Girl of My Dreams (38 page)

Sweeping back her honeyed hair, Pammy said, “Look, I have to tell someone. Teresa would talk her head off if I told her. Plus, she'd criticize me.”

“Thanks,” I said. “If nothing else I can be depended on to keep quiet.” I was fishing, hoping she'd spell out some virtue of mine other than silence. She wasn't biting and simply ignored what I'd said.

“The Commies are after me. Again.”

“What does that mean?” I asked, not knowing whether they were attacking her for being a capitalist or trying to woo her back to her old outspoken sympathies.

“The thing is,” she said, “I agree with them, but I don't want to be with them.”

“Why not?”

“They're humorless, dogmatic, and they suck the life out of you. Aside from that, I love them.”

“What do they want you to do?”

“Address a meeting at the Shrine Auditorium. Introduce the ambassador.”

Mike Quin had told me Alexander Troyanovsky, the new Soviet ambassador to the United States, was coming west to look at the country he was now accredited to. American Reds were giving FDR unusual praise for recognizing the USSR though they heaped most of the credit on Maxim Litvinov, Stalin's foreign minister, who negotiated the exchange of ambassadors. “So tell them you're busy that night,” I offered.

“Except I want to help them. What they're saying about the capitalist system and its holding down the working class is right. Look at this Depression. It's not the capitalists on the bread lines. The industrialists hurt a little, but the big thing hard times do for owners is drive down wages, force the unions either to make bad deals or give up jobs to scabs who gobble up the dregs from the troughs of the rich guys.”

“You can give the speech you're giving me and then say here's the ambassador.”

“Don't be naïve, Owen. Hollywood's part of the system too, and my appearance at what will be seen as a Communist rally will enrage all the studio heads, which will in turn hurt every union and guild in this town. ‘Get the Reds out of the picture business'—can't you just hear Louie B. Mayer and the rest singing that song in unison?”

She did have a problem. I saw a sheet of yellow paper on her piano, filled with block printing, the unlined kind of paper used by Western Union to give a copy of sent messages to the sender. “All right,” I said, “send them a telegram of support they can read at the rally, and tell a couple of your friends to send their own telegrams—Frederic March likes the Reds, doesn't he?—which will take the sting off the whole business, and you won't have to go.”

“That just might do it,” she said, “and I'll think about it while I'm dressing. Excuse me. I want you to tell me about San Francisco—a lot of Reds up there, too, no?”

While she was in the next room I couldn't resist looking at the yellow sheet of paper I'd spotted. The printing spread over four of the little half pages Western Union favored. Must have cost a fortune, I thought. I read:

Mr. Amos Zangwill

Waldorf Astoria

New York City

Coming together,

Transcontinental medley,

A portal opens,

Hotel door,

Eyes on eyes,

Lips to lips,

Wordless.

Hands, mouths,

Swirl of fingers, hungry lips:

Not so fast:

Pace

Proportion,

Going down,

Now ungowned,

Ancient, Grecian, deliberate

Abandon.

Tongue—

Probing recesses,

Recess, process, possess,

Pause, full stop—

Slow, fast, slowly, faster, finding

Scent beneath smell,

Desire's scent.

Then the form,

An unfamiliar, familiar shape

Moving, tangle of legs,

Moving, almost combative,

Afraid to move,

Softness, hardness mingled,

Venting dew,

Mingling wet sweetness,

Moving, moving, moving

In harmony

Until, until, until

One gives over

Now now now now now,

One part of the form

As the other looses torrent,

Clasped,

Fresh,

Old, new,

Transcontinental medley,

Coming together.

At the bottom she added, “Sleep deeply, dream sweetly, Your P.”

My turn to mope. Just a subaltern, that's all I was. As my head lolled to my chest, I heard her behind me. Startled, I straightened to military attention, guilty, dejected.

“You're awfully nosy, Owen,” Pammy said, but she said it kindly, regretfully.

And you're a fucking Communist who doesn't have the courage to admit it! is what I wanted to say but didn't.

“I know I'm horrid, beastly,” she went on Britishly, “but when I'm not mad at him I'm mad for him, which is madness itself. Son of a bitch that he can be, yearning, craving, in his way a bighearted son of a bitch though. The world sees a schemer, the studio sees a tyrant. But inside the tyrant is a willing boy and inside the boy is an artist aching for approval.”

“Gee, you could print that in
Photoplay
,” I said, wanting to hurt her back.

“Sorry,” she said, shrugging off my insult. “I should have put the damn thing away. I should have known about you. I did know. In my selfishness I forgot. But Owen, dear Owen, don't you see? Your little crush … ”

Little? Crush? Suddenly, for the second time that morning, I was furious, far more than I had been at Dr. Pogo.

“Your crush will subside, soon, you'll see, you'll find a girl more your … ”

She paused. More my what? Style? Speed? Type? Age? Class? What horror was she about to utter? Again I was proving my facility for staying silent, passive. How sweet to be prized for a quality I hated, tongue-tied frozen fearful silence.

“You know,” she continued, “more the kind of girl you should be with. Maybe a young starlet, you could almost have your pick you're such a dear, or a junior writer like yourself, or someone completely, mercifully out of the business, free of all of us.”

What do you say when you've been knocked down, knocked that flat? “Thank you, Pammy,” was all I could think of. Thank you for decking me.

“I know. You came to coax me onto the set. They're doing a shot that doesn't need me anyway, but they want me over there and ready. Tell them I'm on my way.
Merci beaucoup
for the idea about the Reds. We'll always be friends, won't we?”

She hugged me. No kiss on the cheek now. I breathed her, lavender and almond, my anger wilting like lettuce. Hopeless.

19

Treatment

“Greatness,” Yeatsman was saying to me, “once resided in the throne, the church, the academy, the sword. Now it lives in the flashbulb. The flashbulb and the movie camera make hostages of us all, destroying identity and replacing it with celebrity. That's the machine that cranks and hums here, and we're the oil for it.”

Yancey Ballard was from a family of Alabama dairy farmers who had devised a way to mass produce and preserve butter in the nineteenth century. Ballard's Better Butter began to be sold in Chicago not long after Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicked over the lantern in 1871, and Ballard's soon started its own sales fire. By the time Yancey was born in 1895, the family was as rich as the Alabama plantation owners. The boy grew into lanky southern ease, effortlessly becoming a squash champion in prep school, someone who succeeded too handily, whom others tried hard to emulate, and the too-hard trying was already their failure. He was sent north to college and missed being a classmate of Scott Fitzgerald's at Princeton only because he enlisted early in the war, going overseas with the Canadians. In 1915 he was in the battle of Neuve Chapelle when the Canadians were ordered to make a feinting maneuver to draw the attention of the Germans away from the principal battle zone, where the British were attacking.
“That's always been my trouble,” Yancey drawled, “I'm diversionary, can't help it, can't be the main event to save my soul. I was lucky though. Fella next to me was hit in the head by shell, had his brains land next to my feet. Looked like salmon roe. All I had was shrapnel in my shoulder.” That was enough to keep Yancey out of further combat, and he spent the rest of the war writing battle reports for the First Canadian Division. He didn't come home until 1920.

“I had my Paris,” he told me, “right after the Armistice, and it was angrier and less drunk than it became in the Twenties.” He worked on the Paris edition of the
Herald Tribune
, and what he fell in love with was not Paris but Yeats. A trip to Ireland was futile, netting him no admission to the poet's presence but only a dose of gonorrhea in Sligo. When he sailed home, Yeatsman finished his Princeton time and then gravitated to Hollywood in pursuit of an actress he'd met years earlier in Paris. The career choice of Hollywood pretty much cost Yancey Ballard his family, who regarded Jews, along with leprosy, as two of mankind's incurable afflictions. He sold a story to the newly formed United Artists, assuming it would be a ticket to the actress's affections. But she had already been in Hollywood a month, which was time enough. “Only the most
stupide
girls here have a
liaison avec l'écrivain
,” she told him, adding dismissively, “
Jamais. Pour moi, je cherche le cinéaste! Bonne chance, mon cher.
See you around, as they say.” She helped along Yeatsman's education.

A decade later, most of it spent at Jubilee, Yeatsman thought of Mossy alternately as his champion and his nemesis. “‘Some violent and bitter man, some powerful man,'” he told me, echoing his bard, “‘Called architect and artist in, that they, Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone The sweetness that all longed for night and day, The gentleness none there had ever known.' Wasn't old Ghostie thinking of Mossy and the rest of us when he wrote that?”

“He has his visions,” I said, “and I guess we're supposed to accommodate them.”

“‘I am worn out with dreams,'” Yeatsman quoted, “‘and yet, and yet, Is this my dream, or the truth? O would that we had met When I had my burning youth!'”

“Yeatsman, uh Yancey, I need your help.”

“We all need help,” Yeatsman said, warming up. “As we pace the corridor of life, people keep coming out of little doors, and each one hands us a piece of our destiny. Here's your driver's license. Here's your degree. Here's your first job, oops you're fired, you're not ready for this. Here's your wife, here are your kids, and if you write some scripts that actually get made here's your next wife, your new kids, your pool, the maid, the houseboy, don't trust him. Here are your kids as they get older and betray you. Here are your ulcers, a gift from Mossy or some producer. But here's your mistress. The doors along the corridor keep opening and the faceless people hand you more small portions of your fate. Here are some screen credits, here's a sweet holiday in Tuscany, here's your psychoanalyst, here's your reconciliation, more travel, your retirement, your heart attack, cancer, thrombosis, shingles. Here's your death, weren't quite ready were you? Here's your … forget it because you're already forgotten.” He took a deep breath, lit a Pall Mall.

All I wanted was to bring him around to suggesting how I could complete my San Francisco assignment so the studio would be pleased. “Meaning Mossy,” he said, and I nodded. I was too much in awe of Yeatsman, but he was tender with me, affectionate in the way of a big brother who cautions you away from the precipice he himself has plunged over even while knowing your momentum is already going to carry you over it as well. Fifteen or so years older than I, with good screen credits—
Forgotten Hero
,
Manhattan Matinee
and the first
Count of Monte Cristo
—he was both a princely paragon and, as he tried to tell me, a warning. A complicated gifted guy, jealous and insecure, demanding and reticent, unafraid of the bosses yet unable to resist their blandishments and raises, squeezing his life into manageable proportions from the wonder of what it might be, all the more admirable to me if not to himself because he had managed to fit snugly into the Jubilee cocoon. I saw him as a marvel of energy and lassitude, inspiration and doggedness. “So what have you got?” he asked.

When I finished telling him I had material on the earthquake but wanted to write the strike story, he sighed. “Forget the earthquake,” he said.

“What do you mean? That's the whole reason Mossy sent me up there.”

“I mean plot your characters first, not your plot. Forget there ever was an earthquake. When you have the people you want to write about, write them against type. A good man does a bad thing. A fearful fellow does a brave thing. A fallen woman does something virtuous, and so on. Figure those people out, then sneak the earthquake into their lives. Or smash them with the earthquake. Since motion pictures are the medium of the obvious, you'll be smashing them anyway within half a minute of the first wineglass shattering as it falls off the first table. But before anything, figure out who they are.”

“I feel like breaking the laws of history anyway.”

“Attaboy. Other places you can't break the law, you can't rob a person or a bank. In Hollywood we do nothing but rob, we break the law all the time. It's only the lore here, not the law, you mustn't break. If you're a lore breaker we send you back east.”

“You want me to forget the strike too.”

“That's different. You'll never get away with a picture about a strike anyway, so it becomes the horse in the bathtub. You don't mention it, you don't look for it, don't even go in the bathroom, which creates problems. But all the time the horse is upstairs in the tub, everyone knows it. You not only have to forget it, you have to drown it.”

“You know I can't do that.”

“Okay, but that's the principle.”