Girl of My Dreams (7 page)

Yeatsman said, “And after the cheering stops, for the rest of the movie Bill Powell and Myrna Loy have to figure out who did it, and no one wants them to solve the crime.”

At that very moment, cued by Sylvia and Yeatsman, Amos Zangwill descended the stairs into our midst and promenaded his ballroom. “Speaking of the unholy ghost,” said Sylvia. “Cuchulain himself,” said Yeatsman.

Decades later I still see him entering now in his dark suit with his half smile, regal, not arrogant. Where did that smile come from, an executioner's smile but also the grinning rictus of his dispatched victim? Trim, almost small, creating a lagoon of space one could violate only at the peril of being repelled like a clumsy pirate hurled to the sharks off a galleon. A small cortege followed as Mossy nodded to his guests.

“What a night!” Largo Buchalter bellowed as Mossy passed the directors. “We're all having the time of our lives, Mossy!” “Glad you've been elected spokesman, Largo,” Mossy said as he smiled at Nils Matheus and Capra but not at Buchalter.

Mark Darrow, drunkenly on the make, broke from the writers' kennel. His wife tried to pull him back to safety, but he elbowed her aside. He seized what he must have felt was the main chance as Mossy passed an elaborately framed Picasso drawing. In the drawing a male abstraction was inserting part of himself into an opening in a female abstraction. “What a genius he is with a phallic symbol, isn't he Mossy?” Darrow ventured. He pronounced it fay-lick. Yeatsman groaned; there was too much silence in the room and everyone had heard.

“Phallic it is,” Mossy replied with the correct pronunciation, “symbol it's not.”

“Oh sure, AZ,” said Darrow, obviously unaware that Mossy hated being called by his initials as if he were LB Mayer. Mossy's temperature seemed to rise a little as he considered “AZ” and how he might discipline its user; we were seeing the studio head as padrone reproving one of his villagers. “I'll tell you what is a phallic symbol, Marky”—“Oh god,” Sylvia whispered, “he only does that to your name if he hates you”—“when you stick your pencil in your mouth, Marky, and rotate it the way you do in story conferences so it blackens your lips and looks as if you'd really like to be sucking someone's cock instead of yessing my every belch, that is when the pencil becomes a phallic symbol. Am I right, Mel?”

This last was tossed over Mossy's shoulder to the family psychoanalyst, Melvin Baron, who followed in Mossy's train. Dr. Baron obediently nodded as fast as he could. “Yes absolutely definitely, Mossy, I couldn't have put it … ” But Mossy slashed him with a gesture and moved on. Mark Darrow faded wordless into the burled woodwork, smiling bravely as he may have imagined Sydney Carton did on the steps to the guillotine.

“See?” Sylvia said leaning toward me. “At the next party you'll be welcomed by all as one of the happy band of brothers and sisters present for the execution of Mark Darrow. While young Mark himself will be lucky if he ever gets invited after this to the opening of a tin can. Did you catch the glare Marky's little wife gave him?”

By this time Mossy had again disappeared upstairs into his library with King Vidor and Nils Matheus Maynard. There had been talk that the directors might try to form a guild as the writers were doing, and we all knew Mossy would want to head off any such insubordination. He was vaguely apolitical on the right, but many writers called him fascistic, an adjective we threw around promiscuously when discussing studio heads.

With Mossy upstairs, Palmyra reigned. The producers fell over themselves courting her for their next pictures. She was able to fly away, a brightly feathered songbird, telling them all they were too kind.

Teet Beale, the crier, announced midnight supper, “Ladies first,
s'il vous plaît.
”

As wives and actresses streamed past us toward the buffet table, a writer next to me began to swear. “Fuck it all, what I hate most here are the women's perfumes,” said Poor Jim Bicker, a former hobo who sold a magazine story to Jubilee and was now on his third screenplay. He made eight hundred a week, more than twice my salary, but he still had the nickname Poor from his days riding the rails. Even tonight in his relative prosperity, he had torn cuffs, unpressed pants, and he looked as if he had just arrived from a brawl, which was a possibility. “You could use a little education,” he said to me.

“Why the perfume?” I asked.

“I prefer the body stench of bathless hoboes,” Poor Jim answered more to his highball glass than to me. “Yeah, a hobo's honest smell is better than these women with their artificial scents all swimming together like rare tropical fish in this dazzle of a tank. Like to take a pick-ax to the tank, let all the water run out. They couldn't survive without their privilege. Their scents and the sloppy paints on their faces cost more than I saw in a month before I was bought out and became part of this vulgarity. Some say they're Reds, can you beat that?” Poor Jim threw up his hands. “Maybe I'll fuck me one of them later.” He sniffed, scorning and lusting after the extravagantly adorned women.

The Canadian director of Westerns, Walter Heatherington, was telling an ancient man with blue hair, who was addressed as Monsieur Le Comte, about the death of his best friend as they advanced along the line in France in 1918. “My mate Lorne was pushing along in the mud next to me one moment, and the next his head was at my wrist, blown clear of his trunk, and the sergeant told me to keep moving.”

“Ah,
mon Dieu
,” said the very old blue-haired man, who had been involved with the Lumières in devising early film projectors and cameras,
“De temps en temps
I think all of us should have died in the trenches. In my own first war with the Bosch, in 1870, I was wounded in Alsace and they thought I would die of blood poisoning—how you say gangrene in my leg. I was evacuated to Lyon to die in hospital. A nurse was posted there,
une jeune fille, comment s'appellait-elle,
ah Danielle. I recall how she brought me around when I could lie only on my back and she came in the night to wash me again in my helplessness. Danielle's
spécialité de la maison
was the upside down backward squat, to this day there are mornings when I think of nothing but the muscles in her back as she rose and fell. Danielle broke my heart and left the nursing to become a nun. Then I wish I died in Alsace. But it never gets any easier,
relations sexuelles,
does it?”

I asked M. Le Comte what that was.

“Call it the seduction, my boy. Half the people here are working so hard hoping they will be
coucher
with the other half by two a.m., and not a few will succeed. Some of us will be dead, still aching with desire in our final breaths, dying to love a little more as we die. Meanwhile, I recollect Danielle. Long dead herself, of course, unless she is a retired mother superior. Sex and death, they play with each other, unwilling partners who always win and always lose. You think the cinema is about sex, but it is really all about death, and someday you'll see why.”

I didn't, though, not for many years, until I arrived at my own version of what he was saying. All the people in the movies of his early days with the Lumières, like most of us at Mossy's party, those who wrote and directed and produced the pictures, and especially those who acted in them, are dead. Le Comte himself is of course long gone. Looking at old movies is simply looking at dead people, at death itself. The ancient French film pioneer was prophesying that motion pictures were going to last even though their makers would not. Wedded to death: what an art form.

“The shock of the war behind, the pull of a war to come,” said M. Le Comte. “
Alors,
we are always between two magnets.”

“Ta-ra-ra, Darryl Zanuck, He puts us in a panic, The whole town's in his box, Whether he's at Warner's or Fox.”

“Monsieur Zanuck enters the fray,” said M. Le Comte, “your Napoleon I believe.”

Teet Beale was quickly silenced and a clamor arose for Palmyra to sing. Mossy came out of his library to stand at the crest of the six steps leading down into his ballroom. Esther Leah Zangwill, a compact bundle of nerves who had spent much of the evening ordering around the kitchen staff, made an appearance beside her husband. Mossy was a bullet of a man with eyes that did not see so much as penetrate their object. Esther Leah fidgeted, never leaving anything—a piece of furniture, her hairdo, a child's clothing—alone. When a writer asked Mossy, “How's Fussy?” it meant he knew Esther Leah well and was in Mossy's good graces due to a script that was shootable. “She tolerates me,” Mossy would answer. “No one knows why.” If Esther Leah found a servant smoking in the kitchen or heard an underling criticize Mossy, although she did both of these things herself, repeatedly, the offender was banished.

Mossy did not announce that Palmyra would sing. He only moved his eyes toward the piano. If you looked away from the vacant baby grand for a moment and then looked back, you would see a studio musician had materialized at the keyboard.

Palmyra smiled her faintly one-sided smile and proceeded to the piano. At parties earlier in her career she had scandalously added blue lyrics that could never be in a movie or on a record. She'd had a hit in 1932 with a song called “Give Me a Chance,” in which the last chorus had lines ending with “chance,” “romance” and “passionate trance.” At a party given by Marion Davies in the Oceanhouse beach mansion William Randolph Hearst had built for her, after the aged and curiously shockable publisher had gone upstairs to bed (curious since he lived openly with his mistress), Pammy stepped to the microphone and uncorked an altered last stanza:

You're here to pitch,

I'm here to catch;

Where I itch

You know how to scratch,

So honey if you'll give me a chance,

I'll take hold of that thing in your pants;

I'll stroke it and I'll suck it,

I'll sit on it and I'll fuck it

Till I leave you in an unaccustomed trance.

This pretty much brought down the Oceanhouse, and by noon on Monday the whole town was trying to quote Pammy's words. Unfortunately for her, the song had been recorded by a young reporter for Hearst's Los Angeles
Examiner
who wanted to curry favor with the chief. Hearst, too furious even to reprimand his mistress, had the recording sent to his friend J. Edgar Hoover with a note: “This one has Red sympathies. Let's cool her off.” The head of the FBI office in Los Angeles paid a visit to Mossy at Jubilee. “Don't bother to get scratches on your record by playing it on my phonograph,” Mossy told the G-man, “because I was at the party myself.” But what he said to Pammy was, “They're threatening to go to the Legion of Decency with it, Walter Winchell, the churches. Bad luck, but no more union garbage and Red meetings for you, young lady, or your career will be over. They'll deport you as an alien, and they'll try to take your daughter away. They'll keep her here. They're not kidding about deportation.”

“Whaaaat? Take Millie? You're joking.”

“They'll claim anyone who sings songs like that is an unfit mother. Period.”

For the next two years labor organizers complained they couldn't get Palmyra Millevoix at their rallies anymore. The more sophisticated among them shrugged. “She's sold out like the rest of 'em. Works for the fascist Zangwill. 'Nuff said.”

Mossy's party was entering its climactic phase when Pammy reached the piano, where the accompanist from the Jubilee orchestra offered a few chords to gain silence. “I came to the California of unlimited hopes,” Pammy began before the talking died completely. “Most of you have helped me and none of you have hurt me—much.” Appreciative titters. Nils Matheus Maynard clinked his glass with a spoon until the room was quiet. Mossy came down all the stairs but one, which he needed to stand on in order to see above heads to Pammy; sensitive about his height—five and a half feet—he also didn't want to stay at the top of the stairs like the Pope on his balcony. Pammy smiled across the room at him. “My employer, our genial and easygoing host” (chuckles from the braver guests) “has asked me for a song. He is a skeptical optimist, while I remain a cheerful pessimist. The best we can do to keep the wolf away is have some fun and thank Amos Zangwill for the evening.” Scattered applause for Mossy. “Times change, don't they?” Palmyra was keeping time now with her hips as the piano vamped a few notes. “In the Twenties we had plenty, In the Thirties it's all gone, But in the Thirties we got dirty, And we dance from dark till dawn. Oh my heart will jump for dancing, For dancing till we fall; That's when I want romancing, Please take me to the ball.”

“Give us ‘Lucky Rendezvous,' Pammy” someone cried. “No, ‘Moonbeams,'” yelled someone else. Pammy was savoring the wait, roasting those chestnuts I'd described in my overwrought press release, until she had just the anticipation level she wanted.

“But the country around us,” Pammy went on, “is not dancing because it can't even stand up. I'm not trying to raise money or pleading any cause. I just want to say my sense of justice, which has been asleep for several years, is awake again.”

Mossy looked at his toes while the Lefties in the room clapped and everyone else waited. An odd occasion, I thought, for Palmyra to put her social conscience on exhibit, but then entertainers are exhibitionists by nature. She had the audience she wanted, the most visible and powerful members of the industry. Sylvia Solomon poked me in the ribs. “Hooray for Millevoix,” I said to her, “and watch out Hollywood.” “I'd put it the other way around,” she whispered, “especially watch out for the big guys on the playground.”

“We are all dreamers,” Pammy said to the room, “or we wouldn't be writing, directing, acting, composing, or producing, would we?” (Sylvia whispered again, “At least one person here puts writing first.”) “We dare make dreams come true. But when you gain the dream you lose the dream. The song I'm going to sing is about lovers who have to part, their
tristesse
. But it's also about my songs themselves. When I have a song in me it is a happy full feeling because it's still inside me. When I release it, I'm as empty and sad as anyone waving farewell or remembering any time past that we cherish.”