Girl of My Dreams (2 page)

Of all human faculties memory is the most insistent yet also the most fallible. Since I am not among the legions of the formerly famous, I have neither scores to settle nor apologies to pour like syrup over the damage I caused in bygone days. Oh, I may have changed a few names of people whose grandchildren now run things and could want me for a quick rewrite. But essentially this is what happened, my stupendous renegade recollection. Let my chronicles of mortification stand. Hooray for Hollywood.

Unable to believe at first that Jubilee Pictures would let him go, Joey had called another of Mossy Zangwill's henchmen, the production chief Seaton Hackley, from the motor court where he spent Saturday night after coming in from Victorville. Hackley was known as a troubleshooter; sometimes he could modify decisions even if he couldn't reverse them, cushion blows even if he couldn't prevent them. “This must be a mistake, what Dunster Clapp told me,” Joey said to Seaton Hackley. “Can't you fix it?”

“No can do, Joey,” said Hackley, hanging up.

Joey fitted the goggles over his eyes, adjusted the strap around his curls and started rolling, then hurtling, down Chautauqua, a steep grade. He might have been an aviator. When he slowed at the bottom of the incline, after looking up the coast toward Malibu, he turned down toward the Pier a mile away. He was on the winding beach road, already a narrow thoroughfare that people rushed along in their roadsters, a slender hint of its later proclamation as the Pacific Coast Highway. Joey halted quickly. By the side of the road he knew someone. Mervyn Galant's Hispano Suiza had a puncture!

Joey asked the washed-up silents director if he needed help. As always, Galant hid his shame beneath a stream of words. “Bet your life I do, gave the chauffeur the day off, say I know you, didn't you handle a chariot for Freddy Niblo in
Ben Hur
, you worked in one of my pictures too, did a wingwalk for me in
Maisie Flies Over the Moon
, didn't you.” It wasn't a question and by this time Joey had the Hispano Suiza jacked up. In five minutes he had replaced the wire-spoked flat tire with the spare and heard Galant—as the old hasbeen himself later reported—offer him a job. “Son, no question there's work for you on my next picture. Where you serving now, Metro?”

A loud report made Joey jump, a passing car's backfire. “No,” Joey said, “I've been at Jubilee.” “Jubilee?” Galant arched his famous hedgerow brows. “Heap of work on that lot, isn't there?” “Yesterday,” Joey said, “was my last day.” “Sorry to hear it, son. Zangwill's a viper, all right.” “Yes, Mr. Galant,” Joey allowed before he was off again.

In seconds he covered the mile to the Santa Monica Pier and passed under the half-moon sign offering sportfishing. I suspect Mervyn Galant's job offer was ironic to Joey but not bitterly so. I suspect he was thinking about his ten-thousand-dollar life insurance policy. Jubilee would hire someone's cheaper nephew or cousin who was agile and had been laid off by a carnival or circus. The Depression was closing marginal circuses that were unable to do enough business to feed the animals, dumping acrobats onto the tight stuntman market.

Once, on a set between takes, Joey saw a woman drawing a kitchen with two stoves. Shyly, he asked why two. She told him if he looked at the script he'd see it called for two stoves for the different dishes the cavalry would be fed when they paused at the outpost. Why not forget the stoves and have two large pots sitting over the fire in the fireplace the carpenters have already built, he suggested. The set designer took this to the producer since no one consulted directors on program Westerns, and the producer was pleased to save the money. Within days the saucy designer-decorator Elise Millevoix and the modest Joey Jouet were a sweet item on the set of
Cheyenne Sharpshooters
. Though a set designer was a number of rungs above a stuntman on the studio ladder, and Elise Millevoix had a star for a sister, Joey added a glow to any space he occupied.

No one on the Pier was disturbed when Joey rode his motorcycle the length of it, careful to dodge the Sunday strollers who came out from downtown on streetcars. A few of the vendors waved, recognizing the stuntman who had leaped from piers in several movies. “Hey Joey,” the dwarf who ran the bumper cars shouted, “King Vidor send you down here to get ready for a cop chase?” The man who sold cotton candy told his customer, “They darken Joey Jouet's hair he can look like Walter Huston, Bruce Cabot, anybody, if he's going fast enough. Probably practicing for a New York shot at Coney Island. His wife does something too. Her sister's Palmyra Millevoix. Connections.”

Joey pulled up at the end of the Pier as if he were reining in a horse. The cotton candy man said he saw Jouet placing something on the railing at the end of the Pier. On the cycle, Joey returned as far as the carousel, and it looked as though he were leaving the Pier. He spun around, racing the Ariel's engine before he roared out toward the end, vigilant about avoiding so many parents with their small children.

STUDIO DAREDEVIL IN FINAL STUNT
was the headline in Hearst's
Examiner
. The story said that Joey Jouet, brother-in-law of Jubilee Pictures's brightest star, Palmyra Millevoix, had put up a ramp out of planks used to repair the floor of the Santa Monica Pier, then launched himself as though from a ski lift far out into the ocean, which swallowed him and his motorcycle so fast the stuntman could never have heard the throngs on the Pier begin to scream. Jouet had been driven to suicide, the
Examiner
went on to declare, by the Reds, who wouldn't let him alone after he briefly joined and then quit the Party. The
Los Angeles
Times,
sounding its own alarm, claimed that Joey, newly unemployed due to belt-tightening at Jubilee Pictures, was a casualty of the Depression Franklin D. Roosevelt was making even worse with his socialistic policies.
Variety
wrote that Joseph Cayson Jouet, champion of stuntmen, was a shining example of the truism that the good die young. “A victim of Hollywood,” the reporter wrote, “where 1934 is proving you're up one day and sunk low the next, Joey Jouet perished, paradoxically, mimicking one of his masterful stunts, driven into the Pacific by no one's screenplay but his own. The whole town sends sympathies to his widow and toddlers.”

That was when Pammy called me. Would I compose (she used that word, as if she were asking for a song) a few lines about Joey for her to say at the funeral? We had met twice, once at a writers' cocktail party. She had listened attentively to the host; writers love that. She said now she needed to be with her sister and nieces all day and night, and she was too overcome to think. “Poor Joey, poor Elise, poor little girls never to know their generous adoring father.” Shocked, I said it would be an honor to do anything to help. Was she favoring me by asking a favor because she'd heard I'd been assigned to
A Doll's House
? “You're such a consummate dear, Owen,” she said, “I am so
désolée.
” And so I went off those planks, too. The surf that covered Joey Jouet soaked us all.

The funeral was held on Jubilee's Stage Three, a red rose garland the size of a wheelbarrow decked in front of the casket. With a few exceptions, nobody who was anybody was there: a stuntman after all. Stuntmen themselves, technicians, and set designers were scattered in folding chairs; a sprinkling of assistant producers showed up. Mossy Zangwill gave the eulogy, blunting criticism of the studio for having laid off Joey the day before his death. He called Joey Jubilee's own daring young man on the flying trapeze. “We couldn't exist without men like Joey,” he said. “You can't make pictures without excitement. You can't have excitement without stunts, and stunts can't happen without stuntmen. Joe was the best, and we'll miss him more than he'll ever know.”

No one even whispered—why, if he was the best, was Joey Jouet fired?

In the front row, her tears flowing freely, Joey's widow, Elise Millevoix Jouet, held both her small daughters in her lap. The daughters dazed, the mother inconsolable. I didn't know yet how inconsolable. Palmyra was too upset to say the sentences I'd written and went right to music. Her voice cracked on the word “wretch” in
Amazing Grace
. It took less than twenty minutes to turn Stage Three back into the set for
Prelude to Murder
, for which I'd written a couple of scenes, changing the killer from the conductor to the flutist but keeping the victim in place beneath the cribbage table.

Mossy left alone everyone with the rank of assistant producer or above; all technical workers who attended Joey's funeral were docked a half day's pay.

2

The Palmyra Millevoix Booster

Years earlier, on seeing Pammy's first test, Sam Goldwyn said she couldn't act, wasn't beautiful enough, and would make people nervous. “God's sake, I've seen happier statues. Never blinks. Who the hell she think she is, Queen Victoria?” (Which Goldwyn pronounced Bictodia.) He also thought Pammy's features were too fine and too collected, like Jimmy Cagney's, toward the center of her face. Passable in Cagney, impossible in a woman. An MGM cameraman came to her rescue, discerning it was only her regal forehead that made Pammy's features seem low, and he knew how to deal with that. Actresses, especially those past thirty, like to be shot from above so audiences can't see neck wrinkles or any hint of jowls. Palmyra, still in her twenties when she first came out to be tested, was actually in need of the opposite treatment since she had no wrinkles at all. The MGM cameraman suggested, just before what was to be her second and last test, that she be shot to indulge her features from slightly below her chinline, less like a heroine, more like a goddess. In person, even with several Hollywood years behind her, Palmyra was still so unscathed by makeup and miscasting that eyes flew naturally to her as if she were a nest and the rest of us lost sparrows looking for home.

One afternoon in 1933, Mossy had called me to his office to order press releases on Pammy, the first singing star who was both composer and actress. He didn't like the valentines that Jubilee's publicity department was churning out so he'd see what a junior screenwriter might come up with. When I met Miss Millevoix she wasn't in the negligee female stars affected in their bungalows. She wore a dowdy polkadot housedress and was playing checkers with her six-year-old daughter Millicent. Millie's first look at me was a scowl. Her mother glanced up and smiled.

“
Three
games of checkers, Millie!” Palmyra said. “You'll be beating me by the time you're, well, eight, no nine, when you're nine you'll be three kings up on me before I get one. You know you will.” A reluctant grin sneaked onto Millie's face. “Costanza?” Palmyra summoned, and a tidy Filipina emerged from the next room. “Time to take Millie home.” The frown that returned to Millie outlasted her mother's hug and almost became tears when Costanza had her out the door. She stuck her tongue out at me.

“Let's sing,” were the first words Pammy spoke to me as she headed toward her piano. “I hate a white piano,” she said. “It's a decoration, not a musical instrument. This one's left over from Jeanette MacDonald and I hear she didn't like it either.”

“I can't,” I said, “I really can't sing.” “Yes you can,” she said, “do you know any of mine?” “About like I kn-know the n-national anthem,” I stammered. A lie: I was occupied mostly with getting decent script assignments, not memorizing songs.

“You're supposed to get to know me, Mossy says, so let's try a few bars, okay?” It was if she were coaxing a child, and I was embarrassed into joining her. “There's things I do,” she sang and played while I tried to hold her tune, “And things I don't, And in words of just one syllable, There's things I will and things I won't, But can we be Jack and Jillable?” Palmyra went on, not flirting despite the lyrics, and when she sailed past “To the party you'll be bringable, If you're Crosby you can be Bingable,” she swung over into a piece of another song that I stayed out of, a jazzy one. “I've got a guy, I long to be with'm, He flies higher than all of the birds; I'd give up my melody, harmony and rhythm, If I can just get him to say the right words.” She included a two-measure tag that became a jazz riff at the end.

Pammy medleyed through a few of her hits, and I got the point. My press releases would write themselves after this exclusive recital—these sweet sounds from the voice of a young widowed (was she?) mother bravely carrying on. Treacle spilling from my typewriter. Listening and watching, I was in awe but not in thrall. Something remote about her, not merely professionalism though she had plenty of that, did not invite familiarity. Perhaps it was that she was foreign. A moat surrounded her.

“Negro and Irish singers both do my songs better than I do,” she said.

I saw why. Distance, separation, was important to her. She didn't take you into her confidence like the black and Irish singers she mentioned. I was invited to hear her sing but not into intimacy with the singer. The best of her music is bone simple, with an air of permissiveness that encourages improvisation by other musicians. Palmyra cradled a song with a voice like smoke, and in her blues and torches I heard the suggestion of pleasure with the certain expectation of pain. When her songs were appropriated by black musicians, as black music had earlier been appropriated by whites, they had more to them. Her melodies beg for the harmonies and cadences that Duke Ellington first gave them and that have been improvised by successors including the rockers.

Perhaps only Mae West, writing scripts for her own movies, was as versatile as Palmyra, a multilingual icon in the musical theaters of Paris and Berlin before she ever came to America. The first time she landed in New York, not long after the Great War, Palmyra had been taken under the wing of Eddie Marks, an old time song plugger from Tin Pan Alley. Marks brought her into the American idiom and got her singing jobs in speakeasies, yet he also weaned her toward ditties that didn't show her best side. Her novelty tunes had brief currencies, never became standards. But she was getting her American education. She wrote a little number ending with “Yes I'd like to get even, not even with Steven, I'd just like to get even … with you,” a song whose melodic line is as natural as walking. She stayed in New York two years. Possibly because she needed to get away from vaudevillians like Eddie Marks, Palmyra Millevoix was one of the few creative talents who actually improved by migrating from New York to Hollywood.