Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane (18 page)

I kissed his cheek. “I’ve got to go.”

Go I did. Come back in one piece every time—no real suspense
there
,
is there?—I did too. Except in the Clio Airways sense, where crash victims I was fond of litter daisysdaughter.com’s landscape, I hadn’t then and miraculously still haven’t ever known anyone who died in a plane wreck. Even David Cohnstein, a B-17 waist gunner who planned on surviving the war to go to what he called Palestine, was only a name and the same curly-haired snapshot in
Sharon’s
purse and Jake’s wallet.

Despite dully guessing that Wylie had had to suck in his breath and then nod before they opened his future nightmares’ Pandora’s box, I’d always been most conscious of the
fact
of Stella Negroponte’s death, not its manner. It had never sunk in how haunted Gerson must be by its manner. He’d never tried to turn me into Stella. Not without reason, he probably thought he’d married her opposite. Yet I’d terrified him by threatening to undo that all by myself.

Perhaps because that parting had been so intimate, the reunion was shy. As if our Boulevard Rule from Metro days now fit Pam, not him, and its geography had been reversed, we were past Sunset before he asked, “Go well?”

“Yes! Oh, Gerson, I’m so close now. I’ve already done Lexington. The only big job I’ve got is to get Martha to pop out Shelton Wiggins and then bury that bitch for good, tie up a few loose ends, and—I’ll be done.”

Even to myself, I’d never said it before. Selflessly, Gerson wreathed me in smiles. By the next light, he’d grown a wee bit less selfless: I heard a tick of Gersonish mirth from the driver’s seat. Nudged him.

“What, little man?”

“I thought I was the only one who called her ‘that bitch,’” he said with amusement. “Never to her face, of course.”

“I swear I’ll make it up to you. Really, not that much longer!” I tried to remember how non-authors computed. “Two months at the outside. Can you wait? Oh, please wait.”

Wait, Gerson did. Wreath me in even more laureled smiles when
Glory Be
came out and became a bestseller, he did. The West Coast pub party was at Romanoff’s, and I don’t believe he was harboring any Bolshevik schemes. Knowing him as he did, I’m sure the decision that ended our marriage wasn’t taken until an hour at most before he told me, and that was only because he’d woken up earlier. That was on the vacation that, flush with new royalties and Random’s promise of more, I insisted on treating him to make up for it all.

Just the same, I watched
Glory Be
miss out on the Pulitzer alone. Had my twenty minutes of banter with Jack Kennedy, the winner, alone. Well, no, not
alone
: it was a banquet at the Waldorf in spring ’57. In those days, they didn’t officially announce the also-rans, so in theory Pam Buchanan was just a fellow guest and author rather than a thwarted rival. If you were in the know, though, you knew; I knew. He knew, and he was there alone too. Off at some horse show, Jackie was a no-show.

What a different book this might be—Ard, I’ll fix later—if I’d had a bit more bosom, was three inches shorter, and Antoine hadn’t messed up the perm. But I digress.

The name “Gerson” appears nowhere in
Glory Be
.
While in his family’s case the connection would’ve been literally nominal, since it was an Ellis Island alias, I’d hunted for suitable Gersons as well as Fays and Buchanans, thinking the gesture might please or tickle him. Had no luck on that score in Philadelphia or Culpeper, the Great Meadows a.k.a. Fort Necessity, Nantucket, or Boston. Yet my second husband isn’t missing from my second book, even though it probably went right by in Minnesota.

While I worked on the thing, he’d had only two distant competitors. One was Jake Cohnstein, which would certainly have added more apoplexy to Alisteir Malcolm’s
How the Red Faded Out of Old Glory
.
The other was Stella Negroponte, but that would have just upset Gerson—whom Pam, in that annoying habit I picked up from dames in hard-boiled movies and fell into with all three of my husbands, had never called anything but Gerson in conversation or letters. Not this time, though, and the last two words I wrote were the first two I’d imagined on a hungover morning two years gone. On a page headed “Front Matter” and destined for Random House, I typed, “For Noah.”

3. Gerson’s Hope

Posted by: Pam

Unless you’re on the lucky side of forty, you’ll know which two passing remarks in my last batch of Pam-pages are sure to bring a hail of cyber-opprobrium down on
l’équipe
here at plucky little
daisysdaughter.com
. But
That’s My Fran
fans can lump it.

Once Rheuma One, new nickname for my gnarled forefinger, clicks “Post,” we don’t look back. No matter how much abuse you hurl, I’m not going to delete “grimace queen” or recant my 1954 line of dialogue, in casual—all right, not very—conversation with Jake Cohnstein, tagging Fran Kukla as “the horror.” Observe me instead as I lift my ancient hand from the mouse and revolve it to jab Rheuma Two upward in solitary grandeur.

If I’ve got any misgivings, Panama, they’re about your Gramela’s venture into cyberporn. That I do wish I’d left out; it’s the sort of thing Sean Finn would dream up. Let’s just hope Tim restrains him from too much of that in their collaboration.

For Tim’s marriage’s sake, he’d better stay more alert to his surroundings while he’s at it than I was during
Glory Be
’s composition. If making the beast with two hard covers hadn’t been Haroun Pam-Raschid’s command to Qwertyuiop for most of ’54, all of 1955
,
and some of 1956, my wily Smith-Coronal vizier and I might have been less stunned by Gerson’s announcement of his plans in December of ’56. I’d have been as heartbroken in the immediate scheme of things and as happy for his sake once I’d knocked some perspective into myself, just less stunned.

Thanks to our ten p.m. dinners and now hurried breakfasts, I knew in cutlery-clinking detail what Fran and Gene Rickey were putting him through. Itching as I was to get back to my upstairs seraglio, I still thought I could indefinitely postpone compassion more active than conversational bandages. Measuring my authorial megalomania for a marital straitjacket more than I knew, I also thought
Glory Be
would be enough to balm all Gerson’s wounds: not only those I’d carelessly inflicted with my jolly multiple reprises of Stella’s final flight and distracted impersonations of her footsteps pacing the ceiling, but the ones that bathed his brain in blood daily in Burbank.

Fat chance. I could’ve been Winken, Blinken
,
and Nod rolled together; I could’ve been Barbara Tuchman herself. My book’s case for the defense still couldn’t have matched Fran’s, Gene’s, and Rik-Kuk’s case for the persecution.

Posted by: Pam

That’s My Fran
was the nest egg, and I’d hate to have been the vet who examined the golden goose after that one came out. Costarring Hippolyte Lecteur—Americanized as “Hy Lector” in the credits, he was an ex-bandleader who’d had a minor hit dueting with Piaf on a novelty song, as if French popular music is ever anything but, called “Coûte Que Coûte, Cocotte”—the series’s back story was that Fran had met her French husband as a wacky WAC in Marseille. Now he played the accordion and sang in the swank San Francisco nightclub where she kept trying, etc., etc.

Squawking,
That’s My Fran
ruled the roost at One Eye, as the era’s foremost broadcast network was known in the industry and as a pretty dubious-sounding after-hours joint in the meat-packing district was known to a few of Jake’s acquaintances in Manhattan. Yet the proof the Age of Conformity wasn’t misnamed was that Fran Kukla ruled at both.

Not all men in gray flannel suits were immune to an urge to slip into something more comfortable. After the only time Jake, never too happy camping, got hauled off to visit the cabaret One Eye, we got a dazed report in his next letter. Our Fran was the orange-wigged specialty of all three female impersonators he’d seen before finishing his lukewarm paper cup of Eureka Gin, giving a whole new
echt-
Fifties meaning to
mon semblable, mon frère.

Giving it another, the legitimate One Eye was home to the now visually squared radio voice of Eddie Whitling, its evening newscast’s most ponderous marble jaw. Knowing he’d be forced to defer with penguin-suited chuckles to my ETO ex didn’t do wonders for Gerson’s mood when, corporately summoned to New York, he had to put on a tux and dithyrambulate around the room at network powwows. As he used to say, their only purpose he could see was to settle who had the best dentist.

Though I probably did a worse job than I thought of hiding my frustration at being yanked from
Glory Be
’s better world, I used to go with him when I was on the East Coast. My presence made face time with One Eye’s star embalmer of current events at once easier and harder on Gerson. Our glass-clinking small talk would have sounded as civilized as quoits if you’d heard it on tape. Only Eddie’s grin kept my husband advised that, by the obnoxious rules of his sexual poker game, prior bedding topped a wedding. His crayoning eyebrows intimated that in the sack his Pamita was someone Gerson wouldn’t have recognized, infuriating me more because he had a point.

Naturally, I voiced neither fury nor cause in our taxicab autopsies (if four-wheeled L.A. after dark is a Ferris wheel, four-wheeled New York after dark is a penguin morgue). Nor did I ever feel the faintest commemorative flutter in Eddie’s presence. Among other things, his always boiled eyes were now slightly thyroidic, as if inside his muscularly groomed face a circus clown was struggling to get out.

Luckily, if only in the limited sense of the word implied by the French military attaché who once reminded me with some annoyance that it doesn’t
snow
on Devil’s Island, Gerson was spared the day-to-day running of
That’s My Fran
. His name danced on unseen strings in its credits only as it did in those of all Rik-Kuk shows: “Noah Gerson, Executive in Charge of Production.” Gene Rickey oversaw the nest egg while Fran clucked and mimed flying, repaid every week in her ego’s ransom of fuzzy canned laughter.

Brought aboard, he was told, to give Rik-Kuk pedigree, Gerson asked for and got a free hand. The other was usually wrenched up between his shoulderblades by Gene Rickey’s armlock before noon, a figurative ordeal so painful that inside a year my husband, no sybarite, had hired a literal masseuse. Busy upstairs with Pocahontas, I never felt jealous of Ursula. Both Luz and Ava damn near put on mourning, though.

Even when his pet projects limped onto the air, they’d come down by then with Rickeyfied worms. One that caused Gerson special grief was
Shocks of Recognition
,
which up to its first pilot had featured a panel of eminent modern-day historians interviewing actors made up as Adams vs. Jefferson, Burr vs. Hamilton (neither armed, fortunately), Lee vs. Grant, Custer vs. Sitting Bull, Mark Twain vs. James Fenimore Cooper, Babe Ruth vs. Ty Cobb, Stephen Foster vs. (the real) Louis Armstrong. By the time Rik-Kuk sold it, to Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s chagrin—it was the reason he’d started wearing those natty bow ties—it had mutated into a quiz show called
Wasn’t That Us?
which lasted thirty-odd incredible years. So I learned when, numb after a hospital visit during Cadwaller’s long dying, I turned on our (soon my) set and stared briefly at its Eighties iteration, now hosted by an amiable dunce named Mack “Paddy” McMartin. No mean hand at hat tricks himself, the one-term Congressman we’d hardly known had turned District dross into Hollywood gold.

It wasn’t all like that. If it had been, Gene Rickey’s armlock would’ve soon been partnered by his other arm choking Gerson’s windpipe while leaving him a free hand, and my husband had an inner realist whose job was to keep Noah fed. I don’t much recall any of them, but Tim Cadwaller tells me
Molder and Maunder
is a good courtroom series,
Curt Rasp, FBI
has its gangbusting moments, and
Here, Biscuit
(child star and dog rehashing the myth of Sisyphus in suburbia) is funny as you-scrims for Ike’s grin go. Rik-Kuk’s four Westerns—
Giddyup
,
The Chesterfield Clan
,
Ten Steps Back
,
and
Lasso—
were often a cut above the other twenty or thirty then on the air.

Still, the fate of
Proscenium
tells the story. With his passion for seeing history resurrected on film, my husband hadn’t abandoned his fantasy of Lazarusing unpreserved great moments in theater after Jake turned him down. Far from it, since he now had the goad of proving Jake wrong. They could be competitive, those two, and a line in Jake’s letter describing the male after-hours Frans—“But I’ll go back if Pam wants to, since she might enjoy it”—had left Gerson peculiarly irked.

He reworked and polished his brainstorm; he got Orson Welles’s phone number. He set his mouth firmly and went back to his desk with Welles’s rumbling laughter still in his ears. I’m afraid even his wife, descending from Haroun Pam-Raschid’s study with her brain still orgiastic and modulating with difficulty to an environment where other people breathed and spoke, had begun to find Gerson’s hope comical. Even if the silly thing ever got broadcast, it could hardly make up for all the slop and crud, Rik and Kuk, I-scrims and you-scrims surrounding it.

Yet when
Proscenium
did reach the air, it was no ratings disaster. Done in only by the wane of live TV, it ran three years and is ranked among the highlights of what Tim swears is called the medium’s Golden Age. The only one disgraced was Gerson. What’s worse is that he was under few illusions from the moment One Eye gave its blessing and Gene thanked him for not giving up.

Six p.m. was early for me to relinquish
Glory Be
,
but I wanted to watch the Democratic convention. As I came downstairs, Gerson was bidding his masseuse adieu: “I’m sorry, Mrs. Clydesdale. I’ll try to do better next time.”

“Bad day in Bearbank, darling?” I asked as Ursula clopped down the sidewalk. By then, whether he’d gotten pummeled at work or at home, Gerson’s smile and his wince were inseparable.

“Most people would say not.
Proscenium
’s a go.”

“Oh, my God! Which play do they start with?”

“Sarah Bernhardt in
Hamlet
.
Just as I planned.”

“Then what’s wrong?” Light dawned. “Oh, crap! Who’s the actress?”

He was ashen. “Fran wants an Emmy for drama. She’s crazed.”

Posted by: That’s My Pam

To understand Fran Kukla’s ego—and said ego’s interplay with self-knowledge, self-doubt, self-delusion, and base cunning—is a job for a shrink or a saint. I’m neither, but here’s a tip for any saint or shrink trying. Start with the fact that the big Brentwood bash she threw to celebrate her triumph on
Proscenium
(“Fran Kukla IS Sarah Bernhardt as Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
tonite”) took place
before
the show’s broadcast.

By then—late September? Tim, check if you care—Haroun Pam-Raschid was wild for
Glory Be
’s imminent appearance in bookstores. As many-eyed Qwertyuiop looked on with arms proudly folded, the pale tender scruff between the virgin’s parting shanks was in view.
Nothing Like a Dame
had long since devolved to feeling as if it had happened to someone else. But for Gerson’s sake, I put on a print dress and went along to Fran Kukla’s.

Adlai Stevenson was there. Or reputed to be, and tall bald men with weak chins enjoyed sunshine’s spotlight. But I did like the house, a French-windowed and turreted, blancmanged and simpatico
echt-
Twenties smorgasbord built in silent days by none other than a budding pudding’s favorite moving-picture star, Victor Muet. Relinquished to Gabby Chatterton when
The Jazz Singer
did Victor’s career in, it was now Fran and Gene’s trophy. By the late Sixties, a rock star had it—and some people will tell you L.A. has no history.