Girl of My Dreams (42 page)

After she stopped scribbling her changes for “Born Blue,” which she would keep changing until the moment she rerecorded it, Pammy turned to me and said, “Since you've midwifed my song, could you do something else?”

She knew I'd jump off Pike's Peak for her. “Why not?” I said.

She handed me a slip of paper. “Call this number and ask how late someone will be there today?”

A raspy-voiced woman answered the phone and I said I was calling for Palmyra Millevoix. Pammy shook her head vigorously; she'd meant the call to be anonymous. I blundered on, having no idea whom I'd reached. I asked how long the woman's office would be open today. “My office? Is that what she calls it?” The voice sounded like a sneer. “Well, you can inform Miss Millevoix,
s'il vous plaît,
that someone or other will be right here at, ah, West Coast Headquarters, until seven this evening.”

“The Communists keep pestering me,” Pammy said when I hung up, “and I want to help them but keep them away. I have an old Plymouth I never use any more. It's on the lot next to my LaSalle. Could you be a perfect dear and deliver it to them? If I show up myself they'll take pictures or at least call every reporter they know.”

“But if I take it to them,” I said, “they'll still know it's yours. Won't they gab?” Gab: my stab at gangster lingo since we were engaged in an undercover operation.

She rubbed her chin thoughtfully. “Yes and no, because it'll be yours. Watch.”

Pammy pulled out the pink slip California issued car owners. In the space for purchaser she wrote Owen Jant; the previous owner was listed as Pamela Miles, her old pseudonym. Defying logic, the pink slip had a line for who was actually selling the car, as though it could be someone besides the owner. “This should give anyone a double take,” she said, “who might be trying to make sense of the transaction.” With a smile, she designated the seller as Goddard Minghoff. “That will mess up the chain of title enough to bewilder any Red Squad,” she said puckishly.

Like so many blessings, the car was to come from God. She warned me to take all other identifying material out of the glove compartment so that anyone using it would simply be driving a 1929 Plymouth and not a car that had belonged to a movie star. On the piece of paper she'd given me with the phone number was an address in Venice. The car itself, when I saw it, had no rear bumper, a broken taillight and a dented front fender.

The short drive from the Jubilee lot in Culver City to Venice took me from a real place devoted to the imaginary to an imagined district that had been forced to accept reality. The dreamer who plotted the Southern California version of Venice, a tobacco tycoon, excavated his own Grand Canal around which he built homes for motion picture royalty. He dug his ditches and flooded them to provide side-street canals, along which he put luxury homes and tropical flowers. Gambling casinos sprouted on the boardwalk, along with an amusement park on a pier that hung out over the Pacific. By the time the tobacco baron succumbed to his occupational hazard—lung cancer—the silent star Francis X. Bushman was having parties for Rudolph Valentino on the Grand Canal.

But one day, according to the controlling real estate legend, bubbles appeared in one of the subsidiary canals. And then a kind of rainbow in the water, and after that an unsightly slick. The Venetian dream did an about-face. Goodbye to movie star mansions, hello to ugly oil derricks whose pumps looked like praying mantises, hello to a narcissistic slum and eventually to a throbbing little bohemia. The villas under construction became broken phantoms of themselves, ruins before they were even finished. Oil wells turned the precinct into a noisy, smelly, contaminated skid row. Along one of the streets servicing a minor canal in 1934 was an office, or outpost, or subdivision, or just hangout, of another dream that had been imported to Southern California: the Communist Party.

As I pulled up at the hut that served as Venice HQ for the Reds, I was not exactly greeted but challenged—as if she were a sentry—by the sour woman I'd spoken to when Pammy asked me to make the phone call. “So you're the one running errands for Miss Millevoix?” This was less a question than an insult. The woman seemed to be composed of blocks, as burly as she was surly, a rectangular block for her legs, a chunky block for her torso, and an almost perfectly cubic block for her head, a block with a sneer. The woman pronounced Pammy's name in a tone mocking radio announcers on gossip shows about the stars. “You mean to tell me,” she went on, “that this wreck is what the great Palmyra Millevoix drives herself around in? Hee hee.”

“I called you,” I said, “but I only used her name so you wouldn't hang up. This Plymouth is mine. I took your number from someone at the studio.”

“Be that as it may.” She looked at me skeptically. “Palmyra agrees with us like a comrade and she's also afraid of us. Not that we care, as long as we have wheels so we can get around to recruit and organize. You're at Jubilee too? Hee hee hee.” Her laughter suggested she'd caught me committing a minor felony. She advanced—menacingly I thought—to take the keys and snatch the pink slip out of my hand.

“Sometimes I'm there,” I said, trying to be a little cagey to protect Pammy and some figment I was forming of myself as secret courier.

“All right, Mr. Jant.” She glanced at the pink slip. “The Party is much obliged.”

“Thank you, Miss … I don't know your name.”

“And you don't need to. I suppose you need a lift somewhere.”

Those were the last words she spoke to me. She gave me a ride back to Jubilee in the Plymouth but said nothing the whole time. I looked at the little cube that was her head, aptly topped with red hair, trying to think of something to say, but her adamant profile itself was a vow of silence as stern as a nun's. Irked she was, and—despite the gift of a car that would help her make more Reds—irked she stayed. When she dropped me back at the gates of Jubilee, she barely slowed down. I thanked her, but she had already ground the gears of the Plymouth into low and was speeding off.

Returning to my office, I found the telegram Comfort had placed on my Royal. OWNERS THREATENING TO OPEN PORT BY FORCE STOP THIS WILL MEAN WAR STOP REGARDS, QUIN

21

Forward and Backward

Nils Maynard asked me to come to his cutting room that Sunday so I could be a guinea pig when he ran a sequence of a new picture he was shooting. Sundays were lonely days I didn't like or that didn't like me. My idyll with Jasmine/Janice, a tumble of delight even if it led nowhere, had been the exception proving the rule. I was glad to have somewhere to go.

Especially after the night before. Esther Leah was still away with the children, and Mossy had thrown an almost-stag party—almost meant a few men brought dates or wives they thought would impress the host. I was invited at the last minute to fill out the stag part, and I suggested to Mossy I bring a tennis pro I'd met because I knew he'd like the jock aspect and tennis lessons were fashionable at the time. “Perfect idea, kid,” said Mossy, “just what will spice up the premises. I'll let everyone know.”

The night was a disaster. By the time I picked him up at his apartment in Hollywood, the tennis pro was already reeking of Scotch. Though he'd looked elegantly presentable on the court in his long white pants and slicked hair that was never mussed even after a difficult point, Ansel—I remember only his first name—was socially impossible. “Will there be babes there?” was the first thing he said as he settled into my car. I couldn't
not
bring Ansel because he was now advertised to the other guests by Mossy as someone who would cure their backhands. “What's the chances of a piece of ass?” Ansel asked. I told him we were going to the home of a big studio head, my boss, and I hoped he'd meet some nice people who would want lessons from him. “No need to worry about me,” he said, “because I'll fuck a starlet as soon as a star.”

This stag party was worse than most because the couple of dozen men were inhibited around the four or five women, and there seemed little to do but drink. Ansel led the way with Scotch highballs, and he made a clumsy, pawing move at a maid serving canapés. I saw Mossy flush with anger, but his lawyer Edgar Globe's flirtatious wife, Francesca, did ask Ansel about lessons. As he finished demonstrating his spin serve, the drunken pro brought his hand down slowly across her chest, and Francesca giggled as Edgar Globe pushed Ansel away. “What do you all do here for relaxation,” the pro asked a group of men that included the dignified actor Edward Everett Horton, “screw each other's wives?” When Horton glowered at him, Ansel said, “Oops, attempted overhead goes into the net.” He made passes at two of the women, whose husbands were unamused. The women had no trouble swatting him away. “Aw, double fault,” said Ansel. Just before dinner was served he peed into a small palm tree encased in a porcelain vase finished in cloisonné enamel. Francesca Globe joked that Ansel was more potted than the palm.

I tried to drag my mistake away, but Mossy insisted we stay for dinner. Why did he keep us there? Did he think this was in some buffoonish way funny, or was he piling up offenses? The pro sat at the table ossified, silent, foodless. I thought his head would fall forward into his untouched soup, but instead he slumped sideways into the lap of a producer's wife. Only then was I permitted to take the useless drunk home. “Lost in straight sets,” said the producer, who harvested a laugh at Ansel's expense.

Ansel bristled, straightened his shoulders. “Who in hell wants to spend an evening with a bunch of rich yids anyway?”

When I tried to apologize to Mossy he waved me off with a pasted smile. It wasn't my fault. Maybe I wouldn't be blamed. I pushed Ansel out the front door.

Nils's cutting room was humming Sunday morning, cheering me, and I almost forgot about the tennis pro. Racks of film lined two walls, shelves for sound tracks a third, and the fourth held a poster of Rudolph Valentino looking as though he would kill or seduce with equal panache. Fortunately, Nils had not been at the ghastly party the night before so we didn't have to discuss that.

The sequence he wanted to play for me began with a scene in a diner between Constance Bennett and Joel McCrea. The movie was called
In Love Again
, and Mossy wanted it to repeat an earlier success the two stars had in a World War drama called
Born to Love
. Gershon Lidowitz was the producer and had, in a coup, been responsible for getting McCrea away from RKO to do the picture. In the diner McCrea is trying to lure Bennett into leaving her husband. He makes his case as a lawyer would in a courtroom. Cut to an office where three minor actors ask each other where the missing McCrea is; they hope he's staying away from that married hussy. In the following scene the two stars walk on a beach together as waves crash behind them. Bennett tells McCrea she loves to look at the ocean, and we see the ocean roaring toward the illicit couple. The two decide to run off to Hawaii together and are on the sand kissing when Bennett's husband, played by Guy Kibbee, stumbles upon them and yells that his cheating wife will never see her children again. The scene ends with Bennett, in soap opera fashion, springing away from McCrea and hiding her eyes as if to make the entire situation disappear.

What did I think? Nils asked. I thought the diner scene was too long since after a shot of her misty eyes no one would doubt Bennett was ready to follow McCrea to the North Pole. But what was Kibbee doing on the beach? At this the cutter, a crafty film-smitten old-timer named Billie Bonsignori who had worked with both von Stroheim and Mack Sennett in the silent days as well as with her phantom hero Valentino, began to nod vigorously. Nils looked at her and shrugged. “I told you we needed the suspense, maestro,” Billie said. Nils said, “Okay, okay, let's be obvious.” Billie went to find two shots—McCrea and Bennett in a car, and Kibbee following in his own car.

Nils ran the beach scene in reverse on the Moviola. We watched as Kibbee bounded backward out of view, and Bennett kissed McCrea passionately as they rolled on the sand. Instead of surf rolling in on them, the ocean retreated, and Bennett unloosed herself from McCrea; the two then popped up into standing positions as two puppets might. The water slithered away and reformed itself into waves. Run backward, the dialogue McCrea and Bennett spoke sounded as if they were Swedes. (I heard Garbo speaking her native tongue once and wondered if, run backward, it would sound like English.) As Bennett and McCrea jabbered away in Swedish, Nils said, “We don't need much of this either. Let's kill most of the dialogue. All we want is suspense.”

While Billie was looking for and intercutting the car scenes into the sequence, Nils swore at Bennett and McCrea. I'd heard they were relatively easy to work with, but each had come separately to Nils and asked for more close-ups. “Will you look where we've arrived?” Nils said. “Frankenstein made his monster, and we've made ours. We're nothing but toys for the stars to play with.”

I only nodded. As always, I had already transposed Pammy into the scene. Did she demand close-ups from her directors? I didn't think so, but stardom was an infectious disease; once bitten by the rat of renown, the victim would generally squirm and wretch with vanity. Nils had already shifted gears. His wife had made two announcements to him that morning. First, she was leaving him; second, she was pregnant. “In that order?” I asked. “She told you in that order?”

“The pregnancy was a business decision,” he said. “I respect that.”

He didn't want to pursue the subject. Everyone knew Nils's wife, Fiona, was cold in public. What he'd just said confirmed that this quality—or lack of quality—carried into their private life. Her pregnancy was essentially a contract insuring her income for the next eighteen years. I was beginning to learn about Hollywood marriages.