Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane
Read Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane Online
Authors: Tom Carson
“A perfect mirror of the ‘American century.’”
—“Editors’ Choice,”
The New York Times Book Review
A
Washington Post
“Notable Fiction” selection for 2011
Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter
In
Cadwaller’s Gun
—Book 1 of
Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter
—cranky eighty-six-old blogger Pam Buchanan told readers of her plan to blow her brains out in protest while she’s got President George W. Bush on the phone on her birthday: June 6, 2006. While waiting for the White House to call, she breathlessly described her early years: her flight to Europe with her fabled mother after “the Scandal” and her father’s misfortunate death on the polo field one day in 1925, then her return to the Depression-era American Midwest in adolescence once her mother’s suicide in Brussels left her in the care of her guardian, Chicago advertising man and future monk Nicholas Carraway. By age twenty-one, she was married to—and soon divorced from—Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Brannigan Murphy (
Prometheus in Madrid
), meanwhile launching the precocious writing career that took her from reporting on the “dawn-fingered Rosies” of World War Two’s home front for Regent’s magazine to preparing to go back to Europe, this time as a war correspondent.
As
Carole Lombard’s Plane
opens, we find Pam exulting on daisysdaughter.com in the “voluptuous allure” of 1948 Hollywood as a studio gets ready to film her best-selling WW2 memoir,
Nothing Like a Dame
. But in 2006, it’s still only early afternoon—and Cadwaller’s gun is still in her lap as she waits for the White House’s call to reprieve her from putting up with any more of this Shinola.
“You’re unlikely to find a wittier, more ingenious, more compulsively readable novel this year than Tom Carson’s latest
… If
The Great Gatsby
didn’t quite reach the green of the Great American Novel—it’s too short for such a big country—
Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter
lands within putting distance of the grand old flagpole.”
—Steven Moore,
The Washington Post
“Trippy, hilarious, brilliant.”
—Susan Coll, author of
Beach Week
,
Acceptance
, and
Rockville Pike
“
The most distinctive voice to be found in any recent American novel
… Maybe building a cockamamie epic out of a maddening jumble of cultural and historical ephemera is the only way to really do justice to the American century in all its chaos and contradictions. Even if it isn’t, F. Scott Fitzgerald still owes Carson a drink for trying.”
—Jason Anderson,
Toronto Globe and Mail
“
Playful, imaginative, and extremely funny
… Great dames of the 20th century, open your ranks: Pam Buchanan is part of the sisterhood.”
—Farran Smith Nehme, the Self-Styled Siren
“As brilliant as fireworks exploding over the Washington Monument,
Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter
is that rarest of triumphs—a laugh-out-loud funny novel that’s also dead serious … Here is history seen through the looking glass—delirious, diabolically witty, and absolutely unique.”
—John Powers, Critic at Large for NPR’s
Fresh Air with Terry Gross
and author of
Sore Winners: American Idols, Patriotic Shoppers, and Other Strange Species in George Bush’s America
“An uproarious, antic, tender and proudly huge novel
… Earns its status as an American epic even while it redefines what a literary epic is.”
—Mark Athitakis,
Washington City Paper
“Huzzah!”
—Susann Cokal, author of
Mirabilis
and
Breath and Bones
“Inventive and masterful.”
—Thaisa Frank, author of
Heidegger’s Glasses
and
A Brief History of Camouflage
“Sprawling, clever, flamboyant, recklessly ambitious,
Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter
takes gigantic risks and delivers gigantic rewards.”
—Geoff Nicholson, author of
Bleeding London
and
Gravity’s Volkswagen
“Carson—the film critic for
GQ
and the author of the novel
Gilligan’s Wake
—gives himself wholeheartedly to scouring Pam’s lifetime for iconic moments and succeeds: Pam edged out for the Pulitzer by Jack Kennedy, Pam with [Lyndon Baines] Johnson’s head in her lap before his speech forestalling nomination, Pam in a Hollywood both seedy and glamorous, Pam at D-Day …
For our purposes, Pam is America, and once, for better or worse, America was everywhere
.”
—Tadzio Koelb,
The New York Times Book Review
Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter
Book 2: Carole Lombard’s Plane
Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter
Book 2: Carole Lombard’s Plane
Tom Carson
River House INK
New Orleans, LA
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2011 Tom Carson
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, online, radio, or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher (Csaba Lukacs, River House INK).
Cover painting by Glenn Arthur
Author photo by Victoria F. Gaitán
Design and copyediting by Nita Congress
ISBN-13: 978-0-9825973-4-7
Published in the USA
Original one-volume edition published by Paycock Press, Arlington, VA
River House INK
625 Marigny Street
New Orleans, LA 70117
Visit
daisysdaughter.com
.
In memory of Alice, with love to her friends.
My deepest thanks to Richard Peabody—a man I’m proud to call “Big X”—and to designer/editor extraordinaire Nita Congress. A special thanks to Glenn Arthur for letting us use
Le Navigateur
and
Le Commandant de Bord
.
For help of various kinds, I’m also grateful to Virginia Carson Young, Ron Perkowski, Sa
ï
deh Pakravan, Arthur Shaffer and David Rowland, Ron Anteroinen, and Alberto and Victoria F. Gaitán. My thanks as well to Csaba Lukacs, David Lummis, and River House for undertaking this new two-volume edition of
Daisy Buchanan's Daughter
.
“One thing that flatters me and Bill a lot is that Diana, who is normally shy with children, seems genuinely devoted to ours so we don’t feel that it is a strain for her when we take them to Chantilly. Anne hangs on her words and follows her in from the garden helping to carry the great heaps of flowers, and stands adoringly passing them up as Diana creates one of her magical arrangements. ‘Four delphiniums now, Anne, mix the pale blues with the darker. Thank you. Now a big bunch of roses. That’s it. Always remember when doing a mixed bouquet to have clumps of the same flower together. Not one here, one there, that makes for an arty bouquet. Arty things are common, don’t you agree?’ ‘Yes, Lady Diana…Is it a party, Lady Diana?’ ‘No, it isn’t, and that is why we must take a lot of trouble…Suppose we put the white china unicorn on the middle of the table and make a wreath of white flowers for him to wear around his neck. Shall we go to pick the wild flowers?’”
—Susan Mary Alsop,
To Marietta from Paris, 1945–1960
There was an old man of Khartoum
Who kept two black sheep in his room.
To remind him, he said,
Of two friends who were dead.
But he never would specify whom.
—quoted by Gene Smith in
When the Cheering Stopped: The Last Years of Woodrow Wilson
Part One
1. The Voluptuous Allure of Hollywood
Posted by: Daisy Clover’s Daughter
Pam’s a map in the mirror now, especially when I risk beaming at myself. The griffins have come home to Proust, Hopsie! My dentition’s foxhole of gold-cusped good humor turns my hoisted mug into a misinformed jack-o-lantern primping for Christmas. Yet to the mimsy borogoves, a gaze at my grinning reflection feels more like looking at the former Yugoslavia. We kept it hung together while we could.
Not that any raving beauty has been lost. The only photograph of me in
Vogue
was a black-and-white one of Mrs. Gerson in her Beverly Hills garden when
Glory Be
came out, and the flowers had to do most of the work. Still, I doubt I ever looked better than I did when twenty-seven-year-old Pamela Buchanan, bestselling author of
Nothing Like a Dame
(“A delight!”—Celia Brady,
Phoenix Sun
), came down the ramp from a silvery, still propeller-shimmery C-47 Dakota and let her gladdened skin get tipsy on the lavish blue champagne of a Los Angeles nonwinter one day in early 1948.
Catch the mistake, Tim? I still kept making it two and a half years after VJ-Day. DC-3 Constellation, not Dakota. The planes weren’t in olive drab anymore, neither was I, and nobody would ever call me Pamita again if I saw them coming. Wrong continent, his own book had omitted me outright, and what a prick Eddie Whitling had been, really. Everywhere but Dachau.
The studio car was waiting on the tarmac, a more minor perk in the way-back-when in case Potus bridles at my
lèse-majesté
. Wouldn’t you know those eyebrows of his anywhere, even Larousse? The proof was that three other cars stood there too, admitting men in cayenne, cardamom, and ginger sportcoasts—sorry, sports coats—who only looked at me with interest once I helped myself to my own Lincoln’s back seat.
Sorry, gents! You could’ve been currying favor with me since the Rockies. And right you are, Bacall I’m not. I’m told she could end up playing me, though. Ta.
She didn’t: Lauren Bacall, I mean. Neither did Maureen O’Hara, Dorothy Malone, Donna Reed, Barbara bel Geddes, Jane Russell (you wish!!, as Panama would say), or Daisy Clover, all of whose names got bruited at some point. Past forty by then and matronized by her Penelope to Fredric March’s three-striper Ulysses in
The Best Years of Our Lives
, Myrna Loy was on nobody’s list except Pam’s schoolgirl one, unconfessed even—or especially?—to Gerson.
I did meet her once, though, and I hope you’ll agree a tongue-tied Pam has novelty. I practically demonstrated the sailors’ manual through my lipstick as the Nora Charles of my reverie-prone Purcey’s youth graciously waited for me to either give her her hand back or at least name a price. There was bougainvillea behind her, and a ridiculously pleased-looking tea set laid in front of her. People favoring Truman’s reelection lounged and lunged around, and one measure of the laughingly bovine wedge of inanity I became is that I remember feeling impressed by the
pensée
that Anzio was a long way off. (Well, yes, Pam: some 6,370 miles as the cow leaps. Montaigne slept undisturbed.)
I’d love to say every last word she spoke is engraved on my heart, but the coroner will need a working knowledge of cuneiform. I did reassure her Harry had my vote, of course—my unpremeditated goodbye to leftist capriciousness, represented by Henry Wallace on the 1948 ballot. In memory yet green, Myrna Loy’s eyes were the mint that made a good Democrat out of me.
Posted by: Pam
Early on in what I had no idea would be my eight years in Hollywood, the random materializations of its familiar b&w gods in carelessly Californian color did make one feel like Alice among the playing cards. Miss Loy’s blossoming on the old Pygmalion’s veranda was one of only a few such encounters—my crimsoned introduction to unwittingly Tijuana-biblical Gabby Chatterton being another, the majestic third coming soon to a website near you—to turn me gawky in near Hormelic earnest.
