Girl of My Dreams Page 6

  Mossy did not announce that Palmyra would sing. He only moved his eyes toward the piano. If you looked away from the vacant baby grand for a moment and then looked back, you would see a studio musician had materialized at the keyboard.

  Palmyra smiled her faintly one-sided smile and proceeded to the piano. At parties earlier in her career she had scandalously added blue lyrics that could never be in a movie or on a record. She’d had a hit in 1932 with a song called “Give Me a Chance,” in which the last chorus had lines ending with “chance,” “romance” and “passionate trance.” At a party given by Marion Davies in the Oceanhouse beach mansion William Randolph Hearst had built for her, after the aged and curiously shockable publisher had gone upstairs to bed (curious since he lived openly with his mistress), Pammy stepped to the microphone and uncorked an altered last stanza:

  You’re here to pitch,

  I’m here to catch;

  Where I itch

  You know how to scratch,

  So honey if you’ll give me a chance,

  I’ll take hold of that thing in your pants;

  I’ll stroke it and I’ll suck it,

  I’ll sit on it and I’ll fuck it

  Till I leave you in an unaccustomed trance.

  This pretty much brought down the Oceanhouse, and by noon on Monday the whole town was trying to quote Pammy’s words. Unfortunately for her, the song had been recorded by a young reporter for Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner who wanted to curry favor with the chief. Hearst, too furious even to reprimand his mistress, had the recording sent to his friend J. Edgar Hoover with a note: “This one has Red sympathies. Let’s cool her off.” The head of the FBI office in Los Angeles paid a visit to Mossy at Jubilee. “Don’t bother to get scratches on your record by playing it on my phonograph,” Mossy told the G-man, “because I was at the party myself.” But what he said to Pammy was, “They’re threatening to go to the Legion of Decency with it, Walter Winchell, the churches. Bad luck, but no more union garbage and Red meetings for you, young lady, or your career will be over. They’ll deport you as an alien, and they’ll try to take your daughter away. They’ll keep her here. They’re not kidding about deportation.”

  “Whaaaat? Take Millie? You’re joking.”

  “They’ll claim anyone who sings songs like that is an unfit mother. Period.”

  For the next two years labor organizers complained they couldn’t get Palmyra Millevoix at their rallies anymore. The more sophisticated among them shrugged. “She’s sold out like the rest of ’em. Works for the fascist Zangwill. ’Nuff said.”

  Mossy’s party was entering its climactic phase when Pammy reached the piano, where the accompanist from the Jubilee orchestra offered a few chords to gain silence. “I came to the California of unlimited hopes,” Pammy began before the talking died completely. “Most of you have helped me and none of you have hurt me—much.” Appreciative titters. Nils Matheus Maynard clinked his glass with a spoon until the room was quiet. Mossy came down all the stairs but one, which he needed to stand on in order to see above heads to Pammy; sensitive about his height—five and a half feet—he also didn’t want to stay at the top of the stairs like the Pope on his balcony. Pammy smiled across the room at him. “My employer, our genial and easygoing host” (chuckles from the braver guests) “has asked me for a song. He is a skeptical optimist, while I remain a cheerful pessimist. The best we can do to keep the wolf away is have some fun and thank Amos Zangwill for the evening.” Scattered applause for Mossy. “Times change, don’t they?” Palmyra was keeping time now with her hips as the piano vamped a few notes. “In the Twenties we had plenty, In the Thirties it’s all gone, But in the Thirties we got dirty, And we dance from dark till dawn. Oh my heart will jump for dancing, For dancing till we fall; That’s when I want romancing, Please take me to the ball.”

  “Give us ‘Lucky Rendezvous,’ Pammy” someone cried. “No, ‘Moonbeams,’” yelled someone else. Pammy was savoring the wait, roasting those chestnuts I’d described in my overwrought press release, until she had just the anticipation level she wanted.

  “But the country around us,” Pammy went on, “is not dancing because it can’t even stand up. I’m not trying to raise money or pleading any cause. I just want to say my sense of justice, which has been asleep for several years, is awake again.”

  Mossy looked at his toes while the Lefties in the room clapped and everyone else waited. An odd occasion, I thought, for Palmyra to put her social conscience on exhibit, but then entertainers are exhibitionists by nature. She had the audience she wanted, the most visible and powerful members of the industry. Sylvia Solomon poked me in the ribs. “Hooray for Millevoix,” I said to her, “and watch out Hollywood.” “I’d put it the other way around,” she whispered, “especially watch out for the big guys on the playground.”

  “We are all dreamers,” Pammy said to the room, “or we wouldn’t be writing, directing, acting, composing, or producing, would we?” (Sylvia whispered again, “At least one person here puts writing first.”) “We dare make dreams come true. But when you gain the dream you lose the dream. The song I’m going to sing is about lovers who have to part, their tristesse. But it’s also about my songs themselves. When I have a song in me it is a happy full feeling because it’s still inside me. When I release it, I’m as empty and sad as anyone waving farewell or remembering any time past that we cherish.”

  The piano trilled, and here’s some of what Palmyra sang:

  I can’t do a thing when I have to say goodbye,

  Since the word all alone leaves a tear in my eye,

  So please don’t ask if you don’t want me to cry:

  I never have found where’s the good in goodbye.

  I’ve made a sandwich ham and cheddarly

  Just for Gertrude Ederle;

  The tickle in my nose has felt

  A breeze for Franklin Roosevelt.

  You can take me way back to where time began,

  To the east of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan;

  But search as I may and try as I try

  I just haven’t noticed the good in goodbye.

  Pammy had written the song for a nightclub croon in Jubilee’s Reno Weekend, which needed to acknowledge and relieve the self-pity of its three divorcees, only one of whom had by that point in the picture found a cowboy. Years later Harold Arlen played with the same theme, and the song became “What’s Good About Goodbye.” I still prefer Palmyra’s, but then I would. She finished with “So please don’t you ask me or I’ll have to lie; I never have found where’s the good in goodbye.”

  The wanton secret of motion pictures is that everyone connected with them is a starstruck fan. Yeatsman allowed himself a whistle, as did some of the producers. Mossy was clapping from the top of the stairs, to which he had returned. A shout of “Encore, je vous en prie” from Tutor Beedleman brought a smile from Pammy, but she had finished singing for her supper. She was swept up by her forthcoming costar Trent Amberlyn, joined by her best friend Teresa Blackburn, who was just starting to win good parts herself, and Teresa’s brother Stubby Blackburn, a shortstop for the Los Angeles Angels in the Pacific Coast League. Together they led Pammy away from the piano.

  Even though some guests were going home, others were still arriving. The alert Teet Beale spotted big game. “Ta-ra-ra, Here’s a neat trick, Descending now’s La Dietrich, Blesses us with mirth and fun, Shines brighter than the sun.” Enter Marlene grandly. “Between her usual brace of flits,” said Tutor Beedleman. Dietrich’s wide-eyed smile enfolded the room and no one in it. High-waisted black slacks making her legs even longer, an ivory blouse forming a V so expansive its first button was below her self-assured breasts. Boyish, womanly, naughty and haughty, freed from the rigid grip of gender. Why she lighted on me I don’t know; I must have resembled the cringing courtier I was. The low voice, the open throat: “Can you take me, Darlink, to Mr. Zangvill.”

  Leaving all the men and half the women with their tongues hanging—though I heard one
actress say to another, “I’ll bet that dame poses in her sleep”—I escorted Miss D back up the stairs to the library. She took my arm. No ceremony with her host once I’d opened the library door. “Mossy, ve must talk, ve must weally sit down mit each udder.” I shuffled out of the library along with Baringer Donovan, the Warner’s producer. “Ten more minutes,” Donovan said to me as we rejoined the rest of the party, “shit, five more minutes, and I’ve had a deal with Jubilee so I could tell Jack Warner on Monday to go hump one of Zanuck’s polo ponies.” “Tough luck,” I said. “Nothing to do with luck,” he said, “it was that hun bitch’s timing. Say, who are you anyway?”

  Down I went another fathom. What hopes I’d had when I’d come! How they were dashed! Pondering my exclusion from the kingdom of notability, I tried to convince myself it was temporary. I thought about the fame of a hero like Charles Lindbergh who had earned it (then paid for it so dearly with his infant son’s kidnapping and death) and the residual fame of the has-beens like Anita Billow who simply moved about in her cocoon of repute. Billow, who was here at the party, had been a silent star whose Polish accent (née Bilowitsky) kept her not only from achieving talkie stardom but even from getting small parts. She was a somebody relegated to nobody status by technology. Unable to make the necessary adjustments to her thickly accented English, unlike the sultry Dietrich or the whispery Garbo, she sounded like a truck driver with a sore throat. For Anita Billow, fame was lifelong access. She simply went around looking ravishing, nursing her legend, saying she didn’t miss acting. For the public, each kind of fame dissolved into each other kind, soothing them with voyeurism and wish fulfillment. In Hollywood, fame became a kind of magnetic north, and those whose fame lasted would merely be the famous who embodied the public’s more transcendent hopes. The stars’ glamour surfaced as the mysterious flash of lightning extended indefinitely.

  The directors did their late-night hammering. “Actors are basically crazy, can’t let the inmates run the asylum.” “Piece of practical advice, never fuck a starlet if you can fuck a star.” “Thirty-foot-high image of passion—audiences think this is reality and the world outside the theater is an illusion. Know what, they’re right.” “Escape, escape, escape. Eggheads knock it, I live for it.” “Naw, gimme a tough guy fighting in an alley, a broad upstairs in a rooming house, they meet in a breadline and I’m cooking with gas.”

  I looked out the window and pictured Father Junipero Serra creating a mission on this site in the 1700s, on the ground above Beverly Hills. He would have put a holy place here. The Indians converted, farmed, carved their crosses, built a few huts around a chapel, sickened with European diseases, prayed. Father Serra made their faith his cause. The bones of the Indians and their Spanish confessors and conquistadors might be buried beneath the Zangwill palace and gardens. This vortex where I was sinking had once been a mission. A mission it was again.

  “What a pleasure—Owen Jant, isn’t it?” I was returned to the party by a voice followed by a hand on my arm. My hostess, Esther Leah Zangwill, gentled me back to the occasion though I realized my gin-soaked reverie had canted me somewhat and I tried to pull myself together. Before I knew anything I was saying, “Me? A pleasure? I couldn’t be, I don’t even know what I’m doing here, sorry.” And she said, “Think I do? But that’s how I am most of the time, not knowing where or why, mustn’t let it worry us.” She shrugged, and looking into her importuning eyes I saw I’d done something right by being mistakenly honest. “Not knowing,” she said, “and being worried about that, then not caring.” Esther Leah gave the impression of looking on the proceedings with an alternating current of disbelief and resignation. How many of these men owed their careers to her husband, how many of these women had he slept with? Adept at hiding both shame and love, Esther Leah was short, an oval-faced woman with large dark eyes, too prominent a chin, a warm Mediterranean complexion. “You’ll get used to this,” she said. “It’s like what I imagine weightlessness is. Look for meaning, you’ll go nuts. Look for a little pleasure, you’ll find some. Soon it will be a burden to feel any other way.” Esther Leah patted my shoulder and was off hostessing.

  Palmyra had found her way, after many detours, back to Rolfe Sedan, the actor she’d come in with. She whispered to him. Did her lips brush his ear?

  With no Mossy to thank, guests kissed or double-kissed Esther Leah on their way to the parking valets. I knew Rolfe Sedan could not be important in the life of Palmyra Millevoix—at best a cipher, not unlike me, just so she wouldn’t have to show up alone—and this left me grateful. The upsweep of her hair now made her taller, more regal, than when it splashed onto her shoulders as it did in most publicity shots. Had anyone photographed her this way, and could I filch a copy? Wait, why was she patting Rolfe Sedan on the shoulder and moving toward the stairs by herself? She was going home alone too? Losses surrounded me, yet redemption was at hand. In our mutual solitude my spirit would fly to her.

  I had not at first heard the low laugh coming from the open library door at the top of the stairs. In a moment Amos Zangwill and Marlene Dietrich were descending as if leading a stately procession. The low laugh again, from Marlene. “Mossy darlink, you haf giffen me eggsackly vut I need.” “Well,” he said, “it’s a two way street, Marlene.” “No, but eggzackly!” she said, clutching an empty martini glass like a weapon. “On vun little cocktail I am as you say loaded. Bad boy.” Mossy shrugged and smiled.

  From nowhere the two little chaperones Marlene came in with were alongside Pammy at the bottom of the stairs. “Boys, I see you in za morning,” Dietrich said as she dismissed what Tutor Beedleman called her body doubles. “Tonight I think to speak with Mademoiselle Millevoix.” She hooked her arm in Palmyra’s. They had known each other in Europe, hadn’t they? I hustled out of their way, leaving ahead of them.

  “I assumed you must be reading every book in that library,” I heard Pammy say. “Vell, you know Mossy,” Marlene chuckled as they climbed the stairs she had just come down. “Und Mossy gafe you vut you vant?” Pammy asked, mimicking Marlene. “Und how, darlink.” “Oh well,” Pammy said, “I’m glad to know Mossy does that for somebody.” They exited together, laughing.

  I thought, how genteel, if baffling. In those days the word “clueless” had not entered the lexicon. Yet I was able to reflect on my grandiloquent delirium of the morning. In my self-coronation, I’d forgotten a monarch is also a butterfly that can be crushed by anyone’s inadvertent heel.

  But when I’d slunk to my car I had no car keys. I remembered jingling my key chain during the proud moment after hearing my Doll’s House version praised. I crouched behind a bush until Pammy drove off in Dietrich’s car. When I slunk back into the house against the tide of guests leaving Mossy’s party, I tried to hide against the wall. On my hands and knees in the deserted ballroom, I searched for my key chain until a Filipino house boy reached down to tap my back. He handed me my keys.

  5

  The Odyssey of Poor Jim Bicker

  “You cringe before that bitch and you know it. Let me tell you, she’s out of tune in these times, never mind her singing. You know what she could do?”

  Blinking, barely awake, I said I didn’t know. Poor Jim Bicker was haranguing me early the next morning. He broke into my sleep by pounding so hard on my front door I leaped up certain I’d been hit in the head with a hatchet. I knew he lived in a decrepit apartment somewhere in Hollywood, and as I’d dragged myself to the door I couldn’t imagine what he was doing on Sumac Lane in Santa Monica Canyon.

  Freed from the dingy suit and soup-stained tie he’d worn at Mossy’s party, Poor Jim was in his customary baggy pants and a striped jersey that set off his angry face with a little ring of neck hair that fringed over the collar. “You know what she could do with her fame, she and Amberlyn and a few others? They could lead this town to a revolution. If we had a revolution in the most conspicuous American business except for automobiles, we could start to save this fuckin’ country, which doesn’t deserve saving. So M
illevoix says her conscience is awake now and then for Christ’s sake sings us a romantic ballad. Drops the ball when she could be running for a touchdown, right? Am I right?”

  “I really don’t know,” I said.

  “You’re a rank priv like all of them!” he shouted. “You don’t even know that because you don’t know this bleeding country we got on our hands. Yet you’re also still a boy, and a boy can learn.”

  Apparently Jim Bicker had appointed himself my instructor. While I cut up two oranges and put on water for tea, he settled himself on the secondhand couch in the cramped space that passed for a living room. My little home had a steep roof that swept almost to the ground, framing two windows and the front door; the effect was of a man with a cap pulled down over his face. “You call the way I live privileged?” I asked. “Salary cuts are threatened at the studio. How privileged is that?”

  “Okay, some of the privs are going to camp out in hard times for a while. The picture business is essentially thriving, people wasting their quarters to forget what things are like outside the movie houses, and the eastern banking privs, Episcopalians who don’t like the Zangwill ilk anyway, are using breadlines as an excuse to rearrange their colony out here so profits will be even higher this year. Tight millionaires molding bad times into a reason for being even tighter. Blind privilege is all they know. Everything else is invisible. What these people here think they’re going through is nothing but camping.”