Girl of My Dreams (29 page)

“We didn't say nothing about walking out,” Pa Teeter said, “but we oughta get what our boy is worth.”

“I don't care about any of that, Mr. Zangwill,” Skip said, “but I'd sure like to get my puppy back I had to leave with my uncle in Kentucky. He's grown up by now.”

“We'll send for your pet right away,” said Mossy.

“I'm talkin' do re mi,” said Pa Teeter, imitating a B movie he'd seen.

“I'm not deaf,” said Mossy. “Tell you what I'll do. We'll give Skip a bonus of a thousand dollars a week, but I want something in return. Two things.”

“That'll be hunky doodle,” said Pa Teeter. “What kin we do ya for, Mr. Mossy?”

“First, I want the two of you to stay off Skip's sets. Directors and producers have complained, and Skip is a precious asset Jubilee wants to protect.”

Skip looked triumphant and managed to hold his tongue.

The parents were sheepish, possibly hurt. Then Ma Teeter spoke up. “We ain't gonna make trouble, sir, and if you don't want us there we'll stay away.”

“Good,” Mossy said, scowling at Pa Teeter until he nodded glumly. “Now the second point is Skip is getting on to adolescence fast. He's almost at that awkward age. We want to correct his bowlegged walk, get his shoulders evened up, skim off those moles on his face, fix those floppy ears.”

Skip was stunned. He didn't understand exactly what Mossy meant, but he knew pain when he saw it coming. “Mr. Zangwill,” he began, “I don't have to be in pictures. I can go back to school, sir.”

“Hey,” said Pa Teeter, brightening, “you mean you're gonna fit Skip out so he can be a star when he grows up, too?”

“That's exactly what I mean, Pa.”

“Well, hunky doodle,” said both parents at once.

“That's not for me,” Skip said. “I like being the way I am. No fixing up for me.”

“I understand, Skip,” said Mossy as understandingly as he could muster. “But you're a very valuable property. I don't mean just to the studio. You're valuable to your parents and yourself. You'll have money for college, for cars, you'll be able to support a wife very well someday, and your parents in their old age.”

“Or right now,” Pa Teeter laughed. Ma Teeter laughed too.

Skip set his jaw. “No!” he said.

“You'll do what the man said,” Ma Teeter told her son, “or your pa and I will know the reason why.”

“I'll handle this, Ma,” Mossy said. “Skip, when you finish the picture you're on at the end of the week, you're going to get a vacation. Let Jubilee handle this. You won't have to work at all while you're healing. From the surgery. The result will be perfection.”

“Healing?” yelled Skip. “Surgery? I'll run away, I swear.”

“Wouldn't do any good, Skip,” said Mossy. “You're too well known, you'd be recognized everywhere. Look, the operations won't take more than a few weeks, and you'll have three months off. Full pay.”

“No!” Skip thundered, but he was beginning to cry.

Mossy came around his desk. He gave Skip a fatherly pat on the shoulder and tousled his hair. “Hey champ,” he said, “I meant it when I said perfection.” Skip cringed from his boss' touch. “Someday you'll thank me for all this. I promise.”

The Teeter parents proudly led their son from the office, delighted at the thousand dollar a week raise. Skip was stumbling and weeping.

Skip Teeter never did get around to thanking Mossy. His career nosedived as an adolescent. The plastic surgeons and dermatologists left him looking more like a laboratory creation than a teenager. His smile, which had been so infectious, was destroyed into a leer. By the end of the decade he was as drunk as his parents, who by that time had spent all their son's money anyway. He was a bitter young man, and he told people his life had been stolen from him. Right after Pearl Harbor Skip enlisted in the Navy and was killed—gladly, gratefully, I've always thought—at Guadalcanal. His obituary said Amos Zangwill had been his benefactor.

Mossy played us all as if we were instruments in his mighty orchestra. If an instrument was broken, it could be replaced. We were the Jubilee Philharmonic, conducted by Maestro Amos Zangwill, with the whole country for our audience plus wherever on the rest of the planet someone had a projector and a screen.

When the contrite Trent Amberlyn was pulled in late that afternoon, his look alternated between defeat and desperation. He was brought in by Curtt Weigerer, to whose brawny frame Trent seemed almost to be handcuffed. But he had a friend with him as well, a bit player named Boyard Boulton, a small pudgy man who had clearly never been in the office of a studio head before. His eyes flicked around the room like a lizard's tongue, with his own little mixture of intimidation and contempt. Boy Boulton, as he was called, was known in a certain circle as Trent's lady-in-waiting.

Mossy was frighteningly silent as Trent awaited his beheading. Curtt Weigerer knew he wasn't supposed to speak either. Trent refused a chair and shifted his feet, a prisoner in the dock charged with conduct unbecoming a Jubilee star: picking up a fifteen-year-old to pay him for sex. “Mossy,” Trent offered when he could find words, “all I can say is I was sure the kid was at least nineteen or twenty. I'm so sorry.” He ran his fingers through his dirty unpresentable dyed blond hair. “I'm a wreck.”

“I swear, Mr. Zangwill,” Boy Boulton said, his eyes darting everywhere in the room but at Mossy, “some of these minors are unbelievably seductive little bastards if you know what I mean.”

“I can't say I do, Boy,” said Mossy gently.

Curtt Weigerer snickered. Mossy gave a nodding cue. “Mr. Zangwill,” the henchman said, “wants only Jubilee employees present. This is Jubilee business now.”

“Excuse me,” Boy Boulton said, “I was only trying to help my friend.”

“We'll help your friend,” Mossy said.

“I can't tell you how ashamed I am,” Trent said when Boy Boulton had left.

“Your career could easily be over,” Mossy said.

“A blessing.”

“Self-pity won't help.”

“It may make this bearable.”

“The scandal could be unbearable.”

“I know only too well,” Trent said.

“But that wouldn't be any better for Jubilee than it would be for you.” Mossy's voice began to rise. “We can handle what happened,” he went on, “but you have to do what I tell you to do, which is to keep completely silent about this, to everyone including all your friends, which means you have to control that little shitheel who just minced out of here with his furtive fairy eyes. I don't trust him.”

“He'll do what I tell him to.”

“And you'll do what I tell you to do, Trent,” said Mossy. “You need to work with someone smarter than you, and right now that's me. Understand?”

“I understand.”

“You're going to be married.”

“I'm what?”

“I'll let you know when I decide who the lucky girl is.”

This was too much for the man about town who had been called by
Photoplay
, in a story I helped with, Hollywood's most eligible bachelor. Trent was passing quickly from sniveling to defiant, as if something had actually changed in his position, which it assuredly had not. “God, in case you haven't heard,” said Trent, “is dead, and you have not been chosen to succeed him.”

“Know anyone who can play the role better?” Mossy asked. “Besides, God is not dead, he's on location. I'm filling in for him until he comes back, and you're getting married. Remember, you're an actor, so go ahead and act like the man you're supposed to be, who your adoring fans believe you are.”

“I have to be who I have to be on the screen. In my private life I can be myself.”

“In your private life, yes, but being off camera doesn't mean private, and when you're off camera but in public you're still who I say you are. Trent Amberlyn, heartthrob to five million teenage girls, twenty million bored housewives, twenty or thirty million wishful middle-aged and old ladies. I gave you your name, Mr. Bernard Gestikker, and I can take it away. Right now I'm telling you who Trent Amberlyn is.”

“I guess you can do that,” said Trent, abjectly folding his hand. But he was still a star, clearly wanting to remain one, if chastised, and he shook his head at his putative maker. Like everyone else at Jubilee, he could be both dazzled and mystified by the boss. “What drives you, Mossy?” he said. “What makes you make decisions like this?”

“I do what I do because that's what I do when I do it,” Mossy said. Turning to Curtt Weigerer, he added, “Go find that fifteen-year-old kid. Give him a present, ten thousand dollars cash, and tell him and his parents they should make themselves a new start with your gift. Also tell them that it wasn't Trent Amberlyn but his double that their kid met, only we don't want any false rumors flying around so we'd appreciate their silence. One last thing—they're probably a family on the south side of the law in a few other ways, so tell them any loose talk and we tell the police they're blackmailers.”

Trent smiled a little, shaking his head. “All right,” he said, “we'll all play the game just the way you do.”

“I don't play the game,” Mossy said, “I am the game.”

When Trent Amberlyn and Curtt Weigerer had left, Elena brought in a pot of tea and two delicate porcelain cups. This was for Louella Parsons, portly, bossy, all-knowing even if much of what she knew wasn't true. She followed Elena into Mossy's office, sailing in like a cruise ship tooting her horn with three big hello's to the studio chief. The problem with Louella was that some of what she knew actually was true. “Didn't I see Trent Amberlyn outside?” was Louella's opening gambit. “Is he in trouble again?”

“He sure is,” Mossy said, ignoring the ‘again' and pouring tea for Louella, who had built her career not on talent but access and built her access on the almost infinite power of her employer, Mr. Hearst. Mossy sat the gossipist at a little round table well away from his desk, indicating this was a social moment, though of course neither of them was going to let his or her guard down. “Yes, Louella,” Mossy continued, “this is a state secret I'm letting you in on, completely off the record until we release it. Trent was in to announce his engagement, and I'm begging him to hold off until we release his next picture. He may lose the heart of his fan base, which as you know is mostly women.”

“Why I never,” said Louella. “I couldn't be more surprised. Is it an actress?”

Mossy knew she was already thinking this might be a dodge. “You know I'd love to tell you, Lolly, but Trent swore me to secrecy. I promise you'll be the first to know.”

Louella wasn't buying. “It's around town,” she said, “that he picks up sailors and even got caught with a kid over the weekend.”

“That's the most absurd thing I've ever heard,” Mossy laughed.

“Well, if Hedda prints it and I don't, Mr. Hearst will want to know what's holding me up. Who's the girl, Mossy?”

Mossy shook his head, smiling. She had him. If he didn't tell her, she'd print the rumor about Trent being arrested, which wasn't a rumor anyway but simple fact. His mind whirred, all gears spinning. “Lolly,” he said, “this is an exclusive, and Trent will kill me. I didn't know myself who the girl was until just now. You can't print it. Trent told me when he was in the office. It's Thelma Thacker.”

Thelma Thacker was a plucky actress who came out from Minneapolis to play best-friend parts, and a couple of times she'd been the wife to bad husbands who left her, but she found her niche, really, in Westerns at other studios. Although Jubilee still held her contract, Mossy had been putting her on loan to Republic and Anchor Bay, a little company where she had graduated into becoming the first female gunslinger by helping Tom Mix chase down some outlaws. Mossy got four times her salary through the loan-out, which was for a serial with fifteen episodes. There was one problem with Thelma Thacker as far as marriage was concerned. Everyone knew she was a lesbian. As soon as he said her name Mossy realized he must have been thinking about homosexuals and he'd come up with perhaps the least likely candidate he could have mentioned.

“People say Thelma Thacker likes women,” Louella said.

“If I had a buck for all the things people say,” Mossy told her, pouring her a second cup of tea, “I'd buy Jubilee back from the bankers and make only pictures that uplift the social standards of American civilization.” Mossy knew, of course, that he'd have to call Trent and Thelma as soon as he was rid of Miss Parsons. “Lolly you can't print this yet. Promise me.”

“Well, live and learn,” Louella said. “You know, Amos, I had lunch today with Rabbi Magnin.”

Mossy couldn't have cared less about this, but he amused himself by envisioning the invincibly gentile Louella Parsons breaking bread with the self-appointed guardian and spiritual guide to the Jews of Hollywood. “And how is Edgar?” Mossy asked with no interest whatsoever.

“I bring word from Rabbi Magnin that you shouldn't make
Mad Dog of Europe
.”

The property, which Mossy found both funny and horrifying, was a satire on Hitler by the screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, and Mossy knew he could make it cheaply. “The good rabbi has my phone number,” Mossy said.

“Yes, but he knows you don't like him. He thinks the movie will bring unwanted attention to members of the Jewish faith.”

Apparently the lady couldn't say Jews or even Jewish people. “He does, does he?” Mossy replied.

“Frankly, Amos, I've had my doubts about the project myself. The rabbi said in no uncertain terms that such a picture could only inflame opinion against members of his faith. It will only increase the, uh, problem.”

“You mean the Jewish problem, Lolly?”