impossible jailbreak. As a boy Nils had been taken by his mother to the escapade in Boston, and he became a Houdini worshipper at that moment, the moreso because of a condition that denied Nils any hope of emulating the daring physical feats of the master.

  Nils’s mother Bruna was a von Bickenheim of Bavaria, with distinguished roots in universities and the discipline of mathematics. The family had been compromised, Nils told me when I got to know him, first by her emigration to America and then, more grievously, by her marriage to Nils’s soft, shiftless father, Rufus Maynard, an indifferent sailor and sailmaker from Gloucester, Massachusetts. Their second son was sickly, a bleeder, and it was because of Bruna. She had an uncle with severe hemophilia, and she knew she was the source of Nils’s disease.

  Hemophilia, with no known cause or cure, displays itself with serious bleeding only in males yet is directly inherited only from females (in rare cases, females may have mild hemorrhages). A hemophiliac father will have no sons who bleed, but all his daughters will be carriers. A carrier mother will have half carrier daughters and half hemophiliac sons. When Nils was a boy hemophilia was still called the disease of kings, largely because it afflicted both the English and Russian royal families who, as it happened, had intermarried. In the superstition of the day, a family with a hemophiliac was sometimes thought to be in the grip of a diabolical possession. The blood transfusions Nils needed were regarded with suspicion, and his mother was ashamed whenever she had to take her son to the hospital in Boston.

  Bruna von Bickenheim Maynard was so horrified by her son’s condition that she fled back to Bavaria from time to time. This left Nils and his non-bleeding brother with their frequently unemployed father whose chief pleasures were Scotch whiskey and swapping tales with other old salts in the sailmaking lofts of Gloucester.

  Coming and going in Nils’s life, his mother was alternately overbearingly protective and a deserter. Nils obeyed her rigidly, but this had no influence on her abandonments. Joining a small group of parents with hemophiliac sons, Frau von Bickenheim Maynard encountered a woman from South Braintree, Evelina Tedeschio, whose son Mario was the same age as Nils. Nils and Mario played together during group meetings, but since South Braintree is on the other side of Boston from Gloucester they saw each other only once a month when parents gathered to discuss ways to handle their bleeding, and blood-needy, sons. Mario liked to hit his mother, knowing she couldn’t hit him back. Evelina Tedeschio disclaimed any sense of guilt or anger by asserting she felt honored that God had favored her with the responsibility to make her son an inspiration for others. “Nonsense,” said another mother, “my line is cursed and so is yours. All of us here gave birth to vampires.”

  The hostile Mario became the obedient Nils’s best friend, and between their monthly visits they wrote letters. Nils told Mario he wanted to find a formula for curing hemophilia; Mario wrote back he wanted to make the whole world hemophiliac so people would know what the suffering felt like. Evelina Tedeschio made her son a virtual prisoner inside a virtual shrine to his illness, pillows and pads on every piece of furniture, high locks on the doors to prevent the boy from wandering. When he was eleven, Mario escaped from the Tedeschio home in South Braintree and made his way by trolley and bus to Gloucester. He waited until dark before tapping on Nils’s window.

  The two boys were missing for five days—Nils’s mother was away and his father was mostly drinking—and the only person to panic was Evelina Tedeschio. This meant the police looked only on the South Shore; meanwhile Nils and Mario found their way to Lowell, well north of Boston, where they hired themselves into a shirtwaist factory and took milled cotton to the women who transformed it into cloth. If any of the thousands of needles in the factory had poked either of the boys they’d have been in serious trouble, but they were careful. Exposed gears were another hazard, and poor ventilation left the air filled with cotton fibers. Some of the workers, all women, were in the early stages of tuberculosis and often had to spit onto the floor, which endangered everyone else. Yet Nils told me he never felt healthier in his entire childhood than during those few stolen days in the textile mill when he was treated like everyone else. The jig wasn’t up until a watchman found the boys sleeping in the mill. Nils wasn’t allowed to see Mario again.

  To Nils most of childhood was combat, and most of his bleeding was internal. His hemophilia was of a relatively moderate variety, yet when he played with other boys he was sure to come home with grossly swollen and excruciatingly painful joints. Knees, elbows, ankles, wrists were the worst. A contact sport sent him into agony as his blood flowed eagerly, inside his joints, to any bruised area. When he had to miss school because of pain, Nils read books about magic. “Anything to escape,” he told me. He was better with his hands than his sailmaking father, and he could make rabbits disappear for his dazzled school chums, some of whose parents thought it was the work of Satan. Nils had no respect for his father and something approaching hatred for his mother.

  In 1914, when Nils was fifteen, he won a sleight-of-hand contest that gave him six weeks as a junior assistant to Houdini. Unlike Houdini’s other assistants, all older and more experienced, Nils knew he could never become an escape artist or contort his body in any fashion. He practiced with cards, birds, ribbons and scarves up to ten hours a day. He described this as a preference, never telling Houdini or the other assistants about his hemophilia, which had begun to abate but would never permit him to twist himself into the human pretzel that was routine for escape artists.

  From Houdini, Nils learned to make objects disappear and reappear elsewhere, to take the audience into his confidence, give them the impression they knew a trick as well as the performer, then with a whisk and a blinding hand-eye movement leave them astounded at how utterly they had been deceived. Nils told me a magician is really an actor playing the part of a magician. He acted his apprentice part so well that at the end of six weeks Houdini asked Nils to stay on as part of his retinue. Houdini liked to say great tricks are like unsolved crimes, and now Nils was learning to commit them.

  Houdini took Nils to Hollywood where the peerless magician made several silent films, all disappointments. Chaplin tried to give Houdini suggestions to make his pictures more believable. Houdini insisted he had only to replicate what he did on a stage, but audiences did not buy this on the screen. For Nils it was all going to school.

  After several years Nils felt he’d learned enough, and the master was becoming self-destructive
. Houdini kept himself locked in a coffin under water for over an hour, which left him ill for days afterward, and he began doing something Nils found eerie. Some weeks Houdini would spend all his time exposing fraudulent mediums and spiritualists. “This was holy work to Houdini,” Nils said, “but to me it was breaking the proscenium. I love sham. It’s why I became a magician. Audiences love it. It takes them away from the deeper shams and disasters of their lives.”

  Within a year after going on his own, Nils was filling theaters from San Francisco to Savannah, seeing his name grow larger on posters. He could make anything vanish on one side of the stage and rematerialize on the other; he could cut one woman not into two but into six women, which brought audiences to their feet. He introduced himself theatrically, almost in a trance as he chanted his spell: “Hear me, O Spirits, in my torment. Numerals are the invisible coverings of human beings. We ask you to release us through numbers. Let every rope or strap, every knot be broken, every form of matter change its shape and location. Let identity itself multiply, for I am Nils Maynard but also Matheus von Bickenheim.”

  Having borrowed the name of his despised mother, Nils would begin his tricks while explaining he needed his mother’s noble heritage to invoke the powerful forces that would help him perform magic. The ancient von Bickenheim attachment to mathematics at Heidelberg resurfaced in a way his forefathers wouldn’t have predicted but would recognize. He would turn one dove into four, one handkerchief into ten, and again and again one woman into six. He took a few prisoners from Houdini: Nils could make a trumpet leave one table and arrive instantly on another playing “Stars and Stripes Forever,” and he could throw four ringing alarm clocks into the air, make them vanish and reappear hanging from watch chains on the opposite side of the stage. When he had worked his way up to playing New York, Detroit, and Chicago in the mid 1920s, Nils was making eight thousand dollars a week and pocketing virtually all of it. He was free. He never spoke to Houdini again, nor would he see his mother, even when she tried to come backstage in Boston.