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

After all, I’d interviewed generals, slinking my byline through SHAEF rub-a-dubs where Metro’s old boast “More stars than there are in heaven” meant something more soldierly, not to say shoulderly: my Pam-pun to sloshed Eddie and a couple of periwinkling stenographers from Ike’s press gang in a pub two weeks before Normandy. A hint to our intake and jitters was that they found it hilarious.

In fact, during the spitball stages of
Nothing Like a Dame
’s Metro-morphosis into
The Gal I Left Behind Me
,
Gerson had the notion of getting Omar Bradley to appear as himself. His cameo would’ve reprised the pate-massaging press conference during the Bulge when Pam Buchanan of
Regent’s
,
not yet renamed “Peg Kimball” and still uncast to boot (Barbara bel Geddes did
Caught
instead), had asked whether he could confirm that a whole regiment of the 106th was gone—just gone!, and Tim Cadwaller’s future favorite author, Kurt Vonnegut, gone with it into a German POW camp—and there was interest. The Pentagon, as we were learning to call it, saw such quasi-commercials as useful in cementing everyone’s dazed understanding that its wartime encroachments were now a fixture of our national life.

The new Army Chief of Staff’s schedule proved too crowded, and too bad. When I think of the reliable uncles, worried lawyers, and thoughtful apothecaries Brad might’ve gone on to play for Metro—and had played, only opposite the Wehrmacht and under Eisenhower—I know I’m just wishing more of you had gotten to appreciate the helpless respect the flamboyant owe those able to assert authority without theatrics.

No surprise Mark Clark, the long-nosed dolt of Anzio, offered his services in Brad’s place. One red-leatherette afternoon at Chasen’s, Bill M. nearly choked with laughter as I described the eager telegrams from Clark’s PRO, and Bill had always liked him better than I had. Protecting the two disrespectful combat men in Bill’s
Stars and Str
ipes
cartoons from the brass hats who wanted them to reform, or at least to shave and wear less raggedy uniforms, was the best thing Clark did in the war. Anyhow, Fifth Army’s former commander didn’t end up in
The Gal
either.

If only that were true of Bill, since our friendship didn’t survive Metro’s fictionalization of him as smirky, doodling “Chet Dooley.” Everybody knew a cartoonist for “The GI News,” how inspired, could only be one person, and as late as the Bicentennial I’d sometimes get muttonholed by an Insomnia Channel watcher eager to know whether our romance was what had busted up Bill’s first marriage. When I explained it had been fabricated, they looked knowing as only ignoramuses can.

Knowing darned well he’d never laid a glove on me, Bill was genuinely upset. “That first night at the villa, I showed you a snapshot of my wife and kid,” the last letter I ever had from him went. “Mind telling me how that got turned into Chet Casanova and his etchings?” I’d be flattering the Buchanan bod if I thought what truly got his goat was that the plot had Chet—that damned Hal Lime!—lose me to Walt Wanks as Eddie “Harting,” Eddie Whitling’s
nom de
Metro in the final scenario.

The Gal I Left Behind Me
’s release into unimpressed reviewers’ captivity lay far ahead when we had our Chasen’s tête-à-tête. Or
tête-à
-tit, as very nearly happened when Bill stood up to find a phone as Deanna Durbin squirmed and brimmed by. I’m not even sure why he was in California, since Hollywood’s
massacre of his own book was only a gleam in
Variety
’s eye at the time. It could be he’d just come to Chasen’s to see if the chili was everything Louella said it was and then stayed on with me for the sauce. Or our waitress, taloned to be the next Linda Darnell and resentfully aware, those purloined loins receding like an unanswerable—not by my eyes, anyhow!—knock-knock joke, that we’d be no help.

I’d seen him in civvies before, since we shared a publisher and he’d done
Nothing’
s dust-jacket drawing of his pal Pam a year earlier. Yet that afternoon in Chasen’s was the closest we came to recovering our old
esprit de
beachhead, as the sense of a mighty, unreasoning engine clanking away all around us was uncannily similar. Darting like his brain’s inky infantry, Bill’s eyes hadn’t quite lost the impishness that had welcomed mine as new playmates in the correspondents’ villa at Nettuno.

When I first blinked at his baby face, I’d been still itchily jeweled by sea salt under my newly issued correspondent’s togs. He’d been perched Aladdin-style in a knit GI cap atop an ammunition crate in some prewar Fascist’s vacation home that now boasted
two
splendid views of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Through the more recent of them, our Navy’s maneuvers were already halfway to Hollywood: Busby Berkeley with an ocean to play with, chorus-line landing craft enchanting a somnolent tender as durable as Esther Williams. And all that was already four years ago, a fact that, like our plush postwar America in general, seemed preposterous but encouraging.

“Who was it named us the Bobbsey twins?” he asked out of the blue—red leatherette, brown Scotch, and violently violet Linda Darnelly nail polish, rather—once I’d got done spiting Mark Clark’s face. “Capa?”

“Bob? No, never. Floyd Young. He only came up from Naples for the day.”

“I wonder why he took a dislike to us?”

“He only came up from
Na-
poli for the day,” arch Pam repeated. “I heard he had to borrow a change of pants when Anzio Annie hit paydirt, too.”

“Yep, that must’ve been it.”

“Of course it was! He was jealous.”

Even so, I’m proud to say Bill thought too well of our friendship to let us sink into nostalgia’s bog head-on. As we’d both learned, that was what you ended up doing with people when the war was
all
you had in common. Or ever expected to, and my shoulders still recoiled at Eddie Whitling’s already resoftened mitts squeezing them at
Nothing
’s publication party last spring.

Because I loved him, please note Bill’s thoughtful way of steering me back to now. “So who’s going to play him in your movie, huh? Way I remember, William Demarest would be about right.”

“Who, Eddie? Oh, Floyd! That fraud? He probably won’t even be in the script. Not that anything is for sure yet. Even me, so help me! Honestly, Bill, you wouldn’t believe this place.”

Prescient words, though I didn’t know
The Gal
would end up skipping not only Floyd Young but Anzio. No correspondents’ villa, no alternately wary (something might happen) and riotous (something had and here we still were) trips up to the First SSF’s dugouts along the Mussolini Canal. And definitely no “The Angel of Anzio,” the title of my March 1944
Regent’s
attempt to resurrect the laughter and efficiency of one of the three American nurses killed by a direct hit on their hospital tent in early February.

We’d all hoped the front-line troops wouldn’t hear, but there were no secrets on that beachhead. One look at a map would tell you why. Unlike the front-line troops, correspondents could get back to Naples for a break whenever it got to be too much or our deadlines piled up.

“Shit. I like it because I don’t need to,” Bill said now, meaning Hollywood.

“Oh, me neither. All this is fun, but I can’t wait to get back to real life.”

“That’s funny,” he said with a slightly Darnellized grin. Roguishness, which I first took his mood for, made him look even younger—and in fact, cub though I’d been in the ETO, Bill spotted me a whole year. What had evened us up into temporary twinhood was that he was my elder in combat.

“Why, pray?”

“Aw, hell, Pam. When you used to tell me bedtime stories about the ritzy life in Manhattan, you know what it sounded like? One hint: not a play. Bragginham Murphy or no Bragginham Murphy.”

“A movie,” I guessed.

“On the nose. Now I’ve met those people—Jesus, have I—and I keep wanting them to be your old movie. You know? Indulge me, you stupid bastards, what’s it to you? Here’s a nickel, I got plenty.”

“Well, you earned them. I—”

“No, no. Sorry, that’s a whole different rant. The deal is, they’re all listening to me ramble on, and to them the
war’s
the goddam movie. Is that just how the whole works works from here on in?”

“How which works works?”

“Everything. One man’s newsreel is another man’s musical, and never the twain shall meet. Where’s Linda Darnell, anyway? I’m empty.”

“Well, of course I left out the boring parts back then. I’m a writer.”

“I mean the whole house of cards,” he said stubbornly. “In Italy, at least I could—no, fuck that.”

“Fuck what, pray?”

“The minute I start thinking the war was the one true part, you know what I’ll be? I’ll be
obscene
.
I’ll be more disgusting than Georgie Patton. At least he thought it was wonderful while it was going on. Uh-uh, Pammie. Let’s talk about something else.”

“I’m trying, but I’ve only been here a month.” With some interest, Bill’s eyes waited for me to clarify whether I was being sharp with him. So I said, “Shit, I haven’t even slept with Lassie yet.”

“Uh-uh.
I
get Lassie. You get Rin Tin Tin. We’re the goddam Bobbsey twins, and I ain’t gonna be the one to shock our public.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, suddenly hilarious on all eight cylinders. “Your kids’ll look like—”

“What?”

But I’d changed my mind about that joke (“dogfaces”) and pointlessly said, “Ronald Reagan.” Bill only thought it was funny because he’d made up his mind it was going to be.

It’s hard to explain these delicate shoals, Panama. Whatever
The Gal
made of us, Bill and I really had stayed chaste as siblings during the war. Now peacetime was turning us into ex-adulterers, anxious not to spoil our reunion by reawakening the ghosts of rutting. Just as well we were interrupted—and by an expert on these matters, too.

“Vy,
Beel!
” a tall voice said. “Sergeant, I haven’t seen you since Alsace. And such a nasty cartoon that was, with only the officers at the stage door! There were millions of you poor boys, millions. I did what I could.”

Our four eyes crept up the ETO’s best-known human Christmas tree. Old enough to be our mother too, and Miss Dietrich was acting it even if she didn’t look it. “
Vot
are you doing in this awful place?” she scolded.

“Uh, just having a bite. Then we stayed on. Hic and all that. Say, aren’t you here too?” Bill rather timidly asked.

“Not Chasen’s! This
room—
this
booth
.
You are in
Poughkeepsie
.
Didn’t you tell Dave who you are?”

“Marlene, I don’t know who he is either. It just seemed sort of sensible to keep it mutual.”

“So vy didn’t
you
do something, then?” As the female, I’d been promoted to accountability. “But ach, my manners! I’m so magnificently sorry. Who are you?”

“This is Pammie Buchanan,” said Bill. “She covered the ETO for
Regent’s
.
We spent a while dodging shells at Anzio together. Shit, we probably should’ve still been collecting them. The she-sell, seashell kind, I mean.”

Once Miss Dietrich heard I’d been to the war, like her, she softened. Then brightened, Rockefeller-Center-of-attention-style: “Oh, yes! Yours was
Nothing Like a Dame
.
I remember.
Excellent
title, that’s why I bought it.”

“My God, if I’d known you were—”

“No, no! It was such a pleasure—such a luxury, Miss Buchman—to read one
book about the damn war that wasn’t personally autographed. Finally, my real opinions could leap out, pawing here and goring there. You’ll forgive me, won’t you?” As if producing a diamond-bearing rabbit from a
top hat, she held out a deal-sealing hand. “I didn’t know you were so young.”

Mesmerized, I watched my own ringless fingers vanish. “Until now, neither did I,” I said. “I sure admire what you
did, though. I know they hate your guts for it in Deutschland.”

Did they ever, and they haven’t stopped. However long she’d been away, those newsreels of
their
Marlene entertaining our GIs must’ve made them feel even Father Christmas had changed sides.

“Hoo! Ask a German what he loves and you’re inquiring about his pastimes. Ask him what he resents, and…but
didn’t
we meet once back then, Miss Buchman? Maybe London, maybe Luxembourg. I think you look familiar.”

“Oh, it’s—possible, I suppose,” I chirped, winning a snort of delight from Bill. “I’m prac’ically positive I’ve seen you somewhere before too. No, we honestly never did. But thank you.”

Thank
you? My, oh, my. “Ah! Too bad,” said Miss Dietrich. “There weren’t so many of us over there. I loved the boys, I loved the boys! Still, sometimes one does want to pull down the shades on the candy store and drink one’s cocoa in peace. You must’ve known Janet Flanner, though.”

Kind of her to offer a substitute, don’t you think? But Bill and I were still so stupefied we hadn’t even asked her to sit down.

“No, I never met her either. A nice editor did tell me once my writing sounded a bit like hers, but of course it did! It’s called imitation—knowing who your betters are.”

“Then we are different. In my case, I wouldn’t have the faintest curiosity. Or belief. But
Beel!
” she cried as if she’d just arranged for him to reappear from somewhere now that I’d been scooted back to kindergarten. “Tell me, how much longer do we have you in town?” Ah, the Hollywood “we.”

“I’m getting on a train to Taos Thursday morning.”

“Oh, family?”

That was me asking, since Miss Dietrich probably didn’t know Bill hailed—
had
hailed?—from New Mexico. He’d told me a lot about it in conversations longer than any I bet he’d had with her in Alsace.

He shook his head. “Book club.”

“Such a pity,” Marlene groaned. “I have a sneak preview. Usually I stay home and do the ironing, but this one I made with Wilder. We are both
alte Berliners
,
so we know the little lies stuck on at the end don’t matter.”

“They did in Berlin,” Bill pointed out. “And they were kind of big, and—stuck on at the beginning, and—where was I?”

“No, no! It’s a comedy. We shot there too, it’s nothing but rubble and big masonry eyes. Anyhow you might have liked it.”

“I still could,” Bill said. “Hell, I still
can
,
can’t I? Even if I pay for my ticket?”

“Now you’ll be making me weep. Bill, you must absolutely flee this place. Miss Buchman, will you please see he gets on his train? We don’t deserve him. Only the poor dogfaces did.”

No doubt it’s only in my imagination that she receded inside a giant soap bubble, beaming
“Adios”
to us both. Since otherwise the silence might’ve lasted until Dewey defeated Truman, I said, “Why, that’s odd! Marlene didn’t seem a bit
worried about
me
being corrupted by Hollywood. Do you think she knows something we don’t?”

“Sure of it,” Bill mumbled. “Pammie, be honest. Doesn’t all this ever seem bizarre to you?”

“I think I’ve got the advantage of you there. Never had a normal.” I thought I was joking until his helpless nod made me wonder whether, by raising me so wrong, dead Daisy had equipped me right. Since I didn’t want to give her credit, the vaudeville routine went on: “They split my atom in the cradle. I remember Einstein saying, ‘Goo-goo.’ He looked so funny in his polo outfit! I’m sorry, Bill. Something’s really bothering you.”